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
