War on Faith

First they debated the economy and then we had the townhall and finally we will have a foreign policy debate.  You notice how the beltway organizers never get around to a social issues debate? We’ve been told there is a War on Women. I think there is a bonafied War on Faith.  The media doesn’t speak the language of Christianity very well and they’d shrug it off if at all possible. They were probably thankful when the Republican nominee had a controversial denomination overagainst Obama’s. 

That doesn’t make what has happened any less serious.  38 church denominations have joined the Catholics in resisting the mandate of Obamacare, complete with morning after pills and abortion.  The disdain that Obama and his administration have for religious faith is staggering and ominous.  They did it to a Lutheran church school in Minnesota as well.  In arguments before the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said that churches have no right to discriminate for the tenents of faith in to hiring and firing workers.  That is, the Christian school should be coerced to not take action against say, teaching Wiccan.  Nor could a church a discriminate in hiring if an atheist applies for the pastor’s job. Good news: SCOTUS struck down Obama’s interpretation 9-0. Now think about that.  Among the 9 were atheist Kagan and former ACLU head Ginsburg.  When those folks don’t agree, Holder and Obama must be rather radical.

In recent years there seems to be a war against Christmas.  The tactic that is being employed is the denial of any Christian expression or symbolic imagery on State property.  This extreme version of Separation of Church and State differs from the founding fathers who simply sought to remove the State’s influence from religious observance.  Extreme Separation holds that expression of faith should be confined to church buildings and that outside in the public square, it should not be tolerated.  Of course this is in direct affront to Christian belief.  Jesus never told us how to build a church building, how to worship, or even what day to worship on.  He did, however, teach how people of faith should live their daily lives.  Christians are the Good Samaritans.  Faith is out in the streets.

Now I know that some people are squeamish about politics in the church and talking about faith with a neighbor. This is precisely the attitude that Mussolini and Hitler utilized to silence the church in the most Catholic and Protestant countries of  Europe.  The National Socialist platform: 1. Faith could be expressed within the church walls but politics is not to be allowed.  2. Outside in the public domain, politics is to be expressed but no faith.  Hence Hitler charged Bonhoeffer, rightfully according to Nazi law,  with speaking politics within the church and faith outside.

 If Obama’s actions seem at odds with our nation’s tradition, it might be worth asking where did that heritage come from?  The school kids are being taught that all the founders were diests. But the Declaration of Independence is a Judeo-Christian document if ever there was.  “Endowed by the Creator” could never have been written by an atheist or an agnostic.  It even violates dieism which holds that God simply “set the clock” and does not thereafter participate in the universe.  How then the endowment?  Would a Hindu with a caste system or a Muslim with dhimmitude say, “that all men are created equal”? Would a Muslim whose Koran demands an apostate be killed in the name of Islam say that “among these are Life…” Clearly Jefferson wrote those words, not as a dieist as some suppose, but as a Christian though he had some peculiar personal beliefs. What then?  Were the founders actually Christians?

Right after the Revolutionary War but before there was any Constitution, the state of Virginia toyed with the idea of supporting pastors with state money.  James Madison, former Lieutenant to Washington showed up in the Virginia House to speak against the practice.  His 1785 text, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments explains how the signers of the Declaration conceived church and state.  In it, he noted that a Relationship with God is the foundation of a Christian walk.  “Religious belief impresses itself directly on the mind in such a way that we can speak of it as not altogether voluntary--not a matter of willing choice, but of compulsion in light of the evidence that both reason and revelation  in place before us.” That is, faith is initiated by the Almighty making a religious conscience an ‘unalienable right’ which God, not the government, bestows.  He goes on to say that this profoundly differs from the opinions of men, because these can be changed by self or other men.  Moreover, God is Truth, and we pledge ourselves to follow that Truth.  Here he links the pursuit of Truth with the rights even of an atheist.  An atheist has at his core the right to pursue truth apart from the dictates of other men.  Thus, as Madison puts it, Truth and “Religion is wholly exempt from the cognizance of political authority.”

The bedrock principal of our liberties is the Liberty of Faith. This is echoed in the Vatican’s Dignitatis Humanae of 1965, “Our freedom to fulfill our duty to God must be untrammeled because that duty is both first and last for us…” Religious freedom is grounded in the very dignity of the human person.”

If I may put this in redneck language, “If you have a relationship with God, who am I to stand in the way of you and He? Or the way you talk about it in the street.”

Religious communities form an essential element in the civil societies.  So if government is the servant of men endowed by their Creator with a relationship, the right of assembly is also unchallengable.  Bingo!  First Amendment. 

But somewhere along the way God and Truth have become nothing and relative truth is the new norm. “Government is the only thing we all belong to,” I think they said at Barack’s convention.  Or as Rev. John Neuhaus noted, “the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church.”

 He ought to know.  He lived under the Nazis.  Do we?