Separation of church and state
Liberal judges and groups such as the ACLU have succeeded in turning us into a secular nation, removing all vestiges of religion from public life. The results of this secularization are all around us: 73,000 births to girls between the ages of 10-14 in 2003, 6 out of 10 marriages ending in divorce, a prison population of 1.4 million (7 times what it was just 10 years ago), etc.
The mantra of the secularists is “the separation of Church and State.” I am amazed at the number of people who are convinced that this phase is part of the U.S. Constitution. It’s not there, nor is it to be found in the Bill of Rights. So where did this phrase originate and what does it mean? I'm reading a book written by Robert Jeffress in which he talks about the origin of this overused phrase:
In 1801 a group of Baptists in Connecticut were alarmed over a rumor that was spreading throughout the Northeast that the Congregational denomination was about to be established as the national denomination of the United States. In other words, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other denominations would be deemed inferior or would be outlawed altogether. They had heard horror stories from their parents and grandparents about state-established religion in England. Those who had refused to follow the dictates of the Church of England were subjected to imprisonment and torture. So they fled England not to be free FROM religion, but to have freedom OF religion expression.
Naturally, when this first generation of Americans heard that quite possibly there was about to be a Church of the United States, they were understandably alarmed. They contacted then-president Thomas Jefferson about the rumor. Mr. Jefferson allayed their fears in a letter addressed to the Danbury Baptists in January, 1802:
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Thomas Jefferson was reassuring those Connecticut Baptists that the First Amendment was established not to protect government from the church, but to protect the church from the government. Today secularists (moral relativists, as I like to call them) are using that phrase to RESTRICT religious expression. But clearly, Mr. Jefferson used the phrase “separation between Church and State” to reassure this group of believers that government would never restrain their religious freedom by mandating one state-sponsored denomination.
Mr. Jefferson was simply echoing the promise in the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Never in their wildest imaginations did Mr. Jefferson or the framers of the Constitution envision that the First Amendment would be used as a rationale for separating our nation from its Christian foundation.
And, by the way, this nation was indeed founded on Christian principles. The majority of the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians. Fifty-three out of the fifty-six men who attended the Constitutional Convention and formulated our nation’s guiding document supported biblical precepts.
Did you know that the source most quoted by all the writings of our Founding Fathers, was the Bible? Did you know that the separation of governmental powers in the Constitution is based on Isaiah 33:22? It reads: “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king.” From this verse our forefathers established the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government. Such a separation of powers, they reasoned, was mandated by man’s innate corruption described in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
Ken Woodward, writing for Newsweek in an article titled, “How the Bible Made America,” said, “Historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.”
The historical revisionists insist that our country’s forefathers came from a diversity of religious beliefs. Wrong! They were primarily Christians. There were no Muslims on the Mayflower. John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, said: “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government and the principles of Christianity.”
Christianity and civil government connected in an indissoluble bond? Wait a minute. Someone call the ACLU immediately! What about the separation of church and state? What about government’s “neutrality” toward religion?
During the first 160 years of our nation’s history, public-school students were encouraged to learn the moral precepts found in the Bible. For nearly 200 years, The New England Primer was used in schools throughout the land. The primer contained a section every child had to memorize in order to graduate from third grade:
A-“A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.”
B-“Better is a little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure and trouble therewith.”
C-“Come unto Christ all ye that labor and are heavy laden and He will give you rest.”
D-“Do not do the abominable thing which I hate,” saith the Lord.”
E-“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Can you imagine such a textbook being adopted today by a school board? Hah! Any textbook that dares even to suggest the existence of a Creator-God is angrily denounced and excluded from consideration.
So what happened to cause such a huge shift in sentiment toward Christianity in public life? Some will point to Supreme Court cases in the early 1960’s that removed Bible reading and then prayer from the classroom. But the genesis of this change in attitude occurred fifteen years earlier. I will discuss that landmark case in my next entry. I’m tired of writing now. But I’d like to close with something to ponder.
There have been numerous studies done attempting to explain the wide fluctuations in the national crime rate in America over the past two centuries. Liberals like to point to poverty as the main reason people are led to criminal activity. If poverty causes crime, it’s it’s very difficult to explain why crime was low during the Depression, when over a quarter of the population had no income at all, or why crime rose during the affluent sixties and seventies. No, the only consistent causal factor is our nation’s spiritual health.
For example, the decrease in crime that took place in the late 1890’s followed on the heels of a widespread religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Church membership rose steeply. Christians formed voluntary associations devoted to education and moral reform. The entire American society came to respect the values of sobriety, hard work, self-restraint-what sociologists call the Protestant ethic. As the Protestant ethic triumphed, the crime rate plummeted. Widespread religious belief creates a shared social ethic that acts as a restraint on the evil side of human nature.
