Silencing Christians

I am very often astonished that in a nation that was founded upon Judaeo-Christian principles and whose people’s unprecedented freedoms, liberties, and prosperity is due solely to the Bill of Rights of the Federal Constitution, that there seems to be scant exemplification, reverence, or application of either of them truly visible in the society today.  And yet, so many people are puzzled as to why we are socially, morally, and economically declining as a nation.

Too many of us no longer know where to seek for answers, outside of ourselves or another Man.  Too many of us have an estranged relationship to what Truth is, if they have any knowledge of it’s existence at all.  Truth has been relegated to one’s own momentary opinion, with no foundation nor challenged precedence.  The definition of Constitutional Rights and that of liberties have been blurred to that today Rights draw no literal bounds to that of one’s Life, Liberty, or Pursuit of Happiness/Property.  It now seems to be defined as to from anyone based on their capacity, to all based on their need.

So I guess that I should not be surprise to read such polls as the one that Gallop did in 2016 that showed that 55% of Americans between 18 and 29 years old has a favorable view of Socialism; or of the June 2017 Pew Research Center’s poll that revealed that “Overall, 33% of the public now favors such a “single payer” approach to health insurance, up 5 percentage points since January and 12 points since 2014.” ; or that research from the Institute for Ethics in Business at Duquesne University in July 2016 reported, millennials using principled moral reasoning has dramatically dropped to approx. 25% of the time., much lower than previous generations.  I do believe that there is a significant causation and correlation from those troubling stats and that of the report by the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2016 report that illustrated the stunning growth of Americans no longer affiliating themselves with a particular religion, therefore becoming part of the “Religiously Unaffiliated”. It is more troubling and curious as how that trend accelerated since 2000 and that it reports shockingly that, “nearly four in ten (39%) young adults (ages 18-29) are religiously unaffiliated”.  This coupled with a more recent report, September 2017, that a poll by the University of Pennsylvania revealed, what many of us intuitively know, that many of the American populace are highly illiterate when it comes to the Constitution or how the government works, in particular the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution [the Bill of Rights] and Branches of the Federal Government as reported.  The poll exposed that remarkably 37% couldn’t name any of the five rights protected by First Amendment [government shall make no law establishing a religion, the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, and right to petition the government]. Only approx. 50% even mentioned Freedom of Speech, and only 33% could name one of the three branches of the U.S. government, while just 26% could name all the three branches – the Legislative, Executive, and the Judicial Branch.  All of this really ties into an Dailymail.com article that I read from 2011 that said shockingly, “70 per cent of Americans do not know what the Constitution is, and six per cent don’t even know when Independence Day falls.” So the next time you hear someone spout off saying, that having good healthcare is a Constitutional Right, or that speaking out against the U.S flag while at work is protected by the First Amendment, or such, understand that stupid and ignorance is the new cool.  And pray for them.  Pray for our nation.

Despite there being absolutely no evidence of Socialism or Communism ever being an engine to economic prosperity for any nation, to the contrary it harshly stifles and suppressed people’s societal and economic growth – I offer Exhibit #1, the economic basket case of  Venezuela.  Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher prophetically stated, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”  Yet, many of us, particularly the mis-educated young, still dream of it’s arrival to the shores of the one nation that has brought more prosperity to more people of the world in less than 300 yrs. than ever before via the principles that God grants one to own the rights to his or her labor, and what it produces, that one alone is responsible for his or her life, and the governance thereof, and that he or she has the right to pursue his of her dreams and happiness free of government – so long as it does not infringe on that of another.  And there is the rub.

The reason why neither the Constitution nor Christendom is revered nor robustly taught or allowed to be expressed in today’s America is deliberate and purposeful.  One cannot teach of the Constitution which includes the presence of God.  And Judaeo-Christianity cannot be allowed to be the dominate religion, freely taught and expressed, because it places God as the Supreme Ruler, not the government. And the Bible provides specific references to how we should govern our lives, to be self-reliant, and how we should treat one another, i.e., self-governance. Government lives off power that it gets from citizens being dependent on it.

Attempts to fundamentally transform America into a Socialist or government-controlled society didn’t just begin over the past 8 years, or so.  It has been in earnest effect some 60 + years.  America was specifically established with extreme limits on the power of the government and for it to be governed by us, the people, not the other way around.  The freedoms of the individual was prescribed to be superior to that of the collective/group.  The Founders of this great nation were generally highly educated in history and well-studied in the Christian religion. And they clearly understood that success of this nation is eternally tied to free self-governed individuals and the blessing of God.  The growth of secularist ideology and Socialist principles, such as socialized medicine, i.e., Single-Payer or Obamacare, collectivism, the never-ending brutal assault on Christianity and it’s tenets, and the minimizing or demonizing of the principles of the Constitution, and the Founders themselves, is all connected.  Socialism is the extreme antitheses to American Capitalism, just as Secularism is to Judaeo-Christendom.  And we cannot have an America as it was prescribed by our Founders without the Constitution, the restrictions on the power of the government and the expressed acknowledgement of Divine Rights, as well as the Founding Fathers. The baton that Ronald Reagan passed to us is still in each of our hands, “It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. … Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”  The most important components to the success of this nation’s posterity is a civically literate and engaged people and guidance by Divine Providence.