Separation of Church and State and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

So I do want to welcome you to this year’s seminar, God and Masters. With 2020 being a presidential election year, we thought that a seminar exploring the intersection between politics and the Christian faith would be beneficial. So hopefully you’ll have fun with it. I know we had fun getting prepared for the discussion today. The title God and Masters is a poke at the French Revolution whose rallying cry was no God and no masters.

Many today wrongly equate the French Revolution with the American War for Independence. You often hear comparisons made between the two. But in the case of the Americans, the citizens were not attempting to throw off heavenly or earthly allegiances. They were simply trying to get the king of England at that time to honor the agreements that he had made with them and when all those attempts failed, they decided that their only option then was to begin a revolt against that rulership. But the lack of historicity today, and the understanding of how God, how belief in God and his natural law influenced the development of America has contributed, I believe, to a lot of the political turmoil that we see today.

We just have lost sight of what our own history is and the influence of Christianity in the development of our own political way of life. And so we have a big mess today, and we can see that even being reflected in the polls today. This is a Pew poll, I think, showing over time, and you can even see by president there, the question, you know, public trust in government keeps falling and getting lower and lower, closer and closer to historic lows. It looks like from probably about the Nixon era on, you can see how things have really tanked to where it is today, some of its all-time lows. But it’s just a reflection again of where we’re at that we’re just our public.

And I think it’s bled into the Christian community too. It’s just, eh, government, who needs them. And so we have a sort of either somewhere between a let them be, let them do their own thing to an outright hatred of it. But hopefully we’ll see that actually it’s something ordained by God and something we should be a part of the process. Many Christians today that we would identify you know as true followers of Christ have just written off politics altogether as something that’s of the world and beyond repair and so they just avoid the topic altogether and choose not to even in many cases even vote. I often wonder how election results might differ today if if more Christians actually voted consistent with the tenets of their faith, let alone voted at all.

I put together a little graphic here kind of showing this point. You go back to 2016 presidential election year and there were actually 250 million citizens of voting age. Of those 250 million, 150 million took the time to actually register to vote. So 100 million citizens already right off the bat out of 250 million chose not to even participate at all. And then of the 150 million that chose to actually register, only 138 million of them actually voted. So all said and done, of all of the eligible people in America to vote in 2016, only 60% of the population did that. And in the same year, approximately 94 million eligible voters identified as evangelical.

And now when you stop and consider all these numbers, and even the most hotly contested elections that we have, typically the outcome is determined by one or two percent of the vote. I mean, we all know the results of last presidential election where you know, Trump won the electoral college, Hillary won the the popular vote, I think it was three and a half million votes. That’s actually a fairly small percentage when you look at these numbers of how that vote shifted one way or another. And when you start to just consider how many people opted out of voting and how many potential Christians or evangelicals, people who think like us, how many of them opted out of Voting and what would the outcome possibly be if those people got involved?

And that doesn’t even consider if you throw in you can see that shaded area where I showed 94 million evangelicals You throw in Catholics other Protestant groups other conservative leaning people who would tend to think along the same lines that we do You really have to wonder why The outcomes of elections that would be more in alignment with the way probably our group thinks Why it’s not a slam dunk every election. Why is it always?

If he what the outcome is going to be and and you just can’t help but walk away and wonder if So much of our election outcomes today are determined by the people who don’t vote rather than by the people who do vote and I know this kind of a Back of the napkin analysis has a lot of issues with it, but it just doesn’t make you stop and wonder and ponder You know what what could be if more Christians in particular Took interest in the political process and actually exercise the right to vote There’s no way no for sure But it’s highly likely that voter turnout among our kind of people is not as great As it could be because of religion based opposition to politics or indifference or just simply laziness It is the position of the elders here at TEC that politics falls under the sovereignty of God, and therefore it is every Christian duty to care about politics and do whatever they can do to make sure our political leaders and processes submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Now, in practice, that does not mean that every political leader is going to be a believer, But it does mean that we can agitate through our prayers and our engagement to man that our leaders discharge their duties in a manner consistent with godliness. We also recognize that the church and the state are separate domains that God has ordained. We do not believe that it’s the job of the church to be the boss of the state, it’s not the job of the state to be the boss of the church. But we do believe it’s imperative that the state recognize its authority comes from God and that it must govern consistent with the word of God.

