10 Truths About Christians And Politics

Coral Ridge Ministries
Dr. D. James Kennedy, Founder

From the 10 Truths Series
TRUTH #4 - Without God, Government Is a Fearful Master

Bursting with confidence, a small group composed mostly of Unitarian clergymen and academics issued their “Humanist Manifesto” in 1933. Advances in science and economics, they announced, had made it possible to reject God and traditional religions in favor of a new “religious humanism.”

“Man is at last becoming aware,” they burbled, “that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”

Humanism in Practice
That same year, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin approved the genocide of seven million Ukrainians, and Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. While American humanists enthused about “a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good,” their ideological cousins in the Kremlin were imposing policies that wiped out almost 25 percent of the Ukraine population, including some three million children. In 1933, while these American humanists were joining in a chorus of praise to man’s potential to realize his dreams without the help of God, Europe’s two largest nations, led by Stalin and Hitler, were “firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its horrifying potentialities.” While the American humanists were heralding a social vision that banished God, across the Atlantic that vision was being put into practice. Both Stalin, who had become an atheist after reading Darwin, and Hitler, who tried to speed up evolution by eliminating “inferior” humans, ruled without moral restraint. They lived out what Lenin called “the scientific concept of dictatorship.” By that he meant “power without limit, resting directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.”

Don’t Stop Clapping
Under their rule, “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition,” according to historian Robert Conquest. Soviet cruelty included a sentence of ten years prison time to a man who was first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin after he spoke. An unfortunate tailor received a sentence of ten years because when he laid aside his needle, he “stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn’t get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of Kaganovich [a member of the Soviet Politburo].” Hitler, who made it his business to commandeer the church to his purposes, was pitiless toward all of so-called inferior race. “Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality,” he told SS troops just before the invasion of Poland in August 1939.
According to Hitler:
Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state builder. Thus, for the time being, I have sent to the East only my “Death’s Head Units” with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or lineage.

By speaking of his belief in “God,” Hitler would mobilize the German people with his rhetoric. His toxic racial ideas were built on Darwinian blind chance, and although publicly pious, he rejected the Creator God of Scripture. He consistently tried to use the church for Nazi ends, telling two bishops of the South German Evangelical Church that “Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has in Russia.”

Neither Hitler nor Stalin ever signed the Humanist Manifesto, but their beliefs were the same as several of its key planks, including the following:

1. There is no Creator
2. Man evolved and is part of nature with no special status as one made in the image of God
3. There are no moral absolutes

Both Hitler and Stalin would have smiled in approval of these statements. Yet these two failed rulers of failed states clearly show what happens when men and nations remove God from politics. The death toll from Hitler’s mad tyranny was some 13 million people. Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov has put the loss of life during Stalin’s repressive regime at 21.5 million. As Ivan Karamazov, the atheist character in Dostoevsky’s nineteenth century novel, The Brother Karamazov, famously said, “[E]verything is permitted . . . since there is no infinite God, there’s no such thing as virtue either and there’s no need for it at all.”

“Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has in Russia.” Adolf Hitler

America’s Founders Knew Better
Despite the recent lessons of Russia and Germany, many in America want to push ahead with the humanist agenda and erect a permanent partition between God and government. America’s Founders knew better. They acknowledged the existence of God as Creator, affirmed moral absolutes (“laws of nature and of nature’s God”) in the Declaration of Independence, and gave birth to the most free and prosperous nation in history.

The Founders took seriously the Bible’s claim that man is sinful, and they framed a government with checks against human depravity.

James Madison explained it this way:
But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Guided in their “reflections on human nature” by the testimony of Scripture and history, the Founders were supremely skeptical of any claims for human goodness. They crafted a government filled with safeguards against human evil. They recognized then, as we must now, that the Bible offers political wisdom and guidance. They well understood, as the next chapter shows, what the Bible says about these topics.

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