MOVING US CLOSER to a National Sunday Law A second important ecumenical gathering made an important decision This meeting was held on November 14, 2007, in Washington, D.C. Significantly, it was originally planned to be held at the Pope John Paul Cultural Center in the northern part of the city. But, when news leaked out that the purpose of the gathering was to consider the feasibility of initiating a campaign to ram through Congress a bill to enact a National Sunday Law, the location was quickly switched to a hotel elsewhere in the area. The stated purpose for such a meeting revealed the urgency in some minds of getting such a law passed. It was recognized that there was a necessity of not only involving the member churches of CCT,—but also bringing the leaders of the various U.S. Christian Right political action groups on board. Therefore this November 14 meeting was held, which many attended. Representatives from Christian Coalition and a number of other Religious Right political leaders were present. The special topic on the agenda at this meeting was to consider whether the time had come to push Congress to enact a full-blown, National Sunday Law here in America! Arguments in favor21 of it were presented by a Roman Catholic, and a Seventh-day Adventist was invited to attend and present arguments against such a plan. Although there was some mixed feelings, many of those present felt that, in order to restore morality to the nation, a Sunday Law for the entire nation would greatly help solve the problem. A follow-up meeting was held the next week. Nearly two months later, the next annual assembly of Christian Churches Together convened on January 8-11, 2008. Organizational plans and networks were set in motion, in order to begin coordinating the massive number of local churches and members on the “campaign to fight poverty.” If carefully laid plans for an enforced Sunday Law eventually succeed, it will be the crowning achievement of Pope Benedict’s papal reign. There are reasons, going back for centuries, why this would be a triumph for the Vatican. Later in this book we will discover what they are. However, fulfillment of this goal cannot be postponed too long. Pope Benedict only has a few years remaining in which to accomplish his objective, to enforce Sunday observance in America and throughout the world. Born on April 16, 1927, he will turn 81 in 2008. Those church leaders, who are intent on binding Americans with obedience to a National Sunday Law, may be very sincere—but they do not realize what it will lead to. They have not studied history—nor the disaster earlier Sunday Laws brought to families and nations. Later in this book, Moving Us Closer to a National Sunday Law22 Enforced Sunday Law we will discover this also. But the Founding Fathers of our nation did know. And that is why they wrote the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution! Chapter Four Our Founding Fathers SAID NO Religion laws in the U.S. must never be enacted “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity to ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”—Preamble to the United States Constitution. It was done! That grandest of all human documents. But then our founders realized that something was missing! Thomas Jefferson, writing from France, declared that the Constitution was incomplete. A “bill of personal rights” must be added, guaranteeing to each citizen certain inalienable rights that the government could never be allowed to take from him! Other leaders agreed. They knew past history well. Indeed, they had only but recently come out of intense personal and religious persecution of the American Colonies. They were the children not only of the persecuted but also of those who had persecuted them. The very first meeting of the new U.S. Congress, at its first session (in New York City on September 25, 1789),23 wrote and submitted to the states several amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Among the most important of these was the First Amendment, written, along with the others, by James Madison: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” That part of the First Amendment which is in bold print, above, is called “The Establishment Clause.” It guaranteed freedom of religion to every American! On November 3, 1791, at Philadelphia, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution became part of the supreme law of the land. “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declares that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”—Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Reynolds vs. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878). At last, religious freedom could rule in America! Who should we go to in order to learn the meaning of the First Amendment? We should learn the original objectives of the Founding Fathers of our nation. That is what leading jurists tell us: “On every question of construction, [we should] carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying to see what meaning may Our Founding Fathers Said No24 Enforced Sunday Law be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”— U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, Engel vs. Vitale; 370 U.S. 421 (1963). “The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statue is to discover the meaning of those who made it.”—Justice James Wilson, quoted in Commissioner of Education vs. School Committee of Leyden; 267 N.E. 2d 226 (Supreme Court, Mass. 1971), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 849. [Only one of six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he was nominated by President George Washington as an original Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.] “The first and fundamental rule in the interpretation of all instruments [legal documents] is to construe them according to the sense of the terms and the intention of the parties.”—Justice Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Vol. 3, p. 383. [He was the founder of Harvard Law School]. The original objectives which the Founding Fathers had in mind when they drafted the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment were three in number: 1 - Religious liberty: The government is not to ban or restrict personal religious freedoms. Each person has the right to select and practice his own religious worship, and practice it according to the dictates of his own conscience, without government interference or domination. 