Dividing Politics and Religion

Spirituality Column #261
November 8, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Dividing Politics and Religion
By Bob Walters

On this off-year Election Day, let’s take an off-beat tour of America’s mix of church and state. The Bible gets first “ups.”

Jesus separated church and state long before the eighteenth century secular humanists identified and attached the inalienable rights of man to modernity. Rights, by the way, are not in the Bible; responsibilities are.

One can consider the entirety of the New Testament and understand the unique moral and creative wholeness of Christian freedom in Jesus Christ.

Or, one can take the common Gospel verse “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:12:17, Luke 20:25), and see that Caesar (specifically here “Caesar’s money” or euphemistically “Rome’s man-made government”) and God play on different teams.

The apostle Paul declares the primacy of our “citizenship in Heaven” (Philippians 3:17, 20), but also invokes his own Roman citizenship in order to be heard (Acts 21:39) and then not to be executed (Acts 22:22ff). In Romans 13 Paul says government is ordained by God and that if we “owe taxes, [then] pay taxes” (verse 7).

While Paul seems to indicate the scary proposition that “Government is God,” he doesn’t, and it’s not. Jesus Christ is God, and Jesus plainly says that while both He (Jesus) and we (Christians) are “in the world,” neither He nor we are “of the world” (John 15:19, 17:14, 16). Christ commands that God is first, and that we are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 19:19), and even to love our enemies (5:44).

What the United State Constitution and all it amendments describe is a political context within which the creative freedom of man and the God-ordained morality of “love others as we love ourselves” can prosper and thrive. Over 224 years they have mostly – though not always – thrived, but it is only in the Christian moral context that this kind of document is possible.

Democracy demands moral responsibility, which is different from the “fair” (read “blind”) application of “religious freedom” the secular modern world mistakenly equates and jingoistically describes as “all religions are the same.” They, um, aren’t.

Moral discernment is the first casualty of secularism, which replaces God’s moral truth – Jesus Christ – with man’s moral relativism.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Under God” we enjoy freedom and defend a “government of, by, and for the People.” It certainly can and will “perish from the earth” lest we understand, and understand soon, the indivisible equation of our citizenship both in Heaven and as Americans.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recently read about and laments Europe’s cultural disestablishment of Christianity. He is sure we’ll either learn from Europe’s example, or die the same spiritual death.

Safe Place to Tell the Truth

Spirituality Column #206
October 19, 2010
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Safe Place to Tell the Truth
By Bob Walters

We respect and trust people who tell the truth.

So how is it we’ve slipped into a vast public place where it is not politically correct – often, even illegal – to claim that capital-T Truth actually exists?

Certainly, this isn’t a sudden development. Humanity has been slipping in that direction for a long time … maybe for 2,000 years since Jesus said “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” (John 14:6).

In this country, the Truth has been seriously slipping from public view since Knowledge and Truth became an academic dichotomy after the American Civil War. Whether in the public square, a city council, a courthouse (that dispenses justice), a great university or a humble local school system, Truth today is out of vogue.

Our institutions instead clamor for facts and research, not the Truth. They want answers. They often want to do the right thing … overlooking, of course, the utterly inconvenient logic that absent Truth, right and wrong don’t exist. Neither does freedom. Neither does justice. Neither do ethics.

Instead, public institutions abide by a socially acceptable and tautologically nonsensical truth, which is that one can claim any truth one wants, and it will be accepted in the loftiest Ivory Towers of the Academy … but call it Science. Call it Progressive. Call it Green. Call it Social Justice.

Just – please – don’t claim a Truth from the author of Truth, the only person in the history of mankind or in any religion to claim to be the Truth: Jesus Christ. Leave Him out of it; lest you offend someone. Christ as Truth is an unwanted opinion.

The, um, truth, of course, is that the Truth of Jesus Christ has pretty much always been, for competing doctrines or most governments, an unwanted opinion. Exhibits A and B are the Pharisees and Pontius Pilate.

America was supposed to be different because our founders believed:
1. It was unwise to codify religion in our Constitution, and
2. Only God’s free Truth residing in the free hearts of ethical citizens would prosper and congeal a free society.
3. Truth was cherished by the people

Dallas Willard’s just-released book, “A Place for Truth,” published by The Veritas Forum, contains a series of on-campus presentations on Truth by many of the world’s greatest thinkers: Christians, philosophers, scientists, atheists.

The book is encouraging, fascinating, challenging and … has a lot of truth.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) warns the faint hearted, the book is an open academic discussion. Thankfully, the good guys win.

Reason and Discovery

Spirituality Column #151
September 29, 2009
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville
(Indianapolis North Suburban newspapers)

Reason and Discovery
By Bob Walters

It slipped my notice, but Sept. 17 was the 222nd birthday of the U.S. Constitution.

I am fascinated by the Christian and non-Christian implications of America’s founding philosophies, and by the mix of religious and non-religious Colonials who all agreed that personal liberty, economic autonomy, spiritual freedom and limited government composed the best state-of-being for mankind.

“Separation of church and state” appears nowhere in America’s founding documents. It was penned in an otherwise obscure letter written by Thomas Jefferson; a “reason and nature” deist who believed God created the world and left it to run itself.

While “Father of Our Country” George Washington wrote fabulous Christian prayers, Jefferson, like several of his contemporaries, was a humanist who dismissed the Christian supernatural – virgin birth, miracles, Christ’s resurrection, etc.

Jefferson framed the liberty-loving language of the Declaration of Independence and had almost nothing to do with the writing of the Constitution. “Separation of church and state” is nonetheless considered a Jeffersonian dictum and Constitutional tradition.

Nearly forgotten is that it was uber-patriot Thomas Paine, not Jefferson, who wrote rebelliously against religion.

Famed for “Common Sense” published in January 1776, Paine provided the American revolutionaries – from farmers to intellectuals – with a compelling call to arms. The Declaration of Independence was signed that summer, and in late 1776 Paine’s “Crisis” was published containing the line, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Paine’s words crystallized the Colonials’ yearning for freedom and lit the emotional fires of the American Revolution. Yet negative blowback from his anti-religious views caused him to leave America for Europe where he was an outcast in England and nearly executed in France. His 1794 anti-religion book “Age of Reason” sparked further outrage.

Paine considered scripture to be mere hearsay. Not quite an atheist, he believed in one God, hoped for “happiness beyond this life,” and obviously conceded the existence of men’s souls.

But he saw no faith, only “reason,” and considered any church or religion an impediment to man’s freedom. “My own mind is my own church,” he wrote.

How many times we Christians hear that line, or some version thereof, when non-believers are invited to share our faith. “I’m too smart for church,” they imply.

It seems reasonable that God gave us the great gift of intelligence not so we could merely find ourselves, but so we could discover Him.

That’s the proper use of freedom.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com) hopes we are indeed “one nation under God,” and not a reasonable facsimile.