Now in each upcoming session we hope to make the case that the state is something that all Christians should care about and seek to change when it fails either in its God given duties or it tries to usurp other equal but separate spheres of authority such as the church and the family. We firmly believe in that Kyperian notion that there are spheres that God has ordained, and they each have responsibilities and duties, and they interplay with each other. They’re not supposed to be separate and distinct, while yet they do have distinct roles to fulfill. So in this first session, I want to explore then the various lies, half-truths, and misconceptions that arise when the topic of politics comes up.

I’ve titled my session, Separation of Church and State and Other Lies That We Tell Ourselves. And I’ve identified at least seven lies that we do commonly tell ourselves as the topic of politics comes up. Some of these things have been repeated so often over so many decades that they’ve moved from the category of patently false to incontrovertibly true. The old adage, if you repeat a lie long enough, that people will believe it, certainly holds true here. Now let me give you a scenario imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning Grabbed your digital device to check out the daily news And you read this in one of your posts It’s with much pleasure that we announced to you that public worship is now regularly Happening at the state’s cap at the nation’s capital building church services every Sunday morning at 11 o’clock Just imagine that’s what you read tomorrow on your newsfeed.

Can you imagine the uproar that would cause? The ACLU, Atheists of America, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, they would be breaking their necks, climbing over each other to be the first one to file suit. The media outlets would be exploding. Now you might think, well Jim, that’s a pretty far-fetched idea. That would never happen. But in fact it did. It happened in July 2nd, 1795 in a Boston newspaper. And I altered the post a little bit, but here’s what it actually read. It said, it is with much pleasure that we discover the rising consequence of our infant city. Public worship is now regularly administered at the Capitol every Sunday morning at 11 o’clock by the Reverend Mr. Ralph.

For well over 80 years, our nation’s capital building, this is where Congress meets, was used for public worship services. On multiple occasions, they reported that they had over 2,000 people in attendance, and the crowds were often so large that they had to open up the place where the Supreme Court met so they could have secondary services to accommodate the crowds. Now these services were typically quite ecumenical, and we would probably have some bones to pick with the theology that was being taught, but nonetheless, this practice alone indicates a view of separation of church and state back then that doesn’t square up with our understanding of what it is today.

Referring to these services I just described, John Quincy Adams, one of our former presidents, wrote in his diary, “‘I consider it as one of my public duties, “‘my public duty as a representative of the people to give my attendance every Sunday morning when divine service is performed in the hall. Just try to imagine a modern day president saying something like that. Thomas Jefferson, to whom the separation of church and state or doctrine is attributed, regularly attended these services held in government facilities. The very first capital church service that Jefferson attended as president was being preached by his friend, the Reverend John Leland, on January 3, 1802.

And what’s interesting about that is that Jefferson attended that church service in the state capitol building two days after he wrote his famous letter containing the wall of separation of church and state that used that metaphor. And yes, we do know that Jefferson was a DST. He wasn’t a Christian. But my point is that this use of government facilities for religious purposes challenges our modern day understanding of church state relations, particularly in America. Somewhere along the way, we have taken that phrase. We’ve constitutionalized it. That’s a word one of the justices used. And it’s become a principle that we live by.

And totally, it’s not what the founding fathers had in mind at all. So what are these lies that we tell ourselves? I’ve already alluded to the first one, pretty straightforward. The big one is that the US Constitution requires separation of church and state. Lot of uninformed people today, well, that’s in the Constitution. Of course, when you whip out your copy and say, show me, they’re at a loss. But related to this particular lie, there’s three other lies that come out of it as well. And those are that binding morals, binding morals exist apart from a transcendent God. In other words, we can come up with a set of morals that we, the people will live by, that we can claim are binding on men, not by force of guns or money, but simply because.

These are things that are just obvious. All people should live by these. The lie is that we can come up with those kind of rules, those kinds of morals apart from a transcendent God. Secondly, that you cannot legislate morality. I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard that comment more than once. And thirdly, that secularism, which is what today we think we are achieving in our government, is neutral, but whereas religion is not. And then in addition to those particular lies, we’ll talk about these three more. Polite company doesn’t discuss politics. You can waste your vote, and Christians should not be politically active.

So I’ll spend the bulk of my time then dealing with the first group of related lies and then briefly touch on the last three towards the end. So to begin with, let’s talk about the lie, this first lie, separation of church and state because it’s such a huge one. The first reason why I would say it’s a lie is that nowhere in the Constitution nor in any of the other foundational documents do you ever find the term used. So we’re already at a problem from the get-go. The phrase separation of church and state, as many of you know, comes from a personal letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in response to a letter he got from a group called the Danbury Baptist Association.

