11.25.2004 | Godless Nation?

Just a quick note, and a depressing one it is. Via the Claremont Institutute, we learn that the Declaration of Independence has been banned:

In the city of Cupertino, California, a fifth grade public school teacher at Stevens Creek School, Stephen Williams, has been prohibited by the principal from distributing the Declaration of Independence among other documents from the American Founding. Why? Because they mention God.

Getting past the activist jurisprudence that may have fostered a climate in which God is banned from the public square, I think that there is a large majority of Americans who would find these actions in California despicable and unamerican in the extreme.

Let us hope that some decency and respect for our nation's Christian founders and Christian foundation remain. After all, it was those very Christian men who fought against having any one sect becoming the established religion. They insisted that even those who don't share their version of faith be free to worship, or not, as their conscience dictated.

Make no mistake. The founders did this not just out of self interest. They did it because of their faith; a faith that told them that all men are created, by God, as equal. And the dignity of each person comes not from any secular thing, but from God. This is a radical idea in history, and it took post-Enlightenment Christians to put it into practice without the deadly excesses of the French or Russian Revolutions.

It should come as no shock that both of those experiments were dismal failures, because both denied God a place in the public square and insisted on the perfectibility of mere mortal men. Our Founders were both humble before God, and brilliant, to see, well before either of those failed revolutions, that without God as our anchor we are but brutes.

Even with God we often fail. To banish God from our commonweal will mean, sooner or later, that our failure will be certain.