Christians came, actually fled, to America, because they
wanted religious freedom. Now they have
lost it, and there is nowhere else to go.
A lot of you are reading this and wondering what I am talking
about.
Religious freedom, like all freedom, isn’t necessarily lost
suddenly, violently, or completely. It
can happen slowly, like the proverbial camel’s foot in the tent, over
generations. Each generation loses a
bit, learns to accept it and finds it not worth fighting for, and the next
generation starts with less freedom as the new norm. This new generation is easily swayed that
this is the way it has always been or at least how it was supposed to have
been, and they shrug their shoulders and think that Christians shouldn’t be
concerned about these things anyway.
A lot of you are still wondering why I said that religious freedom
is lost in America. The First Amendment
denies Congress the right to prohibit the free exercise of religion.
But this right can only be guaranteed when religious values
are consistent with the highest values of the country. That is no longer the case. We are told, over and over, that our nation
was founded as a secular nation where all the different religions of the world
can live together in blissful harmony free to do whatever they want inside
their respective buildings, up to a point.
As a secular nation, there are secular values, and these values
are higher than any religious ones.
First there was abortion. Not
only is your money now used to pay for them, but if you work in the medical,
pharmaceutical, or pregnancy care fields, you may find that you are required to
provide assistance for abortions in ways you would rather not.
As government confers or establishes rights for more kinds
of human behavior, those rights supersede your religious rights not to participate. You may even be compelled to do things
against your conscience.
Many of you are saying that it isn’t so bad. Things are far worse in other parts of the
world, and we shouldn’t complain. But
you would be missing the point.
The framework has changed.
The trajectory has moved. The
direction of the country is leading away from your religious, or Christian,
values. It’s only a matter of time, for
example, before a pastoral candidate sues a church, because it found out that
he or she is married to another person of the same sex, and since gay marriage
is legal, you will lose your right to discriminate against him or her in a position
of employment.
We are told that we live in a diverse country and must
accommodate and embrace this diversity.
But what we are not told is that this diversification of our country is
intentional. It is meant to dilute and
diminish any Christian influence in our country. And the very idea of diversity today has come
more and more to mean the Islamization of our country. The government supposedly isn’t keeping track
of the religious affiliation of immigrants, but Muslim countries are providing
the bulk of our new immigrants.
In 50 years of less, Europe will become a continent of
Muslim countries. What the Muslim world
could not do in a thousand years through war, it will now do peacefully,
relatively speaking, through immigration.
Christians in general have not seen political involvement as
something that they should do. Yet
Christians own businesses and houses, pay taxes, have investments, hire lawyers
to protect their interests, and send their kids to public schools. What happens politically affects all of these
things.
Christians may give 10 % of their income to God as an act of
being a good steward, but they probably give 50 % of their income to the
government in the form of taxes, fees, licenses, and fines. If we care where that 10 % goes, shouldn’t we
care where that 50 % goes?
Christians are often taught that they must be submissive to
government. But they forget that the
kind of government we have today is not the kind they had in Bible days. We don’t have kings, Caesars, or rulers; we
have representatives. If our leaders do
things we don’t like or agree with, we have the right and the responsibility to
remove them and replace them with ones who will see to our best interests. And sometimes that will mean that we will
have to try to become those leaders ourselves.
We forget that the right to exercise our religion was won by
a war that we initiated. I have often
said that if the Christians alive today were alive at the time of our nation’s
founding, there never would have been an American Revolution. And if the Christians alive then were alive
today, there already would have been a second one.
Where do we start? I
would say that we first need to know and understand more about the origin of
our country. And to do that you need to
read not the history of our founding but the writings of our founding. History books can be very selective on what
they talk about and what they omit.
David Barton, founder of the organization Wallbuilders, is
probably the foremost authority on writings in American history as they pertain
to religion and our country. His books
make the case for a Christian founding of our nation, but more importantly they
gather together the primary sources so that you can read the Founders for
yourself. You can read The Federalist
Papers, which were written to explain the Constitution so that people would
vote to ratify it.
Everybody’s busy. I
know. I have put a lot of things on hold
in my life while I try to get my country back.
You want to win the world, but if you lose your own country,
the country you are living in, the country that used to embrace your Christian
values, then I think we are missing something very important.
