“If
we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants.”
William Penn (1644-1718)
...those who came to America from Europe came for
religious purposes. As they arrived, most of them established their
own individual civil governments based upon the Bible. It is, therefore,
totally foreign to the basic nature of
America at the time of the writing of the Constitution to argue a
separation doctrine that implies a secular state.
When the First
Amendment was passed it only had two purposes...
[1] ...there would be
no
established, national church for the united thirteen states. To say
it another way: There would be no “Church of the United States.” James Madison ... said that the First Amendment to the Constitution
was prompted because “the people feared one sect might obtain a
preeminence, or two combine together, and establish a religion to
which they would compel others to conform.” (34)
Nevertheless, a number of
the individual states had state churches, and even that was not
considered in conflict with the First Amendment.
“At the outbreak of
the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had conferred
special benefits upon one church to the exclusion of others.”
“In
all but one of the thirteen states, the states taxed the people to
support the preaching of the gospel and to build churches.”
[2] The second purpose of
the First Amendment was the very opposite from what is being made of
it today. It states expressly that government should not impede or
interfere with the free practice of religion.
As Justice Douglas wrote
for the majority of the Supreme Court in the United States v.
Ballard case in 1944:
"The First Amendment
has a dual aspect. It not only 'forestalls compulsion by law of
the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of
worship' but also 'safeguards the free exercise of the chosen
form of religion.'” (35)
Today "the separation of
church and state" in America is used to silence the church. When
Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist
state and media is that Christians, and all religions, are
prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and
state. The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from
the original intent. ...
The consequence of the
acceptance of this [distorted new] doctrine leads to the removal of
religion as an influence in civil government. This fact is well
illustrated by John W. Whitehead in his book The Second American
Revolution. It is used today as a false political dictum in
order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas. As Franky
Schaeffer says in the Plan for Action:
It
has been convenient and expedient for the secular humanist,
the materialist, the so-called liberal, the feminist, the
genetic engineer, the bureaucrat, the Supreme Court Justice, to
use this arbitrary division between church and state as a
ready excuse.... It is used... to subdue the opinions of that
vast body of citizens who represent those with religious
convictions." (36)
Ponder
the following quotes by Thomas Jefferson,* a
Deist and the main
author of the Declaration of Independence. The third
president of the United States affirms the First
Amendment decreed that the
government has no power to
control or quench the free expression of religion or
conscience. The first set of quotes refer to legal
and equal "rights". In the second set, he shares
his personal opinion, which does not favor Christianity.
"Believing that
religion is a
matter which lies solely between man and his God, that
he owes account to none other for his faith or his
worship,
that the legislative powers of government reach actions
only, and not opinions, 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." (This 1802 letter
to the Danbury Baptists shows a separation designed to
protect religion from government control, not silence
religious expressions.)
"Religion is a
subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously
reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every
man and his Maker in which
no other, and
far less the public, had a right to intermeddle."
(letter to Robert Rush, 1813)
"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the
Constitution from
intermeddling in religious institutions,
their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results
not only from the provision that no law shall be made
respecting the establishment or free exercise of
religion, but from that also which reserves to the
states the powers not delegated to the United States.
Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in religious discipline has
been delegated to the General Government. It must
rest with the States, as far as it can be in any human
authority." (letter to Samuel Miller, Jan. 23, 1808)
"I do not believe it is for
the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate
to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its
doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the
general government should be invested with the power of
effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them.
Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The
enjoining them, an act of discipline. Every religious
society has a right to determine for itself the times
for these exercises and the objects proper for them
according to their own particular tenets; and
this right can
never be safer than in their own hands where the
Constitution has deposited it... Every one
must act according to the dictates of his own reason,
and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been
given to the President of the United States, and no
authority to direct the religious exercises of his
constituents." (letter to Samuel Miller, Jan. 23, 1808)
"No provision in our
Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which
protects the
rights of conscience against the power of its public
functionaries, were it possible that any of
these should consider a conquest over the conscience of
men either attainable or applicable to any desirable
purpose." (Letters to the Methodist Episcopal Church at
New London, Connecticut, Feb. 4, 1809)
"In matters of religion, I
have considered that
its free
exercise is placed by the constitution independent of
the power of the federal government. I have
therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the
religious exercises suited to it; but have left them, as
the constitution found them, under the direction of
state or church authorities acknowledged by the several
religious societies." (Jefferson's Second Inaugural
Address)
"In justice, too, to our
excellent Constitution, it ought to be observed, that it
has not
placed our religious rights under the power of any
public functionary. The power, therefore, was
wanting, not less than the will, to injure these
rights." (Letter to the Society of the Methodist
Episcopal Church at Pittsburg, Dec. 9, 1808)
"...(O)ur
rulers can
have no authority over such natural rights, only as we have submitted to them. The rights of
conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The
legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only
as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for
my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. In
neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." (Notes on
Virginia, 1785) [1]
As a Deist, Thomas Jefferson believed in
the wisdom of man, not in the unchanging sovereignty of God. Like many of his personal
letters, his message to William
Short dated April 13, 1820, reflects
the Enlightenment's hostility toward the Bible:
"Among the sayings
and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I
find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and
of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much
ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism,
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions
should have proceeded from the same being."[2]
About two weeks earlier, on January
24, he wrote the following letter to John Adams:
"The whole history of these books
[the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain
to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been
played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating
to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain
much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament
there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from
an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric
of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts,
as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."[2]
Francis Schaeffer explained the difference
between Christianity and Deism
in his 1976 book, How Then Shall We Live?
"The utopian dream of the Enlightenment
can be summed up by five words: reason, nature, happiness, progress,
and liberty....
"If these men [who
embraced the beliefs of the Enlightenment] had a religion,
it was deism. The deists believed in a God who had created the
world but who had no contact with it now, and who had not revealed
truth to men. If there was a God, he was silent."[3]
More information here:
Unalienable Rights? From God?
Notes:
1. Andrew Lipscomb and
Albert Bergh, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
20 volumes
2.
Thomas Jefferson on Christianity and Religion, Compiled by Jim
Walker, http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm
3.
Francis Schaeffer, How Then Shall We Live? (Fleming H.
Revel
Co., 1976), p.121-122.
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