Apr
19

In God We Trust

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

Over the past several weeks, I have shared portions of Dennis Prager’s Still the Best Hope — twice from the section on Leftism and once from the section on Islam & Islamism — that I found helpful and informative. This week, I’d like to cite from the final section, which discusses “America and Its Unique Values”. The section begins by laying out what Prager calls the “American Trinity”, i.e., the three foundational American values that can be found on all American coins: “Liberty”, “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One” or “One from Many”), and, of course, “In God We Trust”.

“Given that ‘In God We Trust’ is one of the three components of the American Trinity, it is important to explain who and what this God is.

Here are the essential characteristics:

This God Is the God Introduced by the Hebrew Bible
The ‘Creator’ in the Declaration of Independence is the God of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’

Though this God is the Creator, He is not an uninvolved, disinterested, amoral deity. He acts in history, primarily through the lives of nations, and sometimes in the lives of individuals. As [Thomas] Kidd summarized it, for all the Founders, ‘God — or Providence, as deists and others might prefer to deem it — moved in and through nations.’

This God is the reason every human life is infinitely precious. This, too, is from the Bible: Man was created ‘in the image of God.’ This does not mean that like God, man is inherently good; it means that human life is sacred and that, like God (but unlike the animals, who are not created in God’s image), man knows good and evil — and has the freedom to choose between them.

And of critical importance to making a good society, this God is the biblical God who commands, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself, I am God’ (Leviticus 19:18).

Every Founder, no matter what his theology, was preoccupied with the Bible. Every great university founded before the eighteenth century, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, was founded by clergy, and these universities placed Bible study at the center of their curricula.

This God Is the Source of Morality

Without this God as the ultimate source of a standard of good and evil, there is no objective good and evil, only personal or societal preferences about right and wrong. If God is not the author of ‘Thou shall not steal,’ men might still come up with the idea that stealing is wrong. Indeed, many will. But it would still be men’s opinions, not an objective moral truth. Moreover, when God says something is wrong, it has infinitely more clout than when reason or logic or opinion or feeling alone says it. Among other things it means that one who steals will be accountable to this God.

This God Demands Moral Behavior from All People and All Nations (Ethical Monotheism)

God judges all individuals and all nations. One aspect of the revolution inaugurated by Jewish ethical monotheism was that one God means one morality for all humanity. Morality is the same for the Jew, the non-Jew, the American, and the non-American. Ethical monotheism was a moral earthquake in human history. Before the Hebrew Bible, all gods acted capriciously; they did what they wanted — they were no more than supermen — and what they did was beyond good and evil.”

I understand what Prager’s getting at, but that last sentence isn’t quite accurate. If we take the Bible as reliable history, God (i.e., YHWH) gave moral rules and demonstrated His non-capricious nature from the beginning (see His dealings with Adam, Noah, the Patriarchs), long before even the Torah was written. The other, capricious “gods” — represented in nature, myth, and/or as hand-crafted idols, but sometimes with demonic power behind them — were invented by rebellious mankind later on. So, God’s special dealings with the Israelites as His chosen people, including the many laws they had to follow, was a powerful reminder of who the one, true, Sovereign God really was (and is).

“The notion of God judging nations was instrumental to all of the Founders’ beliefs, and this notion very much included America itself. Kidd writes, ‘Even though Washington seems personally to have held rather a distant view of the deity, he still believed that God was providentially active in human affairs…. [H]e believed that God, through acts of providence, would judge wicked nations…’

All of the American Founders, even Thomas Paine, who is considered the least religious and the most anti-Christian, believed in the afterlife. As Paine said: ‘I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence. I content myself with believing, even to positive conviction, that the power that gave me existence is able to continue it, in any form and manner he pleases, either with or without this body….’

Not one of the Founders was a deist in the sense that term is erroneously understood today — belief in a creator who has no interest or involvement in his creation. The one most identified as deist in the sense of not believing in Christianity, Paine was raised in a religious home by an Anglican mother and a Quaker father, and he kept their values while dropping their religion. Kidd tells us that Paine ‘apparently worked for a brief period as an evangelical Methodist preacher…’ And Waldman writes, ‘Although he once described himself as a Deist, at other times in his life he embraced the very non-Deistic view that God intervened in the lives of human beings.’ Moreover, his extremely influential Common Sense was filled with religious language and biblical references.

George Washington, in Waldman’s words, ‘wasn’t a Deist. He believed in an omnipotent and constantly intervening God…. He issued many orders calling for days of prayer, was heard to pronounce or call for prayers at meals, and — most important — seemed to believe that God could be influenced by the prayers and behavior of men.’

This God Is the Source of Liberty

This God was the source of liberty. In the famous words of the Declaration of Independence, all men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’

If God is not the source of liberty, what or who will be? A king, a dictator, the state? Only if men regard God as the source of liberty will it not be removed by men. The American experiment in God-based liberty was unique — and it, too, traced its roots to the Hebrew Bible. A biblical verse concerning liberty is the one inscription on the Liberty Bell: ‘Proclaim liberty throughtout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.’ No other society except America’s with its Judeo-based ethical monotheism made God the source of liberty and the one who demands that society be based on individual liberty.”

I hope you found this post interesting and perhaps even thought-provoking….

G’night and God Bless!