where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Time to Do Something [an article for Christians]


A lot of Christians see our country in serious need, and they don’t see the answer in politics or Presidents.  They believe God has to do something, and they are praying for a miracle.

But when you look at the history of revivals or miracles, they are always identified with people.  The United States has had revivals before, and they all started with the work of people, like Jonathan Edwards, John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Finney, and others. 

In the Bible, Jonathan delivered Israel, when he took his armorbearer and went the two of them to pick a fight with the Philistines.  The Israelites were stalemated for 40 days, intimidated by Goliath’s challenges, until a shepherd boy, David, said, I’ll go.  I’ll kill the Philistine.  Jesus fed 5,000 people with a few fish and loaves of bread, but someone had to give Jesus his lunch. 

Revivals and miracles can also be associated with particular problems.  I read recently of the revival under George Whitefield, and then the problem was infant baptism.  The Church had been relying on its people having been baptized as infants and didn’t press people for their personal commitments to Christ as they got older.

The big problem that defines our country and Western Civilization today is secularism.  And I believe this is the issue that the Church needs to confront and the one frankly that God will use to bring the revival we have been praying for.  This is the issue where the Church can confront society peacefully but forcefully, where its message will become the talk of society, from news shows, talk shows, social media, and the person on the street.

Secularism puts all religions in the box of private opinions like your taste in movies or music, your favorite ice cream.  There are no right or wrong religions; they are just opinions on things that are not relevant to the workings of society.  And they certainly don’t have any place in public life.  One is as good as another, so just don’t try to impose yours on anyone else.

Secularism is essentially atheism, but it prefers to say that it values and respects religion.  All religions.  Which really means no religion, because every religion believes that it is the truth, the truth about life and reality.  They have very little in common, if you actually do the work as to what they believe and how they affect life.  So to say that you respect all religions means that what they teach is inconsequential in that it isn’t really true.

Secularism likes to point to our First Amendment as touting freedom of religion, as if our Founders didn’t really care what religion anybody believed in, like they were all equal and one is as good as another.  This is all historical revisionism, where when people don’t know the history, modern political figures alter the narrative to fit their agenda, and people learn to accept this new version of their history as true.

The facts are that the Declaration of Independence says that our rights come from our Creator, so atheism is incompatible with the American Spirit.  If there is no God, then our rights come from government, and that is precisely what our Founders fought a war over. 

The Constitution contains the words “in the year of our Lord.”  You can find sources that say that that phrase is not original, but you can see pictures of the original Constitution, and it is hard to imagine how this could have been added later.  The Constitution wasn’t done on a computer where you can easily move text around.  And that is a specifically Christian statement.

The First Congress had Bibles printed to be used in all the public schools.  And it was only in the early 1960s, that the court called supreme ruled that Bibles and prayer could not be a part of public schools, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.  Nobody caught that for 200 years?  The same goes for public displays of the Ten Commandments.  Now all of a sudden, we are to believe that they are incompatible with our Constitution?

So how do we confront this secularism peacefully but forcefully, in love but with conviction, openly and publicly?

I believe the answer is by remembering the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.  Or, as Christian’s used to say, the Lord’s Day. 

For most of our nation’s history, stores were closed on Sundays in respect to God.  Now not only are they open on Sundays, but for most businesses, it is the busiest day of the week.  And when people shop on Sundays, people have to work in those places of business on that day to take care of these customers.  And in many cases, working on Sunday used to be voluntary at overtime pay, but now it is just another work day.  A day like any other. 

I think we underestimate how much value God puts on that seventh day of rest. 

Christians have long argued about “keeping the Sabbath.”  Some say it is only a Jewish responsibility, that it was just a part of God’s covenant with the Jewish people a long time ago.  But the idea of the Sabbath goes back to creation and Genesis.  The very existence of the seven day week throughout the world is testimony to the idea of the Sabbath that goes back to the very beginnings of human history. 

You can read the various attempts to explain the origins of the seven day week, but there is nothing in nature that makes a seven day week obvious or natural.  And they just don’t know how to explain it. 

I was stunned recently when I read Jeremiah 17 again, a passage I have read dozens of times before.  In verses 24-27, God told His people that if they had just kept the Sabbath, they would not undergo the judgement that He was bringing on their nation.  I know there are other verses in the book that show that this was not the only reason for the judgment, but this one issue alone was enough to avert the entire crisis. 

So what exactly am I asking for by remembering the Sabbath?
I am asking that Christians stop shopping on Sundays.  This would include going to restaurants, the movies, the library, gas stations, Walgreens, and even sporting events.  This is not a boycott, because it is only shifting your buying to another day.  Sporting events can be another story.  Kids have sports on Sundays.  And when the Christians stop playing on Sundays, somebody is going to take notice.  Then, of course, there are the professional sports where you have to miss church to go there. 

It’s time that Christians confronted the culture and said, “Enough.  We were wrong to sit by and let our country turn the Lord’s Day into an ordinary day.  The God of the Bible is God, and we are going to live our lives to honor Him.” 

I am asking that you pray about this.  If you agree with this, post it on Facebook.  Print it out and take it to church.  Show it to your pastor, and ask him to support it from the pulpit.  Take it to your small group; talk about it with your friends. 

We have been praying for years for God to do something.  I believe He is waiting for somebody to start doing something, and He will work through that.  And I believe this is that thing.




Sunday, January 15, 2017

stopping gun violence

A recent Sun-Times reader again called for the government to get rid of guns as the way to solve the high rate of gun violence in Chicago.  We are forgetting history when we do this. 

First of all, James Madison noted in the Federalist Papers that we were an “armed” people, which he regarded as a good thing and the only thing that prevented us from being ruled by a dictator.  And, secondly, John Adams said that our Constitution was only made for a moral and religious people. 

The Ten Commandments used to be the moral code for our nation.  It has only been in the last few decades that suddenly the display of the Commandments has been ruled unconstitutional after centuries of common use. 


Secularism and political correctness do not provide the moral fabric needed in a nation to provide domestic tranquility.  Those last words are taken from the preamble to our Constitution as part of defining the purposes of our government. 

Senate confirmation hearings and Democrats

A recent Sun-Times reader lamented that the Republicans seemed to be rushing on Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees, scheduling hearings for several nominees at every day and seemingly not waiting long enough for thorough background checks. 

I had just read about this where it said that this was somewhat rare for the Senate to do.   The most recent time it had done this was on President Obama’s first cabinet.  That was when the Democrats just got complete control over the House, Senate, and the Presidency. 


We should expect with some level of certainty that the Republicans will be a bit more, what’s the word, perhaps brazen in their dealings with Democrats for a time.  It has been observed that Democrats only talk about bipartisanship with they are in the minority.

Friday, January 13, 2017

fixing gerrymandering: a response to an editorial

The editorial in today’s Sun-Times reminded me of something I heard once about Democrats: they only believe in and talk about bipartisanship when they are the minority party.

The editorial was about gerrymandering, one of the greatest evils in our country today, though I haven’t yet been confident in the proposed ways that representative districts should be drawn.  Nobody seems to want a blind map.  They always want maps drawn to help or favor some group that needs help, and the meddling and mischief begin.

But the thing about the editorial that prompted me the most to write was this deep concern that the Republicans in most states would be drawing the maps the next time.  So somehow the Republicans apparently won the majority of the states’ legislative branches when the Democrats drew the districts. 


It was bad when the Democrats had the power to draw representative districts.  But now that the Republicans are going to do it, it’s so bad that we now have to stop it.