It was a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut. And they were concerned at the time that there might be certain Christian sects out there who were agitating or trying to push for a national government that our government would say, okay, this is the official religion of our country. They wrote to the president in part, and I quote, it is not to be wondered at, therefore, if those who seek after power and gain under the pretense of government and religion should reproach their fellow men or should reproach their chief magistrate as an enemy of religion, law, and good order because he will not dare and dares not assume the prerogative of Jehovah and makes laws to govern the kingdom of Christ.

In essence, they were saying, there’s some people who are going to lay charge at you and lay charge at the government that they’re anti-God, they’re anti-religion, their anti-good public order if they do not institute this national government. And so they were really worried that some might try and do that. And so then Jefferson, in his response, he wrote, and this is not too long, but a little bit lengthy, he wrote in part, he says, believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to no other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach its actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people, which declared that their legislature would make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.” That last little bit, Jefferson’s basically saying there’s nothing about the natural rights that they recognized at that time as being contradictory to what social duties might might call for. Now note again that this was a personal exchange with Jefferson. The tenor of the concern and the answer had solely to do with government coercing its citizens to think or believe in a certain way.

Jefferson made it clear that the Constitution forbade that. The case can be made that in Jefferson’s mind, the wall was something to keep the government from intruding on the rights of the people. It was not meant to keep the values of the people out of the government. Again, just that one little excerpt, again, just to make it clear, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people, which declared that their legislature would make no law, respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of. It’s very clear. Government stay out of the people’s domain here. It has nothing to do about people stay out of the government’s domain.

The First Amendment was an act of the people telling the legislature what its limits were. Now as an aside, you have to understand what a constitution in the first place is for. And I found a little blurb in this, in volume one of the Syntopicon, an index to the great ideas, Under the topic of Constitution, the following observation was made, quote, unlike all other man-made laws, a Constitution is the law which creates and regulates government itself rather than the law which a government creates and by which it regulates the conduct of men, their relation to one another and to the state. Constitutions regulate the actions of the government, not the people, but we’re increasingly seeing the Constitution being used to regulate the people.

The Constitution does not grant the power to make laws, but only such laws that do not violate the provisions laid out within the Constitution. Numerous court cases have long upheld the notion that the only time the state can impinge on personal expressions of religion is when that expression significantly disrupts good social order. The first time we saw an example of this, where it went to court and was ruled against the plaintiff, was in a case called Reynolds versus United States. It was in 1879. The situation was there was a Mormon man who had multiple wives. He was practicing polygamy. He maintained that that was a part of his religious expression.

There were laws on the books against that. And so he was taken to court. And they tried the case. And the court ultimately decided that that was not in keeping with good public order. And so they ruled against him. And he lost his case. Now, you do have to really wonder, how did the court even arrive at the notion that that was against good public order? And I would dare say, in 1879, they were probably reaching back to biblical principles to decide polygamy wasn’t a good thing. In 1982, the Supreme Court heard another case titled Wallace versus Jaffrey. At issue was the question if an Alabama state law allowing public schools each morning to have one minute of meditation and voluntary prayer was constitutional or not.

So at that time, so as recent as 1982, Alabama had a law, it said, hey schools, if you want, you can have one minute of meditation and voluntary prayer, that’s legal. Well the plaintiff in this case was a parent of a kindergartner who was being made fun of for not participating. And so that father took the state to court saying hey, this violates my 14th amendment which requires, and I’m gonna get more in detail in this a minute, but you see he made a 14th Amendment argument, and in the 14th Amendment, the first part of it in the first article, it says states will make no laws that basically take away any rights that the First Amendment gave me.

And so this gentleman, the intellectual process was, well, First Amendment, no establishment of religion, No blocking the free exercise there of separation of church in the state blah blah blah The 14th amendment I’ll show in a minute They had the court said previously decided that we can drag those First amendment clauses into the 14th amendment and so this gentleman was making the argument then that you state Alabama the state of Alabama You are violating separation of church in the state and you can’t do that because of the first amendment And so I my rights are being violated And so ultimately then again, he won that case and they had to abolish that practice.

I mentioned this particular case because I want to read a part of Chief Justice Reinkwes dissension from the majority. He takes a really strong shot at the court’s misuse of separation of church and state. You’ve got an excerpt there. I’m gonna read a little bit more, but it’s really interesting. So here’s Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1982 and what his thoughts were on separation of church and state. He wrote, quote, the establishment clause did not require government neutrality between religion and non-religion, nor did it prohibit the federal government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion.

