For generations now we have been told that religion must be
absent from public life and policy, because there is a firm and large wall
between church and state, or between religion and state, or anything to do with
God and public life.
Now the very idea of a separation of church and state doesn’t
even come from the Constitution but from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote
about 16 years later. That letter has
been the source of a lot of scrutiny and debate, but we don’t need to even go
there to settle the debate.
Everybody knows that the United States is the country of
rights. Ask any immigrant, whether he
has been here for 30 years or just entered the country. This is why they come, and no other nation
has more people who want to go there than the United States.
But there are 2 kinds of rights. And this is where the problem lies. We don’t talk about this anymore, in our
schools or in the halls of Congress.
It’s just all about rights.
Rights as commonly understood today are things that the
government is required to see that you have.
And the list keeps growing.
You have a right to an affordable house, you have a right to
health care, you have a right to a good education, you have a right to live in
a good neighborhood, you have a right to
a living wage, you have a right to a basic income, and the list goes on and on and
grows with every election cycle.
This kind of rights requires the government to oversee just
about everything and to spend enormous amounts of money, which means that the
American people must pay enormous amounts of money in taxes to pay for all this. This is the main reason our federal government
is $22 trillion in debt.
But this is not the kind of rights that our country was
founded on. Our country was founded on
unalienable rights, which precede and supersede government. Unalienable rights are things you can do
without the government’s permission or regulation, like the right to freedom of
speech, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to the free exercise of
religion, the right of a free press, and the right to keep and bear arms.
What is forgotten, misunderstood, or left out in all this is
the fact that government cannot give you unalienable rights. Unalienable rights can only come from
God. And specifically, the God of the
Bible and Christianity and Judaism. No
other religion has unalienable rights.
So without the government acknowledgement that our country
is founded on the Bible and Judeo-Christian beliefs, you don’t have unalienable
rights. You only have what rights the
government deems to give you. So when
they say that we live in a secular country, they are essentially saying that
there is no such thing as unalienable rights.
At least not in this country.
So while the number of government-given rights are growing
all the time, what were long considered unalienable rights are being
restricted. Slowly and gradually. Your right to free speech is being restricted
if somebody might be offended by what you say.
Your right to keep and bear arms is being restricted in multiple ways in
the name of safety, as a secular nation seeks to cope with the violence of a
nation not governed by the Bible principles of love, forgiveness, and
self-restraint. Your right to free
exercise of religion is restricted if your religious beliefs now conflict with
the higher moral values of secularism, or political correctness.
And this push to downplay unalienable rights for
government-given rights is also a major driving force behind the push for
socialism in our country today. We used
to be responsible for our own lives; now the government is.
But, but, but what
about the First Amendment where it says that Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion?
The phrase establishment of religion is strange to us today but was
well-known at that time. It had to do
with a church that was the official church of the state or nation, like they
had and still have in England today, the Church of England, often supported
financially by them as well. Notice that
the First Amendment says that Congress shall not make such a law. Many of the original states had established
churches until they realized that they were doing the very thing many of them
had fled from when they came to the New World.
We cannot separate God or Christianity from our government
and public life, because our very existence as a free nation depends on it.
