A Christian nation....

"Like a roaring lion or a charging bear is a wicked man ruling over a helpless people. A tyrannical ruler lacks judgment..." Proverbs 28:15-16a (NIV)

I am sure, as one of my close friends remarked the other night, that most of us are tired of hearing of the 'danger of our President-elect' and his liberal policies. Especially from a 'move-on' attitude.

As a Christian, I offer prayers up for the transition of Presidents and the crisis that the majority of Americans are now experiencing, along with the rest of the world. I know that God is God and that hasn't change, even with the approval of the liberal, socialist agenda by the American people, at least the majority.

With cries of 'stop being racist' and 'get over it', I've penned an article that grew and grew...large enough to post on www.faithwriters.com/article-details.php?id=89715, It is entitled "The new division" and speaks of what I think was hiding underneath the 'racial equality' line.

The election was a symbolic step towards the biblical mandate of 'brotherhood', but in taking that step, we've exposed the true culprit to any sinful expression within our humanistic culture.

One of the columnists for WORLD Magazine, Inc., said that conservative Christians should go to our African-American brethren and find out how it feels to be a pernenial minority, for our time has come in the movement of society to be labeled such. I would contend that we have been a minority for some time, with an estimated 7% evangelical Christians living in the United States of America.

The Barna report I wrote about in my faithwriters article, "A New Division", brings that into sharp focus and brings anew the ability of the liberal left to use previously 'racial' terms to blight the difference between born-agains and evangelicals.

Many born-agains voted for Obama, separating the meager and culturally sensitive expression of their faith from the biblical mandates for leadership; often saying that abortion was the one thing they disagreed with him on, but that it was time for change......... the evangelical in me says, "But???"

Dr. Alveda King, pastoral associate of Priests for Life and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said Obama’s policies will increase the number of abortions. “Pro-lifers must promise to redouble our efforts to resist anti-life proposals, speak up for the babies and, above all, pray,” King said. "The elections are over. The pro-life battle begins anew.”

My article quotes some of our founding fathers, those men who were responsible for the birth of this once great and successful Republic. I was looking into other quotes to maybe include in my blog today and found this one by Ben Franklin:

"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. They found it wrong in Bishops, but fell into the practice themselves both there (England) and in New England."

Of course, there are those who are attempting to intellectually rewrite history, so that the liberal and socialist historical argument that our founding fathers were nothing more than secular religious....often mislabeled as Dietist (believe in God, who has left us to our own devices) a early form of emergent and universalist faiths.

They often quote Madison, who's angry quotes dot the documents of the time such as "A memorial and Remonstrance" penned in 1785;

"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

And there is also Thomas Paine, who is often referred to as a atheist, who penned The Age of Reason;

“All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

The fact is that 52 of the 55 signers of "The Declaration of Independence" claimed provable orthodox Christianity as their faith and were deeply committed to its promotion and growthh. The remaining three expressed the belief of the Bible being the Divine truth of the God of Scripture and that He personally intervened in the affairs of men.

Congress formed the ABS (American Bible Society) after the Declaration was penned and voted to purchase 20,000 copies of Scripture for the American people. Even the very same Thomas Paine, who I've quoted above, said:

"It is by the exercise of our reason that we are enabled to contemplate God in His works, and imitate Him in His ways. When we see His care and goodness extended over all His creatures, it teaches us our duty toward each other, while it calls forth our gratitude to Him. It is by forgetting God in His works, and running after the books of pretended revelation, that man has wandered from the straight path of duty and happiness, and become by turns the victim of doubt and the dupe of delusion."

As I said before, we have been a minority for much of this Republic's history....it's just been 'by turns' that the American people have turned a nation comptemplative of God's hand and proper imitation of His ways into a victim of doubt and duped by delusion.

We have allowed the society to emerge that would cause someone like President-elect Obama an easy path to the White House. I was wrong to think that Barrack Obama wasn't represenative of the emergent American culture, population, and faith. He is, as proven by the ease in which he gained several 'christian' leaders to follow his agenda to promote the liberal, big-government entitlement policies of the Democrat party.

