Yes, The United States is a Christian Nation, and, Yes, It Matters

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.

chaplains in Congress, and what that means

The Sun-Times (May 6) devoted a whole page to a writer who questioned the practice of having chaplains in Congress, because our country was “founded on the principle of separation of church and state.”  Yet, as he notes, the day of the First Congress opened the session with prayer, and “the first order of business was to perpetuate that practice,” by electing a House chaplain.

Maybe this idea of separation of church and state as commonly thrown around today is not what the Founders intended when they wrote the First Amendment.  They certainly didn’t use that expression, and it isn’t found in our Constitution.  We should expect that they knew what they meant when they wrote it.

We use this idea of separation to exclude any mention of God in our public schools, yet Congress itself opens its daily sessions with prayer.  Why or how could the court called supreme then find prayer unconstitutional in our public schools?

The founding document of our nation, the Declaration of Independence, declares that our rights come from God.  You may call that a religious statement, but they regarded that as a true statement.  And, more specifically, our Founders based this on a Christian understanding of God as found in the Bible. 

You can say what you want about multiculturalism and pluralism and diversity, but if we divorce Christianity from the foundation of our country, our whole idea about human rights just becomes our opinion, not grounded in a Higher Authority, and we would then be only an election away from losing them.

heaven: a letter to a newspaprer columnist

Hi Mary

I am sure you that you will receive a lot of mail after your column about heaven.  I’m guessing you might not read them all, or if you do start reading a lot of them, you will start just skimming through them, expecting them to all read alike.

I have rethought my religious beliefs a lot.  Life hasn’t been easy, so I wanted to be sure I was on the right track.

Life is short, and usually there is no way to check our answers before it is over.  So we are left with trying to make the most sense out of what we see by what we have.

I start with the whole idea of God.  Is there a God or not?

I find the answer easy here.  I see any attempts to explain life, existence, consciousness, the complexities and marvels of the human body, and all animal life, without the aid, involvement, or work of an outside Intelligent Being as being contrary to all human experience. 

The idea that life can spring from non-life and then by random acts develop things like brains, cells, eyes, DNA, is simply people trying too hard to deny the obvious.  The idea of a God makes people think that somehow they are responsible to this Being, and so a lot of people will try very hard to find ways to deny His existence, and they end up believing things they would see as being silly if they didn’t want to believe them so much.

The next question is whether this God cares about and wants to communicate with the people He has made.  Of course, why would He bother to do all this if He didn’t care about what He made?  Our human experience is that things we make are expressions of ourselves and, yes, we value them far more than that of someone else.

Humans universally ask  questions about God, and throughout history the vast majority of people have always believed in a God.  I find it quite reasonable to think that God would want to communicate to us and tell us what the whole thing is all about.  Like you buy a new appliance and you get an instruction manual telling you how the thing works. 

We could spend our whole lives trying to figure out the MOL (meaning of life) and never know if we have the right answer, or spend our whole lives learning things and then wishing we had known these things when we were young, so we wouldn’t have wasted so much of our lives doing the wrong things.

So if God wanted to communicate with human beings, surely He would have done so by now.  And I would find it reasonable to assume that this knowledge, or source of knowledge, would be widespread by now as well. 

The obvious first place to look would be at the major world religions.  There are the Asian religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism.  They have a lot of people who believe in them, but they have made no real attempts to spread this knowledge throughout the world.  So unless you think God only cares about Asians, I think we need to keep looking.

Islam is considered to be the fastest growing religion in the world today, but then how is it growing?  Historically it has grown through military force.  The countries that are Muslim today I believe without exception were conquered by Muslim forces.  They did not send our missionaries.   And while Western countries have greatly reduced birth rates, because we teach our daughters it is more important to have a career than a family, Muslims in general have very high birth rates.  And they don’t take kindly to anyone who thinks about leaving the Muslim religion. 

Is this the way God is?  I suppose it’s possible, but I would keep looking before I decided it was.

