Debating Pagans

Fantasy Ventured, Nothing Gained…

The October 29, 2009 debate entitled “Is America a Christian Nation?”  between Chaplain E. Ray Moore (Lt. Col., USAR Ret.), president of Frontline Ministries, Inc. and founder of Exodus Ministries, and Herb Silverman, president of Secular Coalition for America sponsored by the Pastafarians at University of South Carolina in Columbia, S. C. is recorded on the following nine YouTube videos.

I do not support the ACLU and I admire E. Ray Moore but I believe the evidence supporting the position that the Constitution created a Christian nation is flimsy and mostly wishful thinking. Christians need to re-examine this issue with a willingness to see the truth.  I does harm to the Gospel of Jesus Christ when His people fail to discern the nature of the battle and waste their energy fighting for illegitimate issues.

Chaplin Moore was well prepared and presented the usual arguments.  Silverman did likewise.  Though Herb Silverman worships another god and is anathema to the God of his fathers and Christianity I believe he won the debate.

The overwhelming majority of American citizens consider themselves Christian.  They vote for a government that is mostly secular and individuals who are oath bound to support a Constitution that provides no religious distinction.  As outrageous as it is, President Obama has a legal right to proclaim the Muslim faith.

During the Eighteenth Century the enlightenment flowered in Europe and exerted a substantial influence on the desire to bind the thirteen colonies into a single nation and to seal the federation with a constitution.  It was a subtle transition; human reason began to supersede the Word of God.  This elevation of man was readily accepted by leaders in Europe and in the United States.

Founded in 1636 Harvard was a Puritan institution with a primary intent on educating Christian ministers.   As times changed Harvard changed as well.  In 1701Puritan President Increase Mather was deemed too conservative and was forced out and replaced by Samuel Willard who instituted a new “broad and catholic” tolerance.  One Christian writer describes the change as “tolerance, irenicism, and a lack of spiritual perception”. He contends that “It should be no surprise to see the school’s morals changing as well.”

When revivalist George Whitefield arrived in Cambridge in September, 1740, he addressed 15,000 people on Boston Common and preached at Cambridge meetinghouse to Harvard students and faculty.  He found the state of the Harvard student body deplorable with drinking, coarse language, ribald literature, and irreverence as common as it was at Cambridge and Oxford.

As humanism ascended and Christianity deteriorated, Christians fought back.  The presidents of Princeton and Yale railed against Arminianism.  In 1808, Andover Theological Seminary was founded with a charter that committed it to orthodox Calvinism forever.  However, the poison had already been swallowed and slowly the premise that all of God’s creation must be conformed to His Will was being replaced with the premise that God’s demands must bend to human reason. This was the tenor of the time and the framers of the United States Constitution were not immune to its seduction.

Of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention thirty were college graduates.  George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were two who did not attend college.  General Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin and ten other signers (33 percent) were Masons. http://www.bessel.org/constmas.htm All of the delegates were learned men and had been exposed to the enlightenment.

The Constitution contains no reference to God but the Declaration of Independence which was mentioned by Chaplain Moore uses the words “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”.  These are Deistic terms with inexact meanings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law They do not refer to the God of the Bible or to the Law it contains and cannot be used to contend for a relationship to the One True God.

The Bible states that “fruit” is the measure of Christian authenticity.  God expects us to bear good fruit and threatens our destruction if we do not.   The United States of America has been a prosperous and successful nation but the good fruit has fallen far behind the success.

There is an uncanny and tragic simile between the inexorable incursion of Israeli citizens into Palestinian land and the expansion of the original thirteen colonies across the North American Continent.  Both involved a more wealthy and powerful society raping a weaker people; both had a religious component; both were fueled by large scale immigration; both resulted in a visceral hate for the people being oppressed, and both involved theft and genocide.

It was in the final years of the Nineteenth Century that the culmination of broken promises, oppression, theft, and torture of the American Indians, now savages – no longer human, resulted in the Massacre at Wounded Knee.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre An area of land and water containing 3,119,884 square miles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiguous_United_States formerly the home of indigenous tribes, was now populated by immigrant Europeans.  The Indians had become terrorists. There had been atrocities on both sides but it was the occupation by European settlers of land that did not belong to them and where they were not wanted that was the sole impetus for the massacres. Read a short history of Indian removal policies here. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html

As the Spanish Empire tottered the United States connived  a war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War which they easily won.  The Philippines was one of the spoils from that war.  From 1899 to 1902 the United States send the cruel Indian killers to the Philippines to subdue resistance to its annexation.  http://www.iiipublishing.com/politics/asian_war/asian_war_philippines1.html Up to a million Filipinos were slaughtered in that war.

It may have been a coincidence, but, maybe not – in the first decade of the Twentieth Century the mechanics of the Federal Reserve System were implemented http://www.frugalfun.com/jekylisland.html and the United States of America fell into the hands of the banking cartel that still pulls tyrannical strings.

Our nation was expansive, aggressive, and successful but was it Christian?  Did it produce Christian fruit?  God judges nations by the same standards as individuals.

In the Twenty First Century our nation has embarked on a plan of aggressive warfare designed to produce world domination.  We have troops stationed throughout the world and are in the process of subduing some of the last of the world’s recalcitrant nations.

Following are some observations on the debate:

First, debates with pagans are always unprofitable because pagans are unable to accept or understand the Word of God.

Second, attempts to secure a foothold for the Savior from an atheist in front of a secular audience sponsored by an organization called Pastafarian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster exposes the Name of our Savoir to unnecessary ridicule.

Third, there can be no debate that the overwhelming majority of the population of United States claims to be Christian or that Christopher Columbus was a Christian and the Puritans and Pilgrims were Christians.  But to impute that Christianity to those that drafted our Constitution is a big stretch.

Fourth, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were two separate documents.  The Constitution was the singular founding document of the United States of America.

Fifth, the term “nature’s god” is not a Biblical term.  Dr. Rushdoony writes about man’s effort to relocate law and justice outside of God.  He points out that the creation is fallen as well as its inhabitants making nature’s god an evil substitute.  God’s Law is flawless; nature’s god and Christian principles are sullied by sin.

The Calvinistic Christian community established by the Pilgrims was friendly with the Indians for several decades.  They purchased land from them and attempted to convert them to Christ.  The Puritans were not as tolerant   Peace lasted until Europeans began to outnumber the Indians and attempted to assert sovereignty over them.  The Indians resisted and began to kill and scalp outlying colonial families.  Soon the Indians were as hated by the colonists as the Palestinians are by today’s Israelis.  They were now savages, no longer considered human. Killing them was cause for celebration.   With the Biblical Promised land in their subconscious and the hand of Providence in their heads citizens of the United States systematically robbed, murdered, and manipulated the Indians into near extinction

Whatever side ones takes on this question there is no getting away from the fact that the European incursion into an alien land and culture resulted in the death of millions of its indigenous people.

Were we a Christian nation?  Have we produced Christian fruit?