Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Saturday, July 26, 2008 11:30:54 AM
‘Religious faith has long been valued as an essential contributor to our national greatness.’ – Tony Perkins
We understand what you are trying to say, but in this culture you must define what you mean by religious faith. American Constitutionalism is the product of a specific faith rooted in Biblical Christianity. This is the faith our Pilgrim forefathers brought with them to New England.
There are many false religions including Islam and Darwinism that oppose liberty and many faiths within Christianity that never produced liberty. There are many faiths within Protestantism. Now which faith are you talking about?
What is different about the faith of our forefathers that caused liberty to take root and grow? Most Americans today who are people of faith will not acknowledge that our Founders were men of faith whose Christianity was based on Scripture alone which made them children of the Reformation. We who are products of the public schools have been robbed of the truth of our heritage.
With open Bible, the New Covenant ideas of the priesthood of all believers and the equality of all men before God and the law became the foundation for modern political democracy. Ecclesiastical totalitarianism died a slow but certain death and with it the civil monarchy and aristocracy. The ideas of federalism and bicameralism were adopted to limit the concentration of power over ‘we the people’.
Now the point is this: The Constitution does not exist apart from its cultural context. Without this theological foundation our understanding of the Constitution is altogether skewed. It is NOT the product of autonomous man, but renewed man using his reason guided by revelation.
When political systems undermine this foundation then the Constitution is no better than the paper it is written on. The Constitution stands as an obstacle to centralized power over the people because that is its purpose. It is ‘WE THE PEOPLE’ that allow this centralization to occur because we give the political systems their power.
Socialism is the opposite of federalism. That’s why the beliefs of the Founders are hidden, revised, ignored or disparaged and why our state and federal Constitutions are trashed.