Atheist Display In Washington State Does Freedom No Favor

Joe Bell

The yearly Christmas hullabaloo has begun in earnest as secular activists continue to try and drain any trace of Jesus from the public square. In Washington state the Freedom From Religion Foundation was granted a permit to install a plaque in the Capitol that will accompany a Nativity scene and something called a “Capitol Holiday Kid’s Tree,” which is actually a Christmas tree with a nebulous name. Given the vagueness of the moniker the state can display it on any holiday from National Pie Day, which is January 23, to National Mustard Day, which falls on the first Saturday of August.

The atheist plaque declares, in part: “There are no gods, no devils, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

This annual indulgence of secular groups has an overtone of great foreboding. One can only imagine the dire straits the United States would be in today if its Founding Fathers had believed such drivel. No less an authority on the nation’s birth than George Washington warned “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”

Acknowledging that freedom is a gift from God, not something man bestows upon himself, the day after the Bill of Rights was passed Congress called upon the president to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God.”

The freedom cherished by the American people is not dependent upon a common religion but it is unquestionably reliant upon a shared morality. America’s architects understood that moral conduct is essential to ordered freedom and moral conduct is defined by God. If moral conduct is delineated by man then there is no overriding authority to determine why Man A’s moral code is better or worse than Man B’s code.

The Declaration of Independence states “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The conviction of the patriots who signed their names to the document was so profound that they considered those truths to be “self-evident.”

The ongoing effort to exorcise God from the national consciousness and erase Him from the public realm is more than historically deceitful – it is dangerous.

The co-founder of the FFRF said it was important for atheists to offer their views alongside the Nativity scene “not to coerce but just to have a place at the table.”

Atheists have a place at the table, and rightfully so. They are free to refrain from religious activity and free to try and convince others that God does not exist. Letters to the editor and web sites advocate atheist views in the public forum and a variety of books express the atheist canon. What is troubling is that by placing such a tablet on government property Washington state is contradicting the roots of the nation’s founding. The plaque’s presence is an attempt to lessen the significance those who constructed America placed upon God. The atheist’s display grants equal time to an ideology that America’s Founders would have tolerated in practice but not have endorsed in an official capacity. There is a huge difference between tolerance and endorsement. Washington state has crossed the line.

In June 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill into law that made Christmas a national holiday. If atheists want a government endorsed “place at the table” they should petition Members of Congress to follow the same route traveled by Christmas and have a National Atheists’ Day declared.

Again, let us recognize that not only is the Washington display historically fraudulent, it is also dangerous. Whenever a nation severs itself from its roots it cannot hope to maintain continuity. Should the United States dissolve connections to its historical and moral underpinnings it will eventually lose contact with the concept of ordered freedom that has enabled it to become the most successful, by any standard, nation in human history. That would be a loss of monumental proportion.
The Heritage Foundation’s Matthew Spalding has observed that “while it is often thought that religion and politics must be discussed as if they are radically separate spheres, the Founder’s conception of religious liberty was almost exactly the opposite. It actually requires the moralization of politics, which includes – and requires – the continuing influence of religion in public life.”

The history of America is known. As Russell Kirk wrote, “The tap root of American order runs deep into a Levantine desert; it began to grow some thirteen centuries before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Through Moses, prophet and law-giver, the moral principles that move the civilization of Europe and America and much more of the world first obtained clear expressions.”

America’s founding principles were not balanced upon the precarious concept of atheism but on the conviction that there exists an all-powerful God that gives man his moral nature and who has delivered the everlasting law. It is a devotion to enduring principles that has allowed America to escape the carnage and misery that blights so many nations. We separate ourselves from those principles at our own risk. Those who view what is transpiring at the Washington state Capitol as a genuflection to freedom does freedom no favors.

###

Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

jbellopedresponse@hotmail.com