Adam2.org Award-winning Articles . . .
Title: The False Separation of Church and State
Contributor: Media House International
Copyrighted: Permission granted to copy and distribute freely with the following accompanying permission.
Reprinted by permission from: Media House International, P.O. Box 362173, Melbourne FL 32936-2173
The False Separation of Church and State
The current debate over the so-called "separation of church and state" has caused much controversy in America in recent years. It is an argument framed by the world's political system, erroneously reinforced by the worldly religious philosophers, and, of course, undergirded by the invisible spirits of Satan.
It is designed to do one thing: ghettoize Christians, keeping them away from the real issues of discipling the nations. The Church can let the world system control mankind without a fight only if it wants to betray its Leader and condemn to earthly slavery those He died to free.
There are two basic religious systems in this world which have led nations astray. One system holds that man's destiny will come out of social restructuring (Humanism, Marxism, etc.). The other holds that, because God is a spirit or a form of higher consciousness, He is unconcerned with matter or earthly political issues.
It is this second false religious concept that has most severely deceived many God-loving Christians. This false view alleges that God is unconcerned with the real world issues of economics and politics. This is actually an Eastern mystical concept, not a Christian idea at all. Unfortunately, over the last 150 years, this Eastern mystical heresy has entered much of evangelical thought. When the Church falls into false doctrine that pulls it away from the real world, nations go into imprisonment.
Many Christians seem to think God only wants souls; that He has little use for the bodies in which those souls live. The Deceiver has persuaded the Church to buy into the old religious heresy of "dualism" - a gnostic heresy dismissed by the early Church fathers during the fourth and fifth centuries.
Gnostic dualism teaches that the world and all matter is useless, if not evil and/or illusory."God wants spirits," it says, not bodies and the work earthly bodies can do to bring God's kingdom to the earth. Politics is seen as "worldly" to a Christian since it deals with earthly affairs. The only work of value for the Christian dualist is preparing people's spirits for heaven. Because of this heresy, Christians have been tricked away from their duty to God to rule over the earth. If matter were evil or useless, Jesus never would have incarnated Himself in a human body. He would have saved man in the form of a spirit.
Religion Is Not Just a Personal Issue
This false Eastern philosophy of dualism underpins the erroneous concept of the separation of "church and state" because it gives force to the argument that religion is a personal spiritual issue which must be separated from the real world affairs of government. If you think as a Christian dualist, you really don't care how righteous men's social orders become. The dualist is afraid that the evil world of politics will corrupt the religious purity of our spirit.
For him, keeping the Church away from the affairs of state is an obvious religious duty rather than a net of deception, woven to ensnare Christ's nations. The dualist is unable to relate to why Christ wants to assume political power on earth.
Let's examine some of the effects of the Church's dualism in today's political thought.
"The United States Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state. Everybody knows that," says the Deceiver. "The wise founding fathers wanted to make sure that they had created a free society where no one's religious convictions would be pushed off on anyone else. In order to do this, the Constitution was written to provide freedom for all religions to operate privately, and guarantees that no religion is allowed to influence or control the political world or the civil government." So argues our "reasonable" foe.
Those who have imprisoned the nations tell us that religion must be kept out of public debates, since religion belongs only in the Church, where its freedom is properly guaranteed. This dualistic doctrine of "separation of church and state" is written also into the Soviet Union's constitution, Mexico's, and most thoroughly secularized nations.
The more the nations listen to this creed of keeping religion out of the nation's schools and politics, the more society falls apart, the more anarchy reigns, the more murders and rapes and suicides take place.
Do you think the phrase "the separation of church and state" is found in the United States Constitution? If you answered "yes," you are 100 percent wrong! The Constitution never uses the phrase, "separation of church and state." The Constitution's first amendment simply says that Congress shall make no law establishing a national religion and neither shall it prohibit religion.
You couldn't have found "separation of church and state" in any state constitution back in 1789 either. All the states were openly Christian (except for Rhode Island), and most of them had state-financed churches.
It was Thomas Jefferson who used this phrase in a letter written to a group of Baptist pastors in Danbury, Connecticut in 1802. The purpose of the letter was to assure those Baptist pastors that Jefferson's somewhat unorthodox view of Christianity would not be pressed on the Church in the United States during his presidency.
President Jefferson assured them that there is a wall of separation that supposedly protects the Church from any undue meddling by the state. The irony is that the phrase never implied that the state needed to be protected from the Church: Jefferson was guaranteeing the Church the benefit of the Wall.
The contemporary anti-Christian religious establishment has turned the issue completely on its head by redefining the phrase. This trick is called "historical revisionism." Historical revisionism twists history and interprets it for one's own purposes.
