120 Sermon Illustrations on Separation Of Church And State

In response to the 2022 Dobbs decision on abortion and the Supreme Court’s clear, consistent support for religious liberty throughout this term, many progressives are warning of an imminent “Christian theocracy.” Among the loudest voices predicting our collective doom are mainstream media outlets. For example, a recent story in Reuters claimed, “U.S. Supreme Court Takes Aim at Separation of Church and State.”

What’s missing in virtually all of these pieces is a proper understanding of the “establishment clause.” The establishment clause is derived from the opening lines of the First Amendment which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” There are two ways this statement is commonly misunderstood.

First, it is often described as establishing a “wall of separation between church and state.” In fact, those words are found nowhere in the Constitution. The phrase actually was coined later in a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Second, and more importantly, it is assumed that if organized religion cannot be supported by the state, then secularism is somehow “neutral.” Thus, by default, anything goes as long as it’s “secular.”

Understanding the historical context is essential. In the 18th century, an “established” religion referred to an official state church. In the U.S., individual states had already established churches, such as the Anglican Church in Virginia. The First Amendment specifically applied to Congress and prohibited a national church. To prefer the Anglican Church over the Congregationalists or Presbyterians would, at the time, mean alienating certain citizens and entire states. States continued to have established churches well into the 19th century.

In addition, the First Amendment was not intended to prohibit religious activities in governmental institutions. From the very beginning, Congress started each session with prayer. That continues today and is led by an official chaplain.

Our founding fathers, particularly James Madison, believed that religious liberty was an innate right, and inseparable from the freedom of conscience. He also believed that religion would better flourish in a free marketplace of ideas. That thinking was the basis for the free exercise clause.

This understanding of the freedom of conscience is the foundation for the other freedoms protected in the First Amendment. Without conscience rights, we cannot truly speak, write, assemble, or advocate freely from our deepest beliefs. That’s why the freedom of religion is often called “the first freedom.” Its position in the Bill of Rights highlights its importance.

Although the rights of conscience should not be controversial, somehow, that’s what they have become. How this happened is worth considering. By claiming secularism to be neutral, proponents of secularism, as far back as the 19th century, attempted to broadly apply laws originally intended by Protestants to prevent Catholic schools from accessing state funds. In the 20th-century, secularists embraced the concept of “a living Constitution” in order to transform the meaning of the First Amendment, attempting to keep religious institutions from accessing state funds and allowing only “secular” views in the public arena.

Though many court cases illustrate this, among the more important was Torcaso V. Watkins (1961), which declared unconstitutional Maryland’s requirement that officeholders state belief in God. Rather than ruling on the basis of Article VI, which prohibits religious tests for public office, the Supreme Court ruled on the basis of the establishment clause of the First Amendment and of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from violating the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens. The same line of reasoning has since been used to challenge prayers at public meetings, Bible studies in schools, and nativity scenes on public property. In the process, the First Amendment was turned on its head, taking a clause intended to keep the state from backing any one denomination and construing it to position the state in opposition to all organized religions.

In footnote 11 of the Torcaso V. Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black listed secular humanism as one of a number of religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.” Calling humanism a religion was not outlandish. For a century, humanists such as John Dewey and Julian Huxley had defined their beliefs as a religion. After all, secularism involves certain claims about the cosmos, existence, and human nature.

And yet in 1994, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Peloza V. Capistrano Unified School District that while “religion” should be broadly interpreted for free exercise clause purposes, “anything ‘arguably non-religious’ should not be considered religious in applying the establishment clause.” In other words, secular organizations were able to play both sides, qualifying as a religion for the free exercise clause but free from constraints from the establishment clause.

To further determine whether religious activities could utilize public spaces, the Supreme Court derived the so-called “Lemon Test” in the case Lemon V. Kurzman (1991). According to this rule, a religious activity is only licit on public grounds if it performs a secular purpose, neither advances nor inhibits religion, and does not foster excessive government entanglement in religion. This test maintained an obviously secular bias: Secular organizations were not required to pass any tests to obtain access.

In the 2022 decision in the Coach Kennedy case [he prayed on the field after football games], the Supreme Court continued its long-overdue corrections to the anti-religious way the First Amendment had been interpreted. Particularly by unequivocally tossing the “Lemon Test,” the Court has stopped the active suppression of religious beliefs and practice. We ought not fear an impending theocracy, but instead welcome a redress to the unjust and ahistorical understandings of religion.

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Copyright (c) 2022 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

A summary of the Department of Education's guidelines on constitutionally protected prayer and religious speech:

-- Students may read their Bible, pray before meals and pray or study “religious materials” with other students during recess, lunch and other times out of class. Specifically, the guidelines say that students “may pray when not engaged in school activities or instruction....” Such prayer is subject to the same rules “designed to prevent” disruptions.

-- Students may organize prayer groups, religious clubs and “see you at the pole” gatherings “to the same extent that students are permitted to organize other non-curricular” groups.

-- Teachers may pray or take part in Bible studies before school or during lunch, or when it is clear “that they are not participating in their official capacities.”

-- School officials must neither “encourage nor discourage” students from participating in school-initiated “moments of silence.” Students are free to participate or not participate.

-- Schools that have a practice of dismissing students for non-religious needs -- at the request of parents -- must do the same for students with religious needs. For example, a school could dismiss briefly a Muslim student who requests time alone to pray during Ramadan.

-- Students may express their religious beliefs in homework and other assignments “free from discrimination based on the religious content” of the assignment.

-- Assembly speakers may not be selected based on their beliefs. A speaker selected by students may not have his speech restricted because of its religious content. The school is free to have disclaimers saying the speaker's opinion is his, and not the school's.

-- Schools “may not mandate or organize prayer” at graduations but also should not restrict the religious expression of students or other speakers. The school is free to have disclaimers saying the speaker's opinion is his, and not the school's.

-- Schools must make their facilities available to organizers of “privately sponsored religious baccalaureate ceremonies” if those same schools make their facilities available to other private groups.

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The complete text of the education guidelines is available at: http://www.ed.gov/inits/religionandschools/prayer_guidance.html.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #13117]

Over the last few years, there's been increasing political and cultural pressure to keep Christian influence out of public affairs. We've seen it in restrictions on prayer at public events, on posting of the Ten Commandments and the recent Supreme Court case. We see it when politicians or the media describe evangelical Christians as “bigots.”

One of my greatest worries is that the Church will oblige the secularists by retreating into our safe sanctuaries. I've had religious leaders tell me that all we need to do is lead people to Christ and keep them in our churches, and that's the end of our biblical responsibility. Nonsense.

This is a profoundly dangerous point of view because it would undermine the balance between church and state that is vital for the protection and the rights of all citizens.

We live in a democracy, remember, where the will of the majority is enacted into law. Most people believe that this is the best way to guarantee freedom and to promote the common welfare. And democracy has been hugely successful in the American experiment.

But our founders recognized that unrestrained democracy can lead to a tyranny of the majority. Let's say that the majority believes that it's fine to kill people who are designated by doctors as within their last six months of life. What's to stop them?

The Constitution? We've seen how judges reinterpret the Constitution, and how the so-called “right to die” is increasingly being recognized in public policy. It's a short step from a “right to die” to an obligation to die.

The point, you see, is that there must be restraints on democracy. That's why our founders described the American founding as an experiment in “ordered liberty.” That is, order must be maintained for freedom to be enjoyed by everyone. That's why our founders relied on a prevailing consensus that there was an absolute moral law. Some people thought it came from the Enlightenment, but most recognized it as our biblical heritage.

You may have heard the Church described as the conscience of society. It is the only institution that can provide a moral restraint against the excesses of a tyrannical regime. Therefore, it is essential to preserving human freedom. Our government, whenever it passes laws, makes moral judgments. But it is in no position to enforce a moral code in today's highly pluralistic environment.

That's why a strong, vibrant Church is required — not necessary just so you and I can exercise our religious freedom, but so that we can be an influence for the common good in society. In a way, this is God's gift for the freedom and welfare of all people.

William Wilberforce, the man for whom our Wilberforce Forum is named, wrote that God had laid before him two great objectives: the abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. He knew that both were needed. And our founders, men and women of the same era, understood this as well. The events of July 4, 1776, that we celebrate today began the experiment to see if this balance could be preserved.

This is why the Church today must take its stand: be the Church, with all that means. We ought to be explaining, as well, to our secular neighbors that they don't have anything to fear from the much-maligned “Religious Right.” Rather they should welcome Christian influence for the common good of all and the preservation of freedom.

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Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5556]

PRAYER FOR MORALITY .....

On January 23, 1996, Joe Wright of Wichita, Kansas, was the guest chaplain for the Kansas House of Representatives. He was asked to open their session that day with its customary prayer. However after the prayer, three house members jumped to their feet in a rage and indignantly shouted, “He can't talk like that!” What was it he said that was so terrible? Listen in:

“Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know your Word says woe to those who call evil good but that's exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values. We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your Word in the name of moral pluralism. We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism. We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle. We have exploited the poor and called it a lottery. We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. In the name of choice we have killed our unborn. In the name of right to life we have killed abortionists. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem. We have abused power and called it political savvy. We have coveted our neighbors' possessions and called it taxes. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, O God, and know our hearts today. Try us and show us any wicked way in us. Cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas and who have been ordained by you to govern this great state. Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will. I ask in the name of your Son, the living Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.”

I applaud the courage of this man to pray a prayer that ought to be prayed in every state legislature across this country, as well as our national legislature in Washington, D.C.

“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Proverbs 14:34).

Take a moment to offer a personal prayer for our government officials, that their hearts may be turned to seek and do God's will. “Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will.”

Alan Smith Boone church of Christ Boone, North Carolina

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More info attached to this prayer in another message:

When Pastor Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual politically correct generalities. But on this day what they heard instead was a stirring prayer, passionately calling our country to repentance and righteousness.

The response was immediate - with a number of legislators walking out during the prayer. In six short weeks Central Christian Church logged more than 5,000 phone calls, with only 47 of those calls reponding negatively. Commentator Paul Harvey aired Pastor Joe Wright's prayer on the radio and received a larger response to this program than any other program Paul Harvey has ever aired.

In addition, Central Christian Church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa, and Korea.

The prayer is reprinted below as an encouragement and challenge for each of us to stand for the truth of the Gospel wherever the Lord gives us opportunity.

The recently censored "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is far tamer language than that of the Declaration of Independence, which includes phrases like "of nature's God" and "endowed by their Creator."

Indeed, the entire moral inheritance of our Founding Fathers is predicated on the repeated idea that something beyond the power and wisdom of mere mortals is necessary for the survival of the United States.

