Did the founders of America intend for God to be banished from the public arena?
The idea occurs so regularly in modern times that we tend to think it’s what the founders wanted. For example, recently, a law allowing the posting of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools was blocked as unconstitutional (for the moment) by a court.
Yet one early American politician had the temerity to write and do the following:
- 1807. He wrote that “the councils of the General Government in their decisions … [were drawn from] the … precepts of the gospel.”
- 1807. He wrote that “liberty to worship our creator … [is] deemed in other countries incompatible with good government, and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.”
- 1808. He signed an “Act Appointing a Chaplain to Each Brigade of the Army.”
- 1817. He wrote: “Our right to life, liberty … is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of kings.”
Of course, the “King of kings” refers to Jesus.
This is amazing. Didn’t this political leader know what the founders intended for the public square in America? Actually, these are words and actions of Thomas Jefferson, from whom comes the phrase “separation of church and state” – words not found in our Constitution.
Dr. Robert J. Pacienza, the CEO of Coral Ridge Ministries, recently observed, “This is where secularism fails. It borrows the fruit of Christianity but rejects the root. And like a branch severed from the vine, it withers.… You cannot have ordered liberty without moral law, and you cannot have moral law without God.”
A great American would concur. In his First Inaugural Address in 1789, President George Washington said, “The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.”
Dr. Peter Lillback, founder of Providence Forum, for which I now serve as executive director, told me what he thought Washington might have had in mind when he referred to “the eternal rules of order and right.” According to Lillback, it was the Ten Commandments. Week after week, Washington worshiped in churches with the writing on the walls of the Ten Commandments (and the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed).
David Gibbs III, the founder and head of the National Center for Life and Liberty, once told me: “The Ten Commandments serve as the foundational principles of American law, and that is why they are etched in the stone above the Supreme Court. Allowing school children to be exposed to these historical documents is imperative to preserve culture and law for future generations. Schools can teach history without violating the constitution, and nations that forsake their heritage are doomed to forget their foundational principles upon which their continued success depends.”
Someone might say, “You can’t legislate morality.” Certainly, we can’t order people to bow down and worship the one true God, whose commands comprise the Decalogue.
But all legislation reflects someone’s morality. Why is the Judeo-Christian system that helped give birth to the freedoms we enjoy somehow declared unconstitutional?
Is any reference to Christianity in official acts unconstitutional? Well, how is the Constitution itself signed? “In the year of our Lord, 1787.” That is a reference to Jesus in our nation’s governing document. Does that mean that the Constitution is “unconstitutional”?
Someone might argue that the founders didn’t mean anything by saying “the year of our Lord.” But today’s secularists are so threatened by it that they’ve changed the reference to years from A.D. (as in Anno Domini, Latin for “the year of our Lord”) to C.E. (as in Common Era).
We’ve been robbed of our heritage. Children in schools are stealing, lying and in some cases killing others. But woe to those who would post the Ten Commandments in schools, with its prohibitions against stealing, lying and killing.
Someone might say it’s not those parts of the Decalogue that are supposedly “unconstitutional,” it’s the God parts. But then the question is: Where is there any sense of accountability if we remove God?
Can America last as a nation, when we have been so cut off, at least by the elites, from our Judeo-Christian foundation? Is the handwriting on the wall for America? Or will we return to the type of writing on the wall, the Ten Commandments, Washington and other founders of America used to guide their lives?
As Thomas Jefferson once asked, “[C]an the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”