Our Founding Fathers
Consider the quotes on the bottom of this page by our fathers, who wrote, influenced, and/or lived by the wisdom of the Constitution and ruled our nation. Our founders knew better than to pay attention to the dualist's lies about politics and its relationship to religion. The founders of this nation were wise enough to establish neither a state church nor make the state non-religious in its value base. Even the Supreme Court's historical findings support this view.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1799 that "by our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion." In 1892, the United States Supreme Court in the case The Church Of The Holy Trinity vs. United States, examined hundreds of state constitutions, court cases, and other historical documents and reached the following conclusion:
"There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning: they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation. These are not individual sayings, declarations of private individuals: they are organic utterances: they speak the language of the entire people ... These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation (Supreme Court Case: v. The Holy Trinity, Cited: Feb 29, l892).
The Baptists to whom Jefferson was writing feared state established churches, and feared political pressures that come with state established churches. They resented having to pay taxes to support rival churches. Their fear was rival churches, not rival religions. They were not living in a Muslim society. They were living in Christian America. Jefferson promised the church that the wall would shelter them from any growing incursions from the state.
However, the wall today does not fulfill Jefferson's design for it. For example, local cities tax church property to support the public school system. Since the public school system established our nation's values, it has become the state church, maintained with taxpayers' money and defended by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
For over 100 years secular humanists have sold Christians on the lie that the state is to be protected from Christianity. Now that the state is huge, now that it takes four to five times God's tithe of ten percent, it has flexed its muscles and begun to wage public war on the Church.
Rewriting History and Redefining Words
The world system has spent billions of our tax dollars through public education to convince us of its view of reality, even rewriting history and redefining words. It spends billions more reinforcing these views through books, movies, magazines, and TV shows. It has dedicated itself to capturing the media, while Christians were content to live in cultural shadows.
If you have a child in public school, ask to see his American history book. See how it deals with the religious history of Christianity in America. Look very hard. You will find almost nothing, and yet there is absolutely no doubt that Christianity has been the single most dominant cultural force in this nation's history until the early 1900s.
Major religious movements that affected secular history are never even mentioned! The nations are kept in prison through the false words and false history which is their daily diet(Isaiah 5:13). For example, the great revival of 1835-45 did more to spur the Civil War on behalf of justice for the blacks than any other social force. The abolitionists came directly out of this revival in the Northeastern states. It was Christians who pressed the issue of slavery to the wall and who broke with other Christians who refused to reject slavery.
No self-respecting American historian can deny with intellectual integrity the impact of the revival on the Civil War. But search in vain for its analysis in public school books.
We are told that "to speak of religion in a public text book would be a violation of separation of church and state." Will the Pilgrims next disappear from our history books? Will the Deceiver's duped minions, the ACLU, have the United States' founding fathers as closet homosexuals who, in fact, hated the Bible and left Europe to escape religion in any form?
Over the last 100 years, the Church has "cut a deal" with Western society which was never set to paper or ever openly discussed. In fact it was not understood then, nor is it clearly understood today. The deal was this: Christians would stay out of the political world of governing and setting laws for society, and in return the state would permit the Church to evangelize freely about the future condition of men's souls.
Much of the Church increasingly backed out of political involvements because it felt guilty for a job very poorly done. Until the time of the Reformation in the 1500s, the Church had been integrally involved in the running of society and was guilty both of frequent corruption and tyranny. The Church's role in the political realm was out of balance and it had degenerated into carnal and wicked power plays. Even the unbelievers were disgusted. Instead of producing kingdom citizens who would bring God's honor and balance to the world's institutional order, it had produced many church leaders who wanted the Church to wield the sword and control all thought.
Martin Luther's ideas became more widely understood and the Church gradually withdrew from the political realm. It became carnal for Christians to be involved in the political process. "Politics is a dirty business," became the affirmation of the Church. We are told to stick to the business of saving souls. The worldly politicians and the devil loved that "deal." It left them a clear field from which to take God's earth unopposed by God's first line of defense, the Church.
Gradually, dualist thinking became the unwritten rule of Western culture: the unbelievers run the world, and the Christians order the private consciences and afterlife of their followers.
But Jesus never retreated from real life, and He challenges us not to. You cannot "Go into all the world" in order to bring it under Christ's obedience if you are lost in your narrow concern with your own soul.
Never Again
We must adopt the rallying cry of the Jews: "Never again!" For the Jews, that cry means that they will never again permit a slaughter such as happened in Nazi Germany. "Never again" carries with it the affirmation that life cannot and will not be taken without a fight. We too, must affirm that we can no longer stay off the battlefield for God's earth and his nations. Never again will we play religious pattycake outside the political arena while the unbelievers take care of the important job of running God's earth. Never again will we allow the nations of the earth to go down into the depths of human degradation and slaughter without a battle to the end.
