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, June 23, 2022

Christianity and America

Christians are finally waking up and getting involved in politics.  For a long time, they were too busy working, raising a family, being involved in church activities, Little League, all kinds of kid and family things than to spend a lot of time in politics.  But they are slowly and finally waking up. 

For much of their history, they believed that to change or improve society, you change and improve individuals.  And since their mission anyway was preaching a gospel of personal salvation, they often didn’t concern themselves with more structural parts of society, like politics does. 

Now they are slowly seeing that you need both.  When society legalizes something, it becomes acceptable or more acceptable, whether gambling, abortion, drug use, and other things.  And they find that society, including in our public schools, is promoting values that Christians have problems with, and they don’t believe that is the place of the public schools to do that.

But the bigger question is: what is the place of Christianity in our society, or, more accurately, what is the place of Christianity in the United States of America?

Our founding document is the Declaration of Independence.  It speaks of rights and a creator.  These rights are not the natural rights of the philosophers.  They don’t need a god to give them, but the Declaration said that God did give them.  God created human beings, and He gave them rights. 

An atheist cannot believe in unalienable rights.  For an atheist, there is nothing higher than we already see.  An atheist can’t actually believe in any rights but what society decides to give to people. 

But the rights our country was founded on precede and supersede government.  And this is not a religious dogma here.  The Founders didn’t say that they believed that God gave these rights. They said that He did.  It was a fact.  As sure as the sun rises in the east.

But how did they know this?

Not all religions believe in this.  One major religion does not believe in a right to life, and several don’t believe in a right to the pursuit of happiness.  It was the Bible that informed our Founders about what God did.

But make no mistake.  Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America.

In fact, John Adams, our second President, said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” 

The First Amendment says that Congress cannot establish religion, which at that time meant that the United States could not have a State Church like, say, England has, where the Queen is the Head of the Anglican Church.

The court called supreme was wrong to say that our government cannot favor one religion over another or that it must remain neutral toward all religions.  Practically speaking, that removes all religion from public life, and many have insisted that includes theism as well. 

But then our country was founded on something that God did that affects everyone of us.  And we need to know about that.  We need to teach our kids about that.  In public schools.  And this is not some generic god that nobody believes in but the God of the Bible.

Be thankful for Christians and for Christians to be involved in politics.  Without them, you will lose your rights. 

Some will say that Christians are forcing their beliefs on other people, like, for example, in the case of abortion.  No, they are merely asserting that abortion is not a right, at least not a Constitutional right.  Like all other measures that our lawmakers decide, the public weighs in on an issue, and our lawmakers decide what they want to do.  Christians have as much a voice on an issue as anyone else. 

Christians will say that others are imposing their beliefs on them.  This is why freedom is messy at times, and why I would contend diversity is not a strength, but a weakness.  It divides us.  But that is an issue for another time.

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