Kamala, Jesus and the Founders
Recently, Kamala Harris, Democrat candidate for president, went off the teleprompter to counter some vocal detractors at one of her campaign stops.
The Western Journal reports that at a rally in Wisconsin, “Vice President Kamala Harris responded to hecklers saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ by telling them they were in the wrong place.” Specifically, she told them they were at the wrong rally.
The Western Journal adds: “Wisconsinite Jennifer McKinney happened to capture on video the moment the hecklers had called out and posted it on Instagram, saying, ‘Everyone just cheered and screamed for killing babies. So that was disappointing.'”
I can’t help but feel that a moment like this reveals the real views of the speaker – the views usually never put to print or into the teleprompter.
Does Jesus and His Lordship have anything to do with American politics? Today’s secularists, like Kamala Harris, like to act as if America is and should be completely secular. Even if some of America’s founders were religious, we’ve got to move on.
Move on to what? A godless vision for society, for the nation? Again, what triggered the shouts, “Jesus is Lord,” was the celebrating of killing babies.
There’s a link between a godless worldview and the destruction of human life, born or unborn.
The 20th century was marred by those nations that relentlessly waged war against Judeo-Christian values.
In his book “The Quest for God,” the late British historian Paul Johnson writes: “The two greatest institutional tyrannies of the century – indeed of all time – the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Union, were Godless constructs: modern paganism in the first case and openly proclaimed atheist materialism in the second. The death-camps and the slave-camps were products not of God but of anti-God. … Both these regimes persecuted Christians, the Soviet Union more thoroughly but in some respects less viciously than the Nazi Reich. Both these attempts to damage or crush Christianity failed utterly.”
Indeed, Christianity carried on worldwide – but in these two godless regimes, secularism caused the deaths of tens of millions.
Meanwhile, the very office that Kamala Harris strives for – the presidency – was an office created by those grounded in a Christian worldview. Law professor John Eidsmoe, who wrote the book “Christianity and the Constitution,” documents that at least 50 to 52 of those men were professing Christians in good standing in Trinitarian churches.
More importantly, it was their biblical worldview that declares the sinfulness of man that caused them to divide up power so that no one individual or small group could lord it over society.
During the Constitutional Convention, in the hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, after about seven weeks of getting nowhere, Ben Franklin (not an orthodox Christian in terms of his doctrine) stood up and gave an impassioned call for prayer.
He declared, “I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth – that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that ‘except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.”
He called on them to pray together, and a variation of his request was granted and the Constitution was finally produced.
And, of course, the Constitution was predicated on the earlier document, the Declaration of Independence, which acknowledges that God is the source of our rights. Period.
The founders wanted religion to be voluntary, not forced, but they wanted it to flourish because religion leads to virtue and virtue is needed to maintain freedom.
Thomas Jefferson, not an orthodox Christian, said that to force people to believe something contrary to their will is a violation of the principle that “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and it goes against “the plan of the holy author of our religion [i.e., Jesus], who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.”
So religious belief was not to be coerced. But it was nonetheless necessary to the health of a free republic. In his Farewell Address (1796), George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity religion are morality are indispensable supports.”
In the choice between a godless worldview that cuts us off from the source of our rights and has led to the extermination of millions, and the Christian worldview of the founders that led to freedom and flourishing, I’ll stick with the founders.