To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (32 page)

People of faith have been systematically marginalized by a two-part secular campaign waged by the cultural elite. First, there has been a sustained effort to change the culture by spreading propaganda through the schools and through the media, where the values of the secular-socialist Left are advanced while historic American values of God-given rights are silenced and mocked. The second part of the campaign is to give secular values the authority of law through the courts, state houses, and the Congress, while removing
the individual’s right to, as Jefferson put it, “profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.”

As a result, public expressions of faith have gone from normal to unacceptable. The abuses are well documented. Year after year, the courts are filled with hundreds of cases based upon the anti-religious misconceptions of the First Amendment created by the secular-socialist Left and often reinforced by judges.

The reason secular socialists adhere to an agenda that includes tearing down crosses, arresting people for talking about their faith in shopping malls, redefining marriage, prohibiting crèches and menorahs on public property, preventing students from reading the Bible, and removing God from the public square, is really quite simple: the religious worldview is the single most serious threat to the secular Left’s utopian vision. This vision relies upon a powerful, centralized, bureaucratic government that must be the highest authority in the land to ensure compliance. Dissent is not tolerated. Adherence is essential. Every aspect of the lives of citizens must be controlled by the authority of state law, including personal belief.

America, however, was founded on Judeo-Christian principles with a
limited
national government that upheld the individual’s rights of conscience. Therefore, it is necessary for the secular Left to keep citizens ignorant about their history, their heritage, the Judeo-Christian roots of American culture, and even their Creator if they are to impose their secular-socialist agenda on this nation.

Protecting religious liberty is the foundation stone for protecting all liberty. The liberty of every American, whether religious or not, is at risk if even one American’s religious liberty is abridged. There is a profound reason our religious liberties are delineated in the
first
sentence of the
First
Amendment.

In the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were killed by the totalitarian ideologies of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism, each of which required the use of a powerful, centralized state
authority to control every aspect of the citizens’ lives. Those who resisted were eliminated, often by imprisonment or death. Religion was enemy number one and the first to go. The regimes tore down crosses, destroyed churches, hounded and coerced church officials, crushed free worship, and replaced religious texts with nationalist propaganda in schools. The enemy of dictatorship was God.

There are many parallels between the anti-religious governments of the twentieth century and the anti-religious elite of the United States in the twenty-first. But our country wasn’t always ruled by secular absolutists. Before the United States entered World War II, President Roosevelt, the most successful liberal Democrat in the twentieth century, invoked the imagery of religious battle to describe who we were and who the enemy was: “Today the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom—between pagan brutality and the Christian ideal. We choose human freedom—which is the Christian ideal.”

In less than a generation, the cultural elites have created a national amnesia about both our history and our Godly heritage. Today, the Founders’ original intent is all but lost in a post-modern world patrolled by the totalitarian impulses of self-appointed enforcers of political correctness.

Eleven score and fourteen years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s injunction at Gettysburg remains as relevant as when he uttered it: “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Ensuring religious liberty is a sacred tenet of America’s foundational principles. Below is a list of immediate steps to protect
people of faith from further government encroachment on their liberties.

We must restore constitutional limited government by reviving our system of checks and balances. Failure to invoke constitutional checks and balances has allowed the Judicial Branch to legislate from the bench, imposing its judgments on the elected branches of government. This is the main reason why religious liberty is under such sustained assault today. Here’s what we need to do:

The liberties of both religious expression and speech in general are guaranteed by the First Amendment. We must preserve these foundations of our republic by educating Americans about their true meaning and relevance so they can defend their own rights. Therefore, the following measures should be pursued:

Because government power expands at the direct expense of individual freedom, the best way to protect liberty, particularly religious liberty, is to limit the size and scope of governments at all levels. To do that, we should:

President Obama and Congress have put us on the road to nationalized healthcare. State-run healthcare services are typically intolerant of religious objections by medical workers to certain procedures. If national healthcare can’t be undone, we must ensure the system maintains freedom of religious conscience. To protect the doctor-patient relationship and put personal or religious conscience over the policies of the state, we should:

The myth that the establishment clause requires government to purge religion from public life is omnipresent in our public schools, contrary to the express intention of the Founders. To protect religious liberty in education we should adhere to the following: