How ‘Separation Of Church And State’ Is Being Used To Rid America Of Religion

The Supreme Court recently (7/22) ruled that a football coach could kneel on the fifty yard line and pray.  The Court never asked what the coach was praying for, none of their business; but it decided that his expression of faith in no way compromised the Constitutional principle ensuring that no one religion could ever be enforced on anyone.  The Constitutional principle was based on the Revolutionary separation of England’s former colony from the King, his religion, and his opportunistic economic policies.  Never again would any power, international or otherwise, be allowed to impose its religious will.  The same principle was applied to the citizens of the new American democracy – no jurisdiction could ever establish and impose its own religion on those living within it.

A rather simple principle.  Churches abounded in the early days of the Republic, were responsible for social services and education, taxed and tithed their members to be able to do so.  The faithful of many denominations proudly and loudly proclaimed their faith and allegiance.  All through New England there were Methodist, Congregational, Episcopal, and Catholic churches everywhere.  Celebration of faith, prayer, and spiritual inspiration were universal; and there were enough sects and subsects to give everyone a place under God.

Jefferson and the other framers of the Constitution were inspired by the Enlightenment, a movement based on logic, intellectual discipline, and reason organized to pursue matters of faith.  It was in many ways a reprise of the Early Church when Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, and others parsed every word of the  Bible to arrive at a consensus of faith.  Not surprisingly the debate took centuries to be resolved – after all the nature of Jesus, man, god, or both; and the mystery of the Holy Trinity not to mention sin, redemption, and salvation were not matters to be easily dispensed with.  Logic in the pursuit of faith.

Although the Protestant churches after Martin Luther changed the calculus and taught that one could more easily find God without the painstaking exegesis and logical analysis prescribed  by the Church, the Catholic Church retained the principle of logic and faith together as ways to find God.,

In any case, the Founding Fathers knew that religion was to be an important feature of the new Republic.  It was in fact the best expression of the new citizenry, the foundation of morality and ethics, and the guiding principle behind social behavior and justice.  While they remained adamant that no one religion, sect, or faith should ever impose its will on any other, they acknowledged and celebrated the widespread expressions of faith in America.

Today  those foundational principles are increasingly ignored or dismissed out of hand.  Religion itself has become suspect and a dangerous threat to the progressive ideal of an ‘inclusive’, ‘diverse’ society.  The idea of a supreme being is antithetical to the notion of secular progress.  The architecture of religion, whether the highly structured Catholic version or the far more loose and doctrinally free Protestant alternatives, has different goals.  The salvation of souls, the forgiveness of sin, and the all-encompassing idea of spiritual evolution have nothing to do with the restoring the black man to primacy, the disestablishment of traditional sexuality, the recasting of the nature of life and its origins, and the supremacy of women.  Religion gets in the way.  There cannot be two gods- a spiritual one and a secular one.,  Unless the divisive, intrusive, destructive forces of religion are confronted and rolled back, reaching a secular Utopia will be more distant promise.

The Supreme Court has finally and loudly put an end to this absurdity and restored the legitimacy and place of religion in public life.  While the decision only ruled on the claims of one man, the implications are perfectly clear; and soon to be tested will be the insensible restrictions of other religious expressions – displays of the cross and depictions of the crucifixion at Easter, creches and Christmas trees in December on public land.  These restrictions will not stand. A display of Christian iconography at crucial dates of the calendar are in no way restrictions on the rights of other believers.  America is still a Christian country, after all, and Jews have never disagreed, have let Christianity have its say as long as their temples, seders, and holidays went unmolested.  Muslims are no different.,   If in areas of Michigan where there are significant numbers of Muslims, the call to prayer should be recognized, not quieted.

In fact the country will benefit and has always benefitted from a multiplicity of religious expressions. If the symbols of faith are prominently displayed and religious ceremonies publicly recognized, the country will return to its Enlightenment roots; and even more importantly the progressive secular juggernaut will be slowed if not stopped.  Society is not valued for the hodgepodge of race, gender, and ethnicity, but for its foundational values, its morality, and its overarching spiritual nature.  Expunging religion from the public sphere does ho good, but only allows for more secular meanderings.  Progressivism has lost its way and in no way resembles its early reformist nature.  It has become a debilitating force, a dissonant voice in an America which was founded on faith and which continues to profess it.

The victory the coach prayed for was not to be.  God does not recognize idle prayers or in fact reward any of them.  Prayer, according to Christian doctrine is a way to show one’s fidelity, respect, honor, and tribute to God.  In the more conservative Protestant religions, there is no way that anyone can influence Jesus’ heaven-or-hell decision on Judgement Day.  Election, it is called, and one can only hope that one’s life has been acceptable.

Which is why the Supreme Court wanted nothing to do with the nature of the coach’s prayers, for off they went into the ether with no one minding the store.  It was the expression of faith which mattered, no different from Friday prayers at the mosque, rocking before the Wailing  Wall, or writing in ecstasy finding Jesus.  So fundamental is it to the American psyche and soul, that nothing should be put in its way.

