Admiral Jeremiah Denton Foundation

One Nation Under God Program

Founded as ONE NATION UNDER GOD, the United States is being changed into ONE NATION WITHOUT GOD.

The impression has been widely established that the First Amendment implanted a "Wall of Separation" between Church and State. The Amendment is stretched to mean many things depending on the interpreter. The interpreters include the Supreme Court and lesser Courts, legislation at all levels and executive directives of all kinds.

The interpreters, or misinterpreters, also include, in effect, all kinds of actions taken across the spectrum of American education, news and entertainment media, in many forms of commerce, and in social behavior, which in themselves represent a kind of stretching of interpretation--a stretching which is hard to judge in any particular case because the official governmental interpretation of the Wall is so vague.

Among these meanings is that the Founding Fathers meant to say that the Government is not biased about religion and cannot act in any way to appear biased in favor of or against anything about religion.

Or that the Government must ensure that all its agents, in their official capacity must avoid speaking, or acting to promote or displaying anything on government property that can be associated with a religion.

Or that the government is absolutely neutral on whether there is a God, and accordingly the Laws of a God have nothing to do with our own laws and judicial rulings.

Or that children in a public school cannot pray.

Or that Christmas decorations cannot be displayed on government property.

We are among many who believe that this impression about a Separation Clause is a big lie, and that a serious debate on the subject would have a result similar to the little boy who declared that the emperor was wearing no clothes.

We are also among many who believe that if the impression under discussion continues to remain in place, it will be a major historical disaster for the U.S., for the world, and for the march of civilization.

We believe it is the major issue facing our nation.

In this article, we intend to offer some facts in refutation of the "Separation Clause" which we hope will help to begin a debate which will eliminate the misinterpretations before it is too late.

Real Meaning of the First Amendment

Let us begin by examining the wording of the First Amendment:

"The Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

We believe that means that the Congress shall not pass a law establishing a particular religious denomination as the official religion of the United States. And that they can do nothing to interfere with the free practice of religion. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Founding Fathers’ Contemporary Perspective

There are historically recorded events of the time which tend to flesh out the context in which this amendment was contemporarily understood.

Jefferson had taken steps to stop Virginia from adopting a certain Christian denomination. He and the other founders were well educated and well aware of the historical examples of the difficulties caused by nations adopting specific religious denominations.

Starting with the Emperor Constantine, there began to develop a genre of Catholic and Orthodox Church-State relationships, which though bringing immense improvements to the lot of mankind, ultimately led to two evils. First, the temptations of worldly power tended to corrupt many church leaders, and second, over-reaching secular leaders tried to control the Church’s affairs. Catholics and Orthodox persecuted each other and Jews. After the Protestant split, Catholics persecuted Protestants, e.g. the Huguenots. Protestants persecuted Catholics, Jews and other Protestants. Theocracies and near theocracies developed, and in retrospect those became recognized as infeasible, hence undesirable systems.

Jefferson and the other founders were well aware of that and other historical factors which made them most cautious about adopting an official national religion.

The vast majority of Americans then belonged to a variety of Christian denominations and many of the colonists indeed came to this continent to escape religious persecution.

But none of the persecuted dropped Christianity after being persecuted by another Christian denomination. Moreover, by the time of the American Revolution, they nearly all had come to realize that there was nothing in the doctrine of Christianity to justify such persecution. They recognized that the problem was flawed human nature, and a saying developed to express that awareness: "There is nothing wrong with Christianity; it is just that it has never been tried."

But the wiser among the founders were determined to ensure that the United States would not adopt an official specific denomination of Christianity. However, the vast majority were Christians of some persuasion. Naturally there were various opinions about particular denominational strictures about liturgies, requirement for attending church services, fasting and such. And though some of the founders were deists and a handful were agnostics, it can be derived from hundreds of letters and statements, that the founders knew that to succeed this republic would require morality from religion, and that the government drew its right to rule from the Judeo-Christian God, hence his laws were the basis of ours.

It was fully understood at the time that the founders intended that the laws of the nation would be based on the law of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments. Indeed public schools from the outset taught the Ten Commandments, and the establishment of Christmas and Easter as National Holidays, the use of crosses and frequent use of Judeo-Christian phrases on solemn national occasions and Judeo-Christian quotations in Government buildings were reflections of this.

There was indeed clearly evident a strong Christian bias. In fact, in the full awareness of the Christian tone of the founders of the Government, some Jews wondered if when freedom of practice of religion was mentioned, the practice of the Jewish religion was included within that protection.