There is simply no historic foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build the wall of separation that was, get this, constitutionalized in Everson. Another case I’ll speak about in a minute, so just keep Everson in the back of your mind. But he says that the courts at that time constitutionalized the wall of separation. Notwithstanding the absence of a historical basis for this theory of rigid separation, the wall idea might well have served a useful, albeit misguided analytical concept, but it led this court to unified and principled results in establishment cases. The opposite, unfortunately, has been true.

In the 38 years since Everson, our establishment clause cases have been neither principled nor unified. Our recent opinions, many of them hopelessly divided, pluralities have with embarrassing candor conceded that the wall of separation is merely a blurred, indistinct, and invariable barrier, which is not wholly accurate and can only be dimly perceived. Whether due to its lack of historical support or its practical unworkability, the Everson wall has provided all but useless as a guide to sound constitutional adjudication. The greatest injury of the wall notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights.

No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The wall of separation between church and state is a metaphor based on bad history, A metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned and quote So again 1982 chief justice Rehnquist Again granted, you know doesn’t have the force of law, but I think he was definitely You know hitting the nail on the head and his descent That’s quite an indictment in the 38 years since Everson our establishment clause cases have been neither principled nor unified by Everson he’s referring to a landmark case in 1947 Everson versus the Board of Education.

In that case the issue was the state of New Jersey was reimbursing parents the cost of busing their kids to school at that time apparently the parents bore the cost initially to put their kiddies on a bus to school and it didn’t matter if you were busing them to a public school or to a private parochial school the state was still going to reimburse you for that cost and a particular taxpayer took exception with that and got annoyed and he brought suit saying hey you can’t use public tax dollars to bus kids to a private school. What made this case important in our judicial history is that for the first time the court extended the establishment clause in the First Amendment to be included in the 14th Amendment, which contains the clauses that you commonly heard called the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.

So we have in the First Amendment, we have a couple different clauses there, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Congress will make no law establishing a religion. Congress will make no law preventing the free exercise. That’s all First Amendment. 14th Amendment, there’ll be no laws, states, you cannot take away people’s rights without due process, the Due Process Clause, and then everybody should have equal access or equal protection under the law. The law should be blind and not have differences for people there. The Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses come from the first article in the 14th Amendment, and this is where the judges listen to what it says, and this is how they tied the First Amendment to the 14th.

It says, no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protections of the law. But the key thought there, and what the courts were playing with, was, well, OK, it says here the states can’t enforce any laws which abridge the laws of the United States. So they then took the principles in the First Amendment about the establishment and the free exercise, and particularly the Establishment Clause, and they rolled it into the 14th Amendment.

And I’m going to show in a moment, walk you through how this works, and how it’s really messed things up today. Up until the Everson case of 1947, these two amendments had been treated separately. It was not uncommon for religious expressions to be included in the public arena at the state level, and frankly at the national level. With the decision to effectively drag the Establishment Clause into the 14th Amendment, the clause, in essence, became Congress and states shall make no laws establishing religion. And again, if you bear in mind, at this point in history, they’re deciding separation of church and state basically means we can’t consider religion at all in our decisions.

Now take that metamorphosis and combine it with modern day misapplications of separation of church and state, and you get the mess that Reinkwes articulated in his dissension. Now, if you know your history, you’ll know that the 14th, 15th, and 16th Amendments were all added post-Civil War, And their intent was to make sure that the freed slaves enjoyed all the rights and privileges of being U.S. citizens. The 14th Amendment was just making sure that no southern state could use states’ rights as an argument to circumvent giving former slaves their rights. The linking of religious freedoms to due process and equal protection rights is important because it explains how we’ve gotten to things like gay marriage and Baker’s rights issues.

So let me give you an example of how this works. It’s a little hard to follow, but if I give you an example, I think it’ll be clear. So let’s say there’s a state law defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. In fact, there are a whole bunch of laws like that until fairly recently. A homosexual couple complains that they do not have equal protection under the law. And that’s a 14th Amendment argument, right? And so they take the state to the court. The state, in their defense, they say, hey, traditional marriage has been the norm for a millennium and that the courts shouldn’t mess with that.

Well, the court determines that the traditional marriage, the argument the state’s making, they’re saying, well, yeah, Maybe so for millennium, but why is that well that was because that’s what religious people thought and they’re saying oh Your premise that you know marriages between a man and a woman is rooted in religious beliefs. Oh Yeah, we did drag the establishment clause from the first amendment into the 14th amendment so on her So now to protect the gay people to give them equal protection under the law We have to take out any arguments have anything to do with religion and say state you can’t use that as a defense You’ve got no legs to stand on.