The Greatness Of European Civilization–Lost In The Rush To Diversity

Dr. Augustus Johnson, a black man and professor of Systematic Theology at a well-known Divinity School was well known for both his theology and his inclusivity.  He had been hired to reform Methodist teaching of the Bible, right the wrongs that had been perpetuated for decades, and make the teaching of Jesus Christ relevant and reflective of today’s diverse society.  Behind his lectern was a portrait of a black Jesus, ebony-skinned, African-featured, and not suffering on the cross but looking angrily and proudly at the observer.

On the first day of classes, Dr. Johnson took his place in front of a packed lecture hall, adjusted his papers, and said, pointing to the portrait behind him, “This was the real Jesus”.  He then turned on the overhead projector and flashed a series of familiar white, classically handsome images of Christ.  “Not these”, he said.

Discussing the influence of Greek thought on the work of Origen, Irenaeus, Clement, Augustine, and other early church thinkers, Dr. Johnson advised the class to remember whose these Greeks were.  Both Aristotle and Plato were white, slave-holding members of the aristocracy, and their intellectual contributions to the origins of Christianity must be discounted, for they deprive Jesus Christ of his Mosaic roots, his Judaism, his poverty, and his ethnic identity.

Of course Aristotle was privileged, otherwise he would have been a slave, not an educated aristocrat.  Of course he was male and white because for centuries before and after Greece, this sexual and racial pre-eminence was the norm.  In other words, his social position, status, and relationship to the rest of society is irrelevant to the evolution of his philosophical thought. His cultural milieu affected non-academic aspects of his life as it would any man.  Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest and his attitude towards Persia.  At one point he counsels Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants". Aristotle was not surprisingly ‘ethnocentric’, a product both of his age and his social class; but one would be hard put to find traces of this ethnocentricity in Metaphysics. His genius was in his ability to look at the world in terms of abstract, universal principles.

Nevertheless, Dr. Johnson hammered away at his central theme.  Since all ideas emerge from within a social, economic, and cultural milieu, race, gender, and ethnicity are the elements which define them.  One cannot look at the products of philosophers and judge them only for what they are but how they were derived.  The milieu becomes more important that the ideas themselves.  In Dr. Johnson’s view, Jesus was just a black man suffering at the hands of white Romans and Jews, and his message was one of racism, white supremacy, and the inherent corruption of white culture.

Augustus Johnson was not alone in his revisionism.  In the first class on the Old Testament, the instructor made it clear that students were to ignore critics writing before the Twentieth Century, for their criticism would necessarily ignore race, gender, and ethnicity as determining factors in Biblical interpretation.   Only with a modern and more enlightened perspective could one possibly understand the Bible and its continuing relevance to today.  In one instructional fiat the instructor swept away any notion of historical relevance.

Christianity, according to these instructors had less to do with the complexity of the Trinity, the redemptive meaning of Christ’s suffering on the cross, the intellectual legacy of Aquinas and his Summa Theologica, and the evangelism of St. Paul than it did with the poverty of Palestine, the oppressiveness of Roman rule, the arrogance and treachery of the Jews, and the final glory of the black man.

This same revisionist exercise is replayed ad nauseam in secular universities throughout the country. Ancient Greece and Rome and the Western civilizations derived from them are irrelevant to the issues of today.

Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, social reformer, patron of the arts and culture, supported Molière, Racine, Pierre Mignard, Antoine Coysevox and Hyacinthe Rigaud, making their works famous throughout Europe. He founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 and the Académie d'Opéra in 1669.  Thanks to Louis France was able to establish colonies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa during his reign, and by the 1680s, France was a major power not just in Europe, but in the whole world.

The great kings of England from Henry II to Henry VIII established English sovereignty, reclaimed foreign land, and ruled over an increasingly united kingdom.  The kings and queens of Holland and Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, and centuries of powerful and influential popes consolidated and expanded European Influence and culture throughout their empires.  The era of Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French exploration opened new lands to Western civilization, language, culture, and religion.

The campaigns to derogate whites and to raise non-whites to higher cultural significance are attempts to right a listing cultural ship.  The contribution of white people to Western culture, say progressive activists, has been carried out on the backs of the poor, the enslaved, and the marginalized.  Notre Dame, Chartres, Salisbury, the Coliseum, and the temples of Persepolis cannot be counted as positive investments in human development, but examples of exploitation, plunder, and abusive power.  In other words, there can be nothing white worth noting, since all white achievements are tainted.   The entire white race from its earliest beginnings to its sad and sorry end has been corrupt, pernicious, and dangerous.

Not only are the accomplishments of white civilization questionable, but the legacy of the white rule, empire, and political hegemony is like original sin - an innate corruption passed on from generation to generation ad perpetuam. It is about time to reject white history once and for all and to restore racial equilibrium, say social justice advocates.

Yet history is not so easily erased.  The facts of empire cannot be expunged simply because they are looked at through a different lens.  History is the story of empire, wealth, and high civilization.  America is the beneficiary of European civilization, founded by Jefferson and his colleagues on its intellectual and moral principles.

