A fanatical statement? Our Founding Fathers prophesied it would happen if our “religion and private morality” grossly degenerated. That has happened. That lack of response reveals how little the Constitution means to us.
The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. When people no longer keep that law, a crisis will hurl us into violent anarchy and destructive chaos, so prophesied our Founding Fathers. Unless our Constitution is based on biblical religion and biblical morality, it will not work, so stated the Founding Fathers.
Time magazine recently wrote a cover article about how the U.S. Constitution was under siege, but not in a crisis. I totally disagree. The Constitution is over 90% destroyed already. But almost nobody understands or knows why.
Will we allow the Founding Fathers to tell us why?
Much of Christianity today has become an empty ritual. Where are our leaders who will speak out against family breakdown, U. S. drug usage, and the crime it causes? The Constitution won’t work for such biblically immoral people! Who is willing to hear what our own Founding Fathers prophesied? All political parties are guilty of rejecting their warning.
The famous British historian Paul Johnson wrote an article titled “No Law Without Order. No Freedom Without Law.” It was printed in the Sunday Telegraph, Dec. 26, 1999. In it he wrote, “The rule of law, as distinct from the rule of a person, or class or people, and as opposed to the rule of force, is an abstract, sophisticated concept. It is mighty difficult to achieve. But until it is achieved, and established in the public mind with such vehemence that masses of individuals are prepared to die to uphold it, no other form of progress can be regarded as secure. The Greek empire tried to establish the rule of law. It failed and the empire collapsed. The Roman Empire also tried to build a society based on law. They had succeeded under their republic but Caesar and his successors had destroyed it. The essence of the rule of law is that it is impersonal and omnipotent. It is the same law for everyone, everywhere – kings, emperors, high priests, the state itself, are subject to it. If exceptions are made, the rule of law begins to collapse – that was the grand lesson of antiquity.”
But have we learned that lesson? Failure to do so means we pay the supreme sacrifice: loss of our republic.
The continual problem of man has been his failure to learn from history.
What was our Forefathers’ overall goal? Early immigrants who came to this land were often persecuted in the countries they left. They usually lacked religious freedom.
“Both in Virginia and in New England to the north, the colonists were determined, God-fearing men,” Mr. Johnson wrote, “often in search of a religious toleration denied them at home, who brought their families and were anxious to farm and establish permanent settlements. They put political and religious freedom before riches. Thus took shape the economic dynamo that eventually became the United States – an experiment designed to establish the rule of God on Earth…”
What a goal! That means they had the goal of each person keeping the Ten Commandments of God – the basis of all righteous law.
How many Americans are willing to face that reality? Not many. Because then we would have to admit that we often fight not to establish law, but to promote lawlessness!
Consider some statements from the Founding Fathers. In his first inaugural, President George Washington said, “The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.” And in his famous Farewell Address, he said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. Without them we are doomed to failure.”
John Adams backed him up: “Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.”
In 1954, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it.” Ironically, he subsequently began to gradually tear the Constitution apart.
The Constitution is the foundation of our republic. And the Ten Commandments were, in many ways, the foundation of the Constitution.
It was very hard for our Founding Fathers to spill steams of blood winning our freedom, and to create and establish our constitutional law. And it will be just as hard for us today to maintain it. Are we too vain and arrogant to see how profoundly strong they were and how pathetically shallow and weak we are?
What a noble and rare document our Constitution is. Our forefathers had the awesome opportunity to establish the rule of God in this great country. So they established a Constitution to protect all of us from the extremes o.f human reason. Tyrants, unjust judges and biased leaders were controlled by this law.
When Robert Bork was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, it created a firestorm in Congress, and he failed to get confirmed. Shortly thereafter, he wrote the book “The Tempting of America”. In it he said, “The founders of the Constitution put in place the walls, roof and beams of our Constitution. The judges’ purpose is to preserve the architectural features – adding only filigree or ornamental work. Instead the lawyers and judges are changing the very structure of our representative republic.”
We are experiencing a constitutional earthquake, and most of our people don’t even know it – yet. Your future is being changed for you and often you have no input.
The order of events in the life of an empire has often gone like this: 1. Establishment of a representative constitutional government which succeeds for a time. 2. The constitution is gradually changed and weakened. 3. Apathy among the people grows allowing corruption in government. 4. A dictator or oligarchy takes over power and the constitution is completely ridden over. 5. Either the people rise up in anarchy to take over the government and establish a new constitutional government OR 6. The country becomes so weak by overtaxation and spending that a foreign power is able to conquer and destroy the country.
Cal Thomas wrote in the March 8, 2000 Washington Times, “In the final Democratic debate before the Super Tuesday election, Vice President Al Gore responded to a question about the type of Supreme Court justices he as president would select: ‘I would look for justices of the Supreme Court who understand that our Constitution is a living and breathing document, that it was intended by our founders to be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of the American people.’
Mr. Gore’s view of the Constitution, shared by most political liberals, is one of the most dangerous philosophies of our time. It establishes a class of philosopher kings who determine the rights of the people and shreds the Constitution as a document that conforms people to unchanging principles that promote their own and the general welfare.
A “living” Constitution means the Constitution is “up for grabs,” and it becomes whatever the justices decide, not the people through their elected representatives.
Law scholars today don’t believe our founders established the rule of law. But that is just what the founders did. And now their foundational work is so often rejected.
Why did the Founding Fathers keep pointing back to these fundamental building blocks of religion and morality? John Adams himself answered that question in 1798, while serving as president: “Our Constitution was made ONLY for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Without the moral restrictions of a higher spiritual law, the liberty afforded Americans in the Constitution would be abused. The success of our Constitution does not depend on which political party we belong to – it depends on how biblically spiritual we are!
Today, many Americans have departed from the ideals of our forefathers. They reason that religion and morality are nice, but certainly not necessary for the overall wellbeing of the nation. We have been led to falsely assume that private morality and public duty are separate issues. George Washington would have been appalled by such reasoning. And he was the father of our nation.
When Americans have gone from proclaiming that a free society can only exist when founded on private morality to thinking that character just doesn’t matter, it is time to ask some hard questions about the future of this nation.