Consequently, Jewish friends of Washington read into this the possibility that the practice of Jewish faith would be in jeopardy, and one of them expressed his concern in a letter and George Washington wrote in reply,

"May the Children of the stock of Abraham dwell and prosper under their own vine and fig tree…all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship."

The words "their own" implied acceptance of Christianity being the majority religion, but freedom of practice of all religions was certainly assured by Washington’s letter, which reflected the prevailing opinion of the founding fathers.

(But it is not meant here to over-emphasize the Christian issue. Judeo-Christian is sufficient to establish the national heritage, and the only reason references are made to Christianity is that many of those references give the lie to The Wall of Separation fiasco. Recently many Moslem citizens exist in the U.S. and their religion enjoys freedom of practice, respect and empathy as a religion basing its faith on the God of Abraham).

Thus with freedom of practice for all religions, Judeo-Christianity was the religious tradition adopted from which to fashion the principles of Government of our nascent nation.

Democracy and Religion

Let us take note that the United States of America is still a relatively new nation whose government at the time of its founding was a revolutionary departure from forms of government in existence until that time. It was such a radical departure from previous governmental forms that the founding fathers acknowledged that it was an experiment, and all the world’s political scientists and politicians snickered in agreement.

One revolutionary aspect of it was that we were forming a government so relatively weak in its powers, permitting so much relative freedom to the citizens that there was doubt among the founders and strong skepticism around the world that this democratic republic once founded could long survive.

We will state here and prove by further discussion that the founders, far from wanting a Wall of Separation between Church and State, deliberately chose to rely on the Judeo-Christian religion as the mainstay for our national system of government. They reasoned that the nature and degree of that faith would provide the sufficient degree of self-discipline and compassion, the two qualities indispensable to the success of democracy, which will be further discussed. And they chose to make the laws of the Judeo-Christian God the basis of our own law.

They had good reason for worry about establishing a single denominational religion as the official religion of the government as well as doubts about the success of democracy.

Athens’ famous experiment with a radical degree of democracy had ended so swiftly and so disastrously that governments forming in the many centuries after Athens had been an uninterrupted series of governmental forms relying on rather authoritarian magistrates, including emperors, kings, and generally relatively absolute rulers.

(Of course, even relatively absolute governments were most usually better than anarchy. And Athens and the Greek City states should be viewed more with admiration than censure. It was a quite sophisticated governmental form, invented at a time when tribal groups were the rule and with civilization not even established in large parts of the world. Civilized regions such as the Mideast, Asia and Central and South America all were governed by various authoritarian regimes).

Switzerland should be considered a successful democracy but at the time of our founding the country was a loose confederation without a national government in the normal sense of the word, being bound only by a common interest in defense. They had no Federal Constitution until 1848.

What had gone wrong in Greece? Philosophers not unwisely concluded that democracy was a desirable feature in government, but the Greeks lacked the morality to sustain it..

They had a religion, but there were two problems:

A. None of the gods were very big on the virtues necessary for democracy: self-discipline and compassion.

B. Faith in the gods was not strong.

The founders had a more propitious environment to work with.

The prevailing faith Christianity (as well as Judaism) pushed their faithful to believe in loving their neighbors as they love themselves. So one of the key elements needed to support democracy was available: compassion.
There was also the other key element of self-discipline supplied by the mandate of the Ten Commandments.
There was also a deep and strong faith, enough zeal to elicit personal behavior strongly affected by that faith which was tempered and strengthened as it always is when really hard times are encountered and the victims so consistently seek God’s help through prayer, and when delivered, feel proof of His existence and grow in faith. In the centuries preceding the Declaration, those who became the Colonists had been through religious and political persecution in Europe, had been affected by frequent wars, had survived a risky trip across the Ocean, dealt with hostile Indians, coped with near starvation, difficult climates, meager shelter, and had been in a number of wars on this continent. Their faith was strong and tempered, as always imperfectly followed, but strong enough to present a reliable morality to the society.
The people felt themselves wronged by the British king, and were ready to try a government of their own with more freedom.

At the time of decision for the fathers, it looked like a bet worth taking to try a governmental form that permitted more freedom of thought, action and dreams in seeking a successful pursuit of happiness, with the peoples’ religion strong, and with hope that the religious influence would eliminate the danger that individuals would habitually violate other men’s rights as they pursued their happiness as was prone to be the case in Athenian democracy, especially.

We could quote scores of founding fathers who wisely had reservations about what would happen when the relatively poor and hardy colonists became richer and softer after a generation or two of striving with great faith and succeeding with the fine system. Would not the strong faith weaken, and compassion and self-discipline give way to tendencies less noble, like greed and selfishness? After all, history has no lesson more redundantly recorded than the repetitious cycle in which a hungry, poor, desperate group takes over the nation of sated, indulgent softies who have forgotten their original values, and have lost the virtues required to survive.