There’s no reason you cannot prevent, you know, gay couples from getting married. And so you begin to all of a sudden get into the situation where all these clauses are competing, and really you just don’t know which one’s going to win, and you end up with a real mess. Since the 14th Amendment now couples the establishment clause with equal protection under the law, the course decided the state’s definition of marriage is unfair to homosexuals. What has happened is that the Constitution has become a living document that succeeding courts can bend and interpret at will to mean whatever they want. Now while the people, especially Christians, become more disgusted with and less interested in political discourse, the self-anointed ones continue to erode our freedoms.

I mean, it’s happening right before our eyes. It ends up happening effectively, what I’m trying to show with that illustration. So you got the four clauses, establishment clause and the free exercise. Those are First Amendment rights, the due process and the equal access. Those are 14th Amendment. But because they’ve now linked the establishment clause into the equal access clause and the due process clause, in essence, they have put free exercise into a box. They’ve taken the links and built a chain-link fence, and what they’re basically doing is they’re now trampoline on free exercise. This is why then the gay, or the baker, can’t exercise his free right to decline to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because they’re gonna stomp on him and say, you’re violating equal access.

And he’s screaming, well, free exercise. And they’re saying, sorry, something has to give. and free exercise is what keeps given. If you haven’t read the preamble to the Constitution lately, let me remind you what it says. We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. I bring this to your recollection and not to get you to start chatting, USA, USA, but I mention it simply to point out that the liberties we enjoy flow from inalienable rights given to us by our creator.

What people are better suited than Christians to hold the sphere of the state accountable to abide by its heavenly and earthly boundaries? There is so much more we could be saying about this, but we gotta move on, so I’m gonna go ahead and move on to the next one. Let’s talk now about, I previously pointed out that there were three lies that were tied to the separation of church and state lie. You wanna talk about two more of them right now. Talk about the lie that binding morals exist apart from a transcendent God and the lie that you can’t legislate morality.

It’s a fascinating topic, the whole topic of morals and how do we arrive at morals, where do they come from. It’s a fascinating topic to delve into and the philosophers have long debated the subject. You can really spend years and years reading up what all the philosophers thought. Morals, in essence, answer the question, what should I do? And what should I not do? That’s basically a moral saying, what should you do? What should you not do? And then some morals lead to laws. How do morals compare to laws? Laws are simply morals that have been codified to include consequences if you violate the moral. You take a moral, you decide it’s really super important, everybody abides by it, and so you decide we’re going to have a law.

Here’s what’s going to happen to you if you do not do what that moral says. If you think about it, every law written declares what you should or should not do. And those are moral statements. The reasoning behind every law is based on some moral principle.

Even a law as simple as don’t throw your trash out the car window is based on the moral that it isn’t right for you to Toss your junk out into public spaces for health safety and ascetic reasons This is why it’s a lie to say that you can’t legislate morality Every law on the books is a form of codified morality It’s it’s patently a false statement to say you can’t legislate morality morality. Now most people limit their definitions of morals to things like greed and lust, but it’s really much more encompassing than that. Now I think we can all agree that not all morals should have the force of law behind them. We’d all be in serious trouble if every single moral we could think of had a law behind it. We’d be in violation of those all day But the bigger question regarding morals is who gets to say what someone else should or should not do.

Our Constitution grants the power of making laws to Congress, but who grants the power to define the morals upon which laws are based? Nowhere in the Constitution is the state given the authority. This is really an important point because of late we have seen our highest courts assume the responsibility for defining our morals. A case in point is the recent Oprah Gafell versus Hodge decision legalizing gay marriage. During the case, actually during the deliberation, Justice Kennedy, who was waffling on the matter, ultimately landed on the gay, the homosexual side, but he was waffling and he wondered out loud. He says, you know, people have been saying marriage is between a man and a woman for thousands and thousands of years.

I mean, is it really right for us to ignore that? You know, but that thinking was a moral inquiry. He was asking a moral question. Well, Justice Ginsburg gave him a rebuttal and in her rebuttal, she said, you know what? People used to think slavery was okay too, but they were wrong, weren’t they? Well, that too was a moral argument. The problem in this discussion should be obvious. The justices have no business deciding what’s moral or not. Their job is simply to decide if the matter before the missing compliance with the Constitution, the minute they decide where the moral cops were in trouble.

