[laweeks]

For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king;

For the Lord is our Supreme Court, the Lord is our Congress, the Lord is our President;

Isaiah 33:22 . . . It's all in this one phrase

[1malumprohibitum]

Bump for later

[Pilgrim's Progress]

This is why I personally believe that only a born again Christian can truly be a conservative. If one cannot accept the birth of our nation as founded by godly men (even though some called themselves ‘Deists’) - how can they believe that it is God which is blessing our nation.

Everything we believe in regards to morality is based upon the Judeo-Christian ethic.

An atheist (or agnostic) can not fully grasp these fundamentals.

[Ciaphas Cain]

Even if there is not a God, there MUST be at least the IDEA of God, as an incorruptible source of law and good above Man.

The Constitution was written by men who understood this very, very well. It delineates a government which ultimately descends to Man, from God Himself.

So it is that the Constitution is incompatible with Liberalism. Consciously removing God from the equation and putting Man in His place will always be a disaster.

It's almost like the Founders designed the Constitution with a self-destruct mechanism if it was seized and abused by atheism.

[unlearner]

Thanks again for your current posts.

“the obvious absence of specific directives regarding Christianity in the federal Constitution”

The term Christianity itself came from the mockery of the early opponents of Christianity who thought of it as merely a sect of Judaism.

The term “Christian” is actually only used 3 times in the Bible. Just 3. And, in all 3 cases, the context is that being called “Christian” was meant as an insult. Here are all of them:

Acts 11:26
And when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. So it was that for a whole year they assembled with the church and taught a great many people. And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.

Acts 26:28
Then Agrippa said to Paul, “You almost persuade me to become a Christian.”

1 Peter 4:16
Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter.

So it is not surprising that the founders carefully chose broader terms to refer to their common faith and the Divine Object of that faith.

[ifinnegan]

Thanks for this post.

It’s so simple we don’t even think about it.

[shibumi]

Bump/Bookmark

[Sergio]

bkmk

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Ammo Republic 15]

A rallying cry during the revolution

No King But Jesus

[LouAvul]

From my files:

Where does the phrase “separation of church and state” come from, if not from the constitution? It was coined by Thomas Jefferson in a letter on January 1, 1802, to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. Jefferson assured them that we would have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

Of the 55 men working on the constitution, 52 considered themselves to be evangelical Christians. They envisioned school children praying in class as well as teachers using the Bible for educational purposes.

When Thomas Jefferson was made president of the Washington, DC, public school system he placed the Bible and Isaac Watt's hymnal as the two primary reading texts! This is why Biblical morality was taught in public schools until the early 1960's. Government officials were required to declare their belief in God even to be allowed to hold a public office until Oct. 1960.

God was seen as the author of natural law and morality. If one did not believe in God one could not operate from a proper moral base. And by not having a foundation from which to work, one would destroy the community.

So firm were they in their resolve that the same day Congress passed the first amendment (Sept. 25, 1789), they also approved a resolution requesting President George Washington to proclaim "...a day of public thanksgiving and prayer...."

[Lurking Libertarian]

What Justice Story actually wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833) is that, under the Constitution, "the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship."

[BuddhaBrown]

People say America is a Christian nation simply because the population is majority Christian.

But the more accurate reason is because the founding truths of our uniquely blessed nation are based on inherent individual Freedom to control your own earthly destiny - analogous to how Christianity is unique in it's founding principle of the individual being responsible for his/her spiritual final destiny.

After the offer of Christ’s grace, forgiveness and salvation no longer required the gyrations of human hierarchies and central authorities.

In the earthly realm the same goes for individual Americans. As our most document (DOI) declares, you are not free because of men and governments, you are free in spite of them.

And the Declaration of Independence is our founding document. The Constitution is merely a set of governing rules meant to protect the principles of the DOI.

And there is also nothing special about democracy as everybody seems to think today. It's simply a necessary tool. The Constitution is actually their to protect Freedom FROM democracy. Thus all the separations of power, etc.

Liberal like to say God is not mentioned in the Constitution. Who cares. It is acknowledged in our founding document that our Freedom comes from Him. And it, of course, spells out our morally valid case for separation from the King.

Without the Declaration, the Constitution would be nothing but evidence of treason.

[sauropod]

Amen!

[floozy22]

Even the slightest review of American colonial history and our Revolution, affirms that belief in the Almighty coursed through the veins of those patriotic men and women. That belief, perhaps even slightly more than the ideas of liberty and freedom, sustained and fed them through the hardships they suffered in the battle for independence.

Our two greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, often invoked God, Providence, The Almighty - as critical in America's founding. We have always been a Christian nation, and let's pray we remain one.

