Judge Moore, the Founding Fathers, and the Ten Commandments, Part Two
Editor's Note: Rev Nate Atwood of Kempsville Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, recently spoke to his congregation about the controversy surrounding Judge Roy Moore and the Ten Commandments monument that he placed in the Rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. Here is part two of that sermon on the view of the Founding Fathers concerning religious expression in the public arena.
Can There be any Doubt ... About God?
"I have not made trouble for Israel," Elijah replied. "But you have abandoned the Lord's commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And bring the 450 prophets of Ball and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table."
So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel. Elijah went before the people and said, "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God follow him"( ).
Why is the Alabama case turning into such a big deal? I'll tell you why ... Roy Moore isn't backing down. That's why. In fact, the way it looks to me Roy Moore is pushing for an up or down decision on God.
In times past when we've hit hard moments like this in the past two to three decades the courts have weaseled their way out of dealing with the real issue. In fact, 10 Commandments cases have come and gone several times in recent years. On several occasions the good guys have won the case and whether it's the Law of Moses or a Christmas Nativity Scene it's been allowed to stay in place. Here's the way the cases have been won. We've appealed to history and said, in effect, "This Judeo-Christian stuff" is part of our past so let's let it just hang around as a way to remember the good old days.
Now Judge Roy Moore seems to be pushing for more than that -- though it's true our roots are profoundly Judeo-Christian and we should remember the past. But Judge Moore seems to want us to make a decision not just on history -- he wants us to make a decision on God. Thumbs up or thumbs down the Creator of the Universe. Is God the source of Law, or not? Is God the foundation of our legal system. No more back door compromises. No more slick legal tricks designed to give each side just enough to go home sort of happy. It's a bit like Elijah before Israel, "If the Lord is God, follow Him." Needless to say, this is making everyone extremely uncomfortable. How dare Judge Moore be so honest? How dare he pose the question of all questions?
Everything I said a bit earlier -- all those wonderful quotes -- would seem to put Judge Moore in a slam dunk position. After all, the guys who did the painting made it pretty clear that the whole thing was about God. The American Dream was doing it God's way. How is it that Judge Moore lost in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals? All those Federal Judges know that we Americans are supposed to do things religiously, right? The Founding Father's kept referring to "God" and "Religion". That kind of language from the lips of guys like James Madison and John Jay doesn't gave a body much wiggle room. Right? Well ... folks can be pretty clever when it comes to putting distance between themselves on the Almighty.
Beginning in 1941 a series of cases came before the Supreme Court. They had this in common -- they all had to do with Conscientious Objectors who wanted out from military service. Now according to the Selective Service Act there was only way out from military service -- religious beliefs. Religious beliefs were well defined by our Founding Fathers -- they lived them as well as wrote about them.
George Washington gives us the heart of such belief in his prayer:
"0 most glorious God, in Jesus Christ ... I acknowledge and confess my faults, in the weak and imperfect performance of the duties of this day. I have called on Thee for pardon and forgiveness of sins, but so coldly and carelessly that my prayers are come my sin and stand in need of pardon. I have heard Thy holy word, but with such deadness of spirit that I have been an unprofitable and forgetful hearer ... Let me live according to those holy rules which Thou hast this day prescribed in Thy holy word ... Direct me to the true object, Jesus Christ the way, the truth and the life. Bless, 0 Lord, all the people of this land."
James Madison defined religion as "the duty we owe our Creator." What you hear in all the Founding Fathers is a fundmentally Biblical idea of religion in this sense -- it is theocentric. In other words, religion is about God. You know -- the Almighty. The One and Only. The Alpha and Omega. That Guy.Well, as I said, beginning in 1941 a series of cases rolled through the Supreme Court which had do with conscientious objection to military service. By the time 1965 rolled around there were three young men who wanted out from the military but who didn't believe in God. They weren't religious at all -- at least as the Bible and the American legal system had understood religion. Yet they seemed awfully sincere.
The Court wanted to know what to do with sincere people who had no religious belief and so they turned to a man named Paul Tillich. Back then he was about the most famous theologian of them. Now Paul Tillich was astoundingly bright and brazenly liberal. (He also had a big time moral problem -- after he died they opened up all his files expecting to find a bunch of brilliant theological stuff and all they found was a bunch of immoral magazines. But that's another sermon...).
Tillich was a slick thinker and he said, "You know, God doesn't have to be God. The truth of the matter is the God is whatever is of 'ultimate concern' to you." That was his phrase, "ultimate concern." Therefore, if your "ultimate concern" is that people should never kill no matter what the circumstances then that's your religion. And since the Selective Service Act allows people the status of conscientious objector based upon religion, then these three young men don't have to go to war.
