Note: This is the second post I wrote for the short-lived anonymous activist blog I started in early 2007 dedicated to strident Christian politics. It had been four years since I first heard of the concept of gay marriage, and I could see clearly which way the cultural winds were blowing. This was my attempt to fight for the culturally-Christian America of my youth. As described in the note to the first blog article, within a few months of starting the blog, I began to move away from Christian militancy and towards Libertarianism, motivated by the campaign of Ron Paul. Nevertheless, though my methods and political priorities have changed, I think the argument here is basically sound, as the continual encroachment of radical progressive fundamentalism throughout the West has shown. (DL, June 10, 2023).
Judge Wolf’s ruling is . . . a treacherous collaboration with the evil empire which, though fallen in its Soviet form, lives yet in the ideology of godlessness that has been appropriated into the halls of American justice. -Just Words 1.1
American Christians must wake up.
They must awaken to the imminent threats facing their civil and religious liberties–threats which cannot be overstated. There are forces at work in this country that are wholly dedicated to stamping out the social influence of America’s biblical heritage and of America’s Christians. Their watchword is “tolerance,” but these are nothing less then the uncompromising partisans of a god-less ideology.
On February 23, the same day federal Judge Mark Wolf dismissed Parker vs. Hurley in Massachusetts, Walter Cronkite gave a speech in San Jose, California for First Freedom First, “a new national movement” dedicated to halting “undue religious influence in government.” This group’s chilling goal, which is clearly laid out in a petition already boasting some 130,000 signatories, is the complete removal of Christian influence from public life in America.
Take, for example, item three: “Political candidates should not be endorsed or opposed by houses of worship” (petition). Not, “tax exempt organizations,” but “houses of worship.” The focus is not even on righting some perceived inequity in campaign financing; it is squarely on removing the influence of religion on public policy. Signatories of this petition want to make a pastor’s speech from his pulpit subject to legal review. For Walter Cronkite and the supporters of First Freedom First, a wall of separation between church and state means no church influence of any kind on the state (even if the majority of citizens want such influence), and—ultimately—no religious influence of one individual upon another unless it’s state sanctioned. To realize this god-less agenda, they turn to the only means that could possibly bring it to pass: government power. “We, the undersigned, call upon elected and appointed officials to . . . demonstrat[e] a commitment to” these policies. (petition). And how else could they demonstrate that commitment but by enacting totalitarian laws that would regulate the speech and actions of Christians in the practice of their faith?
Nor is this religion-suppressing ideology confined only to rallies and petitions. American government is daily becoming more blatant in its suppression of Christian freedoms, as Judge Wolf’s ruling in Parker vs. Hurley illustrates. And Judge Wolf is far from alone.
In April of 2003, Denver judge John W. Coughlin ruled that Cheryl Clark, a converted former lesbian, could not teach her daughter anything “that can be considered homophobic.” The ruling was specifically in regards to the teachings associated with her new-found Evangelical Christian faith.
In October of 1997, Alabama judge Ira DeMent ordered that the DeKalb County Board of Education be “permanently enjoined from . . . permitting . . . vocal prayer . . . regardless of whether the activity is initiated, led by, or engaged in by students.” To ensure comliance, Judge DeMent ordered the creation of a monitor position“[which] shall have the . . . authority to: enter any classroom or public school propert . . . or school-sponosred or school-initiated event for the purpose of observing and reporting . . . and collect[ing] complaints regarding any violation of” the court order.
In Omaha, Nebraska in 1989, in the case Gierke v. Blotzer, student James Gierke “was prohibited from reading his Bible silently during his free time, or even to open his Bible at school.”
The list could go on and will grow longer with time if Christians take no action.
Their first step must be to recognize the threat for what it is—manifestly comparable to an invasion by an actual atheist, totalitarian state.
Ronald Reagan confronted the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” He argued that the totalitarian threat came not simply from Soviet arms, but from Soviet godlessness. He contrasted Soviet atheism with Western theism and said that if the Western freedom was to survive, the West must remain committed to theism.
The Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause. . . . [T]hey repudiate all morality that proceeds from ‘supernatural ideas’ — that's their name for religion. . . . Whittaker Chambers . . . wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, “for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’” The Western world can answer this challenge, he wrote, “but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as communism’s faith in Man.”
Yet it is the same godless, man-centered, freedom-destroying ideology that Reagan targeted in the Soviets which is gradually entwining itself around America’s public life. There are no red banners, no jack boots; there has been no actual invasion. But the fundamental presuppositions about reality that have begun to take deep root in American government are the same as if there had been. The godless ideology legislates from the bench. It marches in the streets. It speaks to the media in coat and tie. It circulates petitions. It is here and now—with a home-grown, American face.
Clarity is important here. The individual judges that issued these rulings, and the people that supported them, are not of necessity themselves atheists. They may be agnostics, or even professed believers. But any brand of “tolerance” which by fiat erases religious influence from the public sphere for the sake of a secular “neutrality” ultimately serves an atheist agenda because it creates a state that is, for all practical purposes, atheist. It takes as its working principle an ideology that shrilly denies the existence of any absolute standard or reference point for knowledge, or morality, or public policy. There is no universal Truth or Justice, no absolute Right or Wrong—only perspectives. This ideology may retain the trappings of religion in some corners, but in its final denial of a transcendent authority that is relevant to the work-a-day lives of Americans and to which government policy is accountable, it is transparently atheist.
And American Christians must begin to confront it as such. They must begin to marshal the same uncompromising rhetoric that they so admire in Churchill and Reagan in their confrontations with totalitarianism. They must begin to call the evil what it is in the public sphere, or they will without quesiton eventually lose the right to do so.
Our founders never intened a wall of separation in the sense that Walter Cronkite and others like him demand. They understood that a nation can only be truly free if it is free under God. And any nation that replaces the Creator who endows with a human authority who allows, or not, as he sees fit, will ultimately be reduced to rule by petty, ruthless human gods.
Officium nos vocat.