The New Secular Religion and its Opposition to Prayer

Here’s one more story out of thousands on the same exact subject:

• For years, the Vermont town of Franklin near the Canadian border started Town Meeting with a prayer. A lawsuit stopped that from happening this year…Since the town votes from the floor and residents have to attend to be heard, the Vermont Chapter of the ACLU says residents are being compelled to attend religious worship.

What’s the matter with this picture? Well, let me suggest several flaws:

1. Perhaps the main one is that this violates the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech…”

2. Historically, prayer had been part of the Congressional meetings of the USA. Evidently, no one then believed that prayer violated the Constitution.

3. There is no compelling reason for the Fed to trump local sovereignty. What if 90% of the community wants prayer in council meeting? Why should the values or religion of the federal government impose itself on a local, popularly chosen practice?

4. All laws and judgments reflect a certain values orientation, and these judgments are necessarily religious in nature. It seems hypocritical of the Federal government to censure the town council for a religious practice, when the Fed’s imposition is also religious. It is also hypocritical for the ACLU to fault the council that it “compelled [residents] to attend religious worship,” while the Fed and the ACLU are practicing their own forms of compulsion.

5. It is therefore hypocritical to discriminate against Christianity and not against other forms of religions. Our public schools have become indoctrination camps for the religions of naturalism, multi-culturalism, moral-relativism, and sexual permissiveness. While it is acceptable to present arguments in favor of sexual license, arguments to the contrary have been deemed “religious” and therefore proscribed.

6. Any public school student is “compelled” to do many things that they don’t want to do. It is therefore not enough to censure a council because it “compelled” its guests to be subjected to a prayer. This is certainly preferable to being compelled to hear the lies and distortions coming out of many meetings. In fact, we are compelled to do many things that go against our values. We have to pay taxes and drive within the speed limits.

7. There is no neutrality. A prayer-less council meeting represents an imposition of another kind – one that can be equally offensive to religious people. This enforced silence conveys the ideas of secular humanism - the belief that prayer is not necessary.

8. A democratic nation must rule by the consent of its people. If it fails to do so, it will loose this consent and thrust the nation into turmoil. There are no vital national at stake to justify squelching diversity and the will of local communities. There are no reasons why the Fed must enforce uniformity. Such enforcement pushes us closer to having a totalitarian state.

We tend to forget that our legal climate wasn’t always this way.  Up until recently, it has been characterized by the understanding that living together required tolerance and the respect for the conscience and free expression of others, even for those with whom we disagreed. For example, in 1940, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case involving Jehovah Witness children who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Justice Felix Frankfurter argued for the majority that our common national interests for patriotic cohesiveness required the Pledge. In response, Justice Harlan Stone retorted that religious liberty argued for,

·             “The freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say, at least where the compulsion is to bear false witness to his religion.”

According to Stone, our freedom of religion and expression should even take precedence over certain national interests. In contrast, now even the passing fads of political correctness have been elevated over our religious freedoms.

Thankfully, Frankfurter’s decision did not stand. In 1943, in a very similar case, Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the majority and affirmed:

·             “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Sadly, now an invasive national orthodoxy is attempting to squelch all expressions of religious diversity. In contrast, in 1965, the Court heard a case that directly impacted national security but ruled to grant qualified U.S. citizens the status of “conscientious objector.” However, this designation could only be given to “those persons who by reason of their religious training and belief are conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.” 

This was a ruling that would certainly be divisive and could actually compromise national security. However, there was still enough respect for religion and the sanctity of the conscience that the court overruled national security concerns. Even the liberal Justice Stephen O. Douglas concurred with the majority:

·              “…any person opposed to war on the basis of a sincere belief, which in his life fills the same place as a belief in God fills in the life of the orthodox religionist, is entitled to exemption under the statute.”

Even in this critical area where there were legitimate concerns about national security, the Court ruled against imposing a uniform solution. Respect for sincerely held faith was deemed more important than the immediate national interests. How far have we come!

Speaking against Injustice and Hypocrisy: It isn’t an Option

Many Christians have accused me of erroneously portraying Christians as persecuted, marginalized and stigmatized victims.  Well, I don’t want to erroneously portray anything or anybody. However, I am deeply concerned about the dimming of the light of the church and of Christians. I think that some of the problem arises from the secularized media and schools that consistently portray Christians in a negative light and use this as an excuse to act in prejudicial ways towards the church and what it stands for.

There are so many examples of this hypocritical intolerance of the church. Here is just the latest:

• Officials at Dixon High School in Dixon, Mo., took down posters advertising the "Pro-Life Day of Silent Solidarity," claiming that they were offensive to some at the school.

How long will it be that the Bible or the Christian faith is deemed “offensive?” Meanwhile, secularism ignores the fact that they too are offensive, and by their own standards, they should be silenced:

• "Time and again students find themselves being censored … when speaking from a pro-life perspective," said [Matt] Sharp [of the Alliance Defense Fund]. "They have rights that should be protected, nourished." Sharp found it interesting that although the school took down the pro-life posters, posters not taken down include ones showcasing students as "bloody zombies" and the school's Gay-Straight Alliance's "Day of Silence." "Of all the posters, [the pro-life posters] are the only ones we know of that have been torn down," said Sharp, who considered the selective censorship to be a "dangerous thing." 

There are many parents and students who find the Gay-Straight Alliance and much of what passes muster in the schools as offensive. If everything that was deemed “offensive” was censored, we could no longer even conceive of a public domain. There couldn’t be such a domain at all.

However, our secular masters will not follow through with their logic. They would rather make false distinctions – secular vs. religious – so that they can discriminate against religion, erroneously appealing to the separation of church and state. In order to pull off this false dichotomy, they insist that they are not a religion. By doing this, they can then claim that their own values are not subject to censorship while “pro-life” is!

This means that a school can promote abortion and same-sex rights, while the anti-abortion or anti-Gay-Straight Alliance reasoning is prohibited. Oddly, the secularists even appeal to the 1^st Amendment to support their hypocrisy.

A small minority of Christians will say, “If that’s their game, let them play it. We have more important things to do.” However, I can’t go along with this reasoning, even if there are more important things than this “game.” Here’s why:

1. We have a responsibility to uphold society.
2. We have a responsibility to defend the religious and free speech rights for everyone.
3. We have a responsibility on behalf of these beleaguered Christians to speak up on their behalf, like the churches that now are being banished from the NYC schools or the Christian institutions, now being compelled to finance insurance that violates their faith.
4. We have a responsibility to our youth to provide a more realistic portrait of the church. Many are leaving or wanting to change the church because they have been indoctrinated by society to think that the church has utterly failed.
5. We also have a responsibility to he church and before God to be prophetic – to speak against the dangers of sin in all its forms.

Being prophetic in these matters isn’t an option:

• Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins. (James 4:17)

Ezekiel, the Temple, Secularism and the Decay of True Religion

I felt like the Prophet Ezekiel. God had taken him on an intimate and private tour of the inner workings of the Temple. The spiritual decay was far worse than Ezekiel had imagined. Israel’s spiritual leadership was happily engaged in idolatrous worship behind closed doors.

This Sunday, Anita and I went to the Episcopal Church. The honored guest preacher invited us all into the Episcopal inner sanctum, revealing its treasured secrets. According to him the Bible couldn’t be authoritative. That’s because even Jesus had been wrong on numerous occasions, and Paul showed us how irrational many of the Old Testament revelations had been by overturning them. Conclusion: This gives us the authorization to overturn anything in the Bible that’s irrational to us!

Anita and I looked at each other. I had long suspected that the guest preacher’s candid tour was an accurate representation of the real, unvarnished Episcopal Church. (Here’s what we usually hear it saying, “We too believe in the Bible. We just have a different interpretation.”) It reminded me of my tooth where the infection had penetrated to such a depth that I needed a root canal.

I whispered to Anita, “I think that we are seeing the real Episcopal Church.” Then the resident pastor got up to praise the “wonderful” sermon we had all just heard. That confirmed it, and so I took a long fretful walk to compose myself in prayer.

During the coffee hour, I confronted the pastor in the most loving manner I could conjure up. “If the Bible is no longer authoritative, what should be authoritative for us?” I shot at him.

“Well, I didn’t say that,” he corrected me. “Instead, we have to approach the Bible carefully, using our best critical tools.” I envisioned a doctor wearing his anti-septic mask and gloves, lest he be contaminated by the cadaver before him.

“Instead, of placing our faith in the Bible as God’s Word, are you insisting that we should now place our faith in the scholars and their Biblical-criticism tool box?” I asked. He responded surprisingly good-naturedly. However, I shouldn’t have been surprised. He had been a professor at Oxford for six years, among many other places, and knew all about dealing with characters like me. Nevertheless, he was one of the many architects of the new religion – the religion of the educated, secular experts, tamed, defanged, and socially acceptable

“I wish you had been in my Bible study!” I wasn’t going to be flattered. At least, I wasn’t going to allow this too soften me. However, someone else caught his ear, and I wandered away and found the seminarian – the interning General Theological Seminary student.

After exchanging some pleasantries, enough to convince her that I was one of them, I asked her, “What do you thin of the NYC ruling, ousting churches from the NYC schools where they had been renting space on Sundays. She was all in favor of the ruling and cited the “separation of church and state.”

“Well, isn’t this a violation of the principle of ‘equal access?’ If AA can rent space, why not also the churches?” I asked.

She then lifted the veil to the “holy place” of her true thinking. “Well, these churches tend to be fundamentalist. They won’t have women pastors.”

Sadly, it has been the more Biblically-oriented people who had been marginalized from the mainline churches and forced to seek asylum in store-fronts and schools, while the majestic church structures, which Bible-believing Christians had built, have been taken over by “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” Now, once again, these churches were going to be booted out.

I then asked her a series of pointed questions: “Doesn’t your position represent ‘viewpoint discrimination?’ In essence, aren’t you saying that religions that don’t share your views or the views of your religion shouldn’t receive equal protection and access under the law?” She graciously excused herself to find more congenial company.

This is the nature of the modern secularized religion – monopolistic, intolerant, and promoting “freedom of religion,” as long as it’s their own pluralistic religion.

This new monopolistic religion is taking many forms. Here’s a recent example:

• Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington State has signed into law a gay “marriage” bill that will force church-owned facilities to accommodate homosexual ceremonies.

• The bill text originally stated that religious organizations that provide “accommodations, facilities, advantages, privileges, services, or goods related to the solemnization or celebration of a marriage” to the public must offer all those goods for use to homosexual couples seeking marriage or else face a penalty for discrimination. The version of the bill that passed dropped the qualification, allowing religious groups to retain marriage facilities for heterosexual unions.

Although this clause was finally dropped, it reflects the drift of today’s secularism: “If you don’t play ball with us, you don’t play ball at all. We will not respect your freedom of conscience or your freedom of speech or your freedom to worship if you violate our own religious views.”

While the secularists cry “separation of church and state” when a church rents space at a school, they have hypocritically instituted their own state-sponsored church with government funding in our public schools. And it’s a highly permissive religion! A recent video shows how Planned Parenthoodis sexualizing our children according to their beliefs about the “good” life. 

Meanwhile, the religious belief of naturalism has been exclusively enthroned in the science classroom. Consequently, natural mindless causation is the only form of causation that can be mentioned. Free from any God-talk, they now can joyfully shout, “Look how irrelevant God is! We can explain everything by naturalistic causation!”

However, there is not the slightest shred of evidence that causation is natural and mindless. Instead, it’s another chunk of evidence that cries out “God.” (It is much more reasonable to conclude that our laws emanate from the mind of God. After all, who created and maintains the laws!)

I’m almost sure that Ezekiel wasn’t thrilled with his Temple tour. It meant that he now had to do something. He had to cry out his outrage to a people who didn’t want to hear him and eventually killed him.

AN INTERESTING ADDENDUM:

Some unlikely people are waking up to the threat of secularism and its offspring - moral relativism:

• A Muslim Cabinet minister has become the latest member of Prime Minister David Cameron's government to urge the country to embrace its Christian heritage. Sayeeda Warsi also said that "militant" secularism poses a threat to Europe, a comment that has angered atheists and highlighted the divisive political potential of religion…In an article published Tuesday in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Warsi urged Europe "to become more confident in its Christianity"…

• "You cannot and should not extract (the) Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes," she wrote. "My fear today is that a militant secularization is taking hold of our societies," she added, accusing some atheists of having the same intolerant instincts as authoritarian regimes.

• In a speech in Rome, Warsi said that "too often there is a suspicion of faith in our continent." She said in Britain religion has been "sidelined, marginalized and downgraded" and "faith is looked down on as the hobby of 'oddities, foreigners and minorities.'"

Free Speech vs. Politcal Correctness

The Los Angeles Community College District had a warning on their website:

"If [you are] unsure if certain comments or behavior are offensive do not do it, do not say it. ... Ask if something you do or say is being perceived as offensive or unwelcome."

This warning might seem quite harmless, but fortunately, Judge King didn’t think so. According to LifeSiteNews.com (July 16, 2009): “Judge King agreed that the policy violated First Amendment protections of free speech by silencing viewpoints that others would find offensive.”

As it turned out, this wasn’t an unfounded concern. U.S. District Judge George H. King ruled that “the District's policy as written had created the environment that emboldened his speech professor to call [his student Jonathan] Lopez a ‘fascist ba***rd’ for explaining his Christian beliefs and how they related to his views against same-sex marriage” [during his assigned oral speech assignment]. Wisely, King concluded:

"Thus, the Policy reaches constitutionally protected speech that is merely offensive to some listeners, such as discussions of religion, homosexual relations and marriage, sexual morality and freedom, polygamy, or even gender politics and policies. While it may be desirable to promote harmony and civility, these values cannot be enforced at the expense of protected speech under the First Amendment."

We’re left to wonder how many other schools have such policies that would serve to intimidate and suppress free speech. We also have to be astounded by the irony of prohibiting “offensive” but responsible and necessary speech by persecuting the innocent with all manner of offensive tactics. Lopez’s professor had even tried to have him expelled. Who’s the fascist here?