News and Views: Can God bless America today?
By Al Duncan
Whittaker Chambers, a Soviet spy who defected from Communism wrote in his 1952 autobiography, Witness: “Humans, and societies, live by faith and die when faith dies. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom, the soul dies.”
While men have fought for liberty since the dawn of civilization, they have usually replaced one tyrant with another. The American Revolution, however, was different. The U.S. Constitution provided unparalleled freedom for more than 150 years; it began to fail when Supreme Court judges began to re-interpret the law, and the public failed to retain the belief that freedom comes from God.
Schools opened with prayer and the Bible was taught in schools for 150 years, that is, until 1963 when the Supreme Court ruled that these harmless acts of reverence to God were unconstitutional.
The Alabama Supreme Court opens with: “God save the State and this Honorable Court,” and every U.S. President has mentioned God in his inaugural address, yet Judge Roy Moore was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court because he contends, “The State has the right to acknowledge God.”
Moore summarized his position in The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2003: “The battle over the Alabama Ten Commandments monument is not about a monument and not about politics. Today, I argue for the rule of law, and against any unilateral declaration of a judge to ban the acknowledgement of God in the public sector. This case is about one issue: ?Can the state acknowledge God?””
The Founding Fathers feared that the First Amendment would be distorted: “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,” so they included the Tenth Amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Thomas Jefferson feared centralization of power because he knew that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely everyone. He therefore wrote: “It has long been my opinion that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the Constitution of our Federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body, working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today, and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed; because, when all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated…”
I think many believe that the centralization of power in Washington D.C. and the destruction of our Christian heritage began in 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president. FDR endorsed the National Recovery Act (NRA) that allowed federal officials to regulate/control agriculture, industry and private property. Congress enacted the NRA, but the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Act unconstitutional and blocked its implementation. According to the New World Encyclopedia, President Roosevelt was furious. He attacked the Supreme Court, and announced he was going to pack the Court with new justices who supported his agenda. A wave of indignation swept the country because the American people realized President Roosevelt was jeopardizing our system of “checks and balances.” FDR believed in centralized government and that it should have god-like authority, and he thus began to systematically replace retired justices with men willing to re-interpret the Constitution and undermine Christianity. By 1941 FDR”s Supreme Court appointments held a five to four majority.
Since 1941 the federal government has incessantly commandeered power from the States, and to this day the federal courts are systematically eradicating God from American institutions.
Morals and principles are founded in the God who instructs us to, “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” As William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania wisely warned: “Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by Tyrants.” When the Godly standard of right and wrong is rejected, people make their government, their leaders, or themselves to be a god. Each person does whatever seems right in his or her own eyes and what”s considered to be right is done only to enhance each individual”s personal condition, and thus, the inevitable collapse of society.
Al Duncan is a author, businessman and Record-Bee columnist. He can be contacted at alduncan@pacific.net.
