To Save America Page 4

  For most doctors and businesses, litigation reform is important but it’s not dire. But for the trial lawyers—the reactionary defenders of the old order—this is a life-or-death issue. Their status, their incomes, their ambitions to someday own a large private plane and a baseball or football team, or to buy a Senate seat or a governorship—all these dreams could be destroyed if litigation reform led to fewer lawsuits and smaller awards.

  Anyone who doubts how tough this fight will be should talk with a colleague of mine at the Center for Health Transformation, Dr. John Gill, who helped lead the Texas malpractice reform effort. After winning a seven-year fight to get the Texas legislature to approve malpractice reform, he and his colleagues came to a dramatic conclusion: the only way to ensure trial lawyers didn’t undermine the law was to get it written into the Texas state constitution. And that’s just what they did; the people of Texas approved tort reform in a public referendum.

  10. Religious Belief Versus Secular Oppression

  Secularism is the heart of the secular-socialist movement. I’m not talking about secularism simply as a lack of religious conviction. I mean secularism as an explicitly anti-religious outlook expressed in policies designed to ban all religious expression from the public square.

  Seeking to create a man-centered world, leftist elites invoke secularism as a pleasant-sounding term to disguise their egocentric worldview. In their minds, there are no God-given rules for us to follow. There are no Ten Commandments, or really any commandments of any kind.

  Secular elites, particularly in academia, the media, and the courts, are engaged in a steady assault on religious belief. They believe religious expression should be private, marginal, and irrelevant. It’s okay to be religious as long as the religion has no meaning. It’s fine to be vaguely spiritual as long as you don’t try to translate it into some kind of historic religion, especially Christianity.

  The Left originally appealed for tolerance for minority views. Now they demand obedience to these minority views.

  The secularizing pattern, beginning with the 1963 Supreme Court decision outlawing school prayer, has built such momentum that two Connecticut Democratic legislators introduced a bill that would have effectively driven the Catholic Church out of their state.

  Furthermore, in the 2010 U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts (a colony founded by Puritans searching for religious liberty), Democratic nominee and state attorney general Martha Coakley suggested Catholics shouldn’t serve in emergency rooms because they might hold unacceptable pro-life views. In a similar attempt at exclusion, the Left are trying to restrict the activities of faith-based social service agencies that believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

  Religious expression is also under attack in our courts: a plaintiff in Southern California has filed a lawsuit seeking to knock down a cross erected in 1934 in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Other lawsuits are trying to stop us from uttering the phrase “one nation under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Traditionally, America has been a religious society based on the fundamental belief that there is something out there larger than ourselves. Our subordination to God sets boundaries for what we can or should do to ourselves and others. It also creates expectations for us to live up to; a belief in God turns a wasted life into a betrayal of God’s gifts.

  If we are endowed by our Creator with the right to pursue happiness, we also have a responsibility to use God’s gifts to pursue happiness (remembering that happiness in this context means wisdom and virtue).

  There is a profound reason Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program stresses the importance of God. Simply read the twelve steps and imagine what little would be left if God were removed from this process of saving and rebuilding lives.

  THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS10

  1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

  3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

  5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

  6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

  7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

  8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

  9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

  A federal official once proposed that a federal anti-addiction program be developed based on Alcoholics Anonymous—but “without all the God stuff.” That shows the depth of anti-religious antipathy in elite circles: AA may be the world’s most successful addiction recovery program, but the government apparently could improve it by banishing God.

  Chuck Colson, with his extraordinarily effective prison ministry, faces similar opposition from secular elites. The prison ministry system undoubtedly works; it has enabled thousands of people to leave prison as profoundly changed men and women, able to lead decent, productive lives. But many elites would rather condemn prisoners to hopeless lives of secular despair than risk saving them through religious faith. Sadly, simply due to this kind of prejudice, there is significant resistance to prison ministry activities.

  Chasing religion from the public square inevitably lowers public morality. That’s because a belief in God limits our tendencies toward hedonism, exploiting others, and abusing power. If you are subordinate to God then by definition you are subordinate to rules that transcend your own ego and your own personal appetites.

