At the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast the President of the United States faulted Christianity for many of the world’s ills: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” The appeal to events from hundreds of years ago shows a disregard for the true positive influence of Christianity on our culture. Slavery and Jim Crow laws were ended in America because of church involvement. This historical revisionist mindset fuels current attacks on Christian participation in our culture.
The progressive drumbeat is that all religious influence must be sanitized from public discourse and have no influence on government policy. Progressives believe that the “separation of church and state” is a sacrosanct constitutional requirement that justifies prohibiting any religious perspective from informing government action. It does not matter that this hallowed doctrine of the left is nowhere to be found in the constitution. It only has credence as a Supreme Court dictated standard based upon one letter written by Thomas Jefferson. It ignores prior Supreme Court precedent and volumes of historical documentation to the contrary. As a result, there is no prayer in public schools, no nativity scenes on government property, and heaven forbid that the Ten Commandments be found at a courthouse! They work tirelessly to extinguish any hint of Christian thought or morals at every level of government. Their goal is freedom from religion, not freedom of religion.
Our progressive friends should be careful for what they ask. I wonder if they have ever truly considered the real world results of imposing their beliefs on the rest of America. Douglas Phillips, the Executive Pastor at my church, made this point recently by asking whether the average citizen understands what will be lost if the progressive (revisionist) view prevails?
For example, the Declaration of Independence must be jettisoned because we can no longer “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To accept the logic of the left, the document that established the foundation for our system of government is itself unconstitutional. They do not accept the Christian concepts that all human rights come from our Creator and are unalienable, or that we are all created by God, etc. It is interesting that to this day every law signed by the President is dated back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, not the date of the adoption of the Constitution. Moreover, there can be no appeal to the Decalogue so we must purge our criminal statutes of any prohibition of murder, theft, and perjury. Further, we can no longer have any separation of powers as required by the Constitution because that is also a Christian concept (Isaiah 33:22). Nor can we continue with our representative form of government because that is also supported by the Bible (Exodus 18:13-26).
Positive cultural change has invariably originated in the Christian community. From abolition and the underground railroad, to child labor laws, to the civil rights movement, Christian citizens have stood up and impacted our society for the better. Western culture has grown out of Christianity and its moral underpinnings. Obviously, no movement is perfect as it involves fallen human beings. But it is obvious to any impartial observer that issues like slavery and the treatment of women and children have only progressed positively in the Christian West. Remove our Christian compass and the rationale for protecting human rights falls away. There is no longer any standard of right and wrong to which anyone can appeal. Indeed, progressives have no tolerance for the Christian point of view and are using the courts and our political system to silence and destroy anyone who dares stand against their morally-relative orthodoxy. If the progressives prevail in removing the bedrock of truth from our society, we will all pay the price in the loss of our freedoms and liberty.
David A. Kallman, Esq., co-founded the Great Lakes Justice Center, a non-profit corporation protecting First Amendment liberties and other civil rights issues (greatlakesjc.org). He practices law at the Kallman Legal Group, PLLC, in Lansing, Michigan (kallmanlegal.com).
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