You like cheese?
Posted on 06/05/2005 2:49:06 PM PDT by smoothsailing
June 05, 2005
American Left Remains On Fringe Of Society
Joe Bell
One of the most deeply held objectives of the American left is the overwhelming obsession to remove any vestige of God from American history. Earlier this year The Nation ran an article titled "Our Godless Constitution" by Brooke Allen, which made an intrepid, yet failed, effort to rewrite America's past.
Bouncing from the Declaration of Independence to the Founding Fathers to the Constitution the writer battled gamely to prove America was "founded not on Christian principles, but on Enlightenment ones."
The Enlightenment offered much in the advancement of humanity. It was an era of scientific discovery, however it was also, as pointed out by historian Russell Kirk, "boldly anti-Christian."
America's Founding Fathers were not anti-Christian. In "The Roots of American Order," Kirk wrote one of the main differences between the American and French revolutions was that America's Founders mostly had a biblical view of man and his inclination towards sin, while the French revolutionaries "attempted to substitute for the biblical understanding an optimistic doctrine of human goodness advanced by the rationalistic Enlightenment."
The Founders' assessment produced the Declaration of Independence, which expresses the belief that God gives all men certain unalienable rights, and the Constitution, which took the biblical view of man and, accordingly, provided law that placed limits on man's will and insatiability. The Constitution is the means of ensuring the rights that had been bestowed by God. The French imposed no such boundaries upon popular passions.
The Enlightenment stretched from the 17th to the 18th century and in France the 18th century culminated with the French Revolution, which erupted in 1789. Thousands were executed during the Reign of Terror, from 1793 to 1794. Robespierre, one of the leaders who was in charge of the government during that time, was executed without a trial after the public rejected his excessive policies. The American Revolution never sank to that depth because America's Founders were not only men of intellect and circumspection, they also understood the importance of morality and religion in society.
Stumbling onward in an effort to erase God from America's past, The Nation article announced that God only "gets two brief nods" in the Declaration of Independence.
The charge is wrong both in numerical terms and in its assumption that God's role in the document is inconsequential. In the first two paragraphs of the Declaration, God appears twice – with respect to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and as the "Creator." God is also referenced twice at the end as "the Supreme Judge of the World" and "divine Providence."
More important than mere numbers is the significance the Founders placed upon God. They based the entire concept of freedom on the affirmation that God, not government, creates all men equal and gives them "certain unalienable rights." The Declaration makes the case that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. Allen states, "Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God."
That assertion is also untrue. Article VII, states the ratification of nine states is needed to establish the Constitution and that decision was arrived at "in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven…" The document was signed by, among others, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. No one would frivolously sign their name to such a document unless they endorsed the content, and only individuals who believed in God would consider each year of their life on earth to be "the year of our Lord." That is an unambiguous acknowledgement that time itself is under the jurisdiction of the Almighty.
It is not until the end of Allen's commentary that the decisive point is made, that is, Christians are generally hypocrites and extremists.
Allen wrote, "All of our leaders, Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have made very sure they are seen to do so. But there is a difference between offering this gesture of respect for majority beliefs and manipulating and pandering to the bigotry, prejudice and millennial fantasies of Christian extremists."
Many who profess to be Christians do not live lives that demonstrate their declared belief and many a wrong has been done by those who alleged they were doing "God's work." But Allen does not make that case until the conclusion. Throughout the commentary the writer denied American history. While there will always be those who engage in exploitation it is also true that some of the greatest social movements in American history were led by individuals of deep religious conviction. The civil rights movement of the 1960s is a certain example.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman whose "Democracy In America" examined the new nation's institutions, wrote that in France the Enlightenment found religion and freedom walking in different directions but in the United States they were "intimately linked together." He also observed the critical role religion played in social stability.
Tocqueville wrote, "While the law allows the American people to do everything there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare. …Religion is considered as the guardian of mores, and mores are regarded as the guarantee of the laws and pledge for the maintenance of freedom itself."
Allen's commentary flows in the same river as other leftist jargon that promotes the mythology that the left has created regarding the role of religion in America. It advances the fiction that the "wall of separation between church and state" is a constitutional principle even though the words are not in the Constitution. It insists that America's Founding Fathers had little interest in religion despite the documents they wrote and the nation they created.
The left ignores the fact that the Second Amendment protects religion from government interference; it does not prevent those with religious beliefs from influencing government. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had a profound impact, for the good, on both American government and society. When a lawmaker supports a piece of legislation it does not become defective if the legislator mentions God.
Until the left comes to grips with American history and demonstrates a genuine, not an imaginary, understanding of the roots of the nation's institutions, it will continue to occupy the fringes of America's intellectual and social order.
###
Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.
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to hear them tell it they are the mainstream majority.
The Left will be ...left behind.
You're supposed to humor the mentally ill.
I will once they are in a room with rubber wall paper wearing a sport cot with sleeves that buckle in the back.
You like cheese?
Mmm-hmm.
didnt see #5 what was it???
I just read another thread (about "green" terrorists) which the recently-zotted was on, so you may be right.
Stepford Citizen's
The whine has already been served
LOL
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