  The Founding Fathers overwhelmingly agreed that religion was crucial in sustaining the culture of responsibility needed to keep the country free.b The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 says, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

  Note the order: first comes religion. Then comes morality. Knowledge is the last goal.

  The move toward secularism has harmed American society. Look at the problems affecting today’s teenagers, compared to the same data for 1963, the year the Supreme Court banned school prayer.

  • Drug addiction is up.

  • Teenage pregnancy is up.

  • Drinking is up.

  • Violence is up.

  • Rape in schools is up.

  • Assaults on teachers are up.

  • The display of disrespectful attitudes is up.

  Did the elimination of school prayer help our schools? No. To the contrary, the decline of morality in school and in society overall has given rise to a destructive pattern that the late Senator Pat Moynihan captured perfectly in his article, “Defining Deviancy Down.”

  The secular-socialist effort to drive God and morality to one hour a week in Church, Synagogue, Mosque, or Temple, but to preserve the other 167 hours a week for secularism, has deeply weakened our capacity to distinguish right from wrong and to sacrifice short-term gratification for a commitment to permanent moral principles.

  Perhaps more than any other area, the Left will fight any rise in religious expression. Secularism is their guiding philosophy, which they enforce with ruthless intolerance. If they find a cross in the middle of the Mojave Desert unacceptable, imagine how they will fight the restoration of God to the public square.

  Throug
h any means necessary, from violent street protests to the insidious expansion of bureaucratic power, the Left have spent the last four decades tightening their grasp over America and its most important institutions—the federal bureaucracy, academia, Hollywood, Big Labor, and even big business. From that dominating position, they have propagated a completely foreign set of secular-socialist values. Rejecting American traditions of hard work, self-sufficiency, and honesty, they encourage Americans to learn how to game the system—sucking the maximum resources out of our country while contributing the minimum.

  Once people accept this outlook, they quickly realize the bigger government gets, the more opportunity there is to game it. A small government with relatively few resources and strict oversight is difficult to cheat. In a leviathan like the Left want to create, however, with more bureaucrats controlling more money, it’s much easier to buy favors and abuse programs. This is a lesson we should learn from Europe, where the massive, largely unaccountable EU bureaucracy is mired in waste, fraud, and inefficiency.

  The struggle between America’s historic value system and that of secular socialism will be intense. The Left did not fight this long just to give up when they’re so close to victory: creating a socialist system where a voting majority, dependent on the state’s largess, will permanently vote for the party of big government. And so Americans who prefer traditional America to the socialist vision are left with one option: to stand up and fight.

  In the following chapters, I’ll explain the goals and methods of the secular-socialist machine in more detail, and propose policies and strategies to help save America from its manipulations.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Why “Secular- Socialist Machine” Is the Only Way to Describe the Left

  While it may sound alarmist, the best way to describe the opponents of American liberty is this: they are a secular-socialist machine.

  Many people, especially on the Left, will reject this term. So let me explain why it’s the only honest description of the way Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the many left-wing power figures and organizations operate.

  The “Left” is a term stemming from the seating of political parties in the National Assembly during the French Revolution. The radicals were seated on the left and the conservatives on the right. Today, the Left comprise a range of opinion favoring various levels of state control over society and over the economy. So the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda is indeed leftist, but it is also a unique collection of policies and attitudes that deserves a more specific description.

  “Liberalism” also fails to capture the values and beliefs that animate this agenda. Originally describing the nineteenth-century movement for free markets and limited government, liberalism later came to signify President Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR’s liberalism, however, was so much more accepting of God (see his national radio prayer on D-Day, for example), so much more pro-work, and so much more concerned with defending America (FDR tried German saboteurs by military tribunal and executed them within six weeks of their capture), that the modern Left can honestly be characterized as a radical break from FDR’s worldview.

  Today, it’s not liberalism but secular socialism that drives the Left’s policies, which are enacted through a political machine. Because defining the Left in these terms will be controversial, we should briefly examine the interlocking relationship of secularism, socialism, and machine politics.

  SECULARISM: ONE COUNTRY WITHOUT GOD

  Describing the Left as “secular” will be controversial for two reasons. First, when you discuss a left-wing politician’s secular policies, many on the Left, abetted by the mainstream media, will indignantly insist you are accusing them of being atheists or apostates. Don’t take the bait. We cannot know what is in the hearts of other men and women, and any speculation is an exercise in hubris and futility.

