Government Without God Not Our Kind

[Editorial Note: The following article appeared in GRIT 7 April, 1985. GRIT is a magazine published weekly since 1882 at Williamsport, PA. As a child, I remember GRIT coming into our home. We believe the following article is timely, but more importantly it is worth reading and thoughtful pondering. W. Terry Varner, Research Coordinator]

“You’ve been hearing, ‘We must keep separate church and state.’
When President Reagan dared to suggest that ‘religion and government are inevitably related,’
that remark was pounced upon by some as a ‘grave threat to the constitutional separation of church and state.’
Hold the phone.
It says nothing in the Constitution about separating the church and state.
The First Amendment does not mention the ‘state,’ does not mention the ‘church’ and does not mention ‘separation.’
ALL IT says is that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’
Big difference.
Dr. D. James Kennedy has retraced American history to see if we are, in fact, drifting in the direction of too much religion in government.
He finds our first settlers at Jamestown in 1607, as their first act, built a wooden cross and conducted a prayer meeting.
In 1620, the Mayflower Compact begins, ‘In the name of God . . .” and goes on from there.
IN 1643, the New England Confederation bound the colonies ‘to advance the kingdom of our Lord . . .’
Our Supreme Court’s Trinity Decision of 1892 affirmed that ‘this is a religious people, this is a Christian nation.’
Yet, America from its theistic foundation has provided more religious freedom for more people than had ever existed in this world.
In this country, any person can worship any god or none. In Saudi Arabia, you worship Allah or else. . . . in Egypt, it’s against the law to be anything but Muslim.
Indeed, all legislators in every nation reflects somebody’s moral views and attitudes.
The author of our Constitution, James Madison, wrote, ‘It is impossible to govern without God and the Ten Commandments.’
In our schools, where all textbooks were Scripture from 1776 to 1800, today none is.
So instead of ‘drifting in the direction of too much religion in government’ we have, in fact, drifted toward the total exclusion of God from government, until law-abiding Americans are increasingly at the mercy of the lawless.
The authors of our Constitution wanted no one church to run our country . . .
Our founders came over here to get away from that sort of thing.
But government without God is not our kind.
There is government in our present world which denies God, improvises and enforces its own dictator’s ideas of rightness and wrongness.
But not ours—thank God.”

Paul Harvey (Deceased)