The mantra of the secularists is “the separation of Church and State.” I am amazed at the number of people who are convinced that this phase is part of the U.S. Constitution. It’s not there, nor is it to be found in the Bill of Rights. So where did this phrase originate and what does it mean? I'm reading a book written by Robert Jeffress in which he talks about the origin of this overused phrase:
In 1801 a group of Baptists in Connecticut were alarmed over a rumor that was spreading throughout the Northeast that the Congregational denomination was about to be established as the national denomination of the United States. In other words, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other denominations would be deemed inferior or would be outlawed altogether. They had heard horror stories from their parents and grandparents about state-established religion in England. Those who had refused to follow the dictates of the Church of England were subjected to imprisonment and torture. So they fled England not to be free FROM religion, but to have freedom OF religion expression.
Naturally, when this first generation of Americans heard that quite possibly there was about to be a Church of the United States, they were understandably alarmed. They contacted then-president Thomas Jefferson about the rumor. Mr. Jefferson allayed their fears in a letter addressed to the Danbury Baptists in January, 1802:
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Thomas Jefferson was reassuring those Connecticut Baptists that the First Amendment was established not to protect government from the church, but to protect the church from the government. Today secularists (moral relativists, as I like to call them) are using that phrase to RESTRICT religious expression. But clearly, Mr. Jefferson used the phrase “separation between Church and State” to reassure this group of believers that government would never restrain their religious freedom by mandating one state-sponsored denomination.
Mr. Jefferson was simply echoing the promise in the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Never in their wildest imaginations did Mr. Jefferson or the framers of the Constitution envision that the First Amendment would be used as a rationale for separating our nation from its Christian foundation.
And, by the way, this nation was indeed founded on Christian principles. The majority of the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians. Fifty-three out of the fifty-six men who attended the Constitutional Convention and formulated our nation’s guiding document supported biblical precepts.
Did you know that the source most quoted by all the writings of our Founding Fathers, was the Bible? Did you know that the separation of governmental powers in the Constitution is based on Isaiah 33:22? It reads: “For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king.” From this verse our forefathers established the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government. Such a separation of powers, they reasoned, was mandated by man’s innate corruption described in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
Ken Woodward, writing for Newsweek in an article titled, “How the Bible Made America,” said, “Historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.”
The historical revisionists insist that our country’s forefathers came from a diversity of religious beliefs. Wrong! They were primarily Christians. There were no Muslims on the Mayflower. John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, said: “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government and the principles of Christianity.”
Christianity and civil government connected in an indissoluble bond? Wait a minute. Someone call the ACLU immediately! What about the separation of church and state? What about government’s “neutrality” toward religion?
During the first 160 years of our nation’s history, public-school students were encouraged to learn the moral precepts found in the Bible. For nearly 200 years, The New England Primer was used in schools throughout the land. The primer contained a section every child had to memorize in order to graduate from third grade:
A-“A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.”
B-“Better is a little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure and trouble therewith.”
C-“Come unto Christ all ye that labor and are heavy laden and He will give you rest.”
D-“Do not do the abominable thing which I hate,” saith the Lord.”
E-“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Can you imagine such a textbook being adopted today by a school board? Hah! Any textbook that dares even to suggest the existence of a Creator-God is angrily denounced and excluded from consideration.
So what happened to cause such a huge shift in sentiment toward Christianity in public life? Some will point to Supreme Court cases in the early 1960’s that removed Bible reading and then prayer from the classroom. But the genesis of this change in attitude occurred fifteen years earlier. I will discuss that landmark case in my next entry. I’m tired of writing now. But I’d like to close with something to ponder.
There have been numerous studies done attempting to explain the wide fluctuations in the national crime rate in America over the past two centuries. Liberals like to point to poverty as the main reason people are led to criminal activity. If poverty causes crime, it’s it’s very difficult to explain why crime was low during the Depression, when over a quarter of the population had no income at all, or why crime rose during the affluent sixties and seventies. No, the only consistent causal factor is our nation’s spiritual health.
For example, the decrease in crime that took place in the late 1890’s followed on the heels of a widespread religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Church membership rose steeply. Christians formed voluntary associations devoted to education and moral reform. The entire American society came to respect the values of sobriety, hard work, self-restraint-what sociologists call the Protestant ethic. As the Protestant ethic triumphed, the crime rate plummeted. Widespread religious belief creates a shared social ethic that acts as a restraint on the evil side of human nature.