The word "God" is everywhere in our national heritage - from the Mayflower Compact's "In the name of God, Amen," to Patrick Henry's incendiary "Give me liberty or give me death" speech - "Forbid it, Almighty God." (Even the wild-eyed Tom Paine invoked "the Word of God" in his "Common Sense.")

We read not only "In God We Trust" on our money, but also (on the dollar bill) "Annuit coeptis" ("Providence has smiled on our beginnings") and "Novus Ordo Seclorum" ("A New Order of the Ages"). Those are from Virgil's famous lines in his "Aeneid" and so-called messianic "Fourth Eclogue" - a poem selected by our Founders because of its traditional associations with the birth of Christ and the idea of a divinely created new nation.

Both Athens and Jerusalem are woven into our American fabric, since the architects of this country realized that neither Reason nor Faith alone could establish a powerful and humane country. The entire notion of the West is one that derives from Hellenism (whose Socrates believed that a divinity inspired his rationalism), combined with a Christianity that preached prior Platonic forgiveness and kindness were not merely logical, but spiritual and God-given as well.

From that unique balance springs the great ideas of the nation. No one could accuse Abraham Lincoln of being a fundamentalist. Yet he realized that his own acumen was not enough to guide the Union in its hour of peril. So he promised in the Gettysburg Address that we "resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, Under God, shall have a new birth of freedom."

Those words would perhaps now earn the Great Emancipator a lawsuit in San Francisco.

Lincoln's most famous allusion to God appears in the Second Inaugural Address: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." (No doubt our bureaucrats, with firmness from jurists, can now substitute, "as We ourselves see the right.")

The ruling outlawing the language of the Pledge of Allegiance is an outrage for a variety of reasons. At its most basic, such censure is hubristic: Two federal judges in their great scholarship profess to know what Jefferson and Lincoln did not.

It is the worst form of modernist condescension - that suddenly, in the year 2002, a few jurists have just discovered that the age-old tradition of invoking God in our civil speech is technically improper.

It is also elitist - the idea that legalese in a blink can overturn what thousands of local, state and national elected bodies insist on. It's arrogant - judges dictating from on high that the theoretical welfare of a few discontents outweighs what 300 million choose to see as stirring and inspirational in their schools, military ceremonies, state funerals and government meetings.

The people know that in a nation without an official religion or unifying race - unlike, say, China or Saudi Arabia - ideals are all that bind us. Values alone trump our more natural affinities of skin color, accent and religion.

Such allegiance to principles like liberty and justice - and God - must be reiterated and renewed as the very lifeblood that nourishes our national flesh. Those in their robes and chambers have not a clue about all that.

Finally, the decision is dangerous for the message it sends to our enemies at a time of war. The terrorists are intolerant and so insist on theocracy. In turn, they charge us with the exact opposite sin of extremism: godless individualism, personal license and crass faith in man, money and materialism.

They claim that our creed is as intolerant of religion as theirs is of reason. They say that they believe in something, we in nothing.

Yet we Americans are neither like them nor like their caricature of us. Instead, our mottos, protocols, songs, currency - and pledges - have always reflected that we are uniquely balanced: committed both to wisdom and to the idea that such reason is divinely inspired.

Socrates once knew that. So did Washington and Lincoln. We apparently now do not.

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From Baptist Press, 6/27/02

Comment by President Bush on Pledge controversy:

"(The) Declaration of God in the Pledge of Allegiance doesn't violate rights. As a matter of fact, it's a confirmation of the fact that we received our rights from God, as proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence."

For some time now, I’ve been warning you about the various threats to religious freedom. We’ve talked about the gay-rights movement, which insidiously insists that religious believers and organizations bow before the altar of sexual freedom. We’ve talked about the so-called health care reform bill, which does not protect the freedom of conscience of medical practitioners.

But now I’m seeing the threat to religious freedom in its most pernicious and dangerous form ever. In a nutshell, here’s what happened. In a speech at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on human rights. Not only did she talk about the right “to love in the way you choose,” (an obvious attempt at making protecting gay rights a top priority for the U.S. government), she also talked about “freedom of worship.”

But she never mentioned freedom of religion. Only freedom of worship. This is a big change.

In the First Amendment, the founders (whose work we celebrate this weekend) wisely ensured that government could not prohibit the “free exercise” of religion. And that means so much more than freedom of worship. It guarantees that we are not restricted to living out our faith in the privacy of our homes or church sanctuaries. It means we are free to exercise our religion — and contend for faith — in every area of life.

Just this clever dissembling of words is an apparent attempt to restrict freedom of religion to freedom of worship only. Do you see the implications? Sure, I am free to attend church, sing hymns, pray over meals, offer thanks to God for my children and grandchildren. That’s my own private affair.

But should the government succeed in redefining freedom of religion, how much longer can I practice my faith in public?

If you read history, you will see that that the first act of a tyrant is to suppress religion, which means of course, religious practice. Our Founders knew this. They knew the first English settlers came to these shores precisely so they could practice their faith.

And if you read history, you’ll know that the one true threat to a tyrant’s rule is always the believer’s loyalty to a God Who is above the god of the state.

This is why Christians were thrown to the lions in ancient Rome. The earliest baptismal confession of the young Christian Church was “Jesus is Lord.” And that meant Caesar was not. This is why Hitler and Stalin first went after the church. The star of David and the cross were symbols of an authority higher than their own.

We all know about the battles over the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase “under God,” the battles over manger scenes on public property. These are important, but they are skirmishes, mere skirmishes. The real battle is about whether God is Lord, or whether government is Lord. And make no mistake, if government can redefine or restrict our freedom of religion, our first freedom will be gone.

And, as our Founders understood, when that freedom is gone, we will, in short order, lose the other freedoms as well.

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Copyright (c) 2010 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was deleted for being obsolete]

For the past few years, incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina have been assigned summer reading on subjects like the Vietnam War and Civil War re-enactments.

This year, in anticipation of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, university officials assigned something that they thought would help students understand the events of the day: excerpts from the Qur'án.

Specifically, they were assigned the book APPROACHING THE QUR'ÁN, which translates and comments on thirty-five passages of Islam's sacred text. After reading the book, freshmen are expected to write a one-page paper and participate in groups where they'll discuss what they've read.

It's possible to opt out of the assignment on religious grounds, but students must still attend discussion sessions and write an essay explaining their objections.

This, to put it mildly, has sparked controversy. Joe Glover, the Family Policy Network's president, found the opt-out procedure especially objectionable. As he put it, imagine what it's like for "an 18-year-old girl ... to bring a sheet of paper to a discussion group ... [and defend] her most deeply held beliefs?"

That's why his group has filed suit in federal court. They argue that the requirement violates the separation of church and state. And they're not alone in these concerns. The ACLU has promised to oversee the discussion groups for the same reason.

For their part, university officials are confident the groups will pass muster. They insist the goals are insight and understanding, and not proselytizing or advocacy.

Well, who can oppose insight and understanding? The question is whether the approach taken by UNC and its choice of books serves these purposes. If you are reading the Qur'án, selected passages at that, my answer is no.

In the aftermath of September 11, there was a fear of widespread discrimination, even violence, against American Muslims. To prevent such a possible backlash, Americans were asked not to judge Islam by the actions of a few extremists. They were repeatedly told that Islam was a religion of peace, and we had much publicized interfaith services.

What's happening in Chapel Hill is a continuation of this. As the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR put it, university officials see the assigned text as a way to "counter the hate-filled rhetoric put forth by Osama bin Laden and other Islamic radicals . . ." They insist that they have a "responsibility" to "open students' eyes to the Muslim religion and culture."

Tolerance and understanding are laudable goals, but they must never be a pretext for ignoring the fundamental differences between the Islamic worldview and the Western worldview. Those differences are real and constitute the basis of the war that we are in.

Christians can only wish that our religion received the same benefit of the doubt that Islam is getting in Chapel Hill. Can you imagine a university course on Christianity that didn't mention the Crusades or the Inquisition? Neither can I, which makes the actions of North Carolina officials even more maddening.

University officials are right. They do have a responsibility: to the truth and fairness. But their approach to the subject of Islam fulfills neither responsibility.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

Patrik Jonsson, "Edgy first college assignment: Study the Koran," CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 30 July 2002. http://www.csmonitor.com/search_content/0730/p01s03-lehl.html

Jennifer Medina, "Colleges and High Schools to Observe 9/11," THE NEW YORK TIMES, 28 July 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/education/28SCHO.html

"Lawsuit Filed Vs. UNC in Federal Court," Family Policy Network press release, 22 July 2002. http://www.familypolicy.net/nr/unc-filed.shtml

"University Sued over Islam Reading Assignment," CNN, 24 July 2002. http://fyi.cnn.com/2002/LAW/07/24/islam.unc.lawsuit/index.html

Read more about the Carolina Summer Reading Program and APPROACHING THE QUR'ÁN. http://www.unc.edu/srp/ http://www.whitecloudpress.com/books/quran.html

Chuck Colson calls "Questions on Everyone's Mind" by Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, "some of the best apologetics I've seen in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11." http://www.redeemer2.com/news/wtc/index.cfm?fuseaction=questions

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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It's not the sudden ejection of God from our Pledge of Allegiance that is the real problem this morning. It is the slow, steady, been-going-on-quietly-for-years ejection of God from our lives.

Reinserting the words "under God" is an easy public-relations fix that will get done. We are, after all, God-fearing people. We will shout this out. And shout down the people who object.

But actually live our lives "under God"? Change our lives so that they reflect God's love for us and for one another?

Only when hijacked planes fly into our buildings do we come even close.

For our relationship with God is adolescent. We're like teenagers with a parent. We want God on our side, but we don't want God telling us what to do. We're OK on our own. Most days we think we can get by without God.

And yet, the second trouble comes knocking, there we are on our knees begging for help. We go to God with our troubles and when our troubles are gone we hardly go to God at all.

But threaten to take something public away from God, threaten the national idea of God as guardian and protector and look how we rush to his defense. Thank you for always being there. Without you we are nothing. Under God. In God we trust. God bless America. We cherish the words.

But as our parents used to say, "Actions speak louder than words."

"If you really love me, you'll be home when you say you're coming home and not have me lying in bed worrying about you," parents say to teens who are testing their wings.

"If you really love me, you'll worry less about the words and more about how you live your lives," the God we occasionally believe in might say to us today.

Get along. Be kind. Be tolerant. Don't turn everything into a fight. Get rid of "either-or." For "either-or" is a divider. Either we're under God or we're not under God. Either we're Christian or we're not Christian. American or not American. Rich or poor. A smoker or a non-smoker. Either. Or.

And people take sides.

I talk to a 16-year-old who doesn't believe in God, who says God doesn't put food on the table. Her parents do. That's who she believes in, her parents, not God.