Judaism is a world religion, though its numbers are small by comparison.  One big reason for that is that Christianity considers itself to be Judaism 2.0, and Jewish people who agree identify themselves as Christians as to their religion.

Christianity is obviously the most widespread religion in the world.  In fact, many nations in the world are literate today, because Christian missionaries went there, learned their language, and then translated the Bible into that language so that they could read the Bible for themselves.  Seeing the Bible as God’ revelation to humans, they didn’t just tell people what to believe, they gave them the book and the means to read it for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

The Bible is grounded in history.  It is not just the thoughts of a holy person sitting in a cave musing over the idea of God or having a vision from above.  It traces God’s interactions with humans throughout history. 

How can we know it is true?  There are scores of books written to show how the Bible can be trusted, whether through archaeology, psychology, literary criticism, textual criticism, but in this short life that we have, there are not unlimited options. 

Many books have been written in objection to the Bible, and more books have been written that adequately defended the Bible from these criticisms.

The Bible says there is a heaven.  No, not everybody goes there, otherwise it wouldn’t be heaven anymore.  But God wants people to go there.  No, it doesn’t say that all roads lead there.  That really doesn’t make any sense.  The Bible says that Jesus is the way to heaven.  Is that so hard to believe?  Even those who are Christianity’s biggest critics find it hard to say anything bad about Jesus.

Yes, the truth is that we all die.  And, no, we don’t know a thing about what happens after death unless God Himself tells us.  Has He?  On something as important as this, I would expect that He would.  And the Bible, I would say, is the best answer to those who look for the MOL and the other questions about what comes after.

I wish you well.

Larry Craig

 heav

What is an American: a response to a newspaper column

I hope you are doing well.

You had a column printed on February 27 that has been on my mind since then.  I wanted to write you sooner, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say.  I do a lot of political writing, and I have written on this before, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted a four-page response.  I needed something different and finally figured out what it was.

Your column asked the question: what ‘American’ really means?

What has made our country different from all the rest is our level of freedom, our understanding of human rights, plus the separation of Church and State.  Europe recognized most of our understanding of freedom and rights, but each nation had a Church that was a part of the government. 

England had the Church of England, a number of countries were Lutheran, some Reformed, and some Roman Catholic.  Our Founders didn’t want that.  But they also didn’t want a secular country.  That’s why the Bible, prayer, and the Ten Commandments were a major part of our public life and schools for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.  They didn’t want God out of our schools and public life, but a particular Christian denomination as a part of our federal government.

But that’s not the point.

They said our rights come from God and not the government.  If they came from government, government would have the power to take them away.

Now this is the point.

How did they know that these rights came from God?  No other nation recognized these same rights.  What was different? 

The Founders believed in the Bible as revealing God to humankind.  That’s where their understanding of God and rights came from.  They believed that Christianity is true.  They, unlike what we are told today, saw a religion as a description of reality.  Today we think of religion as a person’s personal preferences, like a person’s taste in food, music, or movies.

If religion, and in this case Christianity, is not true, then all our talk about human rights is simply our opinion.  People don’t die for their opinions, and they certainly shouldn’t try to impose them on others.

If our human rights are not based on the Bible and Christianity, then we have no basis to believe in them except as a majority of opinion in our country.  Meaning, at some point in our history, we can vote them out of existence.

For example, Muslims have a very different view of God and rights.  You have 50 Muslim countries in the world, and not one of them is anywhere near to the United States in their understanding of rights, liberty, and representative government. 

Europe in a generation of two will become a Muslim majority continent.  When it does, you will see major changes taking place in the laws of those countries.

I

f we in our country do not agree on what is the foundation of our rights and our liberties, then we can find them removed, limited, or changed by elections and changes in our leadership. 

There is talk now about repealing the Second Amendment, the second item in our nation’s Bill of Rights.  But the Bill of Rights was supposed to be a statement of some of these natural rights that come from God.  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.   You can’t have true freedom without a people who have self-restraint through a high ethical code, like the Ten Commandments, which we have banned from our public life and schools. 