Patrick Henry in 1776 wrote that "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here."

Of course, those who would rewrite the religiousity of our founding fathers call upon modern historians's interpretation of their religion. Robert T. Handy, one such historian, points to the fact that no more than 10 percent of the population of early America were members of a congregation and fails to consider that the movement of the early colonists were to meet in communities; homes and businesses with their neighbors and friends.

The commonality of the expression of Christian thought peppers the papers; both personal and public, of our first citizentry of those days. As Henry stated, it was because of the persecution of Christianity that allowed the freedom of even false doctrines. It was the human invention of denominations that caused rifts to occur in the religious experiment of the Republic and was often the frustration written by the founding fathers.

As James Madison expressed, "All men having power ought to be mistrusted. Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government. I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

It wasn't the separation of the true church from the state that Madison is talking about but the human endeavour of the creation of religion through the forced application of the government that "soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

In the Supreme Court's 1892 Holy Trinity Church vs. United States, Justice David Brewer wrote that "this is a Christian nation" 'in dicta', meant as a personal opinion that has been taken out of context according to the secular historians by Christians. Justice Brewer explained this opinion later, "But in what sense can [the United States] be called a Christian nation? Not in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or the people are compelled in any manner to support it. On the contrary, the Constitution specifically provides that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Neither is it Christian in the sense that all its citizens are either in fact or in name Christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within its borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all."

In the sense that Christianity was the 'established' religion of the United States, as Brewer says, there is no such nation. The very lifeblood of the Constitution, the governing document of the young nation says as much....not against the promotion of Christianity but against its human establishment according to human means as a law of the land. Which is reflective of the design of the Designer.

We were given free will, and in the acknowledgement of Christianity and the mandate of the Great Commission, we aren't called to force conversion, as is often the case when religion is a human invention or coopted by human forces, but to allow a choice to be made upon the informed and debating conversation of free men.

One of the scholars discussed in one of the articles I read below concludes "neither strict separationists of today nor those who argue that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation" get it right. The truth is in the middle, the founding fathers affirmed religion's importance and most practiced their faith publicly, but they created a nation where faith would not be polluted by politics, and politics would have no say in an individual's faith."

I would take it one step further....the Founding Fathers affirmed the vitaliness and importance of any nation's or individual's pursuit of the True God, written and discoverable in the Scriptures as I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, visible through the public and private practice of its expression in their lives and warned of the danger of humanization of such religious beliefs due to the danger evidenced in history of the destructive power of mankind in the handling of divine power.

It's a truth that is evident clearly within our borders even today. So what is our mandate, our calling, our destiny for these days?

Will we walk as the heroes of old, steadfast after God? Because in our day prophecy spoken by Jesus himself concerning the last days seems to be coming true: "because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold." [Matthew 24:12]

We can follow the paths of Moses, Josiah, and Paul all who walked amidst incredible idolatry and sin in the world, but instead of catering or yielding to it, we can use all the authority given to us in the Constitution and our governing laws to stop its spread and redeem a nation.

We have to be fearless in our hatred of sin due to an intense love of God and not let that love grow cold, for it will allow us to bring those lost in sin's embrace to the light of God's love as we accurately reflect it into the dark world.

Sin abounds in the world, around us and to some extent IN us, but Christ tells us we can triumph with the intensity of the love God gives to us.

Keep the passion of God true, pure, and unblemished by human inventions. Each Christian is alive for such times as these.

Shining for the world tossed in darkness reflecting the love of our Heavenly Father to all who would look for solace and comfort in such troubling tiems.



Resources:
http://discuss.infidels.org/showthread.php?t=244904
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html
http://www.mccoolportraits.com/TrueHistory.htm
http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000008659.cfm
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=315364
http://www.barefootsworld.net/founding.html