Her parents don't believe in God either. Look at all the wars that have been fought in the name of God. Look at the wars still being fought. God is the trouble with the world, not the solution, they say.

And yet they pause to point out to their children lightning over a mountain and a full moon on a clear summer night. It's like the story of the atheist who is served a delicious meal and is then asked if he believes there is a cook. Of course there is.

But we've made God into a fall guy, responsible for all the ills of the world, and even all the goings-on within churches. And we've made God into an "either-or." Either you believe this and you will be saved or you believe that and you won't.

We laugh at polytheism in these days of intellectualism, at the idea of praying to a god of this and a goddess of that. Of golden calves and sacrifices. But how different is now from then, with all of our religions and rules, as if God belongs to one sect and not to us all.

That's the conceit. That man has it all figured out. That if we worship in a certain way and follow prescribed rules and say in public "one nation, under God," our maker will meet us with open arms.

Words are easy. Actions are hard. We can say "one nation, under God" and sing "God Bless America" until our throats are dry. But that won't make us one nation. Only our actions will do this.

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During his recent press conference, President Bush was not expecting to be accused of the likes of precipitating mass murder; but then, he wasn't accustomed to dealing with Helen Thomas either. She went after his faith-based initiatives with all the subtlety of a heat-seeking missile.

It's an indication of the hostility secular elites bear toward the influence of religion in public life.

When the President called on her, Thomas asked, "Why do you refuse to respect the wall between church and state? The mixing of religion and government for centuries has led to slaughter."

Bush tried to answer. "I strongly respect the separation of church and state," he said, but Thomas rudely cut him off. "You wouldn't have a religious office in the White House if you did," she snapped.

The President explained that his proposals would not violate the Constitution, but Thomas would have none of it. "You are a secular official, not a missionary," she snarled. Oh, the joys of an unbiased press corps.

Thomas is not alone in her hostility to faith-based initiatives. The New York Times last week went after Samaritan's Purse for its volunteers holding a prayer meeting before rebuilding homes destroyed in the El Salvador earthquake. And the government stepped in this week and cautioned Samaritan's Purse. Imagine!

Well, the President has to make his case. When it comes to government support of faith-based programs, constitutional law is, after all, well settled. The Supreme Court has ruled that government must allow secular and religious groups to compete on an equal footing for government grants.

Second, the Court has ruled that when the government funds programs run by faith-based groups, it cannot interfere with the group's right to define its own mission -- just as government may not interfere with a secular group's vision.

As George Washington University law professor Ira Lupu observes, this means that when Planned Parenthood hires a staff, it has the right to discriminate against people who don't share its ideological views. Equal treatment demands that faith groups have the same right.

Where the government does draw the line -- and rightly so -- is in how faith-based groups treat beneficiaries. Presbyterians, for example, can refuse to hire a Muslim drug counselor, but they can't discriminate against Muslims seeking help.

Of course, for 25 years Prison Fellowship has reached out to people of all faiths, and no faith. Prison Fellowship, by the way, takes no federal funds, though we've run very successful faith-based programs.

Many critics in my opinion are using the church-state issues -- sure to inflame passions -- to mask deeper objections. They know that faith-based solutions are only part of the President's broader agenda to pry power away from the nanny-state and invest it instead in community and voluntary associations. Bush seems intent on undoing the failed government programs of the last 40 years and empowering people in the communities and churches to help themselves. It's a profoundly conservative understanding of how society should function, but in pushing his proposals, Bush is taking on powerful vested interests.

You and I have to help make the case for faith-based programs. Helen Thomas notwithstanding, these initiatives won't lead to religious wars or the slaughter of millions. Instead, they will bless the poor, the hungry, the alcoholic, the neglected child, the prisoner -- and bring them peace of God.

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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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Several years ago, Rev. Stephen Fournier, and his wife, Darlene, decided to start a "Good News" club in Milford, New York. The club would meet at the elementary school right after classes let out.

The Fourniers expected school officials to grant them permission to use school facilities since other groups already held meetings there. And a series of Supreme Court cases guaranteed the rights of groups like the "Good News" clubs to use these facilities.

But Milford officials forced them out, citing a policy that prohibits use of school facilities for "commercial activities, partisan political gatherings, or 'religious purposes.'"

The Fourniers sued. They lost in circuit court, but this week the Supreme Court overturned the circuit court decision.

Writing for the six-three majority, Justice Clarence Thomas gave a judicial back of the hand to nearly every argument made by the School Board. He chided the Board for ignoring the clear precedent set in the Court's decision in the Lamb's Chapel case. He questioned how anyone could think that allowing a private group to hold meetings in a school was an establishment of religion.

Justice Thomas also rejected the School Board's claim that a perceived endorsement of religion by the state poses a "danger" to our children. This assertion is laughable, especially since few ten-year-olds of my acquaintance ponder constitutional law.

But laughable or not, this idea has carried weight in the courts. Cases like the abominable Lee V. Weisman decision, denying a generic prayer at a school commencement, regard uninvited exposure to religion as the equivalent of exposure to pornography or radioactive waste.

Well, Justice Thomas thankfully cut through the nonsense. He wrote out that any such "danger" posed by religion is no greater than the danger posed by a perceived hostility to religion.

Just as gratifying as Thomas's opinion was the fact that he was joined by Justice Stephen Breyer -- one of the liberal judges on the Court. Could this be a signal of a break in the Court's hostility toward religion?

Well, hostility has clearly dominated the Court's decisions about church-state relations since the early sixties. Cases like Engel V. Vitale and Abington V. Schemp, the infamous school prayer case, turned the First Amendment's religious freedom guarantees on their head.

Two dissenting justices in the school prayer case, Abington, warned that the "unilateral devotion to the concept of neutrality" wouldn't stop at "noninterference and noninvolvement" with religion. They would lead to "a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious."

And that's exactly what happened. Since then, secularists have used the establishment clause to squelch religious liberty. And the free exercise clause has become a mere footnote. That's why I called the dissenters "prophets" in my book, Kingdoms in Conflict.

The good news out of the Supreme Court is that this devotion to the secular seems to be waning. In recent years, Court decisions like this one suggest that the Court is reconsidering the issue. The Court has said that the free expression of religious ideas is at least as important as the non-establishment of religion. And that's real progress.

Which is why this case is so important. For the first time in nearly forty years, we've refused to allow the establishment clause to trump religious freedom. The "Good News" case is good news indeed.

For further reference:

Good News Club et. al V. Milford Central School. No. 992036 (2001).

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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

A few weeks ago, the White House Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives issued a report on how government agencies treat religious nonprofits. The report cited many examples of discriminatory treatment toward these groups.

This discrimination has no basis in law, and it underscores the important issues in the current debate over faith-based initiatives.

One example of discriminatory treatment took place at a Head Start program held in a church in Worcester, Massachusetts. Prior to each class, the teacher covered up all the religious imagery and bible verses. Why? Because Head Start officials believed that federal law required them to do so.

In fact, it does not. But, as the report noted, government agencies have been "hostile" toward the participation of religious groups. The report cites "overly restrictive agency rules ... [that] are repressive, restrictive, and actively undermine the established civil rights of these groups ..."

Well, the president has promised to end this "governmental bias" against faith-based groups. Good for him. I hope he acts quickly.

But even this clear evidence of bias didn't dissuade the initiative's critics. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State told reporters that "taxpayers must never be forced to support religions they don't believe in."

Lynn's comments highlight the double standard that lies at the heart of the discrimination described in the report. For instance, it's difficult to imagine Lynn saying that taxpayers must never be forced to support art they don't believe in. On the contrary, as Terry Golway of the New York Observer has written, withholding tax dollars -- as Mayor Giuliani did with a New York museum featuring a painting of the Virgin Mary covered in dung -- is considered a violation of the First Amendment. Liberals maintain that the government has an obligation to support art and ideas that many people consider offensive.

The same double standard extends to concerns over the possible corrupting influence of government money. As Golway pointed out, artists, museums, and defenders of the National Endowment for the Arts are untroubled by any possible corrupting influence of government money. They regard it as an entitlement.

Which brings to mind another bit of hypocrisy. Opponents of the president's initiative are aghast at the idea that religious nonprofits would seek assurances that they wouldn't be forced to hire homosexuals. You'll see Senate Democrats this fall in the upcoming debate over the president's faith-based bills demand that religious groups not be allowed to discriminate in who they hire.

At the same time, these same senators insist that money given to artists must be free of any restrictions or requirements. As Golway puts it, restrictions on art are considered the product of "neo-Fascist" opponents of free expression.

The First Amendment protecting artists but not religious workers: This double standard makes neither moral nor constitutional sense. But it surely illustrates the anti-religious bias that exists among many of our elites. And it reminds us of what's at stake in the debate over faith-based initiatives: Not only helping those in need, but also correcting the distortion created by our culture's embrace of secularism.

It's a distortion that, in this case, prefers facilitating vulgar and even obscene expression to serving the needy.

For more information:

"Report on Unlevel Playing Field: Barriers to Participation by Faith-Based and Community Organizations in Federal Social Service Programs." White House Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives, Washington, DC, 2001.

Terry Golway, "Clerics Search Souls, Artists Demand Payment, " New York Observer, April 16, 2001, p. 5.

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Copyright © 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

As part of a 3-week unit on Islam, public school students in Byron, California, were given several assignments. The seventh-graders learned the beliefs of Islam and studied the important figures of the faith. To make it "hands on," they were required to wear a robe, adopt a Muslim name and play a jihad game with dice. It gets better - they had to memorize many verses in the Koran, and were taught to pray "in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful" and chanted, "Praise to Allah, Lord of Creation."

Christian parents complained the school doesn't teach Christian prayers and beliefs like this. Jewish commentator Joanne Jacobs agrees. She says it's because Byron school officials know that Christianity is a religion. They think Islam is merely an exotic culture, so it's kosher to teach its practices and beliefs in school. It's like celebrating Chinese New Year.

[see also http://www.assist-ministries.com/Stories/s02010019.htm]

George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone.

His text isn’t news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.” The author is Oswald Chambers, and, under the circumstances, the historical echoes are loud. A Scotsman and itinerant Baptist preacher, Chambers died in November 1917 as he was bringing the Gospel to Australian and New Zealand soldiers massed in Egypt. By Christmas they had helped to wrest Palestine from the Turks, and captured Jerusalem for the British Empire at the end of World War I.

Now there is talk of a new war in the Near East, this time in a land once called Babylon. One morning last month, as the United Nations argued and Washingtonians raced to hardware stores for duct tape amid a new Orange alert, the daily homily in “My Utmost” was about Isaiah’s reminder that God is the author of all life and history. “Lift up your eyes on high,” the prophet of the Old Testament said, “and behold who hath created these things.” Chambers’s explication: “When you are up against difficulties, you have no power, you can only endure in darkness” unless you “go right out of yourself, and deliberately turn your imagination to God.”