[Combat_Liberalism]

Atheism and Marxism go hand in hand. Rarely is an atheist also a conservative. Atheists and Marxists seek to dethrone Christ to enthrone man. They do not believe mankind is endowed by his and her Creator with certain inalienable rights. To them, rights (or their warped version of them) come from government, not from God. That is why the left sees the Constitution as more of an obstacle to be overcome—for the good of the masses, of course—than as a blessing bestowed by Almighty providence.

[jimfr]

If one spends even a short time reading the original documents and letters of the persons back then with an open mind, he would realize that the word religion back then could only be translated into today’s word Christianity. And the freedom of religion is really freedom of Christianity.
The Constitution only supports the freedom of practicing Christianity. And within that Christians would allow others to practice their beliefs but not the promotion of other beliefs. And that Judaism would be specially protected and respected.

[daniel1212]

This was the subject of a 2004 thread, Where is God in the Constitution? - Free Republic

An objection that ACLU types raise is that the phrase "Year of our Lord" was not included in the draft of the Constitution that was approved by the Convention.

Strict separationists argue that "The Year of our Lord" was ritualistic, not religious. being the standard way of dating important documents in the 1700s; its use was ritualistic, not religious. But which "proves too much," for it evidences that they were not strict separationists, who would not tolerate such a statement, much less call for prayer or publicly do so.

As Wolfstar stated in the aforementioned thread:

The main body of the Constitution concluded with this statement:

"done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,"

Granted, it is not part of the regulatory language, but it is the operative paragraph which confirms that those who signed witnessed the drafting and passage of the Constitution. Also granted that "year of our Lord" was a common formulation on legal documents in the founders' time. Nevertheless, if they wanted to ban all religiously based references, they could have eliminated the phrase.
<

Moreover, while the delegates apparently did not vote for the phrase "in the year of our Lord" as they did for Franklin's locution fostering acceptance by the states, and it is possible that the delegates signed the Constitution before the attestation at issue, which was engrossed by non-delegate Jacob Shallus [which is in large script in the original, similar to that which titles the Articles] on the final day of the Convention, for presentation as a legal document (Michael I. Meyerson, Endowed by Our Creator: The Birth of Religious Freedom in America), it was apparently in copies which were sent to states such as Delaware for ratification:

We the Deputies of the People of the Delaware State, in Convention met, having taken into our serious consideration the Federal Constitution proposed and agreed upon by the Deputies of the United States in a General Convention held at the City of Philadelphia on the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven,.. - http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2014/12/december-7-1787-one-down-and-eight-to-go/

Also, as one researcher found,

ALL of the colonial State constitutions of America at the time the federal Constitution was ratified in 1787 were explicitly Christian in nature and most of them had established denominations as State churches (an “establishment of religion” to use the First Amendment’s language), yet NONE of the State constitutions ended with the dating designation “in the year of our Lord.”

Yet here, in the closing, they DEPARTED from established tradition of dating by bare date, month, and year to specifically include the acknowledgement “the year of OUR LORD.” None of the State constitutions used these words. http://thecreationclub.com/in-the-year-of-our-lord-creation-evolution-and-the-u-s-constitution/#

And in a document signed by Thomas Jefferson on September 24, 1807 giving permission for a ship called the Herschel to proceed on its journey to the port of London, is the phrase “in the year of our Lord Christ..” https://wallbuilders.com/thomas-jefferson-document/

The Heritage Foundation adds:

Dating documents to "the Year of our Lord" had become more unusual; the Declaration of Independence, for instance, simply states "In Congress, July 4, 1776." Dating important documents in American political history to the Declaration of Independence was at that point relatively frequent. The dual reference can be found in only two other national documents: the Articles of Confederation and the Northwest Ordinance (considered, along with the Declaration, to be the "organic documents" of the nation).

The language here is neither insignificant nor unintentional: these dates serve to place the document in the context of the religious traditions of Western civilization and, at the same time, to link it to the regime principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution having been written in the twelfth year after July 1776. The usage stands in contrast to both the contemporary British tradition, in which documents were dated to the reign of the sitting monarch (see the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Petition of Right of 1628), and the French decision in 1793 to reject the Gregorian calendar altogether and begin measuring time starting with the French Revolution. http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/7/essays/137/attestation-clause

[boatbums]

The facts of the matter are that by their use of the term “religion,” the Framers had in mind the several Protestant denominations. Their concern was to prevent any single Christian denomination from being elevated above the others and made the State religion—a circumstance that the Founders had endured under British rule when the Anglican Church was the state religion of the thirteen colonies.

They did this because they KNEW that the Christian faith was the only true religion.

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." — John Adams

[Elsie]

AMEN!