As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday as a nation, the far left is pulling out all the stops to label such celebrations as emanations of a concocted “Christian nationalism” – a slanderous slur which recently appeared in an AP article on the Sheridan Press’s faith page.
Anyone doubting the influence of the Bible and the Christian faith on the values and principles upon which America was founded would benefit from some serious remedial study. I highly recommend “The American Story: The Beginnings” by David and Tim Barton, including its 64 pages of endnotes documenting the facts for every major claim made in the book.
The overwhelming majority of America’s founders were Christians with a Biblical worldview who understood their actions to be guided by God. Fifty-two of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were deeply committed Christians. Many other founding documents – the Constitution and its Bill of Rights – evidence a value system clearly derived from the Bible.
The claim continues to be made that the Constitution guarantees a “separation of church and state.” This is an incorrect supposition whose roots are to be found in an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists in which Jefferson coined a term “the wall of separation between church and state.” But in this letter, Jefferson asserted that the First Amendment created a strict boundary preventing government from interfering with religious belief or practice.
Sadly, the Supreme Court has often misunderstood and misapplied that phrase in some rulings. The “establishment clause” does clearly forbid the establishment of the type of state-sanctioned church found in other nations, but this does not trump the wording of the First Amendment, i.e. that the right of the citizens to practice their faith is not to be abridged by the state.
If Jefferson in his letter were actually asserting that the church was inserting itself into state business, one must wonder why he wrote in his own Bible: “I am a real Christian, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” He knew full well that the Bible was used as a textbook for public education for many decades. During his lifetime, Jefferson knew that the New England Primer was still in use employing direct scriptural references in teaching reading skills.
Regardless of current secular claims to the contrary, documented historical evidence proves beyond a scintilla of doubt that America was founded based on the values and principles taken from a Biblical worldview. For many years, pastors in American churches actually preached election sermons from the pulpit with their Sunday sermons appearing on the front page of Monday editions of American newspapers. Such actions were deemed to be in total harmony with the religious freedoms specifically enumerated in the First Amendment.
How sad it is that when people of faith choose to express their beliefs and values in today’s public square they are mocked and subjected to ad hominem attacks claiming that they are somehow acting in contravention of the very Constitution which guarantees them the right to freely express their beliefs.
Charles Cole,
Sheridan
Charles Cole lives in Sheridan. He is the author of In Russian Wonderland: An American's Odyssey in Soviet Russia and American in Name Only