From their reflections we have quoted and will quote, it will be seen that the fathers were remarkably prescient in foreseeing the main factors in the game as it would play out. Perseverance in religious faith would be the key to success.

The Founding Fathers knew this, and moved forward with The Declaration which set forth their remarkable philosophy of Government, later spelled out in functional terms in the Constitution.

In the Founding Fathers Own Words

So the Declaration of Independence expressed the apologia for discarding allegiance to Britain, and laid out the philosophical foundation of the government which the Constitution spelled out in organizational and functional terms.

Aha! What was the attitude taken by our founding fathers toward religion? Neutrality, disdain, the Wall of Separation? The answer is they regarded religion as the indispensable key to our prospects for success.

They saw religion as the only strong enough source of morality that would provide a sufficient degree of compassion and self-discipline among the people in such a weak form of government. Of course, freedom was seen by them as so desirable because of its advantages in inventiveness, innovation in all forms of endeavor, and for its advantages in the pursuit of happiness.

Note the clear and compelling emphasis on the need for religion in a democracy in this statement:

A. "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morals are indispensable supports.

B. "In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness – these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.

C. "A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.

D. "Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?

E. "And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

F. "Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar stature, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle".

The kind of religion they had in mind was the one that taught Love Thy Neighbor as You Love Yourself, and held the Ten Commandments as the law: the Judeo-Christian Tradition which had been in their families and nations for almost 18 centuries. The Christians believed that they could not reach heaven unless they loved their neighbor as they loved themselves. Good medicine for supplying self-discipline and compassion, the prerequisites for democracy.

The quotation above is from George Washington’s Farewell Address. For those who attended schools with certain textbooks omitting this information, George Washington is known as the Father of our Country. He led our troops to win our independence. Was offered a crown to be our king, refused, and was the first President, serving two terms. He had a large part in planning our form of government.

William Penn, another founder, put it more succinctly, "Men must choose to be governed by God, or condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants."

Thomas Jefferson exclaimed: "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but by his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just ; that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Benjamin Franklin asserted: " I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proof I see of this truth—That God governs in the affairs of man."

The Declaration of Independence in laying out our fundamental governmental concept declares:

"All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The above sentence was the most revolutionary governmental change, and is the fundamental fact which gives the lie to the "Separation Clause".

First of all, that sentence established God as the source of all rights and thus establishes the Ten Commandments as the only legitimate basis of how each of us is to use those rights, and how not to use them so as not to interfere with others’ access to their rights: the basis of our laws. And they meant the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. No other religion could have been considered as the religion of any of the colonists of this country in 1776. By "religion" they did not mean Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism.

Second of all, and even more important in the field of political philosophy (because the entire set of Western Governments since the Holy Roman Empire of which we are a member had been dedicated to God as ours was) the sentence was like an explosion of a Galaxy in the Skies of Political Science. For thousands of years, all the governments which we descend from in Western Civilization, and most of the governments from others, had fundamentally held that the authority for the determination of what constituted human rights flowed from God, then to the King, then from the Divine Right of Kings to the citizenry.

Now, like a stroke of lightning, came the corrective change to the tendency toward tyranny among monarchies like the British, the daring claim that: Man derives his rights directly from God, and the citizen will choose and elect the government which shall serve the people for a time.

That’s how important religion is to our government, or should be if we can rid ourselves of this preposterous lie conjured up by "minds of peculiar stature". DAMNED PECULIAR!

How can we give in to the ignorant philosophers of our time who would trash the integrity and brilliance and validity of the transcendent system which has brought us such blessings in favor of establishing their version of a big Godless Government, big on free sex, porn, killing unborn babies, adopting adulterous cocaine addicted celebrities as gods, a culture screaming at our children to enjoy themselves at anything that feels good and ignore their parents and Almighty God, who has been removed from their education. The bitter fruits of this godless system abound, putrefy and expand.

Let us mobilize and bring ourselves to our national senses. Let us remind ourselves of what we have been trying to do under a system as yet imperfect, but always improving, and bringing success unchallenged by any other governmental system in the world.