Later that day, the president did so. At Opryland in Nashville — the old “Buckle of the Bible Belt” — Bush told religious broadcasters that “the terrorists hate the fact that ... we can worship Almighty God the way we see fit,” and that the United States was called to bring God’s gift of liberty to “every human being in the world.” In his view, the chances of success were better than good. (After all, at the National Prayer Breakfast a few days before, he’d declared that “behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God.” If that’s so, America couldn’t fail.)

After his speech in Nashville, Bush met privately with pastoral social workers and bore witness to his own faith in Jesus Christ. “I would not be president today,” he said, “if I hadn’t stopped drinking 17 years ago. And I could only do that with the grace of God.” The prospect of war with Iraq was “weighing heavy” on him, he admitted. He knew that many people — including some at the table — saw the conflict as pre-emptive and unjust. (“I couldn’t imagine Jesus delivering a message of war to a cheering crowd, as I just heard the president do,” one participant, Charles Strobel, said later.) But, the president said, America had to see that it is “encountering evil” in the form of Saddam Hussein. The country had no choice but to confront it, by war if necessary. “If anyone can be at peace,” Bush said, “I am at peace about this.”

Every president invokes God and asks his blessing. Every president promises, though not always in so many words, to lead according to moral principles rooted in Biblical tradition. The English writer G. K. Chesterton called America a “nation with the soul of a church,” and every president, at times, is the pastor in the bully pulpit. But it has taken a war, and the prospect of more, to highlight a central fact: this president — this presidency — is the most resolutely “faith-based” in modern times, an enterprise founded, supported and guided by trust in the temporal and spiritual power of God. Money matters, as does military might. But the Bush administration is dedicated to the idea that there is an answer to societal problems here and to terrorism abroad: give everyone, everywhere, the freedom to find God, too.

Bush believes in God’s will — and in winning elections with the backing of those who agree with him. As a subaltern in his father’s 1988 campaign, George Bush the Younger assembled his career through contacts with ministers of the then emerging evangelical movement in political life. Now they form the core of the Republican Party, which controls all of the capital for the first time in a half century. Bible-believing Christians are Bush’s strongest backers, and turning them out next year in even greater numbers is the top priority of the president’s political adviser Karl Rove. He is busy tending to the base with pro-life judicial appointments, a proposed ban on human cloning (approved by the House last week) and a $15 billion plan to fight AIDS in Africa, a favorite project of Christian missionaries who want the chance to save souls there as well as beleaguered lives. The base is returning the favor. They are, by far, the strongest supporters of a war — unilateral if need be — to remove Saddam.

Now comes the time of testing. The war is controversial, more so every day, and the nuclear crisis in North Korea intensifies. The president hasn’t played his diplomatic hand well, and is tied down by the likes of Hans Blix, the Philippine military and the Turkish Parliament, which late last week denied American troops transport rights through the country. Bush advisers know that many Americans — and much of the world — see him as a man blinded by his beliefs (and those of his most active supporters) to the complexities of the world as it is. He makes a point of praising Islam as “a religion of peace.” But to many Muslims, especially Arabs, he looks sinister: a new Crusader, bent on retaking the East for Christendom.

Aides say the president’s quiet but fervent Christian faith gives him strength but does not dictate policy. He’s only seemed like preacher in chief, they say, because of what one called “a confluence of events”: the horrors of 9-11, the terror alerts and the Columbia shuttle explosion. Still, belief gives him something more than confidence, says his closest friend, Commerce Secretary Don Evans: “It gives him a desire to serve others and a very clear sense of what is good and what is evil.”

How did he get that way? Consider this a “faith portrait” of the president, the story of the power of belief to save a life and a family — and to shape a political career and a national government.

GROWING UP — ‘God’s Frozen People’

The story begins in Connecticut. Protestants there long ago were a fiery breed, with Jonathan Edwards’s (Yale ’21 — as in 1721) warning sinners to avoid the wrath of an “angry God.” But by 1946, when George W. Bush was born there, the old-line Episcopalians — Bushes among them — spoke in quieter voices. His dad was a “duty, honor, country” guy, a World War II hero and a punctilious churchgoer. But he was uncomfortable with public testimonies of faith, especially his own. The hoary joke among Episcopalians seemed apt: we’re “God’s Frozen People.”

The Bible belt was another story, but not for the Bushes. Moving in 1948 to the oil patch of west Texas, they joined other Ivy League immigrants from back East at the Presbyterian church in Midland. (Barbara Bush had been reared in the denomination.) It was staid compared with other churches there, more madras than denim. Dad raised money for the building fund, and taught in Sunday school. “Georgie” was a dutiful son and churchgoer. Years later, in an excess of spin, his mother claimed that he’d always shown an interest in reading the Bible. George smilingly said he was unable to remember such a fact. Sent back East to prep at Andover, he became a school “deacon.” But that role had long since lost any true religious significance; Bush used it to engineer pranks, not minister to the student flock.

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RELIGIOUSLY-TINGED STATEMENTS BY BUSH:

“An angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”

Context: The whirlwind symbolizes a medium for the voice of God in the Books of Job and Ezekiel.

“Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”

“We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.”

Context: Bush's references to “good” and “evil,” on the upswing since 9-11, imply the Biblical clash between Christ and Satan.

“And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it.”

Context: A reference from the Book of John (appropriated from the Hebrew Scriptures) to the coming of Christ.

“The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.”

Context: This statement is not found in Scripture, but harks back to the writings of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. It raised a red flag for supporters of separation of church and state.

“The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”

Context: The words “safely home” are commonly used in homilies delivered at Christian funerals to mean that those who've died are now with Jesus.

“There's power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.”

Context: “Power, wonder-working power” is a direct quote from one of the oldest evangelical gospel songs.

Karen Yourish

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Come-to-Jesus stories are more dramatic if the sinner is a pro. Bush was a semipro, a hardy partyer — his Triumph convertible was famous in Houston — until he married Laura in 1977. They joined her Methodist church. In most respects, he became what his father was, a respected member of the congregation. But he was a drinker, and a serious one. Only after work and at night, he told himself. But sometimes the nights were long. He could be famously obnoxious at parties, and, worse, a bore to his patient wife. The birth of his twin daughters in 1982 brought him joy. But, friends say, Laura grew increasingly fed up with his drinking. By 1985, as he approached 40, he needed to fix his relationship with the women in his life. “Nothing was broken,” Evans said. “But he wanted it to be better.” Mostly, he had to leave alcohol behind.

In campaign biographies, ghostwriters highlight the role that Billy Graham played in launching Bush on what he and Evans call his “Walk.” The truth is more prosaic, and explains far more about Bush’s evolving views, not only of faith but of government. Evans, married to a Bush elementary-school chum, was the key. He had been the golden boy of Midland, a handsome straight arrow, a “Cowboy” at the University of Texas (the Skull and Bones of Austin). He had gone home to climb the ladder of Tom Brown Oil Co., a booming concern in a booming economy. But in 1984 the oil business caved in. “It was the worst industrial collapse in the history of the American economy,” says Evans, who was left with the task of plowing through piles of corporate debt. Personal life was hard, too. By that time, he’d learned that a daughter, born severely handicapped, would need lifetime care.

As a west Texan, Evans did what came naturally in a storm: he joined a nondenominational Bible-study group. He coaxed his friend George to come along. The program was called Community Bible Study — started, ironically, in the Washington, D.C., area in 1975 by a group of suburban women. By the time it got to Midland, it was a scriptural boot camp: an intensive, yearlong study of a single book of the New Testament, each week a new chapter, with detailed read-ing and discussion in a group of 10 men. For two years Bush and Evans and their partners read the clear writings of the Gentile physician Luke — Acts and then his Gospel. Two themes stood out, one spiritual, one more political: Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, and the founding of the church. Bush, who cares little for the abstract and a great deal for people, responded to the conversion story. He liked the idea of knowing Jesus as a friend.

The CBS program was a turning point for the future president in several ways. It gave him, for the first time, an intellectual focus. Here was the product of elite secular education — Andover, Yale and Harvard — who, for the first time, was reading a book line by line with rapt attention. And it was ... the Bible. In that sense, Bush is a more unalloyed product of the Bible belt than his friends, who may have deeply studied something else in earlier days. A jogger and marathoner for years, Bush found in Bible study an equivalent mental and spiritual discipline, which he would soon need to steel himself for his main challenge in life to that point: to quit drinking.

Bush says he never considered himself to be an alcoholic, and never attended an AA meeting. But it turned out he didn’t have to. CBS was something akin to the same thing, part of what has since come to be called the “small group” faith movement. It’s a baby-boomerish mix of self-help, self-discipline, group therapy (without using what, for Bush, is a dreaded word) and worship. Whatever, it worked. As the world knows, Bush did quit drinking in the summer of 1986, after his and Evans’s 40th birthday. “It was ‘goodbye Jack Daniels, hello Jesus’,” said one friend from those days.

THE POLITICS — Making New Friends

Bush turned to the bible to save his marriage and his family. But was he also thinking of smoothing his path to elective office? We’ll never know for sure. But he knew the political landscape of his near-native Texas. He knew that, by 1985, the South had risen to take control of the GOP, and that evangelical activism and clout was rising with it — indeed had been instrumental in making it possible. He also knew that his father’s way — Episcopalian reserve, moderation on cultural issues, close ties to back East — was a tough sell, to say the least. Bush the Younger had experienced it firsthand, in 1978, when he impetuously ran for Congress in Midland. He was a proud alumnus of Sam Houston Elementary and San Jacinto Junior High. But he had been clobbered as an Ivy League interloper nonetheless.

When Bush moved to Washington in 1987 to help run his father’s campaign, he seized the main chance: to take over the job of being the “liaison” to the religious right. He quickly saw that he could talk the talk as well as walk the walk. “His father wasn’t comfortable dealing with religious types,” recalled Doug Wead, who worked with him on evangelical outreach. “George knew exactly what to say, what to do.” He and Wead bombarded campaign higher-ups with novel ways to reach out. Wead slipped Biblical phrases — signals to the base — into the Old Man’s speeches. Dubya, typically, favored a direct approach. He wanted to feature Billy Graham in a campaign video. Dad nixed the idea.

