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

Friday, July 22, 2022

Another Look at the Separation of Church and State

The concept of a separation between church and state is being talked about a lot today, and that is a good thing.  What is exactly the relationship between religion and government?  And why is it a separation between ‘church’ and state?  Why not synagogue or mosque?  Why not religion in general?

The founding document of our country is the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution describes the system of our government, but the Declaration tells us what it’s all about, what our country is all about, what our government is all about.

In defining our country, the Founders talked about God.  They didn’t present God as the object of their beliefs but as an Actor in life.  God created human beings.  The court called supreme ruled that talk of creation was a religious idea not suited for public schools, but the Founders called it a fact. 

Not only that, but God created human beings equal.  This means that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.  This fact of creating people equal determines the form of government that we can have.  We reject the idea of kings, because they have no right to rule over other people.

This God also gave human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government.  Rights that the government did not give us and that it cannot take away.  

The first Ten Amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights.  They are meant to encapsulate what these unalienable rights are.  Other Amendments can be repealed, like the 18th Amendment was, but these cannot. 

So while the Constitution doesn’t explicitly use the word ‘God,’ it certainly recognizes Him.

But what God exactly does it recognize?

All religions talk about God, but not the same God.  They can’t all be talking about the same God, because their beliefs about God are not the same.  They don’t all recognize that God gave these rights to human beings.  Not all religions recognize a right to life.  In some major religions, you don’t have a right to life if you are not of that religion.  And you certainly don’t have a right to the pursuit of happiness.  Anyone ever hear of the caste system?

So whatever this separation is, it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about God and politics.  We say that religion cannot influence politics.  Well, too late for that.  It already has.  That’s why we have a republic instead of a monarchy.  And we have to talk about God in our public schools if we are to teach our children about the foundations of our country, what America is all about.

The fact that this separation is between church and state and not religion and state shows that we are misunderstanding the concept.  The Founders didn’t want our federal government to choose which church, or Christian denomination, is the official one, like they did in Europe. 

But they were great fans of the Bible and religion being taught in our public schools, because they knew they had to have a moral people if they were to live in freedom, otherwise they would abuse their freedom, hurt other people, and require a large, strong government to rule them.

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