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Janalu Jeanes (Parchman)
To All,
I read this piece and thought it made a lot of sense.
Not long ago, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote: "It's sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous, or atypical, our (America's) religiosity is in the world. A recent Gallup report underscored just how out of line we are."
Given Blow's leftwing politics and his point being that all rich countries except for the United States are secular and that all poor countries are religious, he was obviously not making this point in order to celebrate America's "anomalous" religiosity.
He should have. America's anomalous religiosity is very much worth celebrating -- not because it leads to affluence, but because it is indisensible to liberty. Had Blow make a liberty chart rather than an affluence chart, he might have noted that the freest country in the world -- for 244 years -- the United States of America, has been the most God-centered.
Yes, we know that the Islamic world has also been God-based and that it has not been free. But that is because Allah is not regarded as the source of liberty, as the America's Judeo-Christian God has been, but as the object of submission ("Islam" means "submission").
Since the inception of the United States (and, indeed, before it in colonial America), liberty, i.e., personal freedom, has been linked to God.
America was founded on the belief that God is the source of liberty. That is why the inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Old Testament (Leviticus 25): "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof."
The Declaration of Independence also asserts this link: All men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Because the Creator of the world is the source of our freedom, no state, no human being, no government may take it away. If the state were the source of liberty, then obviously the state could take it away.
Both reason and American values therefore make these claims:
1. The more important the state is, the less the liberty.
2. The more important God is, the smaller the state.
3. Therefore, the more important God is, the more liberty there is.
A proof of the validity of these assertions is that as this country -- the country, not the government -- becomes more secular, it becomes less free, just as has happened in other Western countries. We have far more laws governing human conduct than ever before in America's history. And Western Europe has even more, including limitations on as basic a liberty as free speech.
So too, every totalitarian state except Muslim ones (because a religious government is the Muslim ideal) seeks to abolish religion. Stalin, for example, murdered virtually every member of the clergy, and came close to destroying all religion, in the Soviet Union. He understood that a totalitarian state cannot allow a competing allegiance.
And in democratic Western Europe, the ever-expanding state is inevitably accompanied by an ever shrinking God and religion.
This is largely what the current culture war, which is actually a non-violent civil war, is about. The left seeks an ever-expanding state with, by definition, ever-expanding powers. And a fundamental aspect of that program is the removal of God and religion from as much of American life as possible. This is pursued under the noble-sounding goal of ensuring "separation of church and state." But whatever the avowed aim, the result is the same: secularize as much of society as possible, its institutions and, most importantly, its values.
And recently, commensurate with the removal of God from American society, the most leftwing government (the Obama administration) in American history, expanded state powers to an unprecedented degree.
That leftwing party passed -- more accurately imposed, since it did so without a single vote from the opposition party -- legislation that massively expanded state powers, and it governed more and more of Americans' lives without passing any legislation, but rather by executing executive actions, and subverting Congress. (Remember the DACA program?)
It was inevitable.
From its inception, the left has regarded God and religion (especially the Judeo-Christian varieties) as impediments to its goals: "Trust in Us!" ('aka' the Leftwing intellectuals) has supplanted "In God We Trust." And so, God-based liberty gives way to state-based controls.
Whichever side you are on, at least you can now better understand why the conservatives are fighting. For liberty's sake, not just for God's.
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and be respectful of our differences. 
