Dub McClish
Dark and malevolent elements in our nation have led a powerful crusade in recent decades to obliterate any connection between the founding of our nation and the Bible. That the men who wrote our Bill of Rights and Constitution—and who were among its earliest officeholders were men who believed in the God of the Bible and in Jesus as His Son—is simply a matter of fact. Only dishonest or grossly ignorant men deny this historical fact, as the following evidence attests:
• All 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence believed in the God of the Bible, as evidenced by their numerous references to Him in that fundamental historical document.
• Patrick Henry, famous for declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death,” led up to that bold statement as follows: An appeal to arms and the God of hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle sir, is not of the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death. He further wrote: It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
• Thomas Jefferson wrote in the front of his Bible: I am a Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our Creator and, I hope, to the pure doctrine of Jesus also.
• George Washington was a devout believer in God and the Bible. He stated in his famous “Farewell Speech”: It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible. Of all the dispositions and habits that lead to political prosperity, our religion and morality are the indispensable supporters. Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that our national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
While noting that he expressed some serious misconceptions about the plan of salvation and the work of the Holy Spirit, none can gainsay the fact of Washington’s deep faith in God as expressed in the words he wrote in his personal prayer book: Oh, eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the lamb and purge my heart by the Holy Spirit. Daily, frame me more and more in the likeness of thy son, Jesus Christ, that living in thy fear, and dying in thy favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind and let the world be filled with the knowledge of thy son, Jesus Christ.
• James Madison, principal author of our Constitution, stated: We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.
• John Adams, our second president, once addressed military leaders as follows: We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
• John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and who later served as president of the American Bible Society, wrote in 1816: “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest, of our Christian Nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”
Justice Jay’s sentiment stands in almost incredible contrast to the convictions of many of his successors on this court, especially over the past half-century. Our Founding Fathers would be horrified and incredulous at some of the court’s decisions that have denied the place of the Bible and its influence in our history.
• John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S. President, stated on July 4, 1821: “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.”
• Harvard, our nation’s oldest university (chartered in 1636), was founded to educate men to preach the Bible, as the following statement of purpose indicates: “To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches.” Its original motto, “For Christ and the Church,” appears on its official seal. An early student handbook stated the school’s concept of the purpose of all education:
Let every student be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of all sound learning and knowledge.
• Noah Webster (of dictionary fame) published his Blue-backed Speller in 1783, which became a standard text for American schools for almost a century, selling 80 million copies. Webster based most of his spelling and grammar exercises on Bible stories and precepts.
• William Holmes McGuffey wrote six volumes of The McGuffey Reader, beginning in 1836. They became the most widely used schoolbooks for the remainder of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, eventually having a circulation of 125 million copies. McGuffey drew his reading lessons from the Bible, exalting Biblical morals and American ideals. He once wrote:
The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our notions on character of God, on the great moral Governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions. From no source has the author drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred Scriptures. From all these extracts from the Bible I make no apology.
Such historical information as cited and quoted above (a bare sampling of what is available) has been systematically expunged from the textbooks from which our children have been taught in public schools over the past fifty years. A series of Supreme Court decisions since 1962 have drawn an imaginary line between the Biblical roots of our nation and its public institutions, a line not found in our Constitution and obviously that never existed in the minds of the patriots who framed that marvelous document. These decisions have given great impetus to atheistic, humanistic, and secularist ideologues (such as the misnamed American Civil Liberties Union) to obliterate every vestige of connection between the Bible and America’s heritage.
The first of these foolish and flawed decisions forbade prayer in the schools, followed soon by a ruling that forbade Bible reading. In a 1980 decision, the Court ruled that even posting a copy of the Ten Commandments in a school building is unconstitutional. The ruling included the following brainless rationale:
If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the school children to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective…
It is an amazing irony that the very building that houses the Supreme Court has several depictions of the Ten Commandments in or on it, four of them in which Moses is holding the tables of stone. Further, the Capitol building, National Archives, Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, as well as every piece and size of our currency and coin are inscribed with words that register the fact that our nation was formed in a matrix of faith in God and the Bible. To fill the vacuum left by removal of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and prayer in our schools, we have sex education, evolution, metal detectors, illicit drugs, and violence. Is it any wonder our nation is in such an awful mess?
Let us all study carefully the convictions of those who are running for public office and without fail vote for those who are not ashamed of America’s Biblical roots. Let us also pray earnestly that many, many citizens of our great nation will do likewise.