Progress of the U.S. with Its Church-State Relationship

It can be said that in effect the relationship established a system full of freedoms which are to be used within the limitation that the right to freedom comes from God and must be used accordingly. To militate against the tendency of some individuals to use their freedoms to pursue their happiness by trampling on the rights of others to pursue theirs, we have the religiously induced self-discipline and compassion provided by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The degree of freedom, thus constrained, permits prolific opportunities for the pursuit of happiness, including freedoms conducive to the development of productive entrepreneurial innovation and enterprise. This constrained freedom also ensures a greater degree of harmonious teamwork within and between organizations in the public and the private sector.

We have done well with this relationship. We have become rich and powerful. We have always been able to mobilize as well as needed. And the same constraints on freedom and greed have endowed us with a relatively effective foreign policy which is also relatively compassionate as well as strongly backed with military power.

By this relationship, labor vs. management disputes, disputes of taxes, racial clashes, religious conflicts, class clashes, marital disputes, conflicts of interest among special interest groups—all of these have generally been relatively satisfactorily mediated because in the crunch phase of the resolution of the conflict, there has been a sufficient element of compassion derived from the religiously induced quality: Love thy neighbor as you love yourself. Give the guy a decent break.

This magic formula has worked reasonably well, but the point is we are now abandoning that traditional system.

Compassionate Capitalism could be a good name for the system.

All in all, our system has worked relatively well. All the elements of national power have been adequately developed with this system: military, political, economic and spiritual. Since the unique and ingenious system was installed at our founding we have grown from a fledgling nation to the most admired, most immigrated to, and the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world.

The tradition works, and though we must respect and learn from other traditions, we cannot throw ours away. Adopting improvements is possible from other cultures, but don’t abandon the key principles which have brought us to the pinnacle of success to become admired and imitated by the rest of the world. Multi-culturalism should be viewed in this light.

Previous Historic Major Violation of our Principles

It is undeniable that the U.S. has not found it always possible to live up to its principles. Now there is a crisis in that regard, and there have been previous historical examples of our abandoning our principles and of the consequences thereof.

Although our Declaration stated, "All men are created equal", we could not live up to it. While Washington, Jefferson and others tried to devise plans to eliminate slavery, such as by appropriating money to ship many of them at a time to various fertile islands, educating them and moving them in stages--none of the plans were adopted.

It was simply politically impossible to eliminate slavery. Even during the Civil War Lincoln was not able to get an amendment eliminating slavery—all he could get was the Emancipation Proclamation, justified as a war-time extraordinary military measure, eliminating slavery in territory held by the Confederates. It took sobering up after the horrible war and Lincoln’s assassination to bring America to its senses finally to get the Amendment passed.

The truth is: greed motivated the continued existence of that horrible institution (with the temptation to greed most prolific among large plantation owners and those whose finances depended upon slave labor) and the most disastrous war in our history took place. In greed we had abandoned our principles. In fairness to the Confederacy, many like Robert E. Lee opposed slavery but saw themselves fighting for states rights.

The Supreme Court found a way to find an exception to All Men Are Created Equal by passing the infamous Dred Scott Decision which decided that slaves weren’t quite men.

Near the end of the Civil War, which killed more Americans than any other war, Lincoln was asked what caused the war. His reply:

"We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us—and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all those blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own…intoxicated with unbroken success we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."

In other words in rapidly attained power and prosperity we had abandoned our religious principles and it had cost us heavily in blood and treasure, and had almost cost us our nation.

Lincoln did not think the Supreme Court was right in its Dred Scott decision, and apparently he suffered from the belief that this Government and this nation and its success have everything to do with God. He said in effect that in sated arrogance we disobeyed a law of God reflected in our Declaration of Independence and suffered the terrible consequences.

And many Americans believe today the Supreme Court found a way recently to eliminate another basic founding principle, that all men are endowed by the Creator with the right to life. Roe v. Wade ruled that a child living in its mother’s womb did not have the right to life. Here we go again—what will be the consequences and what will it take to eliminate the disobedience to God?

But neither ruling discarding the two national principles above compares in wrongness nor in the scope of harm being done with the misinterpretation of the First Amendment which essentially kills the entire foundation of all of our principles, the concept of One Nation under God. We are taking the disastrous step of removing religion, the source of national survival, from its traditional governmental foundation and from the foundation of American life and sociology.

Having reached unprecedented success as a world power and having finally fought off the atheistic Soviet Evil Empire, we in a stupor of sated materialism are electing to become an even more Evil Empire.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship."

From: "The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic"
by Alexander Fraser Tyler

Please continue your reading by using the links below or on the left menu:

The True Intent of the Founding Fathers with Regard to Separation of Church and State

including:

Thomas Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists

(the "Wall of Separation")

and

The True Meaning of the First Amendment as

Disclosed by the Congressional Debate Leading to its Final Passage