A Nation Like No Other (12 page)

It was this notion, not merely indignation at the price of tea, that was at the core of the Revolutionaries' cry for liberty. The Great Awakening had cemented a deep and immoveable belief that ultimate authority rested with God alone, that God—not government—gave man his rights, and that a government that usurped the sovereign authority of God or the right of man to govern himself had lost its legitimacy.

It was through a renewed commitment to these religious truths that Americans gleaned the moral strength to endure a long, costly, but ultimately victorious war for their independence.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, America was swept by the Second Great Awakening—another movement of profound spiritual renewal that emphasized God's accessibility to every person. Though historians often fail to make the connection, this deeply religious movement, and its emphasis on the equal dignity of all men, strongly impacted prevailing beliefs about the issue of slavery, as witnessed in the writings and speeches of America's foremost opponent of human bondage.

Years before the Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln argued that the practice of degrading and abusing human beings made in the image of God was incompatible with America's foundational principles. He described the inescapable conflict between the forces of freedom and slavery in a speech in 1854: “Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a ‘sacred right of self-government.'”
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Lincoln repeatedly appealed to the conscience of America to reject slavery, not on pragmatic or economic grounds, but by reasserting the moral and religious truths that animated the Founders and the eighteenth-century revivalists. In a speech on August 17, 1858, in Lewistown, Illinois, he declared,

The belief that the “Divine image” had been stamped upon every person, slave or free, sustained Lincoln through the dark and horrible crucible of a civil war that cost the lives of more than 600,000 Americans. It was by reminding Americans of this truth that Lincoln continually rekindled the moral will of a free people. It was the knowledge that they fought for a cause not merely political, but deeply spiritual and eternally significant, that inspired the Union to press on to victory despite the devastating cost.

Charles Davenport, one of the first American eugenicists, called eugenics the science of “the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”
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Essentially, eugenicists believed in advancing society by selectively breeding the most talented or beautiful or intelligent people, while preventing the reproduction of the disabled, the poor, or the so-called “feebleminded.” Eugenicists drew widespread attention with their warnings that “defective” people were reproducing at a much higher rate than were “normal” people, threatening all of society.

These repugnant theories took root in American academia in the early twentieth century and from there began to permeate the wider American culture.

Eugenics was especially aimed against immigrants. When immigrant populations were given IQ tests that were largely vocabulary-based, eugenicist Henry Goddard unsurprisingly discovered that over 80 percent of immigrant test-takers—whether Hungarian, Polish, Italian, or Russian—were mentally defective.
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He then concluded that feeblemindedness was inherited through genetic traits, a standard argument among a large group of eugenicists who believed certain races or ethnicities were more likely to be “defective,” and were therefore less useful to society, than other races.

Odious ideas have consequences. Elected leaders looked to science for solutions to social ills, and eugenicists offered a seemingly scientific answer to what was deemed a scientific problem.

By 1940, more than thirty states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, and by 1941, tens of thousands—at least 60,000 according to one source—of eugenic sterilizations had been performed in the United States.
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This brief history should be seen as a stark warning against diminishing or ending an innocent human life simply because “society” deems that life to be burdensome; in doing so, we compromise every ideal and belief in human dignity that has made America great, and we tear at the very fabric that holds our exceptional society together. The history of the eugenics movement in America will always blight the nation's soul, demonstrating the danger of straying from our foundational principles. But this history also shows that when we renew our commitment to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, even the largest ship of state can be righted and set on course again.

Like the issue of slavery, the 1960s-era struggle for civil rights forced America to confront deep, long-standing injustices.

The most prominent leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., was a Baptist minister who believed that the effort to end racial discrimination and segregation was premised on the same religious truths that our Founders had proclaimed. Indeed, he understood that no objective claim can be made to civil or legal rights without the assumption that there are God-given moral rights and principles of justice. It was only by appealing to these unchangeable laws of justice—especially the natural law that
all
men are equal and endowed with dignity from their Creator—that King believed the case for civil rights could retain its moral legitimacy. King clearly articulated these beliefs in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

Moreover, King knew that by reasserting these core truths, civil rights activists were, in his words, “standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
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In autumn 1989, the most potent symbol of totalitarian evil, the Berlin Wall, was ripped apart by the people it had imprisoned for nearly thirty years. Two years later, the Soviet Union officially dissolved, on Christmas Day 1991. The fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union transpired in relative calm, but they followed decades of repression, cruelty, and murder by the Soviet regime and its satellite governments.

The Wall fell due to a mix of political, economic, diplomatic, and military events. But spiritual factors were decisive, as President Ronald Reagan did his part to rally the West to defend religious freedom and human dignity. Most people know of Reagan's demand, issued in June 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate, next to the Berlin Wall, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Unfortunately, this iconic statement has overshadowed the rest of his speech, in which Reagan described the “fundamental distinction between East and West.” Said Reagan, “The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.”
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Reagan then ridiculed how the “totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront.” He pointed to the frantic attempts by the Communist East German government to correct with paints and chemicals what they found to be a major flaw in the glass sphere of the massive communications tower they built in 1969. Reagan noted that their attempted fixes had failed, since “even today when the sun strikes that sphere—that sphere that towers over all Berlin—the light makes the sign of the cross.”
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This theme was nothing new to Reagan; he had been stressing the primacy of the spiritual struggle against Communism since he had taken office. In his 1981 Notre Dame commencement address, four months into his presidency, Reagan issued this rallying cry: “For the West, for America, the time has come to dare to show to the world that our civilized ideas, our traditions, our values, are not—like the ideology and war machine of totalitarian societies—just a facade of strength. It is time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength, a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.”
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Similarly, in his “Evil Empire” speech in 1983, Reagan declared, “The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man.”
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When human freedom and dignity were under assault during the Cold War, Reagan knew that the spiritual nature of man and the freedom to know God were central to defining humanity and decisive in defeating tyranny.

In his dissenting opinion in
Wallace v. Jaffree
(1985), Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stated, “The ‘wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
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His declaration was a blunt reminder that no attack on American culture is more historically dishonest or socially destructive than the relentless effort of radical secularists to drive God out of America's public square.

While radical secularists claim to support religious neutrality in the public realm, in fact they focus almost exclusively on attacking expressions of Judeo-Christian morality, revealing that their real agenda is to banish our Judeo-Christian heritage from public life altogether. Their campaign is waged on two main fronts: the classroom and the courtroom. Additionally, they have recently extended their attacks to the family, and to the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.

In June 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shocked Americans nationwide by ruling the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to be unconstitutional. The ruling brazenly trampled upon centuries of American religious heritage, disregarded countless judicial precedents, and flouted the explicit will of the American people as asserted by Congress and President Eisenhower when they formally adopted the phrase in 1954.

With that ruling, many Americans realized just how hostile our elites have become to the public expression of our traditional religious precepts. But in fact, the Pledge of Allegiance decision was only the latest effort in a decades-long campaign to eliminate not only the words but the very concept that America is “under God.” Consider the following Supreme Court decisions:

The campaign against public prayer and the display of religious symbols is only the tip of the iceberg.
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Consider the following examples: