How Did the U.S. Become A Secular Nation?
BY CHARLES LiMANDRI
A friend recently asked: “How did we get to this point in our nation’s history when so many people have a secular worldview?” I told him that I thought that there were many factors; however, a few major milestones stood out in the past sixty or so years. For example, in 1954 the U.S. Congress passed the Johnson Amendment which had the effect of silencing many of our nation’s religious leaders on the important political and cultural issues of the day. Then, by 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively outlawed prayer in public schools. What followed was a new era of deleterious impacts on students and society. These included a decline in academic achievement and increases in teen pregnancies, illegal drug use, juvenile crime, etc.
To accomplish its secular social engineering, the Supreme Court had invented a non-constitutional “separation of church and state” which marked a huge departure from our nation’s former rich Christian heritage. This is well illustrated by statements from our first two Presidents. These heroic Founding Fathers stressed the importance of religion and morality to our new American nation. For example, George Washington stated: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Reason and experience also teach us that religion informs our morality, and our morality is the basis of our laws. Thus, our second President, John Adams, also warned his fellow countrymen: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thus, by secularizing our schools, we have robbed generations of students and our nation of the best hope for a more virtuous, unified, and stronger nation.
It is an interesting fact that in 1963 the Congressional Record also listed the threat posed by the Communists’ 45 goals for the ideological conquest of the United States. Of particular note for our present purposes, goal number 28 states: “Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of ‘separation of church and state.’ See also goal No. 30: “Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the ‘common man.’'”
Moving ahead to 1973, two major events occurred to bring us to our current crucial juncture. First, the American Psychiatric Association bowed to political pressure and, with no scientific basis for doing so, removed homosexuality as a listed “disorder” from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM). Second, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the decision in Roe v. Wade and, in doing so, invented a constitutional right for mothers to kill their unborn children.
This introduced a culture of death into American life that would have been unfathomable to our nation’s enlightened founders. Yet, the current Democratic candidate for President has gone on record to state that, in her view, unborn “persons” should have no rights, even moments before they are born. She has gone so far as to state that it is religious beliefs that have to change on this issue, rather than these inhumane practices.
The culture of death has also led to such a devaluation of human life that we have recently witnessed the barbaric practice of abortion providers selling aborted baby body parts. Further, several states have recently enacted laws to permit the “compassionate” killing of the elderly and infirm. Those who object on religious grounds are increasingly marginalized and silenced.
Nothing has had as great an adverse impact on religious liberty as the advancement of the radical homosexual agenda. Therefore, it follows that this too was one of the communist goals listed in the Congressional Record in 1963. Specifically, goal no. 26 for remaking America stated: “Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as ‘normal, natural, healthy.'” Many of the successful attacks on religion and morality have been driven by lawsuits brought by the ACLU. What a surprise that its founder, Roger Nash Baldwin, unabashedly stated: “I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself… I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”
Likewise, Harry Hay, the man known as the “founder of the modern gay movement”, who died only recently, was also a prominent member of the U.S. Communist Party. Interestingly, he greatly influenced Kevin Jennings, President Obama’s former controversial “Safe Schools Czar”. Jennings is the militant gay activist who founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). He pushed hard to fully implement the gay agenda into the public school system, while lashing out at the religious right.
Communist ideology and gender ideology are both incompatible with Christianity but for different reasons. Communism views the state as god–the giver and taker away of all our rights. Christianity views our rights as coming from the one true God, and thus they are inalienable. Gay ideology makes the individual a god onto himself or herself and, in doing so, replaces the Creator with the created person. The defiant created person then destroys the Creator’s plan for the human race. This desecrates the divine model for marriage of husband and wife, which our Lord uses to illustrate His sacred relationship with the Church. Ephesians 5:25-27.
The ideologies of both communism and gay activism are mutually exclusive with a Christian worldview. Hence, our nation is badly divided between secularists and people of faith. And, as our Lord warned, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Mark 3:25. The Obama Administration has misused its executive authority, with Soviet style coercive government policies, to push the secularist ideologies of abortion and gay rights. Examples are the unconstitutional Dept of HHS abortion pill mandate and the recent Dept. of Ed. transgender mandate. In doing so it has bulldozed the First Amendment rights of people of faith. Another example is President Obama’s attempted downgrading of our constitutional right to the “free exercise of religion” by treating it as a much more limited “freedom of worship”. Thus, the modern Democratic Party is the realization of Communist goal No.15: “Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.”
In further examining the issue at hand, “how did we get to this point”, it is worth noting that the gay lobby has been so successful largely because it followed the diabolically ingenious blueprint laid out for it in the book “After the Ball”. This is a gay manifesto for convincing straight America to embrace the homosexual agenda. It was published by two expert gay activists in 1989. Step 5 of this gay manifesto states that activists must make the so-called “victimizers” of homosexuals look like bigoted bullies to the average American. “To be blunt they must be vilified.”
That is why hardcore liberals who read this article will no doubt answer with their usual knee jerk reaction in their responsive comments by accusing this author of bigotry and homophobia. Yet, this writer has always said that it is not the place of devout Christians, as repentant sinners themselves, to judge the hearts of homosexuals; rather, we should love them, as we do all men and women, as our brothers and sisters in Christ. Yet, even the timeless Christian message of “love the sinner…but hate the sin,” is enough to send many a gay activist into attack mode. As far as they are concerned, any consensual sexual act is void of any negative moral implications. Moreover, they conveniently ignore the potential serious consequences of homosexual behavior.
Indeed, even setting aside religion and morality for the moment, gay activists refuse to acknowledge the irrefutably heightened, and sometimes deadly, health risks of homosexual sex.
They also fail to ignore the ample and increasing sociological evidence that gay parenting is generally a poor substitute for kids being raised by their own moms and dads. Not surprisingly, same-sex “marriage” and gay parenting serves to greatly promote communist goal no. 40, which seeks the moral collapse of the United States: “Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.”
Undoubtedly, the next to weigh in against this article will be the faux Christians who claim that it is not compassionate to share the Truth with those who are most in need of it. I would remind these wayward Christians that our Lord said: “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” John 14:23.
Jesus’ teaching on the subject of sexual morality is very clear: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?‘” Matthew 19:4-5. In light of the foregoing, it is simply bad theology and a false compassion that would encourage and enable people to continue in self-destructive sinful behavior.
I would instead encourage our misguided brethren to keep in mind that our Lord is not the wimpy Savior that the cowardly and complicit would have us believe Him to be. Rather, Jesus reserved His strongest condemnation for those who would corrupt children: “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Matthew 18:6.
Nonetheless, what we see happening today is exactly what the destroyers of American culture have successfully sought to accomplish for over six decades. They are now mandating in law that we allow the godless public school system to replace the role of parents and the Church in the moral formation of their children. It is the goal of their anti-Christian social engineering that our children be molded in their own image and likeness.
These modern secularists are destroying the innocence of the vulnerable young students that we are duty-bound to protect. At the same time, the present Administration in Washington, D.C. is also destroying the morale and readiness of those in our armed forces who are charged to protect all of us. If left unchecked, their radical agenda will complete the stated communist goal of bringing America to its knees.
Our only hope now is a robust spiritual renewal brought about through the positive influence of our nation’s Churches. As I started this article, so shall I finish it. The Johnson Amendment, passed in 1954, has thus far largely accomplished its objective of removing the Churches from the battle for the soul of America. The current Republican candidate for President has pledged to seek to repeal that unconstitutional and disastrous law. Hopefully, he will be successful and our nation’s religious leaders will once more find their voices on the most pressing moral and political issues of our day. If they do rise to the challenge, then there is great hope that America will once again be richly blessed as “one Nation under God.”
Mr. LiMandri is devout Catholic and currently represents David Daleiden in the legal fight against the abortion industry.
