December 24, 2023

In the very tiresome battles over whether one religious element can be in the public realm without being accompanied by other “religious” elements that someone, somewhere, claims to value, a simple point is missed:

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We do have the right to freedom of religion.

But this does not equate to the right to equal government showcasing of religion.

The issue at hand is that cultural devolutionaries have for years now applied a religion-focused Cloward-Piven strategy, through which they seek to eliminate all public-square religious expression by inundating the system with equal-time requests for “religious” expression ranging from the evil to the asinine.

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For example, the Satanic Temple has an after-school club that’s set to start in an elementary school near Memphis in January and also has “holiday” displays at the Iowa and Michigan state capitols (and no doubt elsewhere). Interestingly, after the first Iowa satanic display was destroyed, authorities charged the man responsible, a Navy veteran. Unlike when mobs tore down Confederate statues, they didn’t turn a blind eye and Nancy Pelosi didn’t say “People will do what they do.”

As for asininity, other Christmastime displays have “included a Festivus pole in tribute to a holiday created on ‘Seinfeld’ that satirizes the commercialism of Christmas,” related Fox News in 2014, “and a display by the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, which mocks beliefs that a god created the universe and argues instead that the universe was created by a plate of pasta and meatballs.”

Is this what the Founders, those 18th-century giants who sometimes wore powdered wigs, envisioned?

Before answering, consider that the men who crafted the First Amendment, who birthed the Establishment Clause, opened the very first Congress in 1789 with exclusively Christian prayers. This practice continues to this day — and the prayers are still mainly Christian.

In other words, anyone supposing the First Amendment means that “religion must be kept out of government” is essentially saying that the men who wrote that provision didn’t know what it meant. (If that’s the kind of thinking secular reason gives us, I’ll stick with religious mysticism.)

Note, too, that our first president, George Washington, stated in his farewell address (1796), “[L]et us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.” And our second president, John Adams, said in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Clearly, they considered faith a prerequisite for the “American experiment’s” success.