The Patriot Post® · Does Religion Have a Role in a Free Society?
By Larry Craig
Religion isn’t talked about much publicly anymore. The thinking is that religion is a personal matter. But even more than that, the thinking is that it doesn’t really matter anyway. Whatever you want to believe doesn’t matter. As long as it is your belief and you sincerely hold to that belief, nobody can tell you that you are wrong. So there is nothing to discuss. To even think that somebody is wrong in a sincerely held belief is deemed arrogance and a form of hatred.
However, our country was founded on what can be called religious beliefs, though the Founders didn’t call them beliefs. They called them facts.
They didn’t just believe that God created all people equal, such that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people. It is a fact.
They didn’t just believe that God gave human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government did not give and that government cannot take away. No, it’s a fact.
Now if a person is an atheist, how can he or she believe that all people have unalienable rights? Not even every religion believes in that. Not every religion believes in a right to life or the right to pursue happiness either.
A religion is an all-encompassing worldview that defines what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, what is the rule and what isn’t the rule.
Every person lives by a personal worldview whether it has the name of a religion or not. Nations have worldviews too that shape laws. Our country was founded on the Christian worldview. That’s why we believe in a right to life and the right to pursue happiness. And why we don’t have kings but representatives.
The Founders believed in a small government. That presumes that the people are self-reliant, responsible, caring of their fellow citizens, and of a high moral standard. Our Founders encouraged the use of the Bible in public schools, where it remained for almost 200 years before a court called supreme deemed it unconstitutional.
Now this doesn’t mean that people are or should be compelled to believe the Bible or even in God. The right to freedom of speech means that people are free to believe what they want and to talk about it. But you have that right, because our Founders believed in a worldview in which God gave you that right. And that is Christianity.
You don’t have to believe in Christianity to live in our country and to enjoy our freedoms, but you have those freedoms because our Founders believed in Christianity.
Some people will insist that our Founders were deists and that these rights were natural law and had nothing to do with the Bible and Christianity.
Except that a deist god wouldn’t give humans anything, let alone tell them about it.
Natural law is an outworking of philosophy. Every generation sees new philosophical systems that influence things until the next one comes along. But the Founders affirmed that God gave these rights to human beings. That’s not philosophy but a statement of fact, undergirded by their belief in the Bible as God’s revelation to humans about Himself and life.