MInTheGap

We Hold These Truths: Jefferson’s Creator

One of the arguments that Christians like to try to use is that the acknowledgement of the Creator is in the Constitution.  It isn’t.  It is in the Declaration of Independence– and regardless of its location it has a lot to tell us about what the founders of this country believed and the framework from which they conceived this great country.

The arguments that people are trying to use today is that the Declaration of Independence can mean any Creator God.  The problem is, Jefferson knew exactly who his audience was.  To quote Benjamin Hart,

There were no Moslems, Buddhists, Confucianists, or Hindus present at either the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or eleven years hence at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.  Jefferson was addressing Christians.  His entire argument about people having “unalienable rights” is contingent on the existence of God, and One who cares deeply about each and every individual.

Jefferson is the origin of the logic that I’ve used many times here– if God is not the originator of liberty (if they are not gifts of his) then the state is the highest moral authority and has the rights to determine what is right or wrong based on the whim of those in power.

You see why what Jefferson was saying in the Declaration was so radical and yet contingent on the presence of a Creator God– specifically the Christian Creator God?

The reason that our land is a Christian land lies in the fact that it is based on this Christian ideal– that man is eternal, and government temporal.  It’s a philosophical question that has its roots in what is truly eternal.  If government is or the world is, then it must be the moral authority.  If a Creator God is eternal, and civilizations are but a blink of the eye, then government’s purpose is to protect the rights of the individual.

To cement this reasoning, I close with this from Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty:

“I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion– for who can know the human heart?– but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable for the maintenance of republican institutions.  This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole rank of society.”  America, Tocqueville added, is “the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest power over men’s souls; and nothing better demonstrates how useful and natural it is to man, since the country where it now has the widest sway is both the most enlightened and the freest.”  John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth President, acknowledged that from the beginning Americas “connected in one indissoluble band the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”

Do you see how the founders viewed the government and Christianity?  Not at odds, but banded together.  Not a high wall, but as one necessarily flowing from the other.

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We Hold These Truths: George Washington

Are we, or are we not a Christian nation?  It seems to be a question more people are asking as time passes and Christianity is challenged in America.  I’ve had this discussion on this blog in comments, and so I thought we could take some time to delve into this question and see if we can find a good answer.

In the book Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty, starts out looking at George Washington, and I would like to quote a passage that we need to absorb and understand:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable support,” he said.  “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.  The mere politician, equally with pious men, ought to respect and cherish them.  A volume could not trace all the connections with private and public felicity.  Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religions obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?  And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.  Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on the minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”  Washington knew well that a nation’s laws spring from its morals and that its morals spring from its religion.  And the religion of which Washington spoke was clear to all who knew him: “It is impossible to govern rightly without God and the Bible,” he said.

I want you to absorb what the first President had to say about morality, for there’s a lot of truth here.  It was once said that Atheists were not accepted as serious because who could they be swearing an oath to– since they did not believe in a God.  I think that was Washington’s point about having believability in a court of law.

But more to the point, Washington is saying that a nation’s morality is tied inextricably to its religion.  I think this is why we’re seeing what we are seeing today in terms of perversion and lawlessness in our land.  Certainly the time around the founding was not perfect, but as we travel from the time when we truly were a Christian nation to this time where we are either becoming a humanist/agnostic/atheist nation we are seeing more of the fruits of that change– if you will.

What we are witnessing is the morality of a religion that believes that there is no God– no one to which they are accountable.  The laws don’t apply to some people.  The government can do whatever it pleases.  As long as it’s consensual, who cares?  All of this are the fruits of the religion that is fighting to gain dominance in America, if it already hasn’t.

So, Washington has taught us today that morality, religion, and governing rightly are all linked, and that in order to govern rightly those in authority need to know God and the Bible.