Billoblog ®

The Supreme Court has just accomplished two assaults on the liberties of Americans. In the first, Kelo, they denied us the basis of all of our other rights, that of private property.

As worrisome as that is, it doesn’ bother me as much as the assault on religion in the US. This is not merely an assault on rights, but it is an attack on the fundamentally religious belief in inalienable rights as such. There are a number of problems with the ruling against the posting of the Ten Commandments. The first is that the SCOTUS equates “offending” someone with “establishing” a religion. I have never heard that it is unconstitutional to offend. How European. This is one more step down a slippery slope that the petty antichristians in the US are greasing with abandon.

But more important than the increasing antipathy of both the atheistic left and the anticlerical libertarians towards practicing Christians is a revisionism that would make a Soviet propaganda minister proud. The agenda is not merely to remove references to God from all public discussion, but to deny the importance of Christian thought and Christian morality to the development of liberty and of the basic political ideals that make America what it is.

It is fine to create a memorial to Abraham Lincoln and carve his famous “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” in marble for everyone to see. It is now a crime to acknowledge in a public place the original author of the phrase, John Wycliffe, who gave his life translating the Bible into English. In 1382, in his dedication, he wrote “This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, for the People.” Similarly, while Luther was beholden to Frederich the Wise, and opposed the peasant uprising, it was a belief in a equality before God that drove him to translate the New Testament into German. It was this recognition of the importance of the value of all individuals in the eyes of God that provided the impetus for our liberty today. Luther’s “The Liberty of a Christian Man” was primarily concerned with the individual’s standing before God. Luther states “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone… ” He was hardly a fan of democracy, but the extention into politics was inevitable and inexorable. The history of the Reformation is the history of the slow, painful, birth of our liberty.

Atheism, in contrast, has been a consistent opponent of individual liberty. There is no affirmation of the divine in every individual, because there is no divine. The call to the greater good has been an unresistable call to tyranny in virtually every truly atheistic state. Karl Marx was correct in his observation that Protestantism is the ideology of capitalism.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet practice of removing the images of those who had fallen from favor from public photos and erasing mention of them from historical documents was a self-parody. Now the Supreme Court has begun the same process. The contribution of Christianity to our society is to be erased. Sure, we can practice our dirty little religion at home, where nobody can see us and be offended. But acknowledge the contribution of Christianity to our liberties? Heaven forbid. Or, more correctly, Supreme Court forbid.