The concept of ‘toxic whiteness’, an attempt to blame historical white rule for society’s current ills and to assume an innate moral corruption of whites because of their heritage, is the last, most desperate accusation of a political movement which has little intellectual foundation except the vague notion of ‘multiculturalism’, an ascribed value without the philosophical underpinnings.

Only in America do we have a pernicious desire to not only to forget the past but to expunge it from history.  The only reality is today’s reality, progressive reformers insist. 

American multiculturalists would like to consider themselves latter-day French revolutionaries, but they have little of the Europeans’ cultural imperative.  They have no substantive vision of a true structural reform, but only one of vague aspirations.  They have never demonstrated or proven the inherent value of a culturally inclusive plurality.  The original American ideal of democratic heterogeneity – all newcomers are welcome if they subscribe to the Founding Fathers’ notions of enterprise, discipline, family, God, and country – was based on the lessons of history and the philosophical principles of Greece and Rome and adopted by the Enlightenment.  Contrary to progressive idealists, not only is there no higher value to a society based on racial heterogeneity per se – i.e. without subscription and adherence to universal norms and a Judeo-Christian ethos – but that peculiarly narrow understanding of foundational democracy is debilitating.

What does blackness, homosexuality, or gender have to do with higher moral enterprise? Such attributes are superficial characteristics only, and have nothing to do with foundational moral principles.  Cato the Elder, a Roman educator, taught the future leaders of the empire not only the practical elements of leadership – strategy, management, organization, rhetoric, and policy – but the moral ones.  Rome would never survive without a grounding in the moral principles of honesty, courage, discipline, compassion, respect, and honor.  These principles were most important for Rome’s leadership, but essential for all.  Modern China is still based on Confucian moral principles – an ethos, a philosophical foundation on which the society can be governed and prosper.

It is respect for and adherence to these fundamental principles which should guide America.  Traits of gender, race, and ethnicity are superficial, secondary, and insignificant relative to them.

The idea of whiteness as an evil in and of itself is an outgrowth of this myopic focus on multiculturalism.  It is not surprising that those who have raised ‘inclusivity’ to a higher moral order by fiat alone – that is without philosophical or historical grounding – are now vilifying those who are assumed to be its enemies.  It is not enough to demand a just, fair, and equal society as Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin did; but to play a perverse zero sum game of racial politics.  Only if white people are marginalized, dismissed, and removed from cultural importance can minorities thrive.

Dismissing white European civilization as nothing more than an incidental, valueless bit of history denies its foundational values.  It is no coincidence that all great cultures, both East and West, share the same principles.  Cato the Elder and Confucius are only two examples.  Respect for the past does not imply a vain hope for a resurgence of white supremacy in an age of threatening multiculturalism, but a validation for historical, universal values.

Educators, intimidated by punitive progressive ideology, are hesitant to speak in other than critical terms of America’s white, European past.  They have been indoctrinated, brainwashed, and threatened.  Any mention of historical legacy without couching it in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity is considered heretical.  One may refer to kings, queens, shahs, emperors, and shoguns but only if their predatory, racist, supremacist intentions and actions are central to the discussion. 

The two Blooms, Allan and Harold, have made their voices heard on the importance of Western civilization and its necessary focus in American education.  Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind delves into what he believes is the "Great Books" dilemma. He believes that the "great books" of Western thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom—but more importantly, that "our students have lost the practice of and the taste of reading". Because of this, students are unable to derive their beliefs from evidence, from central texts, or any print source at all. Bloom contends that without an understanding of important older texts, such as Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's The Prince, modern students lack any reference point with which they can critically think about or address current events. Students are instead left with vague and abstract ideas of "good" and "evil".

Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon assails "the current disease of moral smugness that is destroying literary study in the name of socio-economic justice." He loftily derides the notion that literature either has a social mission or can profitably be discussed in its own social and historical context. For Bloom, literary interest is always a question of artistic merit, which rests on the degree of "literary individuality and poetic autonomy" a text achieves.

The American progressive Left is not content just to ignore history; it intends to expunge it from education and society.  The cancel culture is determined to erase any and all who they consider tainted by ‘racism’, a catch-all phrase to include all offenses against women, gays, and ethnic minorities as well as blacks.  Under that deformed rubric, all American history is tainted; and no period is exempted from censure.  All wars are capitalist adventurism, the market economy is ruled by Wall Street predators, Westward Expansion was the deliberate annihilation of indigenous populations; the arts are continuing vehicles for white elitism; and education is the academic version of the slave plantation.

Let alone the great monarchs and thinkers of Europe, America’s Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and Adams – a genius cluster rarely found in any period of history and men of character, insight, intellectual brilliance, and political influence – are dismissed, relegated, and ignored.

This trend cannot continue and will not.  Despite the insistence of the Left that they are are the arbiters of culture and the guides to a better world, they are retrograde and destructive, autocratic, arrogant and intellectually illiterate.   They cannot last.