Church - - - - - - - - - - State

...and ne'er the twain shall meet.

There are a lot of folks who are fond of yelling about the lack of Christianity in America and get loud about our Christian foundations. And since I am a perpetual smart alec I feel obligated to comment about this.

First off the predominate religion of the shapers of the Declaration of Independence was not Christianity, they were deists. They believed in a very Aristotelian understanding of God which was a sort of Cosmic Watchmaker who put the universe in place, established laws to govern it, wound the watch and jumped ship. This is not the Christian understanding of God which declares that God rules over His Creation nanosecond by nanosecond and there has never been a single instance in which God has even blinked, but rather that He has personally overseen all and everything which has ever happened. To say that God rules His Creation by means of natural law is to declare that this natural law is on par in power with the One who created it. In other words, God personally would have created an impersonal god to govern in His stead while He naps and catches some rays on Alpha Centari.

Problem!

God cannot create God. To say that He could would mean that He, a self existent eternal being would have created a contingent (since it is created) all powerful (except for its ability to exist) personal (excepting that whole impersonal force thingy) force which does everything He does except show up. And... ya know be God.

Ridiculous.

Of course there are many who think that any idea of god is ridiculous, but I am not arguing for the existence of God here but rather in what sort of god did the Founders believe. And the Declaration gives us a great clue, and it is found in the notion of natural law.

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..."

The clue is found in this statement. The notion of "certain unalienable rights" is foreign to Biblical Christianity. The notion that man has the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and that this right is certain, that is inviolable, is found nowhere in Scripture. In fact the Bible promises that if in our pursuing of happiness we offend God He will deprive us of liberty and life. It also affirms that our existence, freedom and happiness depend on God's beneficence toward us and our willingness to depend on Him and follow after Him. The Gospels tell us that we will not have happiness in life but suffering and Paul admonishes us to accept the happiness of freedom found only in slavery to Christ. The persistent admonition of the Bible is that man is fallen and rotten to his core enslaved to sin and selfishness and incapable of pleasing God, and in fact in attempting to please himself is bound to displease God and thus work toward the undoing of the very happiness toward which he is supposedly working.

Also the very idea that these rights cannot be set aside (unalienable) is to say that no one (and yes that includes God) can deprive us of these rights and therefore the rights are part of natural law which as we have already seen would be equal to if not in fact above the Creator from a deist perspective.

I have no doubt that a great many of the signatories of the Declaration and Constitution were Christians, but the notion that they were all Christians and these documents are Christian in their origin and orientation is manifestly false. There are some who will say that "Creator" is proof enough of their beliefs, but Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans, Jews and a wide assortment of others all affirm the existence of a Creator and yet are all distinctly non-Christian.

In fact the Constitution makes no mention of God at all. It is an utterly secular document.

So what is the big stink?

The First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Jefferson (again a deist) sought two things in this amendment concerning religion; to prohibit the establishment of a State church/religion and to protect the Church from the State.

First remember that these men had roots in Europe which had seen war over religion for seven odd centuries by this time beginning with the Crusades and then the more insidious wars which saw the rise of such things as the Inquisition (what a show...) and outright wars following the Reformation. England had seen repeated persecutions of people due to the wild swings in Monarchical Religious preference. Be it Henry VIII and the Catholics. Mary and the... well, everyone not a Catholic. Good Queen Bess was great as long as you weren't a Scottish Reformed believer. Cromwell practically made killing Irish Catholics a national sport.

The point is that Jefferson firmly believed that the only way to protect the rights of the individual citizen from the State concerning religion was to restrict the State's power to establish a church and thus to give that church state power. Again see the Inquisition (here we go...)

Jefferson also understood that even if the Federal Government did not declare a State church/religion it could still create laws which so restricted the practice of religion that it would do so de facto. Therefore he included the clause concerning laws "which restrict the free practice thereof." In so doing he prevented the writing of a law outlawing say the Liturgy of the Mass. Such a law would not serve to create a State church but would so restrict the practice of Roman Catholicism that it would essentially outlaw it. Such would also be true of a law banning praying to the east, venerating Joseph Smith and reading the Bible.

The purpose of the first amendment is to separate the Church from the State even if it does not explicitly say so. The reason why is to protect the Church from the State. And that is in all of our best interests.

Just ask your Iranian neighbor who can never go home again because he is Christian or Baha'i.

However, (nod to R. C. Sproul here) to separate the Church from the State does not mean to separate the State from God. And when the Church calls on the State to repent and return to the Creator who ordained it to be, the Church is not assuming the role of State but is rather explicitly acting as the Church should. And anytime the State fails to protect life, the poor, the fatherless, the widow and yes even the sojourner the State has failed in its mandate from God and in so doing has failed to be, not the Church, but the State.

And we should all be concerned about that.

Just a thought

God Bless