Christmas & the Public Square



It’s a perennial complaint: The creche on public property, depicting the Holy Family, breeches that “wall” separating church and state, as does posting the Ten Commandments in a courtroom or school.

The United States was meant to be “neutral” to religion, they say, meaning our government should be officially atheist.

Well, no, it shouldn’t, and it wasn’t meant to be.

Ours has always been a religious nation, from the time the first hardy settlers showed up at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown.

The Puritans fled England because of its religious climate, and Catholics pioneered Maryland’s future and the settlement of California.

In early Virginia, the state religion was Anglicanism. Most of the leaders who led the War for Independence were professed Christians. The Mormons settled Utah.

Far from being officially “neutral” to religion, the new nation was meant to nourish it with laws that respected a man’s religion and his right to practice it.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its atheist allies can tell a different tale if they want, but that’s all they tell: a tale, and a tall one at that.

The enemies of religion are never willing to discuss what has occurred in the modern secular state for which they never stop praying.

Granted, many excesses, even murderous excesses, have been carried out in the name of religion. But none of them equal the deprivation of rights and slaughter perpetrated by atheist tyrants, who were schooled in 18th-century rationalist dogma and nurtured its 20th-century bastard, communism.

They believed a man’s first duty is to the state; that a citizen enjoys rights at the pleasure of the state, or only because of service to the state. So the state can take rights away when it pleases.

They attacked, with stunning, ruthless violence, the taproots of ordered liberty: religion, family and private property.

They seized all private property, said the state’s claim on children superseded that of parents, even training children to inform on their parents, and murdered religious believers by the millions.

They were not religious men, but communists. The anticlerical butchery that began in the French Revolution fully bloomed in Josef Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, who murdered about a quarter-billion people in the name of building the state.

But such is ineluctable result of basing laws and power not on moral absolutes, but on the caprice of men who recognize no higher authority than the god of their own minds.

They make the law, and they are therefore above it.

Our laws did not sprout from the fetid mud of rationalism. They sprung from the rich soil of English common law, which itself grew from an unambiguous Christian vision of moral absolutes, before which, even kings and statesmen must bend their knees.

And those absolutes, generally, are found in one place: the Bible. Our conception of rights and the dignity of man devolves not from rationalism, but from Judeo-Christian teaching on the nature of man and his relationship to God and the state.

America’s primordial documents unmistakably recognize that our rights come from God, not from the state, so the state cannot take them away without good reason.

Which means that our civil order must do more than just suffer, with a grimace, the Little Boy from Bethlehem. It should celebrate Him, by erecting a creche in every public square in America.


R. Cort Kirkwood is a syndicated columnist and managing editor of a daily newspaper. This article courtesy of Agape Press.

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