Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont ripped Deputy Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget nominee Russell Vought for his Christianity during a hearing. Sanders, after questioning Vought about his Christian beliefs and Vought answering forthrightly, declared, “This nominee is really not someone who this country is supposed to be about. I will vote no.”
Over the weekend far left radicals countered peaceful protests against Sharia Law with violence, saying that protesters were motivated by hate. This country is not only divided along political lines, but also-and the case can be made-mostly along religious lines. This division is leading to persecution of God-fearing Americans.
The Founding Fathers worst nightmare is coming true. They believed that an overreaching government would naturally seek to control the freedoms of its people. That’s why they put checks and balances into the system. But one of the problems with representative government is that it only works when the citizenship is engaged.
John Adams, Founding Father and second U.S. president, said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The religion he was speaking of is Christianity. Aside from Judaism, other religions are incompatible with a republican form of government. They tend toward despotism of varying degrees.
This precept was part of the very fabric of America as far back as the 1600s when the Pilgrims came here to escape religious persecution at the hands of the Church of England. Pastor of the Pilgrims John Robinson wrote in a farewell letter to those leaving on the Mayflower:
Lastly, whereas you are become a body politic, using amongst yourselves civil government, and are not furnished with any persons of special eminency above the rest, to be chose by you into office of government; let your wisdom and godliness appear, not only in choosing such persons as do entirely love and will promote the common good…not beholding in them the ordinariness of their persons, but God’s ordinance for your good.
Robinson’s letter is credited as inspiration for the Mayflower Compact, which shaped the Founders view on self-government. Exodus 18:21 influenced the Founders in devising our representative form of government: “Moreover you shall provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.” Sanders and the radical left are wrong.
While not all the Founders were Christian, they agreed that the Bible contained the principles for self-government. We are a nation divided politically because the absolute moral truth of Christianity is contradictory to the rebellious and immoral agenda of the left. They are willing to persecute those who don’t agree with them.
Have a blessed and powerful day!
Bill Wilson