Coral Ridge Ministries Dr. D. James Kennedy, FounderTRUTH #1 - The Foundation of Government and Politics Is Religion
“Strictly separate.” When it comes to religion and politics, that is the rule announced by the courts and enforced by the American Civil Liberties Union over the past sixty years.
In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a longstanding American legal tradition and declared that the U.S. Constitution has erected a “high and impregnable” wall of separation between church and state. The ACLU then set out to apply that ruling in the decades to follow, sending threatening letters and going into court to force civic officials to remove Ten Commandments displays, crèche scenes, the Bible, and even prayer from public life. But while the ACLU has been tireless in its efforts to purge the Christian religion from public life, the truth is, religion is the foundation on which nations are built. And although ACLU attorneys may shudder at the thought, the Christian religion provides the surest foundation for the moral, political, and social order of any nation.
The importance of religion in providing the necessary foundation for any social order has been noted by acclaimed historians Will and Ariel Durant, who acknowledged in 1968 that “there is no significant example in history before our time of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” Every government needs a moral code to justify and legitimize its rule, and every lasting moral system must rest on religion—which answers the ultimate questions about man and God. Without religion to breathe life and meaning into any legal-political system, the options are either anarchy or tyranny.
Christianity and Western Pre-Eminence Some argue, as did the Durants, that in our time such a religious foundation is no longer necessary. But the truth is evident, even to elite social scientists in Communist China. The “pre-eminence” of Western cultures and nations is due to the influence of Christianity. Former Time magazine reporter David Aikman tells in his book, Jesus in Beijing, how a Chinese researcher explained that he and his colleagues “studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective,” to understand Western dominance.
The researcher explained: At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.
What these Chinese scholars found to be true for the West was recognized very clearly by our nation’s founders. President John Adams, signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, put it this way: We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Despite the record of history, the ACLU and its friends are adamant in their insistence that America is a secular nation. What Catholic priest and writer Richard John Neuhaus has called the “naked public square,” has become the ruling orthodoxy for contemporary American political thought.
Government by Guillotine
It is a modern innovation and one, if you consult the French Revolution, that doesn’t work out so well. The short-lived French Revolution (1789-1799) was so thoroughgoing in its rejection of Christianity that it even established a new calendar without Sundays. During its infamous Reign of Terror, the streets of Paris flowed with blood and tens of thousands of people were guillotined.
As Ernest Renan, a nineteenth century French agnostic, stated: If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.
And since Renan, Nazi, fascist, and communist regimes, all of which rejected God and religious belief, have shown, again, that once religion is removed, a door opens into the abyss. The death toll from Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their fellow communist henchmen is nearly 100 million people, according to The Black Book of Communism. Here in America, the court-ordered departure from America’s Christian moral framework has already resulted in the death of more than 48 million people—all of them unborn.
Thirty years later, we know better. Attributing humanity to the unborn can no longer be brushed off as “mystical notions of religious dogma.” To the contrary, it is a widely accepted scientific fact. After reviewing mounds of evidence, one U.S. Senate committee declared: Despite this sobering testimony from history, American law and politics have over the past decades moved toward the view, as stated by Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, that “[i]n the United States, secularism is mandated for the government.” “Mandated” is an aptly chosen word since “we, the people,” have not had any say in the matter. “Many Americans,” as Richard John Neuhaus writes, “feel that they were not consulted by whoever decided that this is a secular society. And they resent that; they resent it very much.”
State-mandated secularism, imposed by the courts and enforced by the ACLU and its allies, is a leading flashpoint in America’s ongoing culture war between competing Christian and secular moral visions for the nation. One side looks to the Christian foundations of this country; the other provides no moral basis for American politics and government at all. It‘s a pity that the quarrel exists at all since, when you look at the record, not only is religion needed to found and sustain a state but, as we will see in the following chapter, Christianity makes the best foundation by far.
Coral Ridge Ministries. Copyright 2008. All Rights Reserved.
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