2 - No State Church: No one church, or group of churches working together, should be able to gain the ascendancy by coercing the government to enact one or more laws requiring the acceptance25 and practice of certain church beliefs, forms, ceremonies, practices, times, or methods of worship. 3 - The government should not oppose religion, but encourage it:It is to do this by leaving it alone, so that it can grow and the numbers of its adherents can increase. Neither should atheism be favored by the government above that of religious belief. Only a religious citizenry is able to benefit the prosperity of the nation. Those are the three objectives of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Here are several statements by the Founding Fathers: “All men have an equal, natural and unalienable right to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that no particular sect or society of Christians ought to be favored or established by law in preference to others.”—George Mason, Bishop vs. Aronov; 926 F. 2d 1066 (11th Cir. 1991). [Mason was a member of the Constitutional Convention, which drafted the Constitution, and is called “the Father of the Bill of Rights” because of his importance in drafting it.] “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established.”—James Madison, quoted in Duran vs. Nitsche; 780 F. Supp. 1048 (E.D. Pa. 1991). “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted [banned] by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion [the First Amendment] . . Certainly, no power to prescribe Our Founding Fathers Said No26 Enforced Sunday Law any religious exercise or to assume authority in any religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government.”—Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1808; also quoted in Doe vs. Aldine Independent School District; 563 F. Supp. 883 (U.S.D.C. S.D. Tx. 1982). “The real object of the [First] Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance . . infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects.”—Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Vol. 3, p. 731. [ [A leading Supreme Court justice, nominated to that position by President James Madison, he was called “the foremost of American legal writers.”] “No power over the freedom of religion . . is delegated to the United States by the Constitution.”— Thomas Jefferson, Kentucky Resolution, 1798, quoted in Documents of American History (1948), p. 179. “In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of general government.”—Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805; quoted in Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. 1, p. 379. “Our excellent Constitution . . has not placed our religious rights under the power of any public functionary.”—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Methodist Episcopal Church, December 9, 1808. “As neither reason requires nor religion permits the contrary, every man living in or out of a state of civil society has a right peaceably and quietly to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience . . The right to freedom is the gift of God.”—Samuel Adams, “The Rights of the Colonists as Men,” November 20, 1772.27 We dare never let it occur that any of “the leading churches of the United States, uniting upon such points of doctrine as are held by them in common, shall influence the state to enforce their decrees and to sustain their institutions,” for then “the infliction of civil penalties upon dissenters will inevitably result.” No churches should be permitted to “seek the aid of the civil power for the enforcement of their dogmas” (Great Controversy, 445 [an excellent resource book on church history]. “You whose high prerogative it is to invest with office and authority, or to withhold them, and in whose power it is to save or destroy your country, consider well the important trust which God has put into your hands. Let not your children curse you for giving up those rights which your fathers delivered to you.”— Matthias Burnet, “Warning to our Citizens,” Address given at Hartford, CT (May 12, 1803). We will conclude this chapter with a clear statement by George Washington, himself: “Every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshiping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.”—Writings of George Washington, Vol. 30, p. 321. Chapter Five Why They Were FRIGHTENED The founders of our nation knew what had occurred earlier in the Colonies Why They Were Frightened28 Enforced Sunday Law They knew only too well what had happened back in England which caused their ancestors so much anguish that they fled to the New World. They were also aware of the misery experienced in the American Colonies, when the same attempt to control religion was made. Only two years earlier George Washington had been forbidden to continue his journey by horseback to New York City, to take the oath as the first president of the United States. He had been stopped by a Connecticut highway official because he was traveling on Sunday. Fortunately he had left Mount Vernon early enough to make it in time. A few days later, on April 30, 1989, at Federal Hall, New York City, he was sworn in as the first president of the United States. The Colonies had become a nation. Later, the First Amendment was enacted. Yes, there were Sunday laws back in the colonial period. But before considering the suffering they brought, let us turn our attention to conditions in England, which caused the Pilgrims and others to take ship for America. Cotton Mather, a leading minister in Boston, was stunned. He had just learned the news—that a shipload of heretics was headed toward the American Colonies! They had not registered with the established Church of England as members, so something would have to be done—and quickly. There was no doubt about it; a letter with the news had just arrived on a British ship, that “100 or more of the heretics and malignants—called Quakers, with Penn who is the chief scamp of them a
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:22:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015