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Chapter 2
Foundations for Faith and Freedom
The Founding Fathers of the United States (in varying degrees) understood very well the relationship between one’s world view and government. John Witherspoon (1723-1794) a Presbyterian minister and President of what is now Princeton University was the only pastor to sign the Declaration of Independence. He was a very important man during the founding of the country. He linked the Christian thinking represented by the College of New Jersey (Now Princeton University) with the work he did both on the Declaration of Independence and on countless very important committees in the founding of the country. This linkage of Christian thinking and the concepts of government were not incidental but fundamental. John Witherspoon knew and stood consciously in the stream of Samuel Rutherford, a Scotsman who lived from 1600-1661 and who wrote Lex Rex in 1644. Lex rex means law is king---a phrase that rex lex, the king is law. In Lex Rex he wrote that the law, and no one else, is king. Therefore, the heads of government are under the law, not a law unto themselves.
Jefferson, who was a deist, and others, knew they stood in the stream of John Locke (1632-1704), and while Locke had secularized Lex Rex he had drawn heavily from it. These men really knew what they were doing. We are not reading back into history what was not there. We cannot say to strongly that they really understood the basis of the government which they were founding. Think of this great flaming phrase: “certain inalienable rights.” Who gives the rights? The state? Then they are not inalienable because the state can change them and take them away. They understood that they were founding the country upon the concept that goes back into the Judeo-Christian thinking that there is someone there who gave the inalienable rights. Another phrase also stood there: “In God we trust.” With this there is there is no confusion of what they were talking about. They publicly recognized that law could be king because there was a Law Giver, a Person to give the inalienable rights.
Most people do not realize that there was a paid chaplain in Congress even before the Revolutionary War ended. Also we find that prior to the founding of the national congress all the early provincial congresses in all thirteen colonies always opened with prayer. And from the very, prayer opened the national congress. These men knew they were building on the Supreme Being who was the Creator, the final reality. And they knew that without that foundation everything in the Declaration of Independence and all that followed would be sheer unadulterated nonsense. These were brilliant men who understood exactly what was involved.
As soon as the war was over they called the first Thanksgiving Day. Do you realize that the first Thanksgiving Day in this country was called immediately by the Congress at the end of the war? Witherspoon’s sermon on that day shows their perspective:
“A republic once equally poised must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty.”
Earlier in a speech Witherspoon had stressed: “He is the best friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting pure and undefiled religion....” And for Witherspoon, and the cultural consensus of that day, that meant formation. This was the consensus which then gave religious freedom to all — including the "free thinkers" of that day and the humanists of our day.
This concept was the same as William Penn (1644-1718) had expressed earlier:
“If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants.”
This consensus was as natural as breathing in the United States at that time. We must not forget that many of those who came to America from Europe came for religious purposes. As they arrived, most of them established their own individual civil governments based upon the Bible. It is, therefore, totally foreign to the basic nature of America at the time of the writing of the Constitution to argue a separation doctrine that implies a secular state.
When the First Amendment was passed it only had two purposes...
The first purpose was that there would be no established, national church for the united thirteen states. To say it another way: There would be no “Church of the United States.” James Madison ... said that the First Amendment to the Constitution was prompted because “the people feared one sect might obtain a preeminence, or two combine together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform.”
Nevertheless, a number of the individual states had state churches, and even that was not considered in conflict with the First Amendment. “At the outbreak of the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had conferred special benefits upon one church to the exclusion of others.” “In all but one of the thirteen states, the states taxed the people to support the preaching of the gospel and to build churches.”
The second purpose of the First Amendment was the very opposite from what is being made of it today. It states expressly that government should not impede or interfere with the free practice of religion.
As Justice Douglas wrote for the majority of the Supreme Court in the United States v. Ballard case in 1944:
"The First Amendment has a dual aspect. It not only 'forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of worship' but also 'safeguards the free exercise of the chosen form of religion.'”
Today "the separation of church and state" in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, and all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state. The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent. It is not rooted in history. The modern concept of separation is an argument for total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of this doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government. This fact is well illustrated by John W. Whitehead in his book The Second American Revolution. It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas. As Franky Schaeffer says in the Plan for Action:
It has been convenient and expedient for the secular humanist, the materialist, the so-called liberal, the feminist, the genetic engineer, the bureaucrat, the Supreme Court Justice, to use this arbitrary division between church and state as a ready excuse. It is used ... to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions."
To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers.
Continue reading here: A Christian Manifesto - Google Books