America’s colonists were predominantly English — which meant their religion was predominantly Catholic or Protestant — which meant their book of worship, no matter how you slice it, was the Bible.
Not the Muslim Koran, not the Hindu set of Vedas, not the Wiccan prayer book, not a merely generic spiritual guide.
The Bible. The one where Jesus teaches.
So it’s not just disconcerting and offensive on the Christian front to see the war being waged in this country against public shows of the Bible — against public discourse of biblical principles. It’s actually historical revisionism.
From the Blaze, this past May: “Colorado Mesa University officials demanded that a student get rid of references to Jesus and the Bible in her graduation speech to fellow nursing students — that is, until she got a Christian legal firm involved.”
From CBN News, a headline from April: “One Step Closer to Law: Could a California Bill Ultimately Lead to the Banning of Bibles?”
From Fox News in October of 2016, a report how “Jesus just got kicked out of public schools in Henry County, Georgia,” with a district edict that commanded the removal of all religious items from the classroom, including the Bible.
From Gospel Herald Society, a headline from January 2014: “Atheist Group Fights to Remove Bible from City Council.”
And of course, there’s been an ongoing war against displays of the Bible at military facilities that’s been waged most notably, perhaps, by the inaptly named Military Religious Freedom Foundation and its band of merry faux First Amendment supporters.
But let’s just circle on back to the history of this nation and the truths of its founding on biblical principles — to the truths of the Puritans, the Anglicans, the Baptists, the Quakers, Anabaptists, Roman Catholics, Pietists and more who may have differed in how they worshipped, but not in whom in heaven they worshipped, or in which book they considered the word of God.
From these colonists sprang the founders of America’s government — the ones who set in stone the concept of God-given rights in our national DNA. Of what God were they speaking?
The God of the Bible. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Joseph and so forth.
And yes, while it’s true these founders believed in a government that allowed for freedom of religious worship, for the freedom to choose your religious affiliation, what’s not true is that tired and wearisome line the secular left so likes to sell about the First Amendment drawing a line of separation between church and state.
There are no such words in the Constitution; rather, the First Amendment speaks to the right of citizens to worship freely and to the prohibition on Congress establishing a national religion.
Today’s secularist-minded skew that to mean those who work in the government can’t express their Christianity because that’s tantamount to an establishment of one faith over another. What bunk. The founders regularly called on God — the God of the Bible — to intervene in their daily goings-on. They may have held different views, as did the colonists, about the importance of religion in public and personal lives; some were definitely more pious and committed to Christ and church than others. But they prayed in public.
They sought divine intervention in public. They wrote on public documents of the Creator, i.e. God.
Even those with weaker spiritual faith, those considered by today’s history books, rightly or wrongly, as deists, still looked to the Bible for moral teaching and regarded its words as a proper instruction in the way humans should go.
So why are so many Americans afraid to fight the forces who want to remove the Bible from public places today? Why tolerate liars?
America’s history is tightly wound with the Bible; so, too, the U.S. government.
The Bible bashers are the ones who’ve got it all wrong. And there’s no need, in this ongoing fight for truth, to fear false teachers.
First appeared at The Washington Times.