If we deny the importance of religion, and in this case specifically Christianity, we lose the entire foundation of our country.  If we don’t know, believe, and affirm these basic principles, our country will gradually change over generations into the lowest common denominator of all the nations, or eventually a Muslim nation.

The changes will be gradual, as the older generations die out, and the younger generations have no clue about what made us what we are, what we fought a war to create.

We no longer teach these founding principles in our schools, to our children, and certainly not to the millions of people who come to our country. 

Being an American is having a certain belief system, a certain worldview.  And, frankly, Christianity is at the core of it.  Remove it or ignore it and we lose the foundation of our beliefs about liberty and human rights.  And without the foundation, we will lose them.  Maybe not in our lifetime, but we will lose them.  If we don’t teach our children and all those millions coming here what it is that made us what we are, then we will lose it, just like the rest of the world doesn’t have it.

xenophobic America: a response to a newspaper opinion column

The Sun-Times (April 9) ran a full-page article about xenophobic anti-Muslim Americans.  Xenophobic was the word of choice in describing Americans who oppose Muslim immigration or who have not been enthusiastic about the growing Muslim population in our country.

There is an issue here, though, that is not being discussed. 

The United States, when it was formed, was unique among the nations of the world.  No other nation in the world had the same views as ours on human rights and freedom

The Declaration of Independence states that these rights come from God.   In saying that these rights come from God, the Founders were saying that the rights were based on our understanding of God as shown in Christianity and the Bible.  This is why the Bible was an integral part of public school education and public life for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding. 

Islam had been in existence for a thousand years when our nation was founded; and today, when there are about 50 Muslim countries in the world, there is no Muslim country in the world that is anywhere close to the United States in its Constitution and its views on human rights and freedom.  The God from whom our Founders believed they received these natural rights is not found in Islam.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world today.  Not because it has a high conversion rate but because it has a high birth rate and a unique response to those who want to leave it..  The birth rate of Western countries, including the United States, apart from first generation immigrants is below replacement value.  In a generation of two, for example, Europe will become a Muslim majority continent.

The court called supreme was wrong to remove the Bible and the Ten Commandments from public life, including our schools, because they are the basis of our freedoms as Americans.  Apart from the Bible and the Ten Commandments, our views of human rights are merely our opinions which can be voted away by a majority vote.

Diversity is good, when you are buying a car or ice cream.  In a nation, not so much.  If we don’t agree on the basis of our rights and freedoms, they are only one election away from being taken away from us.  Maybe not the next one, or the next.  The changes will take place gradually, but they will happen.

Proof that the Church and State separation dogma is wrong

The first Ten Amendments to our Constitution are called the Bill of Rights.  Our Founders were hesitant about including a list of our rights to the Constitution.  They were concerned that the people would think that their rights were limited to only those specifically stated in the Constitution, and they were concerned that the people, and the government, might think that their rights came from the government.  In which case, of course, they could then be modified, limited, or revoked. 

The Declaration of Independence states that these rights come from God.  But every nation at that time believed in a god of some sort, and they did not see human rights as we did.  The difference is that our Founders believed that the Bible was God’s revelation to us about who He is and the nature of the world.  It was from there that they learned of these human rights.  This is one reason the Bible was a major part of public school education for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

If we don’t teach this to our children in our schools, then we are not teaching them the founding principles of our nation, and we cannot expect them as our future leaders to know and understand what makes the United States what it is.  After all, most nations of the world do not see human rights as we do.  Human rights are either our opinion, and everybody has an opinion.  Or they are based on transcendent values, which means God, and specifically in this case, the Bible and Christianity.

And what this means ultimately is that our country is not and never was a secular nation as we are commonly told we are.  We cannot separate ourselves from our Christian roots without separating ourselves from our founding principles and thereby weakening the very things that we fought a war over so that we could establish our Constitution. 

The court called supreme was wrong when it said that our government cannot aid or favor any religion, because our nation was founded on the Bible and Christianity.  If we don’t acknowledge and teach this to our children, at some point we will cease to exist as the nation we were founded to be.  Our name may not change, but we will have thrown away the very things that made us a great nation.