Several of the dissenting Supreme Court justices agreed with this limitation of what they, that this was inappropriate what they were discussing. Justice Scalia said, today’s decree, the ruling in favor of gay marriage, today’s decree says that my ruler and the ruler of 320 million Americans coast to coast is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. And then Supreme Court Justice Roberts, in the same case, his dissent, he said, understand well what this dissent is about. It is not about whether in my judgment, the institution of marriage should be a change to include same-sex couples. It is instead about whether in our democratic republic, that decision should rest with the people acting through their elected representatives or with five lawyers who happen to hold commissions authorizing them to resolve legal disputes according to law.

It isn’t the state’s job to define higher moral standards then whose is it? If it isn’t, whose is it? And again, there’s been no lack of people expressing their thoughts. The 18th century philosopher, Rousseau, succinctly states what the problem is when men try to define that. And again, and I’m going to have to pick up the pace here. I can see, but let’s go for it. Knowing so little of the nature and agreeing so little about the meaning of the word law, it would be difficult for us to fix on a good definition of natural law. Thus, all the definitions we meet with in books, setting aside their defect in point of uniformity, have yet another fault, in that they are derived from many kinds of knowledge which men do not possess naturally, and from advantages of which they have no idea until they have already departed from that state.

Modern writers begin by inquiring what rules it would be expedient for men to agree on for their common interests, and then give them the name of natural law to a collection of these rules without any other proof that the good that would result from there being universally practiced. This is undoubtedly a simple way of making definitions and of explaining the nature of things by almost arbitrary conveniences. But as long as we are ignorant of this natural man, it is in vain for us to attempt to determine either the law originally prescribed to him or that which is best adapted to his constitution. If you had trouble following all that, he said, we’re making it up as we go, and we got no business doing that.

Christians, of course, have a solution to the problem of making, of who makes the universal laws that are binding on all men. Augustine, this is the law by which each age and place forms rules of conduct best suited to itself, although the law itself is always and everywhere the same and does not differ from place to place or from age to age, and of course, referring to the word of God. Thomas Aquinas, the natural law is promulgated by the very fact that God instilled it into man’s mind so as to be known by him naturally. And of course he’s referring to Romans 2, 14 through 15, which says, when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having no laws, are a law unto themselves, which shows the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness and their thoughts, the meantime accusing or else excusing them.

As Christians, we understand that the foundations of our morals come from God. Those morals are binding on all men at all times, in all places. Now, individual societies can define should and should nots that are not binding on all people everywhere. Example would be our traffic laws. We can, our country can say we’re gonna drive on one side of the road, not the other. But even in these lesser moral standards, the higher moral imperative to submit to our governing authority still applies. Well, as you might expect, there were other philosophers who argued that universal morals could be derived apart from God. Hume and Kant are two examples.

Now, Kant was a little more friendly towards religion, while Hume was very much anti-religion. But they both generally agreed that you don’t need God to come up with binding morals. Hume suggested, or he rejected Luther and Calvin’s claims, that morals, distinctions between good and evil come from divine command. His disdain for the virtues of spiritual disciplines, for example, was apparent when he wrote, were it not for religion’s influence who would never approve of qualities such as celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues. Both he and Kant held that the foundation morality is independent of religion.

Hume believed that morality was just a part of human nature. We’re just born moral people. Whereas Kant believed morality flowed out of right reasoning. You start with thinking right, and you arrive at good morals. And that would then lead to the greatest freedom. Kant saw morality as something more fundamental than a belief in God. You start, you get your morals straight, and that might lead you to God, but you don’t start with God. And some of his tenants were that belief in God flows out of commitment to morals first. So think right, use a reason, and what will produce the greatest freedom, that’ll lead you to your morals, and then your morals can maybe lead you to God.

Man does not have duties to God as a second tenant. We only have duties to what is right morally. And then thirdly, he said, children should not be taught about God until after their moral framework has developed so that their motivation to do good is not based on God’s favor or God’s punishment. It’s just like, for whatever reason, I’m interested in this stuff, so I’m actually reading these books right now. But boy, I tell you, it’s like, talk about the wisdom of men. Needless to say, it is the thinking of men, in, like human Kant, that dominate our culture’s conception that you have binding morals apart from God.

That is kind of the prevalent thought today, that we can make it up as we go, and we’re making it up as we go, and the morals keep changing. Once the state’s decision, excuse me, once the state decouples morals from religion, the church loses the ability to speak with any authority into the culture. It is told to keep its morals to itself. One of the apocryphal books is called The Wisdom of Solomon. While not authoritative as the word of God, it does speak to government’s proper role when it’s rightly understood. In chapter 6, 1 through 3, it says, listen therefore, O kings, and understand. Learn, O judges, of the ends of the earth.

