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“OUR FOUNDATION RESTS ON GOD”
Stephen Schwambach
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Dr. Schwambach is senior pastor at Bethel Temple Community Church, a contemporary Bible church in Evansville, IN. He has earned a B.A. in Religion, an M.A. in Theology, and a Ph.D. in Psychology. He is author of five books including Devotion Explosion! – When Your Quiet Time Gets a Little Too Quiet! as well as over 300 columns and articles.

Take a dollar out of your wallet and read the phrase on the back: “In God we trust.” This is not some empty platitude. This is the official motto of the United States of America. By choosing this phrase, we the people declare that trust in God is our guiding principle, the essence of who we are as a nation.

Unique among the nations of the world, America was founded by Christians and established on Christian principles. John Quincy Adams, our sixth U.S. president and in a position to know, wrote “The Declaration of Independence. . . laid the cornerstone of government . . . on the precepts of Christianity.” History records that 52 of the 55 people who crafted our Constitution were evangelical Christians.

Then what about “separation of church and state”? Many people believe this phrase appears in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and therefore must be strictly enforced. However, the words “separation,” “church” and “state” appear nowhere in the amendment.

The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This is a solemn vow that the state will never interfere in the affairs of the church. It does not even come close to the dangerous assertion that God is unwelcome in affairs of state.

Then where did this “wall of separation between church and state” idea originate? From a phrase buried in a brief note to the Danbury Baptists penned in 1802 by Thomas Jefferson.

However, a straightforward reading of this short note makes it clear that Jefferson’s intent was to reassure these Baptists that the state had no right to interfere in their affairs. Period.

How can we be so sure of Jefferson’s meaning? By his actions.

Just two years later, in 1804, the first public schools of the District of Columbia implemented Bible reading and the use of the Bible as a textbook–under the leadership of the president of the school board, who was none other than Jefferson.

Today, visitors can read Jefferson’s own words, inscribed on the wall of his memorial in Washington, D.C.: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are a gift from God?”

William Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, explains, “The wall of separation between church and state is a metaphor based upon bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build a wall of separation (between church and state).”

On what did Rehnquist base his opinion? Perhaps in part on the words of our fourth president, James Madison: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions . . . upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

Or perhaps he went back even further to the words of our first president, George Washington: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

Some revisionists have suggested that while our forefathers may have made such statements for public consumption, they were not all that devout in their personal lives.

But listen in to the prayer life of Washington, and you be the judge: “Direct my thoughts, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the lamb, and purge my heart by thy Holy Spirit. . . daily frame me more and more into the likeness of thy son, Jesus Christ, that living in thy fear, and dying in thy favor, I may in thy appointed time attain the resurrection of the just unto eternal life.”

America is a far greater nation because of the influence of the Bible upon public policy. It is hard to imagine that 39 years ago America had separate drinking fountains for whites and blacks and “colored balconies” in movie theaters. Where would we be today if a preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. had not thundered against this injustice from the pulpits and in the public streets of this land?

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 is a direct result of the actions of men and women of all colors who marched arm-in-arm, united and passionately motivated by the biblical principle of racial equality: “My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism” (James 2:1).

Should we continue to allow religion to influence public policy? Yes.

We’d be absolute fools to do otherwise.

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