BreakPoint
cultural commentary with Prison Fellowship's Chuck Colson
http://link.crosswalk.com/UM/T.asp?A1.25.18204.1.672091
January 19, 2004
One Nation Under Whom? - The Founders' Compact
Today is the holiday in which we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
birthday, and all over the country millions of children are studying his
life and his work. They'll learn that his Letter from a Birmingham Jail
is one of the most eloquent defenses of the law of God that must
undergird our nation's laws.
How astonished King would be, were he alive today, to hear the shrill
claims from secular ideologues that America was founded as an explicitly
secular nation.
In the New York Times recently, Susan Jacoby argued that it's a
"misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American
government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason."
Nonsense, Dr. King would have retorted; after all, his entire campaign
to abolish unjust laws was predicated on his belief that civil laws must
square with the lawgiver God.
As King knew-and most scholars agree-for the first time in history, two
ideological streams partially converged in America, one coming from the
Judeo-Christian tradition, the other from Enlightenment thinkers.
Adherents to both traditions agreed (for different reasons) that the new
government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. But
this certainly did not mean that America was to be a nation free from
religious influences.
George Washington was explicit: "Of all the dispositions and habits
which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are
indispensable supports."
In his marvelous book On Two Wings, theologian Michael Novak contends
that the faith of the founding fathers was deeply rooted in the writings
of ancient scripture, especially the Jewish covenant. As he put it,
secular writers typically cut off "one of the two wings by which the
American eagle flies"-the one that is America's "compact" with the
biblical God. They understood, with Thomas Jefferson, that "no nation
has ever yet existed or even been governed without religion. Nor can
be." Why? Because, in the founders' estimation, virtue was the
precondition for liberty.
While the founders admittedly did not use the word God in the
Constitution, they didn't need to. The "laws of nature and nature's God"
had already been appealed to in the Declaration of Independence, which
provided the context for the constitutional debate.
No one made the case better than Martin Luther King, Jr., that America's
founders intended religion to undergird America's laws. "One has not
only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws," King wrote.
"But conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? The answer would
likely make Jacoby, Barry Lynn, and secular ideologues cringe. "A just
law," King said, "squares with the moral law of the law of God. An
unjust law . is out of harmony with the moral law."
As we celebrate King's birthday and his success in advancing the civil
rights cause in America, let's remember that without his defense of the
law of God, we would still be a segregated nation today. We need to
learn from his stirring Letter from a Birmingham Jail that it is the
moral law that undergirds the nation's law.
America is a purely secular state? Don't tell that to the gentlemen
farmers who founded America-nor to those who today honor the legacy of
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Revelation 3:16
