For many decades, the left in America has interpreted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a manner that is inherently hostile to religion, particularly to the Christian faith.
An example of the left’s adversarial interpretation of the separation of church and state is the recent decision by U.S. district judge John W. deGravelles, who has ruled that the Ten Commandments are not to be displayed in Louisiana’s public schools. He has declared the public display to be a coercive establishment of religion.
It is hard to overemphasize the importance of Judge deGravelles’s ruling, following as it does the multi-generational assault on Christianity as well as the other monotheistic faiths revering the Ten Commandments.
Historically, when and wherever the left holds the reins of power, the advocates of atheism will attack Christians, as Pope Pius XI noted in his 1937 encyclical concerning atheistic communism.
The ’30s saw the height of the Moscow show trials and the purges that eliminated or sent to gulags millions of Soviet citizens, many of them Orthodox Christians. Those years also saw the acceleration of materialistic atheism in Russian classrooms and an increase in anti-religious efforts in Russia as well as in other nations in which Bolshevism was nascent or ascendant.
As the pope noted, “this all too imminent danger … is bolshevistic and atheistic Communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.”
The communist campaigns against the Christian foundations of the West remain a constant in Europe, America, and present-day China.
In the United States, Christianity has seen the Judiciary assault people of faith.
Prayer and Bible reading in public schools was abolished in 1962, when the Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that school-sponsored prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. The decision attacked the foundational belief of all three monotheistic religions that there is a transcendent Creator to whom children of all ages pray.
In 1973, SCOTUS’s Roe v. Wade decision ruled that the constitution of the United States protected women’s right to have abortions, thus rendering protection of the unborn children null and void. The decision utterly degraded the value of human life, which was no longer to be regarded as having intrinsic worth given it by its Creator, but rather to be seen as a merely material entity subject to another’s or the State’s power to eliminate at will.
In 2015, the highest court’s Obergefell v. Hodges vitiated the Jewish and Christian idea of marriage as the union between a man and a woman by ruling that same-sex couples have the same right to marry as opposite-sex couples do. The decision was a ruling that overruled all civilizations’ bedrock foundation of family, a pre-civilizational unit. In addition, the decision fostered the extreme left’s idea of equality as elimination of distinctions, including the obvious distinction between man and woman. Hence the rise of advocacy of the trans movement and its manifold deleterious effects on our children — within the very walls of our public schools.
The bottom line is that leftists in America have essentially sought to drive Christianity out of the civic square and thus to eventually eliminate it from the national discourse and influence. As Pius XI wrote, the left always seeks to eliminate what it considers the enemy of religion to establish a godless utopia: “[all] other forces whatever, as long as they resist such systematic violence, must be annihilated as hostile to the human race.”
Joseph Stalin put it even more bluntly: “The Party cannot be neutral towards the bearers of religious prejudices, towards the reactionary clergy who poison the minds of the toiling masses. Have we suppressed the reactionary clergy? Yes, we have. The unfortunate thing is that it has not been completely liquidated.”
The rejection of the universally applicable and generally accepted moral standard summarized by the Ten Commandments means that no person is subject to a higher authority and that lawfare is waged solely by means of sheer personal power and control of institutional levers. Both are then employed to control and persecute those who do not bow down to the almighty State and its self-anointed rulers. The self-appointed cognoscenti rely on infallible internal illumination that supposedly grants divination into the true nature of the law, which is regarded as evolving in a progressive direction that renders the bases of divine and natural law null and void.
Judge deGravelles and those likeminded totally repudiate the Judeo/Christian belief there is a transcendent moral and natural order that one cannot seek to change or subvert without disastrous consequences to self and to culture. As Pius XI put it, the left’s contempt for divine and natural law “removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.”
Acknowledgment of that moral and natural order applies to both domestic and foreign policies: “How can any contract be maintained, and what value can any treaty have, in which every guarantee of conscience is lacking? And how can there be talk of guarantees of conscience when all faith in God and all fear of God have vanished? Take away this basis, and with it all moral law falls, and there is no remedy left to stop the gradual but inevitable destruction of peoples, families, the State, civilization itself.”
Thankfully, the endeavor to crush Christianity and the standard of law summarized in the Ten Commandments will not succeed.
It never has.
Recall that Lenin and Joseph Stalin were elevated to god-like status. Stalin sneered at the papacy’s power, saying, “The pope! How many divisions has he got?”
Lenin and Stalin are gone, just as in present-day America the anointed few who seek to force godless ideology on America’s children will one day be powerless.
To that end, it is past time this nation promoted the restoration of the standard of moral excellence summarized in an ineffably majestic way in the Ten Commandments, each of which has finely wrought permutations that have defined the West’s ideas and practice concerning law for millennia.
The State has the responsibility of promoting that Law for the guidance of the nation. As Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869, “the eternal theme of the harmonization of the necessary that … flows from the laws of nature — that which is and cannot be otherwise.” (Italics mine.)
As Pius XI also pointed out, the State must fight for the preservation of the foundations of Western civilization. “All diligence,” he wrote, “should be exercised by States to prevent within their territories the ravages of an anti-God campaign which shakes society to its very foundations.”
The State must work for, not against the development of the spiritual life of its citizens. A start would be to stop the lawfare against Christians, including those whose children are in public schools. As the pope warned, “when religion is banished from the school, from education and from public life, when the representatives of Christianity and its sacred rites are held up to ridicule, are we not really fostering the materialism which is the fertile soil of Communism?”
Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon.
As the Epoch Times relates, the incoming Trump administration has indicated an end to the Department of Education, returning control of education to the states. Hopefully, people of faith will have more of a voice concerning their children’s spiritual development.
Trump has also promised an end to the promotion of the transgender cult in public schools as well as the inherently discriminatory Critical Race Theory. He has promised to halt “gender transition,” vowing an end to the “chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth.”
The Church at large generally has not compellingly fostered harmonization of spheres of influence, as it has failed to promote the all-encompassing worldview it once articulated with great intellectual and spiritual authenticity. Those who should have been keepers of the flame of justice and righteousness have become smoldering wicks, too often incorporating the insanity of “woke” ideology into church doctrine and practice.
But as Arnold put it, Christians leaders can and should re-ignite the flame. The Church must lead — but not “hole and corner churches without great men and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity.”
It is time for both Church and State to rise and to rekindle the bases of the spiritual life on which America was built and which have allowed her to thrive.
A beginning? Post the Ten Commandments in our schools, courts, and state houses.
Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Her thoughts have appeared in American Thinker and other online publications. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.
Picryl.
