A hallmark of the Left, from the French revolutionaries to our sexual “devolutionaries,” is the persecution of Christians. After all, the government can’t be the people’s highest power if God is. And Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would embrace this dark tradition with vigor, warn observers.
In contrast, one of President Trump’s many unrecognized accomplishments is that he has stood up for religious liberty more than perhaps any other modern commander in chief. Just consider, points out the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson, the White House’s proclamation commemorating the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. Honored by both Anglicans and Catholics, he was murdered in 1170 A.D. by followers of King Henry II of England for refusing to make the church subservient to the state.
While you can read the whole proclamation here, consider the following three quotations and see if you can figure out which ones were formulated by Founding Fathers.
- “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.”
- “A society without religion cannot prosper. A nation without faith cannot endure — because justice, goodness, and peace cannot prevail without the grace of God.”
- “The only foundation for … a republic is to be laid in Religion.”
The first and last are from, respectively, founders Patrick Henry and Benjamin Rush; the second is from President Trump’s White House — and it’s hardly out of place.
It is striking, though. When Donald Trump sought the presidency, no one mistook the famous billionaire playboy for a desert mystic (and still wouldn’t). Yet we now have to “acknowledge how rare it has been to have, in President Trump, a chief executive who seems honestly to care about religious liberty and the rights of conscience,” writes Davidson.
“At the same time, it’s unnerving to think how diametrically opposed to this view the incoming Biden administration will be,” he also laments. “Although he professes to be Catholic, Biden has already indicated he will once again target religious groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, as the Obama administration did, in an attempt to force such religious orders to participate in state-funded abortion.”
“And Biden’s soon-to-be vice president, Kamala Harris, is an open anti-Catholic bigot. She infamously imposed an unconstitutional religious test on a nominee for the federal bench in 2018,” Davidson continues. “When Brian Buescher was nominated as a District Court judge, Harris inveighed against him for being a member of the Knights of Columbus, asking, ‘Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?’” (To choose what? What clothes to wear or food to eat?)
Harris also “has a long history of attacks on Catholic moral teaching, including her assault on the rights of David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress, which had exposed the illegal trafficking of organs from aborted children by Planned Parenthood,” relates WND.com.
Moreover, “she supported a law, later struck down by the Supreme Court, that attacked pro-life pregnancy centers,” the site continues.
Furthermore, Harris co-sponsored “the Orwellian-named ‘Equality Act,’ which would force Catholic hospitals to perform gender transition surgeries and Catholic schools to embrace transgender ideology in their sports programs, among other violations of religious liberty,” Davidson also informs. “Biden, too, has expressed his support for the act.”
Of course, none of us will end up like St. Becket anytime too soon. We won’t be thrown to the lions, a fate befalling some Christians in the Roman Empire, or suffer a more modern martyrdom as witnessed in the USSR yesterday or China today — again, not anytime too soon. We won’t even in the near future see our leftists try to alter the calendar so as to eliminate the Lord’s Day, as the French revolutionaries did.
Instead, pursued is the Cold War-era, Hungarian Marxist model: You can be Christian or you can be successful.
But you can’t be both.
Thus have we witnessed governments punish bakers, florists, photographers, and other businessmen for not servicing so-called “same sex” weddings; and propose to deny Christian schools accreditation and compel Christian doctors to perform prenatal infanticide, among other efforts.
A practical reason for this attack on Christianity is, as stated in my first paragraph, that power-mongers want the state they control and not God to be citizens’ highest power; they want their laws, not Divine ones, preeminent. But this isn’t the only reason.
Much of what man does is governed by emotion, and militant-secularists’ hatred for Christianity cannot be understood without grasping the passions animating their dark aims.
Though we’re all sinners, hardened leftists aren’t just vice-ridden people: They’re people so married to vice they’ve no intention of relinquishing it — and emotionally they need to justify it. Thus, the last thing they want prevailing in civilization is an absolute and universal standard for morality (such as the one Christianity upholds) dictating that their sins really are sins, as opposed to mere “lifestyle choices.” No one likes having his bubble burst, you see.
So because Christianity condemns their dark “choices,” they condemn Christianity. If Christianity is right, they’re wrong; if it reigns, they’re rejected; if it wins hearts, they lose votes; if society is painted an ethereal white, their darkness stands out, an unholy sight screaming for purgation.
Speaking of which, the Bible asks, rhetorically, what “fellowship hath light with darkness”? None. This is why hatred isn’t the only reason leftists seek to force Christians to violate their faith, though it’s one reason.
Rather, it’s somewhat akin to why brutal Third World rebels would often force boy soldiers to shoot their parents. Make a person commit grave sin, against his Father — make him betray his basic moral foundation — and he can be disconnected from all that’s good. He may feel as if his former attachments are irrevocably severed and perhaps, thinking he’s already damned, may surrender and dance with the demons.
Boy soldiers are an extreme example, of course. But compelling Christians to violate their principles with action can detach them from their principles — and make them more likely to accept, or at least tolerate, yours. And when this is effected widely and those principles appear absent enough societally to seem like preferences, and the government’s “principles” are legislated and enforced, well, the state can more easily play god.
The good news is that we don’t have to play worshipper of the state. We can instead, as with Becket, say that “God is the supreme ruler, above Kings,” and “we ought to obey God rather than men,” as Davidson quotes it.
And on a practical note, this resistance becomes far easier if we “all hang together” so we won’t “all hang separately.” Ergo, some faith-driven nullification is in order — but that’s an article for a different day.
