Trump’s crackdown on anti-Christian discrimination
Is religious liberty at stake in our time? President Trump has established a Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias meant to eliminate discrimination within the federal government.
The president has appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi to head this project. The goal is to “immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government.”
Steven Ertelt of LifeNews.com reports, “In his address [announcing the task force], President Trump also highlighted the importance of prosecuting acts of violence and vandalism against Christians. He pledged to ‘move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide.'”
To many believers, Trump’s pro-religious freedom stance is most welcome. Furthermore, I believe that the founders of America would applaud this – including those we could call the patron saints of the ACLU.
The Christian faith played an indisputable role in the founding of America. The Supreme Court reviewed all the evidence in the Trinity decision of 1892, where they declared, “This is a Christian nation.” And because America began as a Christian nation, people of all faiths or no faiths are welcome here.
A review of the facts of history show that the founders had no intention to banish religion from the public square. Let me marshal examples just from those who gave us the Constitution, which today is sometimes used as a club against religious freedom.
At the time of our Constitutional Convention, progress was so slow at first because of the participants’ many conflicts, some even despaired that they might not finish the task. Yet at the darkest moment during that hot summer of 1787, Ben Franklin – one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers – got up and gave an impassioned speech, imploring them that they needed God’s help to finish the task.
Franklin declared, “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this – that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall without His notice, can an empire rise without His aid?”
He continued, “We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House, 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: We shall be divided by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages.”
A variation of Franklin’s request for prayer was adopted, the founders prayed together (on July 4th), and the United States Constitution was finished a few months later.
James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution, called the freedom of conscience “the most sacred of all property.” He was a part of the committee that hired chaplains for the legislature and for the military.
Banish religion from the public square? Not according to the “father of the Constitution,” as some people call Madison.
The man presiding over the convention was George Washington – the “Sir” in Franklin’s above-cited speech. Washington said that we need to imitate Christ, whom he called “the Divine Author of our Blessed Religion,” or we could never hope to be a happy nation.
The man who spoke at the convention more than anyone was Gouverneur Morris, a representative from the state of Pennsylvania. It was he who co-wrote the Preamble to our governing document – which famously begins, “We the People.”
The National Constitutional Center notes, “Morris … spoke more than any other member of the Convention, a testament to his famous oratorical abilities. He gave 173 speeches over the course of the Convention, more than second-place James Wilson (168) and third place James Madison (161).”
Did Morris want to ban Christianity from public discourse? Not at all. He wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “The open contempt of religion, also cannot but be offensive to all sober minded men.”
Alexander Hamilton represented the state of New York at the convention. Although at one point, he confessed to committing adultery, he was a regular churchgoer. Two years before he died, he wrote, “Let an association be formed to be denominated ‘The Christian Constitutional Society,’ its object to be first: The support of the Christian religion. Second: The support of the United States.” Hamilton’s premature death in 1804 in a duel in which he was reluctant to participate and in which he chose not to shoot at his opponent, Aaron Burr, ended any plans for establishing such a group.
Thus endeth the history lesson. And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. President Trump is doing the right thing to try and curb anti-Christian discrimination. The men who gave us the Constitution would concur.