Lavar Christensen appeared on KCPW the other day pushing the Sutherland Institutes agenda. He believes that religion is under attack in the country and that the United States is a religious nation and that is what the founding fathers wanted it to be. Okay, I recently addressed the Christian Nation thing in a prior post and I am not going to rehash that now.
During the interview Lavar Christensen spoke in the soft monotone we are used to hearing during the LDS General Conference. But is is what he says not the manner that he says it that is troubling. When asked what he sees as the biggest threat to religious freedom now he says:
I think it is the loss of our moorings and our anchoring faith. The
confidence that our nation exhibited demonstrated in its first 150+ years as a
nation, marked by the adoption of the adoption of our national motto 'In God We
Trust', and the of the Pledge of Allegiance. All of those signs of
faith which are so much a part of our American culture are now being
chipped away.
I know that history is inconvenient when it does not support your position. The national motto that his country was founded on and one that still appears on our money is "E Pluribus Unum" which is Latin for "One from many" or "One from many parts." That is the secular motto that was born with the country.
The new motto "In God We Trust" did not come to us until 1956 at the beginning of the cold war. It is not the motto that gave us our exceptional ism as he alleges. The pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892, it was edited again in 1924. Both versions excluded references to god. In 1954 in the middle of McCarthyism and the "Red Scare" congress added "Under God"
You see we have not been marching away from god in the country. We have been marching toward god. It is in the last 50 years that we have pushed god on to our citizens because if they believe in god they are not communists. It has been less about god than it has been about pushing fear and imposing religion on the citizens in the same manner that "god" was taken from the peoples of communist nations.
Today it is the assertion that we are a Christian Nation. Because if we are a Christian Nation we are not Muslims. We use religion as a way to homogenize our people, a way to bind the tribe and to be able to determine who our enemies are. God is not a benevolent tool....It is a way to direct our vitriol
Interesting post. The idea of freedom of religion also applying to freedom FROM religion is a topic that rarely gets addressed.
ReplyDeleteMost Christian Apologists will tell you there is no such guarantee. The constitution does not, according to the apologist protect you from religion or require a separation. According to them the document that has given us that belief was a letter written to the Danbury Baptist; now know as the "Wall of Separation" letter.
ReplyDeleteJefferson wrote "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" thus building a wall of eternal separation between Church & State. Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion, practiced indeed by the Executive of another nation as the legal head of its church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect"
While he was the closest to the intent of the constitution...apologists deny he correctly interpreted the intent and this is not proof that is what the Constitution was meant to say....of course when we speak of religion...do we really need proof? Will an overwhelming amount of proof ever be enough?
Nicely done, Dudley! I thought I might be the only person in, Utah that knew about, "In God We Trust"! You nailed it. Not enough freedom FROM religion around here lately.
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