Give ear you that rule over multitudes and boast of many nations. For your dominion was given you from the Lord and your sovereignty from the Most High. We will search out your works and inquire into your plans. Romans 13 tells us that all governments derive their authority from God. And among their duties is the duty to reward those who do good and to punish those who do evil. How is the government going to know what to reward and what to punish if they pursue a complete separation of church and state? They’re only going to be just reach into the air and pull their own morals out of the air. Again, quoting Russo, in considering what we should have become had we been left to ourselves, we should learn to bless him whose gracious hand, correcting our institutions and giving them an immovable basis, has presented those disorders which would otherwise have arisen from them and caused our happiness to come from those very sources which seemed likely to involve us in misery.

Basically, if we hadn’t, if God hadn’t intervened, we’d be in a real mess is what he’s saying. This diagram that I’m trying to communicate up there, don’t read too much into it. There’s three models, if you will, of how society might work. The first model, I’ve labeled theonomy loosely, using that term. The idea there is that the church operating in its proper sphere, it’s communicating the word of God. It’s speaking morals into the state and into the family. Okay, so both both state and family get their notion of what moral is from the church The state then is having the power to make laws they decide well What morals do we need to codify due to each you need to turn into laws?

You know thou shall not commit murders a good one, okay? So they then send down the laws and then basically this whole thing works, and you’ve got this type of Theonomy Now, what happens if all of a sudden if you have separation of church and state and the state says, church we don’t want to hear what you have to say, well you see where I’ve eliminated the moral link between church and state. All of a sudden where do the morals come from? The state makes them up. That’s what that little arrow coming back upon itself. The state is making up morals. And they then in turn produce laws which come down to the people.

And you can also see that linkage of morals from the church to the people. You can see I’ve kind of started to gray it out, indicating that the church’s voice into the people is becoming weaker and weaker as the state assumes a responsibility for dishing out the morals. And I believe that’s basically the beginnings of a tyranny. It’s a type of tyranny. And then in the third grouping, you have where now the church has become pretty much silent in terms of the state and the people. nobody’s listening to what the church has to say regarding morals. In this situation, the state has lost all moral authority. They’re just cranking out laws, but the people are making up the morals themselves.

Everybody is doing that which is right in their own mind. That basically is the formula for an anarchy in essence. I really believe because of our misapplication of churches of separation of church and state that we are transitioning towards that tyrannical model and for some reason, A lot of people seem to be OK with it. The other lies that secularism is neutral and religion is not. I’m just going to kind of blow through these pretty quickly because our time is really going. That one should be pretty self-evident that that’s nonsense. And what happens in all these situations is that it’s not a case of that there really is neutrality, but it’s an exchange of values is what’s going on.

Take gay marriage. We say gay marriage is not good. Somebody else says gay marriage is good. That’s an exchange of values. That’s not simply telling the church to be quiet. We’ll have a secular approach to the world. I went out to a website, the National Secular Society, and this little phrase that they had right there, excerpt the Fuller quote was, secularism champions universal human rights upon religious demands. It upholds equality laws that protect women, LGBT people and minorities from religious discrimination these equity these equality laws ensure that Non-believers have the same rights as those who identify whether religious or philosophical belief They think they’re creating an even playing field for everybody to coexist that’s what they state in other words That’s what they’re trying to do, but their own statement underlies that it says Because they hold up these universal human rights, whatever those are, those are held up above religious demands.

That says that there’s going to be winners and losers in the conversation about what’s moral and what’s not moral. So the whole idea that you can actually have separation of, or a secular state that’s neutral is bunk. It’s another type of religion. just another god selling its own bag of moral goods to us. As a result, examples where this doesn’t work is, we have people today, bakers that must bake a cake celebrating a gay marriage or lose their license. You have to refer to a boy as a she if that’s what he wants or lose your job. You have to respect the woman’s right to kill her unborn child. All these are examples of where it’s not a secular state taking over, it’s another religion taking over.

When the state no longer listens to the church, it will have to impose its own set of morals on the people, or else anarchy will increase as everyone does what’s right in their own minds. And then quickly, these last three, you can’t discuss politics in polite company. You can waste your vote. And Christians should not be politically active. This notion of that we don’t speak about politics in black company, best I could trace the origins of that as it came out of a book on etiquette in 1879. And it’s taken on and becomes sort of common knowledge that you do that. But of course, we should be speaking up about politics.