Bush and Rove built their joint careers on that new base. Faith and ambition became one, with Bush doing the talking and Rove doing the thinking on policy and spin. In 1993 — the year before he ran for governor — Bush caused a small tempest by telling an Austin reporter (who happened to be Jewish) that only believers in Jesus go to heaven. It was a theologically unremarkable statement, at least in Texas. But the fact that he had been brazen enough to say it produced a stir. While the editorial writers huffed, Rove quietly expressed satisfaction. The story would help establish his client’s Bible-belt bona fides in rural (and, until then, primarily Democratic) Texas. As a candidate, Bush sought, and got, advice from pastors, especially leaders of new, nondenominational “megachurches” in the suburbs. His ideas for governing were congenial to his faith, and dreamed up in his faith circles. The ideas were designed to draw evangelicals to the polls without sounding too church-made. “Compassionate conservatism” — mentoring, tough love on crime, faith-based welfare — was in many ways just a CBS Bible study writ large. The discipline of faith can save lives — Bush knew it from personal experience — and undercut the stale answers of the left.

The presidential campaign was Texas on a grander scale. As he prepared to run, in 1999, Bush assembled leading pastors at the governor’s mansion for a “laying-on of hands,” and told them he’d been “called” to seek higher office. In the GOP primaries, he outmaneuvered the field by practicing what one rival, Gary Bauer, called “identity politics.” Others tried to woo evangelicals by pledging strict allegiance on issues such as abortion and gay rights. “Bush talked about his faith,” said Bauer, “and people just believed him — and believed in him.” There was genius in this. The son of Bush One was widely, logically, believed by secular voters to be a closet moderate. Suddenly, the father’s burden was a gift: Bush Two could reach the base without threatening the rest. “He was and is ‘one of us’,” said Charles Colson, who sold the then-Governor Bush on a faith-based prison program.

For his public speeches, he hired Michael Gerson, a gifted writer recommended to him by Colson, among others. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois (“the Evangelical Harvard”), Gerson understood Bush’s compassionate conservatism. More important, he had a gift for expressing it in stately, lilting language that could appeal, simultaneously, to born-agains and to secular boomers searching for a lost sense of uplift in public life.

The Bush campaign conducted its more-controversial outreach below radar, via letters and e-mail. Only once was it forced to reach out in a raw public way. After John McCain won the New Hampshire primary, Bush made his infamous visit to South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, the ultrafundamentalist and officially anti-Roman Catholic school. Strategists were opaque in public, unapologetic behind the scenes. “We had to send a message — fast — and sending him there was the only way to do it,” said one top Bush operative at the time. “It was a risk we had to take.” Bush won.

THE RECKONING — Forged in the Fire

Faith didn’t make Bush a decisive person. He’s always been one. His birthright as a Bush gives him a sense of obligation to serve, and a sense of an entitlement to lead. West Texas, where dust storms and the gyrating economy buffeted the locals, left him with a love of straight shooters and a come-what-may view of life. A frat man at Yale in an increasingly radical time — the late 1960s — he came to loathe intellectual avatars of complexity and doubt — especially when they disparaged his dad. He is a Pierce, too: a quick-to-judge son of a quick-to-judge mother.

Still, faith helps Bush pick a course and not look back. He talks regularly to pastors, and loves to hear that people are praying for him. As he describes it, his faith is not complex. In recent weeks he has added a new note to his theme of the personal uses of faith, drawn from CBS. Now there is a sense of destiny that approaches the Calvinistic. “There is a fatalistic element,” said David Frum, the author and former Bush speechwriter. “You do your best and accept that everything is in God’s hands.” The result is unflappability. “If you are confident that there is a God that rules the world,” said Frum, “you do your best, and things will work out.” But what some see as solidity, others view as a flammable mix of stubbornness and arrogance. “No one’s allowed to second-guess, even when you should,” said another former staffer.

The atmosphere inside the White House, insiders say, is suffused with an aura of prayerfulness. There have always been Bible-study groups there; even the Clintonites had one. But the groups are everywhere now. Lead players set the tone. There is Gerson, whose office keeps being moved closer to the Oval. Chief of staff Andrew Card’s wife is a Methodist minister. National-security adviser Condi Rice’s father was a preacher in Alabama.

The president is known to welcome questions about faith that staffers sometimes have the nerve to share with him. But he’s not the kind to initiate granular debates about theology. Would Iraq be a “just war” in Christian terms, as laid out by Augustine in the fourth century and amplified by Aquinas, Luther and others? Bush has satisfied himself that it would be — indeed, it seems he did so many months ago. But he didn’t do it by combing through texts or presiding over a disputation. He decided that Saddam was evil, and everything flowed from that.

The language of good and evil — central to the war on terrorism — came about naturally, said Frum. From the first, he said, the president used the term “evildoers” to describe the terrorists because some commentators were wondering aloud whether the United States in some way deserved the attack visited upon it on September 11, 2001. “He wanted to cut that off right away,” said Frum, “and make it clear that he saw absolutely no moral equivalence. So he reached right into the Psalms for that word.” He continued to stress the idea. Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were “evil.” In November 2001, in an interview with NEWSWEEK, he first declared — blurted out, actually — that Saddam Hussein in Iraq was “evil,” too.

The world, and the Bush administration, are focused on Iraq. But as a matter of politics and principle, the president knows that he needs to deliver on his faith-based domestic agenda, especially since his party controls Congress. The wish list compiled by Rove is a long one. It includes conservative, pro-life judicial nominations; new HUD regulations that allow federal grants for construction of “social service” facilities at religious institutions; a ban on human cloning and “partial birth” abortion; a sweeping program to allow churches, synagogues and mosques to use federal funds to administer social-welfare programs; strengthened limits on stem-cell research; increased funding to teach sexual abstinence in schools, rather than safer sex and pregnancy prevention; foreign-aid policies that stress right-to-life themes, and federal money for prison programs (like the one in Texas) that use Christian tough love in an effort to lower recidivism rates among convicts.

While Rove and Hill leaders work the domestic side, Bush is dwelling on faith-based foreign policy of the most explosive kind: a potential war in the name of civil freedom — including religious freedom — in the ancient heart of Arab Islam. In the just-war debate, he has strong support from his base. Leading advocates for the moral virtue of his position include Richard Land, the key leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s political arm. Another supporter is Michael Novak, the conservative Catholic theologian. Novak recently journeyed to Rome to make his case at the invitation of the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. All politics is local.

But the president is facing a mighty force of religious leaders on the other side. They include the pope (Bush will meet with a papal envoy this week, NEWSWEEK has learned), the Council of Bishops, the National Council of Churches, many Jewish groups and most Muslim leaders. “People appreciate his devotion to faith, but, in the context of war, there is a fine line, and he is starting to make people nervous,” says Steve Waldman, the editor and CEO of Beliefnet, a popular and authoritative Web site on religion and society. “They appreciate his moral clarity and decisiveness. But they wonder if he is ignoring nuances in what sounds like a messianic mission.”

Muslims are especially wary. Bush has gone to great lengths to reassure them that he admires their religion. He has hosted Ramadan dinners, and periodically criticized evangelicals, including Franklin Graham, who denounce Islam as a corrupt, violent faith. Still, evangelical missionaries don’t hide their desire to convert Muslims to Christianity, even — if not especially — in Baghdad. If one of the goals of ousting Saddam Hussein is to bring freedom of worship to an oppressed people, how can the president object?

For Bush, that’s a nettlesome question for another time. If he’s worried about it or other such weighty matters, it wasn’t obvious at dinner upstairs in the private quarters of the White House the other week. He and Laura had invited close friends and allies such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Bush, as usual, was a genial, joshing host. Also, as usual, he didn’t want the evening to last too long. “He tends to rush through cocktail hour,” says a friend. “One quick Coke and he wants to eat.” The president asked Rumsfeld to say grace. (“Can you help us out here, Mr. Secretary?”) As 10:30 p.m. approached, the commander in chief seemed eager to turn in. Knowledgeable guests understood that he wanted to catch at least a few minutes of his beloved “SportsCenter” on ESPN. But he also needed to get up early, very early. He had some reading to do.

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With Tamara Lipper, Martha Brant, Suzanne Smalley and Richard Wolffe

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RELIGIOUSLY-TINGED STATEMENTS BY BUSH:

Delivering the 'Good News'

While past presidents have invoked the name of God in public remarks, President Bush has done so, arguably, more than others-and has increasingly moved beyond broad statements on faith to include overt Christian references. An overview:

Inaugural Address, Jan. 21, 2001

“An angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.”

Context: The whirlwind symbolizes a medium for the voice of God in the Books of Job and Ezekiel.

______________________________________

Speech to Congress, Sept. 20, 2001

“Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”

______________________________________

West Point Commencement, June 1, 2002

“We are in a conflict between good and evil , and America will call evil by its name.”

Context: Bush's references to “good” and “evil,” on the upswing since 9-11, imply the Biblical clash between Christ and Satan.

______________________________________

9-11 Remembrance,Sept. 11, 2002

“And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness will not overcome it.”

Context: A reference from the Book of John (appropriated from the Hebrew Scriptures) to the coming of Christ.

______________________________________

State of The Union, Jan. 29, 2003

“The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.”

Context: This statement is not found in Scripture, but harks back to the writings of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. It raised a red flag for supporters of separation of church and state.

______________________________________

Hours After Shuttle Tragedy, Feb. 1, 2003

“The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”

Context: The words “safely home” are commonly used in homilies delivered at Christian funerals to mean that those who've died are now with Jesus.

______________________________________

State of The Union, Jan. 29, 2003

“There's power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.”

Context: “Power, wonder-working power” is a direct quote from one of the oldest evangelical gospel songs.

______________________________________

Karen Youris

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© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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"No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state."

-- Felix Adler

"In the relationship between man and religion, the state is firmly committed to a position of neutrality."

-- Thomas Campbell Clark

"The church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back."

-- Charles de Gaulle

"The church is actually patronized by the social order as a means of stabilizing and perpetuating the existing system."

-- C. C. Morrison

"The church is only a secular institution in which the half-educated speak to the half-converted."

-- William Ralph Inge

At the Jefferson Memorial, quotations from our third president are carved into the wall. One of them reads: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Lovely words, but what was their context? Professor Philip Hamburger, in his book SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE, gives us some much needed insights.

Among Jefferson’s opponents in the election of 1800, none were as fervent as the clergy of New England, especially Connecticut, where Congregationalism was a state-established church. These clergymen, by and large, were solidly biblical in their theology and solidly Federalist — which is to say, anti-Jeffersonian — in their politics. Jefferson’s “eternal hostility” line occurs in a letter written in the midst of that bitter 1800 campaign.

The established clergy, Jefferson wrote, “believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe right: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” The “tyranny,” you see, that he had in mind was that of the New England clergy.

Was Jefferson just protesting the state establishment of religion? Well, in a letter to the Unitarian leader Joseph Priestley in January of 1800, Jefferson condemned the notion that we should rely on our beliefs in religion. And seventeen years later, rejoicing in his party’s victories in Connecticut, he wrote to John Adams that these victories had brought “light and liberality” to this “last retreat of monkish darkness,” this “den of the priesthood,” this “Protestant Popedom.”

