“Tear Down This Wall!”
“If we ever forget that we are One Nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” Ronald Reagan
This afternoon I was listening to a speech recorded for me by a good friend on my mp3 player. The speech, a famous one, was given before the Brandenburg Gate in Germany in 1987. I don’t remember the day Ronald Reagan gave that epic speech, but I do remember a couple of years later when people tore down a part of that wall which had long separated Eastern Communist Europe and the free West. The people were stirred by the thoughts of liberty then spurned to action to reclaim freedom for themselves and their families. It was the time that wall came down and the people who had been subjected to communist imposed godlessness and poverty broke the chains of tyranny and freedom erupted from that first breech.
Here in America there is another wall which still exists, which was never intended as so many secularist progressives have led generations to believe.
In my last article, I wrote about a burden I have for America. It’s a burden which extends to the people as well, those who have not learned their history. The true History of America, which was founded upon the faith of Jesus Christ and freedom. America has always been exceptional, but more so when America was blessed as the people remembered that our Lord is God.
Years ago I wrote a short prose which went something like this:
What is not taught is not known
What is not known is not remembered
What is not remembered leads to chaos.
For years since the progressive liberalization in our media, entertainment, news, government and education, Americans have been conditioned to believe that God doesn’t belong anywhere in our society except for church on Sundays. From prayers removed in schools, prayers in Jesus Name being removed from our town halls, removing God from our military, the removal of the 10 commandments from the public square, progressive secularists have sanitized America’s true history from the minds of millions. People now have an idea that there is, in our 1st Amendment a “Wall of separation” between church and state.
Because History has been re-written and taught as truth, it has been reinforced in generations who have known nothing of America’s actual History. America has been transformed into something very similar to the kind of society the first pilgrims escaped from when they landed on these shores. Instead of being a Monarchy, head of church and state, America has become a Secularist state in which government is god.
The Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom, and for the purpose of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Religious freedom afforded by a Christian nation is why millions have come to America since. Our Founding Fathers knew and believed in Jesus. They believed the Bible and that it is the most important Book for instruction.
Can anyone imagine if a US Supreme Court Justice said, “The Bible is the best of all books, for it is the Word of God and teaches us to be happy in this world and in the next. Continue therefore to read it and navigate your life by its precepts.” The ACLU, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Freethinkers and all other secular progressives would be up in arms filing lawsuits.
John Jay was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, a President of the Continental Congress, and United States Supreme Court Justice appointed by George Washington. If John Jay was around and said that now, he most likely never would have been picked for SCOTUS.
Another Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story said, “I verily believe Christianity necessary to the support of civil society. One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is a part of the Common Law. . . There never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying its foundations.”
Judge Roy Moore was the Alabama Chief Justice, who believes much the same, yet was sued by the ACLU for displaying the 10 Commandments in his courtroom and also for not removing a monument of the 10 Commandments he had commissioned which was displayed in the courthouse. Moore’s case and so many others have been tried on the “separation of church and state clause”, but it doesn’t seem to matter that all people no matter who they are, are protected by the 1st Amendment and have every right to display or speak their beliefs.
There was never meant to be a so-called wall of separation of church and state. The meaning behind the words, from a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists was to guarantee that the government would not impose on the church. He never created a wall but he saw the 1st Amendment as a protection for the church from government intrusion.
What about in schools? By the late 1700s, public schools were instituted so every child could have a chance to learn to read and write. The main textbooks found in the earliest years were the Blue Back Speller, the New England Primer and the Bible. During the next century, about a dozen more textbooks were introduced into American schools, these included The New Instructor from 1803, Beauties of the Bible from 1806, Instructions for the Better Government & Organization of Common Schools from 1819, A Common-School Grammar of the English Language, 1871 and Bible Readings For Schools, 1897. For over 150 years, American education was steeped in Biblical based learning, yet somehow, this was turned around and ignored, and the narrative since, has been that this is un-Constitutional because of the “wall of separation of church and state”.
All it took was one atheist in the 1960s to have the Bible removed from America’s schools. In 1980, another lawsuit was argued in the Supreme Court, this time in Stone vs. Gramm, where the court defined the posting of the 10 Commandments as “passive” meaning that someone would have to stop and look on them at their own volition. In the Majority rule it was written,
“This is not a case in which the Ten Commandments are integrated into the school curriculum, where the Bible may constitutionally be used in an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like. Posting of religious texts on the wall serves no such educational function. If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.”
Back in the 1950s and earlier, the most disruptive behavior in public schools was most likely chewing gum and talking during class. In only 50 years since the Bible was taken out of school, followed by words such as though shalt not Murder, Steal, Lie and Covet, the removal of prayer, and even Christmas music, we now have lock downs, metal detectors and armed guards in our schools.
Our Founding fathers knew the importance of the Bible, and what good it was for education. Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Rush in a letter in defense of the Bible being taught in schools said, “By withholding the knowledge of [the Scriptures] from children, we deprive ourselves of the best means of awakening moral sensibility in their minds…. Let the children who are sent to those schools be taught to read and write and above all, let both sexes be carefully instructed in the principles and obligations of the Christian religion. This is the most essential part of education.”
Noah Webster, considered to be America’s School Master, and the author of our nation’s first Dictionary said, “In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed…No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.”
God has been kicked out of every public place and replaced with humanism and moral relativism. When our children are not taught that they are fearfully and wonderfully made by our Creator, that they have inalienable rights from our Father in heaven that no one can take away, they grow up not knowing and not teaching it to their own kids. When government, media, music, movies, and their schools teach them that life is not sacred, that truth and morality are relative, that if it feels good – do it, and that government is in place to give you things, it has in essence led to chaos.
It’s time for the people of this country who know that America has always been a Christian nation to not just say “tear down this wall”, but to tear it down ourselves and let the truth and real liberty shine and pour out.