Now part of the problem, the reason why politics and political art discussions usually devolve into fights and arguments and debates is because People haven’t considered the words of Mark Twain, you know, which says, you know that never argue with stupid people They will drag you down to their level and then beat you up with experience So it’s really important that when we do get into the discussions that we be informed we be intelligent we be armed We know what the facts are and then have civil Discourse on the topic. I heard of a recent example in a local high school I think it was Arlington High School. The teacher was telling the classroom that it was the Democratic Party that has historically fought for the rights of slaves and former slaves.

And the whole class was like taking notes, and there’s one student in there that’s like, no, what I read. But that’s going on today, and people are ignorant. And so they swallow it. And then when those students armed with how evil the Republican Party is for all the damage or did to slaves, you can see why those discussions devolve into fights because nobody’s operating on truth. I like this quote from Thomas Jefferson. Ignorance is preferable to error and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong. Just a shout out to our omnibus program if you really are interested in becoming more educated and understanding, you know, where a lot of our beliefs and thinking have come from, you know, come to be a part of the omnibus Thursday nights where we did discuss these kinds of things.

How about the topic that you, that says you can waste your vote? Again, I would argue that that’s a lie because it’s important that people always vote their conscience. Regardless of, even if your candidate has no chance of winning, it’s important to vote your conscience. I do understand the arguments about the strategic value of your vote and hey, you know, last time was going to be either Hillary or Trump and if you vote for somebody else, you know, well that’s basically like voting for Hillary because you know, you know, all those kind of arguments. And there’s some strategic value to those arguments but it’s still super important that we recognize and respect the fact that people need to vote their consciences first.

And so I say you can’t technically waste your vote because your vote is your vote. you are expressing what you believe to be the right thing in that situation, even if you’re a minority. And Abe agrees with me. You can see the quote there for yourself. And Abe also said, don’t believe everything you can read on the internet. So I just want to leave you with a few last quotes here as we think about this notion of not being politically active. It is actually important that we become active. Again, not in a moral majority kind of way, but in a way where we, again, recognize where the government’s authority comes from.

We’ve been blessed with the kind of a government where we have the right to speak up, to dissent, to challenge. And I think we should take that opportunity to do that. Other great men in the past would seem to agree. Samuel Adams, you can see there, let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts and human society for which he is accountable to God in this country. Daniel Webster, bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote. And if you need a verse, first of all then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made to all people, for all people, for teens, and all who are in high position that he may lead a peaceful and quiet life that we may lead, godly and dignified in every way.

Kind of makes you wonder, if it’s good and pleasing in God’s mind that we be offering up prayers and supplications on behalf of our government leaders, it sure seems like he would actually like us to be involved in that process and not just simply sit in a corner praying for them while watching it, you know, go the wrong direction. So in summary, the only logical outcome for a culture that is at war over its values is tyranny or anarchy. where it has to go if the culture is fighting over its values. The litany of lies that we’ve looked at has created a climate where Christians feel increasingly threatened and intimidated.

The sphere of the state has assumed powers well beyond the scope of its biblical and lawful duties. In an attempt to keep the church and the state from being the boss of each other, many have failed to see that neither sphere is independent of the other. Perhaps if more people would just just read the Declaration of Independence itself, and they would understand how the two spheres relate. And since I’m out of time, I won’t go through all that. But again, we the people holding these truths to be self-evident, recognizing that we have these rights granted to us by the Creator, and it’s the duty of the people. This is where it may be a little different, but we’ve been blessed in this country where we the people established the government and what I was about to read, the Declaration of Independence also says have the right to throw the bums out if they start to violate their rightful duties.

You know, we rightfully denounced the French Revolution’s cry of no god and no masters. However, it would seem that this same cry is being shouted by an increasing number of our own countrymen. Is it pleasing to God for us to bemoan this rising tide and not lift a finger or cast a vote to resist it? I don’t think so. Let’s pray. Father we had as we reflected on just our own history here and to realize that how much Christianity did Christian thought permeated the shaping of our country and its operation for at least half of its history it’s it’s tragic to see how we have Turned our backs on you as a nation and and now mock you and now make rules that just flaunt in your face we do pray that you would yet rescue us from our folly while there’s still time.

We have much accountability before you and I do pray that you will just stir up the hearts of the people across this land who do still fear God that they would instead of running away from politics they would instead run towards it, not to set up a theocracy, but rather to again rightfully demand that the government get back within the sphere that it’s supposed to live and that you would once again maybe bring about a day and an age where we are functioning much more consistently with the truth of your word. We just ask this in your Son Jesus’ name, Amen.