There’s no way around it: Despite his many great qualities, Thomas Jefferson was as vigorous a critic of traditional Christianity as the Enlightenment ever produced.

It is in this context — his overt hostility to Christians — that we must evaluate his famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, the sole source of the metaphor the “wall of separation.” The Danbury Baptists wrote to Jefferson in 1801 seeking his support for its efforts to disestablish Connecticut’s Congregationalist Church. In response, Jefferson upped the ante in the debate, both by creating the “wall” metaphor and by insisting that this metaphor is the true key to understanding the Establishment Clause. As Professor Daniel Dreisbach, author of THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE WALL OF SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE, has written, “Jefferson’s Baptist correspondents, who agitated for disestablishment but not for separation, were apparently discomfited by the figurative phrase. They, like many Americans, feared that the erection of a ‘wall’ would separate religious influences from public life and policy” — just what it has done.

We have just celebrated our independence, and that’s a good time to remember that the “wall of separation” is not in the Constitution. It’s a phrase written by a president who was upset with Christians. I say it’s time to put it all in perspective and end the radical separationism that keeps Christianity out of public life. We should be honoring Jefferson, not for his sour view of historic Christianity in 1801, but for the eloquent and moving words he wrote in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

You can read the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE at the National Archives and Records Administration website.

Visit the THOMAS JEFFERSON MEMORIAL WEBSITE, maintained by the National Park Service. Click on “inscriptions” to read some of President Jefferson’s quotations and writings.

Philip Hamburger, SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE (Harvard University Press, 2002).

Daniel L. Dreisbach, “A GODLESS CONSTITUTION?: RELIGION AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT,” BREAKPOINT ONLINE, April 2000.

Daniel L. Dreisbach, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE WALL OF SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE (New York University Press, 2002).

BreakPoint Commentary No. 030708, “HISTORIC PRESERVATION: THE ‘WALL OF SEPARATION.’“

John J. DiIulio, Jr., “FAITH, HOPE AND GOVERNMENT,” BOSTON GLOBE, 22 June 2003, D1.

Ginny Mooney, “JUST ‘ONE NATION’?: OR ‘ONE NATION UNDER GOD’?“ BREAKPOINT ONLINE, 1 July 2002.

Michael Novak, ON TWO WINGS: HUMBLE FAITH AND COMMON SENSE AT THE AMERICAN FOUNDING (Encounter, 2002).

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

All citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, must be free to voice any opinion about anything or anyone to their governmental representatives. Moreover, they should even be able to voice any concern about the representatives themselves in public without fear of retribution by the government.

James Madison understood this fact of political science when he penned Federalist Ten. Fearing that certain “factions” (or special interests) might seek to restrict free speech from those who held opposite opinions, he saw freedom of speech as the antidote for the “mortal diseases” which had destroyed other countries.

The one indispensable ingredient for this to work: liberty.

Madison was no political novice. He realized that elections were often “carried along” by the “vicious arts” of “unworthy candidates.” To combat such people from being elected to office, he believed that “the suffrages [rights] of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.” Unless, of course, the representatives themselves grew to fear the scrutiny of the people so much so that they passed laws to protect themselves from the close watch of the electorate.

This is precisely the issue at hand over 200 years later in the very same republic Madison helped form.

Tucked away in the Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3) is an amendment introduced by then-Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1954. Under penalty of prosecution and the forfeiture of a tax-exempt status, the statute requires churches and some religious organizations to “abstain from participating or intervening, directly or indirectly, in any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” “Issue discussions” divorced from political candidates are permitted so long as specific issues are not linked to particular candidates who hold certain positions.

Regardless of the senator's intentions, the regulation fails to take into account that ideas alone do not make policy. People make policy. To dictate to the church the boundaries of what can and cannot be said from the pulpit places the state over the church in matters of religion. This is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.”

HR 235, a bill currently working its way through Congress, seeks to lift the ban, unshackle pastors and church leaders, and restrict government to its rightful and constitutional position.

Precisely because the pulpit possesses great power to influence large numbers of people, political operatives have targeted its content for censure. To forbid churches from forthrightly declaring that a certain candidate does not support the teaching of the church is to forbid the church, in many ways, to have a voice at all in the public square.

There are, to be sure, inherent dangers for any church to voice public support of any man for anything -- political or otherwise (Psalm 118:8,9). The best of men are men at best, and orthodox Christian teaching warns against trusting in man because of what is “in man” (Jeremiah 17:9; John 2:25). The Gospel of Jesus Christ is owned by no nation or politician - conservative or liberal. Yet, should not, at least in some way, a church's theology and moral teachings gravitate toward those in public life who support those values?

During last year's hearings for the bill, the Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy testified: “We do not want to see houses of worship identified more by the political parties they support than by the theology or the moral values that they proclaim.” Taken to its logical conclusion, Gaddy's proposition is untenable. Behind every public policy lies non-neutral ideas which seek to rule and dominate the political landscape for a certain and defined end. He fails to admit the truth: Public policy is, in many ways, practical theology.

Forcing the church into silence through legal means is but the first step toward the same procedure used by tyrannical governments to advance their agenda unopposed. In muzzling the church's prophetic voice, the state acts as though it fears that the power of national government is limited by another Sovereign who rules with absolute authority and power.

Though history teaches that the church can thrive without the benefit of a democratic republic and tax exemption, the question is and remains: Can the republic thrive without the influence of the church?

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Douglas Baker is a writer who lives and works in Washington, D.C.

*

President Bush took a bold stance in voicing his backing of traditional marriage in America on July 30.

“I think it's very important,” the president said, “for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country. On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that's really where the issue is headed here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”

Following that statement, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a national homosexual-rights organization, called into question President Bush's “invocation of personal religious beliefs” in his comments opposing “marriage” for same-sex couples.

What this means is that GLAAD officials believe that personal religious beliefs should have no place in the public arena. They know that by eliminating religious ethics they can make further social inroads. Never mind that these moral guidelines have preserved the nation's moral heritage since its inception.

This reproach of traditional religious values has brought us to a turning point. Conservative people of faith -- those who embrace the Judeo-Christian doctrines of the Bible -- are considered illegitimate in the important social/political debate on homosexual marriage (and other key issues, for that matter) solely because our beliefs are founded in historic sacred teachings.

Listen to the comments of John Sonego, GLAAD's director of communications:

It is equally important that the media carefully scrutinize and

hold up for debate President Bush's invocation of religion as the

fundamental rationale for his policy of excluding same-sex

couples and families from the protections of marriage. By saying

he has charged government attorneys to explore ways to 'codify'

the 'sanctity of marriage,' and through numerous biblical

references in his discussion about this issue, the president is

clearly signaling his conviction that his personal religious

beliefs should be the basis for governing law. In a country

where the separation of church and state is a founding principle,

this mix of personal beliefs and his administration's public

policy needs to be examined critically by the media.

I find this statement quite alarming because Mr. Sonego is essentially calling on the nation's mainstream media to publicly censure President Bush for daring to invoke his sincerely held religious beliefs in supporting traditional marriage. Even President Clinton supported traditional marriage, signing the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In addition, 37 states have Defense of Marriage Acts that define marriage as a union exclusively between one man and one woman.

Someone should also give Mr. Sonego a history lesson to instruct him that the so-called separation of church and state is not a “founding principle” of this nation and can be found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution (the document reflecting the founding principles of our founders).

Manipulating and rewriting history has become quite fashionable these days as those who define the Constitution as a “living” document attempt to diabolically mold it so that it sanctions their ever-changing moral “standards.”

Understanding their willingness to shamelessly amend our history, it's really no surprise that these careless revisionists also would stoop to aggressively disparage those who utilize religious teachings in forming their political beliefs.

It is becoming ever more clear that evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics in America are going to be further ridiculed and portrayed as dangerous “homophobes” simply because we wish to hold forth the Judeo-Christian teachings that shaped the beliefs of Washington, Madison, Franklin and most of our founders.

The 200,000 pastors of evangelical churches in this nation need to ensure that their congregants are aware of the fact that we are public enemy number one in this escalating cultural battle. And these pastors need to fervently instruct their flocks to remain socially active and politically astute as we fight together to retain moral sanity in America.

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Falwell is pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., and chancellor of Liberty University.

*

America was founded on the pursuit of religious liberty, including the liberty to acknowledge God and to pray in the public square.

This liberty originates in higher law, or “the laws of nature and of nature's God,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it. In the words of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the founders modeled themselves “upon God's ancient people” and “wrote what they considered to be a modern-day interpretation of the basic biblical principles of government.”

Those principles demand a place for religious expression in the public square. Unfortunately, radical advocates have long been trying to rewrite the Constitution by making the First Amendment say something it doesn't. The First Amendment plainly forbids the creation of a national denomination, because that would be an “establishment of religion.” It says nothing about the so-called “separation of church and state.”

Even those who agitate to remove the Ten Commandments monument at the capitol here in Arizona and the now-famous plaques with Hebrew Scriptures at the Grand Canyon will admit -- when pressed -- that the so-called “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution.

What did the founders do and say to make us think religion has a place in the public square?

Let us consider General George Washington. When Washington received a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the Continental Congress, he immediately issued orders that “The Colonels or commanding officers of each regiment are directed to procure Chaplains accordingly; persons of good Characters and exemplary lives.”

The Declaration which motivated Washington's appointment of chaplains contains four references to God: God as the Creator and the source of liberty (“all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights”), God the law giver (“law of nature and of nature's God”), God the ultimate judge (“the Supreme Judge of the World”) and God as the king above all earthly rulers, as the Sovereign (“Divine Providence”).

After he led the army to victory, Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention and was then elected our first president under the Constitution.

At Washington's first inauguration in New York City, Washington took the oath of office on a Bible opened to Genesis 49 and 50, and added the words repeated by every president since, “So help me God.” He told his audience at Federal Hall that, “It would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations.”

Washington then went very publicly to pray at St. Paul's Chapel before he attended inaugural festivities. Eight years later, in his farewell address, he said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

Washington, as perhaps the leading founding father, demonstrated repeatedly that religion has a legitimate place in the public square. The hue and cry over the Ten Commandments monument and the plaques would seem ludicrous to him and to all who served with him.

In light of that history, why would anyone object to posting “Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds his name is the Lord, exult before him,” at the Grand Canyon?

If religion in general is the thing that keeps radicals up worrying late at night, then why haven't they also demanded that the Hindu names for canyon locations -- Brahma Temple, Vishnu Temple, Siva Temple -- be changed? Maybe for the same reason they want to banish the Ten Commandments from the capitol grounds -- they hate orthodox religious expressions in the public square.