  Instead, our central argument lies in the second reason for controversy. It is one rooted in historic fact and American history, which makes it a winning argument for us. But it requires a calm, steady, and repeated explanation of the facts to counter the bed of lies that has obscured our understanding of the “separation of church and state” and “religious freedom.”

  Among some Americans, particularly the academic elite, it has become unchallenged conventional wisdom that the First Amendment’s establishment clause—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—means the U.S. government must purge all religion from public life. To understand just how wrong this interpretation is, we need to discuss what the term “secular” actually means.

  The Latin root of “secular” is “saeculum,” which meant “an age,” or roughly, a human lifespan. It is closely related to the word “century,” or 100 years. The connection from this original meaning to the term’s modern understanding as “non-religious” is its emphasis on the “current” and “the now” rather than being concerned with an afterlife.

  A purely secular outlook does not acknowledge God. It does not consider the implications of one’s actions beyond the impact they make within one’s own life. It does not recognize any higher moral order beyond that which human beings have rationally developed.

  The argument that the Constitution’s establishment clause requires a purely secular government is fatally flawed because America’s historic conception of rights is clearly dependent upon a higher moral order than the laws of man.

  For example, the Declaration of Independence, America’s founding political document, boldly proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  This extraordinary sentence makes some key assumptions: that God is sovereign over the affairs of the universe; that God created man; and that man must obey an order of justice God Himself has instituted.

  How then can a purely secular worldview account for the original American understanding of our rights and freedoms?

  It cannot.

  The secular-socialist Left bitterly oppose anyone who speaks the truth about the central role of “our Creator” in the Founders’ formulation of our rights and freedoms. When confronted with the facts, they often resort to ad hominem attacks, arguing that if you oppose militant secularism in the public square, then you must be endorsing a theocracy. This is a ludicrous, insulting charge, especially when so many people throughout the world today are enslaved by religious dictatorships.

  When forging the Constitution, the Founding Fathers did not see the need to choose between the fraternal twin oppressions of a militantly secular government or a state-sponsored and imposed religion. Their new, American model was a country with no official national religion where everyone could worship as they pleased. But they were also careful not to shut out religion from public life. The Founders saw religion as vital to the survival of republican government because they believed the maintenance of liberty requires virtue.

  That’s why, in addition to the establishment clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. . . . ”), the First Amendment also contains the free exercise clause (“. . . or prevent the free exercise thereof”).

  That’s why George Washington declared, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensible supports.”

  That’s why John Adams said, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

  And that’s why Thomas Jefferson, probably the least religious of the Founding Fathers, stated, “Reading, reflection, and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts . . . in which all religions agree.”

  It’s worth focusing on Jefferson, because he is the Founding
Father most cited by militant secularists. Jefferson, of course, wrote the phrase “separation of church and state,” which appeared in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists. For fifty years, a deeply anti-religious court system has used this phrase to justify banning school prayer, tearing down crosses on public land, and even threatening the Boy Scouts, whose program includes a multi-denominational religious component.

  The importance of this five-word phrase from one of Jefferson’s private letters has been exaggerated and its meaning completely distorted. In fact, if you look at Jefferson’s public actions as vice president and later as president of the United States, it’s clear he did not intend the establishment clause to ban religion from the public square.

  The most obvious example is that two days after he penned the letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson attended church in the U.S. Capitol building. These services were acceptable to Jefferson (and James Madison, who also attended) because they were voluntary and non-discriminatory; many different preachers, and eventually priests, from various denominations led services. Jefferson also allowed other executive branch buildings to be used in a similar manner.

  It’s hard to square Jefferson’s support for church services in the U.S. Capitol building with the secular insistence that all matters of faith be banned from public life.

  Instead, it’s clear that Jefferson, like the rest of the Founders, wanted a government that allowed for public religious expression, but did not endorse any particular denomination. Doing so would preserve the rights of Americans of all faiths (and of no faith), while recognizing the importance of religion and morality to the Republic’s survival.