The court bought it. In fact, it opened up and whole new way of thinking about religion. Tillich further defined "ultimate concern" as "whatever you take seriously without any reservation." He went onto say that to get to your 'ultimate concern' you may have to forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself."
Do you see the shift? Historically the American legal system had viewed religion theocentrically. Religion was about God and time and again they went further to define Him as the God of the Bible. But post-Tillich religion was whatever you cared about. In this sense you could be religious and not even believe in God. In other words -- now catch this -- each person gets to define their own "ultimate concern". Each person gets to decide who God is.
Now in a sense, that's nothing new. Certainly there were people during the Colonial period who believed in all manner of things. But here's the difference -- the question is now what the Court would formally recognize. In opting for Tillich's definition of God and religion and court put itself on record as saying no one has a more legitimate claim to truth than anybody else. The god of the feminists is just as legit as the god of the secularists; which is just as legit as the god of gays; which is just as legit as the god atheists; which is just as legit as the god of the evolutionists; which is just as legit as the god the witches; which is just as legit as the God of the Bible.
Wow! Pretty heavy stuff, don't you think? Particularly for a legal system and a nation which had always been so careful to point to the One True God.
Now, since any god was just as legit as any other god we need to start getting rid of all this Judeo-Christian God stuff which was all over the place in our legal system, government, and culture. After all, it suggested that there was only One True God and we couldn't do that anymore. Never mind that the people of Alabama elected him to do just what he did (by a 58% majority). Never mind that the First Amendment completely restricts Congress from any regarding religion (which was understood as establishing and barring and particular Christian denomination). Never mind that even before there was US Constitution all the colonies had in place state constitutions -- most of which specifically declared God to be God, the Bible to be His Word, and the Ten Commandments to be the basis of Law. Never mind that the US Constitution -- adopted after those state constitutions -- made no attempt to change those constitutions in any manner and therefore implicitly recognized a state's right to declare their own position on God and Law. Never mind that because of this the federal courts -- and so the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has not authority to speak to the decisions of the people of Alabama in this matter and therefore the ruling of the court requiring Judge Moore to remove the Commandments is unconstitutional. Never mind that Judge Moore is right to defy an unconstitutional order because of his recognition of the higher authority of the Constitution and the even greater authority of God.
You see, Judge Roy Moore violated the new American religion when he put those 10 Commandments in the court building. And they'll just have to go because their presence suggests -- even demands -- a totally divergent Truth ... there is only One God. He is the Source of law and justice. The State is subservient to God and neither it nor the indvidual are all-powerful.
I believe that Roy Moore is a modern day Elijah posing this question to the American legal system and to the American people . . . "If the Lord be God then follow Him, but if Baal be god then follow Him." What's the choice America? Where is our foundation -- many gods of our own choosing. Or the One True God. And friends it's a lie to suggest that this is only a personal decision. It is that but it's also a national decision. If you question that then let me ask this -- didn't the Founding Father make it a national decision when time and again they defined as one nation under God? Indeed, the national decision has already been made. But it seems that we must make it again.
Can There be any Doubt ... About Us?
What really is the American Dream? Do you the answer to that question? Lot's of people think it's a shiny convertible or a home at the beach. Others think it's the right to live your life however you see fit. Well, there's no question that God has prospered us and there's also no question that we enjoy great freedoms.
But neither of those things are the American Dream. It was the son of one of our Founding Fathers who himself became the sixth President of the United States who understood clearly the American dream . . .
"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of the civil government with the principles of Christianity. From the day of the Declaration . . . they [the American people] were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of The Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct." -- President John Quincy Adams
That's the dream -- marry government and godly principle to build a nation which lives under the blessing of heaven. The dream was that if we could ever take God's truth, God's justice, God's law, God's gift of rights, God's mercy, God's economic principles of private ownership and free enterprise, God's morality, God's sense of citizenship, God's practical wisdom, God's hard work ethic, God's self-government, God's compassion, God's plan for government, God's plan for education, God's plan for the family ... if we could ever do it God's way as it was written in God's Book then we could build a precious nation which would be a gift to all mankind.
That's the American Dream friends.
Maybe we're too close to it to realize it. Let me express the same thought to you in a true story taken from 1945, World War II, and Okinawa:
It was early in 1945 when, as a war correspondent on Okinawa, I first came upon Shimbuku, the strangest and most inspiring community I ever saw. Huddled beneath its groves on banyan and twisted pine trees, this remote village of some 1000 souls was in the path of the "American" advance and so received a severe shelling. But when an advance patrol swept up to the village compound, the GI's stopped dead in their tracks.
