What is an
American?
Historically
nations formed from people who were of the same language or kinship, but the
United States was built on a set of ideals.
And what were those
ideals?
Very simply, the
idea of human rights. The idea that
human rights precede government, rights that the government didn’t and cannot
give and that government cannot take away.
But where did this
idea of human rights come from? Did somebody
just make it up?
If this whole thing
is just some person’s political ideas, or a political wave like political
correctness or multiculturalism, and the colonies then accepted it, because they
thought it was a good idea, then they are ideas that can change with the times
and with changing demographics.
So where did this
idea come from?
The Founding
Document of our country is the Declaration of Independence. There it states that these rights come from
God, that humans were created by God and endowed by Him with certain inalienable
rights. Inalienable means that they
cannot be surrendered or transferred.
Among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And people then form governments for the
purpose of securing those rights.
Government exists to see that we get to experience those rights.
Government cannot
infringe, modify, curtail or revoke them.
Government is not the source of these rights, and they are not
determined by public opinion or votes.
This is better but still
not good enough.
How did they know
that our rights come from God? And which
God?
Every nation of the
world at that time had their gods, and none of them believed as we did. They didn’t have atheistic nations in those
days as we do today, but they don’t see human rights as we do either.
The fact is that
our Founders got their beliefs about God and human rights from Christianity and
the Bible.
But Christianity
had been around for 1700 years. Why now?
When Christianity
first began in the first century, it was often harshly persecuted by the Romans. In the fourth century, it suddenly became the
state religion. Christianity was then united
with the government throughout Europe until for most countries long after the
American Revolution.
Starting in the
1500s, Christianity itself went through a major change. For the first time the Bible began to be
translated into all the various native languages of the peoples, and people
could read the Bible for themselves and not rely on other people to read it and
then tell them what it says.
This caused
conflicts between a lot of people and the Church and, consequently, the governments.
When this New World was discovered, they had now somewhere to go to be able to
live in freedom according to their conscience.
No, not everybody who came to the New World was a Christian looking for religious
freedom. Many people came for economic
opportunities. But almost everybody was
from Europe, so they were at least nominally Christian.
Not all Americans at
that time wanted Church separated from the State. In fact, many states had state churches long
after the First Amendment was passed.
The First Amendment addressed only a State Church at the federal level.
Having the Bible in
their own language spawned the birth of many different Christian denominations,
all uniting under the authority of the Bible and the Ten Commandments as our
moral code.
Our Founders believed
that the Bible was God’s revelation to humans, about what He is like, what humans
are like, and what the world is all about.
They saw the Christian understanding of God and the world as being
true.
A religion is not a
list of personal preferences and beliefs of a particular set of people like their
taste in food, music, or movies. A
religion is a worldview, a description of reality that defines what is true and
what is false, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad.
So our nation’s
founding is inextricably united with Christianity. If we separate our rights from the belief that
they come from God as Christians understand God through the Bible, if we deny
the Christian foundation of our country or deny that we need to continue to
believe in that, if we say that we are a secular nation where God must be
absent from public life and discussions, if our rights do not have a transcendent
authority or value, if we say that all religions are equal in our country and
government cannot favor or aid any religion, then our ideas about human rights
are just products of our imagination.
They are only opinions that will change with time.
If we don’t teach
each succeeding generation of our people and the millions of immigrants who
come here where these ideals come from, they won’t know where they came from and
someday there will be more people who don’t know and understand the nature of
these ideals than those who do.
Almost all of the
immigrants who come here come from countries that don’t share our ideas of
human rights and freedom. Over time the
whole concept of human rights can, and will, change as the country absorbs the
contributions, and thinking, of its very diverse population. And they can then all be voted away in the
next election.
It wouldn’t happen
overnight, because we still have a lot of people around who remember where our
rights came from. But that will change
over time.
We fought a war in order
to be able to establish a nation with these ideals. If we were in the same circumstances today, there
never would been a war for independence.
It took a sense that the government was taking away something that had
been given to the people by God. It’s
hard to imagine someone in Congress making that argument today.
John Adams, our second
President, said that our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral
people. It is wholly inadequate for any
other. And by religion he meant Christianity,
because religions are not all alike when it comes to morals and certainly when
it comes to rights. That’s why the Ten
Commandments were a major part of the public life in our country for two
hundred years after our founding. You
can’t give innumerable rights and freedoms to people who don’t have a high
moral code.
After several
generations of having our leaders call our nation a secular nation, we are
already seeing calls to modify those rights. Freedom of speech must now be abridged if it might
offend someone, and the right to keep and bear arms must be infringed for the
sake of safety. Constitutional amendments
describing some of those rights were fine as they were for over 209 years, but
now all of a sudden people are finding problems with them. And this will continue until all of our unique
God-given rights are gone, unless we again find our roots and reassert the Christian
foundation of our country.
The court called supreme
was wrong when it said that prayer, Bible reading, and the Ten Commandments in
public life. and our schools are unconstitutional. Evan judges can be ignorant of the
foundations of our country. Did not our Founders
know what they meant when they wrote the First Amendment and then had the Bible
used in all our public schools? They
knew you had to teach each generation how to live.
The modern moral
standard of tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity is showing itself to
be wholly inadequate as a moral foundation for our country, as it essentially puts
the burden on the government to impose and enforce it. Previously the basic moral standard was ‘Love
your neighbor as yourself.’ From the
Bible.
Frankly, we are running
out of time before our nation no longer has the mind and the will to restore
our country to the founding principles of our country.
Those who know the
truth need to speak the truth, publicly, frequently, and even loudly. If not for us, then for our children and our grandchildren. And we must insist that we teach these ideals
to our children and the millions of people who come there and particularly
those who want to become citizens.
In 1862, Abraham
Lincoln called our nation “the last best hope on earth.” If anything, that statement has never been truer
that it is today.