Remember, the monument is one of 20 similar monuments that celebrate Arizona's history, culture and diversity. Surely, the Ten Commandments monument adds diversity. And what about the Arizona state motto, “Ditat Deus,” or “God Enriches.” No doubt the demand to change the motto will come soon.

Why would any irreligious person care about the monument on Wesley- Bolin Plaza? Perhaps they should follow the advice so freely doled out by the radicals like the ACLU, who want child pornography protected as free speech, to “just change the channel” and turn away from the monument.

Perhaps we need a little more accurate history about the so-called “separation of church and state.” In the early 1800s, many of the original states had churches sanctioned by state governments. These were “established churches,” and because they were a state matter they were not forbidden in the U.S. Constitution.

It took a former Ku Klux Klansman turned Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, to move the so-called “separation of church and state” into common jurisprudence, which he accomplished in 1947 in Everson V. Board of Education. As a committed Klansman, Black surely must have participated in the Klan's oath of allegiance, to “most zealously ... shield and preserve ... (the) separation of church and state....” Klan doctrine is not a good way to interpret the U.S. Constitution.

A free and just society recognizes that freedom of speech and religion applies to public religious expression as well as to private. Our founding fathers knew this, as did most previous generations. Forgetting the hard-won lessons of the past is, in our time, freedom's greatest threat.

We will lose our liberties if we don't fight. We'll lose when we give into all the ACLU's demands. We'll lose when we quit singing God Bless America, or when we take In God We Trust off our currency. We'll lose when we return to the morally and legally repugnant practice of issuing governmental licenses to clergymen and their printers, as the English did here in the 1700s and as totalitarian regimes still do.

Religion should be booted from the public square only if we prefer tyranny to liberty.

_____________

Alan Sears is president of Alliance Defense Fund, religious liberty legal alliance based in Scottsdale, Ariz. This column originally appeared in The Arizona Republic on August 17, 2003.

*

When a USAToday & Gallup Poll found that 77 percent of Americans objected to the order to remove Judge Roy Moore's massive Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building, the overwhelming support for Judge Moore sent pundits everywhere scrambling to answer the question: How do we make sense of God in public life?

On one side of the question stands a group who believe that America was established to be a Christian nation, chosen by God like Old Testament Israel, as the divine representative on earth. On the other side are those such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State who want to sanitize even the memory of the Almighty from public life.

Who is right? Could both be wrong?

Those who point to America as a Christian nation may sometimes be guilty of overstating their claims. Over-eager believers may imply that all of America's founders were faithful, Bible-believing men who intended the United States to be a distinctly Christian country.

While it is true that many who signed the Constitution were men of such conviction, by no means were all. Advocates of this view rarely mention the fact that some of the founders on occasion seemed to question their faith. For example, Thomas Jefferson nonchalantly wrote, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god.” Both Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin doubted the divinity of Jesus and that the Bible is the special revelation of God.

Advocates for the second position, however, have an even harder time explaining how a secular America is so rich in appeals to God by the founders of her government.

The list of those appeals is long. For instance, the Declaration of Independence rooted human rights in the authority of the Creator. In Federalist no.37, James Madison remarked that it was impossible not to perceive the “finger of the Almighty hand” at work in the American Revolution and in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. Even Benjamin Franklin -- at a moment of crisis in that same great assembly -- called for a clergy-led time of prayer every morning and reminded his colleagues that “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.”

The founders of the republic may not all have been thoroughgoing Christians, but they definitely were not secularists. They believed that the American experiment depended on the favor of divine providence, and they knew that both democracy and justice could not be sustained apart from a distinctly religious morality.

As George Washington observed, “Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” The real world depends on Transcendence.

These words from the country's first president also are etched in stone on the monument that once stood in the now-vacant rotunda of the judicial building in Montgomery, Alabama. They are words which Judge Roy Moore asks the citizens of the United States to consider.

Whether or not one agrees with the way he pressed the issue does not excuse us from having to answer the question. Are certain laws true for all people in all times in all places? Is murder always wrong? Is child abuse evil?

If the answers to those questions are yes, then one has to come up with a reason why. And if that reason does not include an ultimate or transcendent source, then the law may be discarded as nothing more than a human invention; it is a “law” with a wink. The Declaration of Independence appropriately concludes that the “laws of nature” can only be explained by “nature's God.”

The founders held that all men are created equal but that all beliefs are not. They refused to favor one version of Christianity by establishing a state church, but did not blush at the divine basis of moral law. They supported robust public debate on issues and thus gave room for every person to worship as he or she pleased.

They accomplished this without demanding that the secular state avoid all references to God. They sought a church free from government interference, not a government free from religious truth.

_____________

Gregory Alan Thornbury is director of the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University. This column first appeared in The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.

*

Are we losing Christmas?

No one wanted Jesus, it seemed. Arrogant kings and conniving thugs throughout the Old Testament sought to exterminate the Jews and sever the bloodline God established for the coming prince of peace. Before the angel appeared to him, Joseph determined he would privately divorce his pregnant fiancée Mary. Later, the innkeeper in Bethlehem didn't seem to care that Mary was on the verge of childbirth. The best he would offer was a stable that no doubt smelled of animal manure. Herod certainly didn't want Jesus. He murdered every boy two years of age or younger in and around Bethlehem in a bloody dragnet hoping to eliminate Him. The Jewish leadership of the day finally did what Herod couldn't do when they succeeded in having Him nailed to the cross.

Jesus was God's gift to mankind. Never has so great a gift been so poorly received. Never, that is, until now.

The attack on Christmas rages across our country with Herodian intensity. Instead of Herod's hit squads, constitutional revisionists use our legal system to wage their war. They stand on a faulty interpretation of the First Amendment and rigorously apply the idea of “separation between church and state,” a declaration never made in the Constitution and one never intended by the founding founders.

However, their double standard belies their logic and reveals that their true goal is not to prevent government from establishing a state religion but to expunge all things Christian from the marketplace.

The proof is in their actions. Within the past few weeks the New York City school system continued its ban on Christmas along with nativity scenes while simultaneously authorizing expressions of the Jewish Hanukkah and the Islamic Ramadan in hallways and classrooms. Hundreds of similar instances across our country verify the frequency of such attacks on Christmas.

Revisionists know that if they can kill Christmas they've greatly pushed Christianity from the center of our culture. They are willing to overlook the use of public funds that “endorse” other religions if they can exclude Christianity.

Christians can't let that happen. Christmas represents the focal point of divine incarnation. To ignore Christ's coming to earth through the virgin birth is to forfeit any opportunity mankind has for salvation. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). It is that exclusivity that our culture finds offensive.

It is our duty -- it should be our passion -- to vigorously defend Christmas even in the face of such animosity. We must fight for Christmas on behalf of the very people who would like to silence it. We carry within us the message that He came in order to reconcile man to God. If Christians don't share that message, then “how can they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe without hearing about Him” (Romans 10:14)?

Christmas represents the beginning of God's physical presence with us. It is easy to get lost in the story of a baby and the tranquility of the nativity scenes we display. Jesus in a manger could not save us, but the Man on the cross could -- and did. My father used to say that Christmas is not a time for remembering a small child but for following a magnificent Man.

The baby Jesus does not threaten secular culture; it's the Man the baby grew to be. Christian, don't leave Jesus in the manger this Christmas or cower to the brashness of secularists. Imitate the angel of Luke 2:10 and boldly announce “the good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

*

Today is the holiday in which we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, and all over the country millions of children are studying his life and his work. They'll learn that his LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL is one of the most eloquent defenses of the law of God that must undergird our nation's laws.

How astonished King would be, were he alive today, to hear the shrill claims from secular ideologues that America was founded as an explicitly secular nation.

In the NEW YORK TIMES recently, Susan Jacoby argued that it's a “misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason.” [see #26526]

Nonsense, Dr. King would have retorted; after all, his entire campaign to abolish unjust laws was predicated on his belief that civil laws must square with the lawgiver God.

As King knew — and most scholars agree — for the first time in history, two ideological streams partially converged in America, one coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the other from Enlightenment thinkers. Adherents to both traditions agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. But this certainly did not mean that America was to be a nation free from religious influences.

George Washington was explicit: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

In his marvelous book ON TWO WINGS, theologian Michael Novak contends that the faith of the founding fathers was deeply rooted in the writings of ancient scripture, especially the Jewish covenant. As he put it, secular writers typically cut off “one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies” — the one that is America's “compact” with the biblical God. They understood, with Thomas Jefferson, that “no nation has ever yet existed or even been governed without religion. Nor can be.” Why? Because, in the founders' estimation, virtue was the precondition for liberty.

While the founders admittedly did not use the word GOD in the Constitution, they didn't need to. The “laws of nature and nature's God” had already been appealed to in the Declaration of Independence, which provided the context for the constitutional debate.

No one made the case better than Martin Luther King, Jr., that America's founders intended religion to undergird America's laws. “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King wrote. “But conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? The answer would likely make Jacoby, Barry Lynn, and secular ideologues cringe. “A just law,” King said, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law ... is out of harmony with the moral law.”

As we celebrate King's birthday and his success in advancing the civil rights cause in America, let's remember that without his defense of the law of God, we would still be a segregated nation today. We need to learn from his stirring LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL that it is the moral law that undergirds the nation's law.

America is a purely secular state? Don't tell that to the gentlemen farmers who founded America — nor to those who today honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Susan Jacoby, “One Nation, Under Secularism,” New York Times, 8 January 2004. [see HolwickID #26526]

• Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. [see HolwickID #22116]

• Read President George Washington's farewell address, 1796 [taken from J.D. Richardson, ed., Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 1 (1907), 213].

• Mervyn A. Warren, King Came Preaching: The Pulpit Power of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (InterVarsity, 2001).

• Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (Encounter, 2001).

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030828, “King's Dream: The Good Society and the Moral Law.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030117, “Fighting Unjust Laws: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.“

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 020121, “The Duty to Disobey: Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.“

• Mark Gauvreau Judge, “The Division of Black America,” BreakPoint Online, 8 August 2003.

• Rev. Thomas A. Tarrants, III was a former Klansman who nearly died from multiple bullet wounds when he was arrested. In prison he came to Christ and now speaks out against racism and for the superiority of the Christian worldview. A CD of his testimony is available: “How a Former Klansman Rejected Racism and Came To Christ.”

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

We are living in troubled times. The scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners seems to grow worse every day. A friend of mine at the Pentagon who has seen all of the photos said they were “demonic.” He felt a cold chill of evil, which is not surprising — Satan would like nothing better than to poison our policies in the Middle East. And then this past Monday here at home, gay “marriage” became legal.

