As we look out over the landscape of our country, one can easily get discouraged with the direction it is headed. On Sept. 17 our Constitution will celebrate its 235th birthday. According to various studies of the worlds 195 nations, the average life of a constitution is 17 years. So why has our Constitution lasted so long? Finding the answer to that question will also explain why our country appears to be spiraling out of control.
Our second President John Adams said, “Our Constitution is made for a moral and religious people, for all others it is totally inadequate.” He is suggesting that the Constitution only works for a people who have the moral discipline that religion, Christianity in particularly, teaches.
George Washington said in his farewell address that, “morality and religion,” again Christianity, were the indispensable supports of our republican form of government.
Both of these Founders understood that freedom required foundational principles in which to operate. And for freedom to last, the principles must be incorporated into the nations governing laws, but it would only work if the nations character reflected the same principles. Most of the Founders, like Washington and Adams, believed if America rejected the virtue found in Christianity then the nation could no longer be called a free nation.
The foundational principles of America came mostly from the Judean/Christian ideas found in the Torah and Bible. Thomas Jefferson clearly calls the principles “self-evident truths.” They included: right to self government, freedom of conscious, right to private property and limited government.
The Constitution was written not to give Liberty to citizens. Instead, it was written to set up a governmental system that would best protect citizens. The Founders understood that the greatest threat to freedom was people with power. History taught them that the most common threat was government. Rulers, whether good or bad, determined the outcome of the citizen’s life. Our Constitution was written to put shackles on a centralized government body.
The Constitution flipped everything upside down. For the first time in human history, citizens were declared the rulers and government declared the servant. We the People became king in America. However, We the People can become a tyrant just as easily as a King could. So the citizens of America wrote a covenant agreement (U.S. Constitution) between the States and the centralized government to secure liberty from the clutches of a tyrannical government and the passions of the majority.
As long as citizens kept the Constitutional shackles taut, the country prospered. However, starting in the early 1920s everything started to change. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s and Karl Marx, people started rejecting liberty from Natural Law substituting it with a liberty formed by man’s passions. Instead of governments protecting liberty it would now be the sole provider of the means of liberty.
Initially, the Church, as the arbiter of, “self-evident truth,” successfully resisted the new ideas. But then the Church started to withdraw from the public square leaving a void that eventually would be filled with the society we see today. As time progressed the government initiated bolder efforts to the remove the foundation of freedom which is Christianity: removing the Bible and Ten Commandments from schools, preventing Christian displays in the public square and inventing an imaginary principle called the separation of church and state. And with each new idea they were met with the same Sound of Silence from the Christian community. Like the lyrics of the 1970s song, Sound of Silence, “Fools,” said I, “do you not know Silence like a cancer grows.”
Out of the silence a deadly cancer has arisen: it is the religion of Humanism and its preferred government: Socialism with Communism to follow. If Karl Marx were alive today, he would be astonished on how his theory has succeeded in America.
We are losing our Constitutional Republic unless “We the People” return to the Christian principles that formed it. On Sept. 17, take a moment to read the Constitution and give thanks to God for the freedom it has protected for 235 years. And also ask God for the wisdom and discernment to elect the candidate that conforms to the same principle of freedom.
—Richard Culliver
Columbia