Barring their way were two little old men; they bowed low and began to speak. The battle hardened sergeant, wary of tracks, held up his hand, summoned an interpreter. The interpreter shook his head.
"I don't get it. Seems we're being welcomed as 'fellow Christians'. One says he's the mayor of the village, the other's the schoolmaster. That's a Bible the older one has in his hand..."
Guided by the two old men -- Mojun Nakamura the mayor and Shoei Kina the schoolmaster -- we cautiously toured the compound. We'd seen other Okinawan villages, uniformly down-at-the-heels and despairing; by contrast this one shone like a diamond in a dung heap. Everywhere we were greeted by smiles and dignified bows. Proudly the two old men showed us their spotless homes, their terraced fields, fertile and neat, their storehouses and granaries, their prized sugar mill.
Gravely the old men talked on, and the interpreter said, "They've met only one American before, long ago. Because he was a Christian they assume we are, too - though they can't quite understand why we came in shooting." Piecemeal, the incredible story came out.
Thirty years before, an American missionary on his way to Japan had paused at Shimbaku. He'd stayed only long enough to make a pair of converts (these same two old men), teach them a couple of hymns, leave them a Japanese translation of the Bible and exhort them to live by it. They'd had no contact with any Christian since. Yet during those 30 years, guided by the Bible, they had managed to create a Christian democracy at its purest. How did it happen?
Picking their way through the Bible, the two converts found not only an inspiriting "Person" on whom to pattern a life, but sound precepts on which to base their society. They'd adopted the Ten Commandments as Shimabuku's legal code, the Sermon on the Mount as their guide to social conduct.
In Kina's school the Bible was the chief literature, it was read daily by all the students, and major passages were memorized. In Nakamura's village government the precepts of the Bible were law. Nurtured on this Book, a whole generation of Shimabukans had drawn from it their ideas of human dignity and responsibilities of citizenship. The result was plain to see.
Shimabuku for years had had no jail, no brothel, no drunkenness, no divorce, there was a high level of health and happiness.
Next day, the tide of battle swept us on. But a few days later, during a lull, I requisitioned a Jeep and a Japanese-speaking driver and went back to Shimbaku. Over the winding roads outside the village, huge truck convoys and endless lines of American troops moved dustily; behind them lumbered armored tanks, heavy artillery. But inside, Shimabuku was an oasis of serenity.
Once again I strolled through the quiet village streets, soaking up Shimabuku's calm. There was a sound of singing. We followed it and came to Nakamura's house, where a curious religious service was underway.
Having no knowledge of churchly forms or ritual, the Shimbukans had developed their own. There was much Bible reading by Kina, repeated in singsong fashion by the worshippers. Then came hymn singing. The tunes of the two hymns the missionary had taught -- "Fairest Lord Jesus" and "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" had naturally suffered some change, but they were recognizable.
Swept up in the spirit of "All Hail the Power", we joined in. After many prayers, voiced spontaneously by people in the crowd, there was discussion of community problems. With each question, Kina turned quickly to some Bible passage to find the answer. The book's imitation-leather cover was cracked and worn, its pages stained and dog-eared form 30 years' constant use. Kina held it with the reverent care one would use in handling the original Magna Carta.
Time had dimmed the memory of the missionary' neither Kina nor Nakamura could recall his name. They did remember his parting statement. As expressed by Nakamura, it was: "Study this Book well, It will give you strong faith. And when faith is strong, everything else is strong."
Can there be any doubt ... about us? I mean who we are as a nation. This little village pictures perfectly the Great American Experiment and the essence of the American dream. The scholars and the judges beg to disagree but they're the art critics not the artists. The people who did the work are uniform in their testimony ... we are one nation under God.
And can there be any doubt as to the times in which we live? John the Baptist said of Jesus, "He has his winnowing fork in his hand." Joshua said, "Choose this day whom you will serve." Elijah said, "If Baal is god then follow him, if the Lord is God then follow Him." This is where we are as a nation -- in the midst of a great and awesome decision.
Can there be any doubt that this same Eternal One agree to a covenant made by our Founding Father's to be this nation's God?
Can there be any doubt that though He is Judge, He is also merciful and patient?
Can there be any doubt that "if my people who are called by My Name shall humble themselves and pray, and turn from their wicked ways then shall I hear from heaven and heal their land?"
Can there be any doubt that the same God who delivered them against the odds from the British Empire could again deliver against the odd from the empire of secular humanism and idolatry?
Can there be any doubt that the God who has sent revival to this land time and again might do it again?
And can there be any doubt that it is God who is the Real Artist -- the true Creator of this nation? And that He who framed the republic has this history of perseverance and restoration? And that therefore there is still hope and therefore we should still work. Indeed, of these things there is no doubt.