Now, it may seem odd to link these two stories, but it's not if you realize that, ultimately, both of them remind us of our need for God and the peril of rejecting Him.

In Massachusetts four judges saw fit to overturn the entirety of recorded human history and tradition. That history and tradition, most perfectly revealed in the pages of Scripture, tell us what happens when we know the truth and willfully disregard it. God turns us over to our own shameful lusts. What we are seeing is Romans 1 being played out in 2004.

And note which comes first. It begins with the rejection of the truth, and then comes the moral deterioration that threatens our culture's well being.

This rejection came to mind while reading a column by Nicholas Kristof of the NEW YORK TIMES. Writing from Iran, he described the oppressive environment created by the theocratic rule of the ayatollahs.

In describing how imposing Islam had backfired on the ayatollahs, his column was a “must-read” for its insights. But he didn't stop there and, thus, the column became a “must-read” for an entirely different reason.

He wrote that “there's a useful lesson here for George Bush's America as well as for the ayatollahs' Iran: When a religion is imposed on people, when a government tries too ostentatiously to put itself 'under God,' the effect is often not to prop up religious faith but to undermine it. Nothing is more lethal to religious faith than having self-righteous, intolerant politicians ... drag God into politics.”

What an outrageous slander of President Bush and conservative Christians — comparing us to the ayatollahs.

But let me tell you what bothers me most about this comment: It probably honestly reflects the attitude of the elite in America. They're neither neutral nor even opposed to religion — they're aggressively hostile. In their worldview, the more secular a polity, the better the culture. Religion, especially the biblical kind, can only oppress and divide people. This is why they see ayatollahs where others see ministers and lay people.

If the effects of this worldview were limited to a few zip codes on both coasts, it would be an irritant. But the effects are felt everywhere. And, just as God warned us, moral chaos follows in its wake.

Fortunately, there are still things we can do, starting with praying for God's mercy, for peace in the Middle East, and for morality at home. Like Nehemiah's men, we can also stand guard over the walls that have safeguarded our society, the moral traditions inherited from Christianity. That means becoming more adept at making the case for Christian faith and the worldview it produces — because it's only these that can see us through these troubled times, times we have brought on ourselves by rejecting what we know is true.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Nicholas D. Kristof, “Overdosing on Islam,” New York Times, 12 May 2004. Free registration required.

• David Brooks, “In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment,” New York Times, 18 May 2004. Free registration required.

• John O'Sullivan, “Left Eye's View,” National Review Online, 18 May 2004.

• Michael Novak, “A Pope and a President,” National Review Online, 18 May 2004.

• Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, The Problem of Evil (Tyndale, 1999).

• Robert George, The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI Books, 2001).

• Register today for the Wilberforce Forum's worldview certificate program.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030707, “How Quickly They Forget: Christians in (and out of) the News.”

• Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know (Spence, 2003).

• Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom (Free Press, 2003).

• Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial (Encounter, 2001).

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate in KeruxID 25837-26027]

The Christian worldview is under assault, and believers must fight back by combating the advance of secular values, best-selling author David Limbaugh said at a banquet. Limbaugh is an expert in law and politics whose recent book, “Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity,” spent five weeks atop The New York Times bestseller list.

“We are engaged in a culture war in this country,” Limbaugh said. “I believe that Christians are the primary targets of the secular humanists who are engaged in this culture war.... Our entire Christian worldview is under siege.”

Secular values “have taken primacy in our culture,” he said. “And it's something that we really need to be concerned about.”

Specifically, Limbaugh said, secularists have attacked Christianity by attempting to eliminate the influence of Judeo-Christian values in the public square and by endorsing values that are antithetical to Christianity.

One tactic secularists frequently use to attack Judeo-Christian values is to interpret the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution to require an absolute separation between religious faith and public life, Limbaugh said. Such a drastic separation, however, was not the intention of the founding fathers, he said.

“The establishment clause ... meant that Congress, the federal government, would not establish a national church,” Limbaugh said. “...The thrust of the establishment clause was not to separate church and state, which it's later been construed to do. The purpose of it is to promote religious liberty.”

Christians must recognize this assault on their worldview and take a stand based on the exclusive truth of Jesus Christ, he said.

“Let's not fall into a delusion of our theology and our values where we can rationalize and say, 'Oh well, other people have pretty much the same values as we do.’ No they don't.... There is but one truth, and that's Jesus Christ,” Limbaugh said.

Many secularists assault the Christian worldview because “they want to supplant Christian values with their values, and Christians are in the way of that,” he said.

Maintaining the influence of Judeo-Christian values in American culture, however, is vital because the Christian worldview undergirds the American concept of freedom, Limbaugh said.

“We need to appreciate our freedom,” he said. “And we need to understand that Christianity is the source of our freedom.... Our constitutional liberties are undergirded by Judeo-Christian principles.”

Two foundational doctrines for the American concept of freedom are the doctrines of creation and sin, Limbaugh said. The doctrine of creation teaches that each human is created in the image of God and gives rise to the notions of liberty and inalienable rights, he said.

“If we truly believe that God is omni-benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent and He decided to create us in His image, what an ultimate honor and compliment that is,” Limbaugh said. “And it carries with it an obligation to respect the dignity of human life. It is what gives rise to the notion of liberty. Christianity gives rise to liberty, the idea that we're made in God's image and therefore entitled to happiness, dignity, freedom.”

The doctrine of sin teaches that humans are fallen and that sin must be restrained by governing forces, said Limbaugh, the brother of popular radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The founders “knew that man left to his own devices ... will subjugate other men. And obviously that militates against liberty,” he said. “The framers ... wanted to invest the government with enough power to ensure ordered liberty, to allow government to protect individuals.... They also need[ed] to turn right around and impose intricate limitations on the government.”

Ultimately, the well-being of America depends upon believers' willingness to acknowledge the nation's dependence upon the Christian worldview, Limbaugh said.

“We have an obligation ... to stay true to the truth and to fact,” he said. “...Infuse your profession with your Christian worldview.”

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On Sunday, America celebrates another birthday. Americans will hoist their flags, march in parades, and set off fireworks. I get a thrill every time I hear the cannons blast that rousing finale of the “1812 Overture.” And I get a lump in my throat whenever I join in singing “America, America, God shed His grace on thee.”

Indeed, God has blessed America. This nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, has endured 228 years. America is the oldest constitutional republic on earth.

But all is not well in our land. When Thomas Jefferson penned the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, he deliberately appealed to the Creator. He acknowledged an overriding obligation to “Nature and Nature's God.” And he understood that ordered liberty is not just a subjective preference, but a divinely ordained condition for which human beings are designed.

But over the last few decades, legions of skeptics have mounted a massive assault on these “self-evident truths.” In prestigious law schools, in the halls of government, and especially in the Supreme Court, God is often banished from public conversation. If a public school teacher introduces Jefferson's ideas and language into the classroom today, she would likely be called on the carpet — and possibly disciplined.

This assault on God in public culture severely damages our republic. If God is thrown out of our history, we lose our basis for believing that individuals have rights and dignity. In an empty universe, we have no meaning, no value. Without God there are no unalienable rights, and no certain proof that liberty is better than tyranny or that life better than death. Everything is a matter of opinion and power.

The references to God in the Declaration of Independence provide a foundation for a moral argument within civil society. And moral truths pervade our founding documents from beginning to end. Without God as the source of all those moral principles, the public square would quickly revert to the law of the jungle. Brutish power would prevail. The weak, the unborn, the elderly, and the gravely ill could be quietly terminated.

As much as I enjoy the anthems and the fireworks, more than that is called for on this July Fourth. We need to confess our moral failures and our national sins. Repent of the lies that have justified killing innocent babies and the elderly. Renewal begins on our knees. It's there that we hear soul-searching questions from God Himself, asking: “How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked? ... Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Our nation's founding document declared independence from Britain, but, with equal fervor, declared DEPENDENCE upon God. Expressing “firm reliance on the Protection of divine Providence,” the signers committed the American experiment to their Maker. The Spirit of 1776 was reverence and trust.

So as we mark this solemn occasion, let us seek a rebirth of true liberty, which is possible only when governed by divine law. For, without God, we can never have “liberty and justice for all.”

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030710, “Wall of Separation: Text and Context.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 031024, “Ordered Liberty: Remembering Russell Kirk.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030704, “Onward Christian Soldiers: Are We Liberators or Oppressors?“

• Read and learn more about the Declaration of Independence: http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/

• Dr. Daniel L. Driesbach, “A Godless Constitution?“ BreakPoint Online, April 2000.

• Marvin Olasky, “Building the Independence Day coalition,” Townhall.com, 1 July 2004.

• “One Nation under What?“ — a Capitol Hill lecture delivered by Dr. Phillip E. Johnson: http://www.pfm.org/BPtemplate.cfm?Section=PF_Store&Template=/Ecommerce/ProductDisplay.cfm&Productid=393

• The “BreakPoint Role of Government Packet“ includes the booklets: “The Causes of Virtue”; “The Social Necessity of a Moral Consensus”; “God and Caesar: Does Religion Belong in Public Life?”; and “Creating the Good Society.”

• James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima (Bantam, 2000).

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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An overwhelming majority of Americans favor allowing traditional Christian values and symbols in the nation's culture, according to a study by the Barna Group. Barna even concludes that tens of millions of Americans would support a constitutional amendment to declare Christianity the official faith of the United States.

The study, released July 26, 2004, found that 79 percent of adults rejected any policy toward “removing signs that list the Ten Commandments from government buildings,” including 60 percent who were “strongly opposed.” Less than one out of every five adults supports such a policy.

Other findings include:

• Only 13 percent of those questioned favored eliminating the phrase “In God We Trust” from the nation's currency, while 84 percent oppose the idea. Nearly three-quarters of the population was “strongly opposed” to the change.

• Just 15 percent of adults were in favor of removing the phrase “one nation, under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance while 84 percent were opposed.

• About 60 percent of Americans favor teaching creationism in public schools while less than 40 percent do not.

• Eighty-three percent of those surveyed said allowing the use of a word for male-female relations on broadcast television is inappropriate. Just 15 percent thought it was acceptable, Barna found.

• By a two-to-one margin, Americans are opposed to a constitutional amendment to establish Christianity as the official religion of the United States, but Barna said the number of people who favor the change -- 32 percent -- is surprising.

“Almost 70 million adults favor such an amendment,” Barna said, based on his calculations. “That is a huge vote of confidence in the Christian faith and a tacit statement about people's concerns regarding the direction and lukewarm spirituality of the nation. If nothing else, this certainly indicates that given effective leadership, American Christianity could play a larger role in shaping the norms of our culture in the future.”

Barna's nationwide survey among 1,618 randomly selected adults was conducted during the last week of May.

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