The hypocrisy of the world system is maddening. They not only condemn conservative Christians to the private ghettos between their ears, they are also incredibly two-faced. Humanistic politicians do not think it is wrong when left-wing pastors march in support of various anti-American causes. That is considered"Christian duty." But let more evangelical elements of the Church speak, and those same liberal forces cry bloody murder.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson can run for President and not a word is spoken about its propriety, but when Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson hazards an opinion on anything that the liberals do not like, you would think they had desecrated the flag! Whatever our problems, we have every bit as much right in the political arena as the Berrigan brothers, Bishop Tutu, or Jesse Jackson.
In redefining the "separation of church and state," liberals have temporarily gained some ground, but in the long run they have only created a much more militant kind of conservative Christian activist.
Welcome to "the Deal." It's such a deal - the world system gets the mine and the church gets the shaft! The "wall of separation" is designed to disembowel the church by cutting off its ability to shape or challenge the money, legal and power structures that run things.
The Lie: Christian Activism Will Destroy Peace and Enshrine Bigotry
In an increasingly godless society, tolerance becomes the supreme virtue and defined religious conviction becomes the supreme sin. The criminal becomes anyone whose standards are tied to God's standards. The "good citizen" becomes anyone who accepts the morality of the lowest common denominator. Excellence dies under the world system's all-tolerating hand.
Our opponents claim that active Christianity in the public sector will lead to enormous social upheaval and unrest. It wasn't the Church that started World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam wars. It was the "enlightened" non-religious nations. Attacks on the Church's responsibility for civil death and the disruption of society tend to be incredibly one-sided and unbalanced.
The non-religious have caused multiplied millions more deaths and destruction than did misguided Christians - even during the Inquisition! The Church's dirty laundry is hardly worth an historical footnote in contrast to the more than 150 million plus deaths that the "reasonable and non-religious society" has brought upon us all in the 20th century. The Christians have killed their thousands, but it takes a secular humanist to kill millions.
But the world system guardians protest: they say "religion in politics will divide the country and lead to disruption of the democratic process." Do they have in mind divisions in society like the ones have already given us - divisions such as labor and management, war and peace, blacks and whites, the old and the young, males and females, and a dozen other hard-core disruptions brought upon the world by those who reject Christianity altogether? Humanists lie about history so much it defies the imagination. Humanistic"concern" for "religion disrupting the culture" is about as wicked as its own unspeakable record of human suffering.
Secular humanism wants raw power, and Christians pose a threat to its ugly intentions. Secular humanism dehumanizes people into objects, whether as the victims of abortion, pornographic exploitation, or starvation of those who are "enemies of the non-religious state" (such as in Russia, Southeast Asia, and Ethiopia). What humanism hates most about the Church waking up is that it will unmask their anti-human exploitation and take their foot off people's throats.
I've been behind the Iron Curtain and seen firsthand what a totally non-religious society looks like in its quest for the separation of church and state. One single world describes the sad eyes of its citizens and their colorless clothes and buildings. That world is DESPAIR. And now American humanists want to bring the "blessings" of a totally secular society to America.
Whether the sales pitch for secularism comes from the decadent West, with its sweet insistence that the individual is the center of the universe and that all problems will be solved with more money and time spent on self-actualizing and navel-gazing, or from the Soviets with their "kill the individualist so that all individuals can be truly free," the logic of humanism is fatally flawed. The liberators offer a third choice: the kingdom of God.
Christianity is humanism's great enemy, and the fact that humanists can recognize this reality is the only evidence I have that they can think at all! In their insane desire to separate the spiritual from the real world, they would condemn us all to a society of amoral barbarism. Their "wall of separation" between church and state is, in reality, not a wall but a coffin. But the liberators are going to dismantle this wall. Our love for people compels us to do so.
Copyright 1987, Dennis T. Peacocke. Reprinted by permission from Winning The Battle For The Minds Of Men. For ordering information please write: ALIVE & FREE, 131 Stony Circle, Suite 750, Santa Rosa, CA 95401.
R e l a t e d Q u o t e s:
George Washington: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."
John Adams: "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people ... so great is my veneration of the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read, the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens in their country and respectful members of society."
Thomas Jefferson: "The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty ... students' perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands."
Andrew Jackson: "That Book (the Bible) is the rock on which our Republic rests."
Benjamin Franklin: "A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know the price of the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved."
William Penn: "If we will not be governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants."
Ulysses S. Grant: "Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future. 'Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.'"
