This is the second part of an essay I wrote when we formed the Family Leader Network, which we invite and urge all to join.  Family Leader Network is not an organization only for Latter-day Saints, but reflects LDS values as we defend family, faith and freedom in the nation and our local communities.  To sign up to receive our regular emails keeping you informed on what’s happening, click here.  We really need you.  Only large numbers of educated citizens can make a difference.  To volunteer to help in the United States contact RoseMarie Briggs at rkbriggs@verizon.net  Give your contact information and tell a little about yourself.  Family Leader Australia is also being formed. If you would like to help there send an email to editorial@meridianmagazine.com.   

It was a precarious time for the Nephites.  Cunning Amalickiah, a Book of Mormon metaphor for the lowest treachery and evil, was conspiring to be king.  To make it more pointed, one Hebrew scholar suggested that his name means, “Jehovah is not my king.”  Lamanite armies were gathering and the Nephites were not sufficiently rallied to defend themselves.

In other words, they were short on political will — so asleep they were in danger of being overtaken.

Just as he was needed, Moroni, the chief commander of the armies, stepped forward, rent his coat, took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives and our children — and he fastened it upon the end of a pole… And he said:  Surely God shall not suffer that we, who are despised because we take upon us the name of Christ, shall be trodden down and destroyed, until we bring it upon us by our own transgressions.

“And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent part of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had written upon the rent part, and crying with a loud voice, saying:

“Behold, whosoever will maintain this title upon the land, let them come forth in the strength of the Lord, and enter into a covenant that they will maintain their rights, and their religion, that the Lord God may bless them.

“And..when Moroni had proclaimed these words, the people came running.” [i]

The Title of Liberty was a symbol of Joseph — the rent cloth representing the part of his coat that was “preserved and not decayed.” [ii]   It was in the covenant of Joseph of Egypt that the Nephites were able to rally.  It is always Joseph and his seed who are called to nourish and rescue srael.

Each generation has its challenge — its threat to their religion, their liberty and their families.  In Revolutionary War battlefields, in bunkers in World War II, in many times and places people have been asked to pick up their own title of liberty and rally people to stand.

In our day the battle that threatens faith, family and freedom is somewhat more quiet than scimitars flashing by night or cannons booming, but it is just as insidious and destructive — perhaps more so because if marriage and family decay, unborn generations will be affected.  We will not be able to get back what we lose.

Today’s war is largely a debate of opposing ideas about what is real and good, what is moral and important.  The tools we will use to fight are not strident or explosive, but persuasive and educated words, emphasizing the teaching of correct principles and the lifting of informed voices.  Yet, if we are to avoid a destruction of the values we hold dear, the contest is as monumental as any that have been faced before.   

President Hinckley, who rallies us in our day, reminded us, “The building of public sentiment begins with a few earnest voices…The sad fact is that the minority who call for greater liberalization, who peddle and devour pornography, who encourage and feed on licentious display make their voices heard until those in our legislatures may come to believe that what they say represents the will of the majority. We are not likely to get that which we do not speak for.” iii]

As citizens we must gather and raise our voices.  The outcome will determine whose ideas will shape our world and our children’s hope for the future.

Lessons from the Book of Mormon

Latter-day Saints have particular motivation because the Book of Mormon gives us profound insight into our times.  The Book of Mormon was recorded by ancient prophets who had certain knowledge they were writing for this day.

Mormon writes, “Behold, I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not.  But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing.” [iv]

He and other ancient prophets had seen our day and the particular rattling and clashing of ideas that would war with each other.  And, as if we were slow to get the point, what this book details is not just one, but two great civilizations that decline and come to utter destruction.  It is as if we are so vague that we don’t get the point once, we are shown it again.  Immoral behavior leads to downfall.

The Book of Mormon also comes with a warning and a promise that is given in some form or another at least 38 times in its pages.  Here is the promise:

This is the ancient benediction-malediction covenant:  the people are blessed if they are faithful, or cursed if they turn away from that God who made the covenant. As long as they keep their covenants, they are prospered and protected.  No army could prevail from without, no philosophy canker from within.

Because of this covenant promise, I will speak here about the United States, though nations across the world are facing the same challenges.  The scripture is clear, unequivocal.  This land was set aside for a destiny.  It is the Promised Land. As long as those who live here have Jesus Christ as their God and keep his commandments, Americawill be blessed and free.  If the day comes, that the people dwindle in unbelief and reject Jesus Christ, the judgments of God will come upon them. 

We can assume that rejecting Jesus Christ also means rejecting the biblical foundation for our morality, the Judeo-Christian tradition.  It is clear, however, that we are already barreling headlong in that direction.  Some would say our ship of state is already in iceberg-laden waters. That is a sobering thought.  It is also a wake-up call for all hands on deck.  If we let the moral foundation of our nation slip away, we are not simply replacing it with a different morality.  We are ultimately signing a death warrant for our country. That is not mere overblown rhetoric, but reality, for God cannot lie.

As Whittaker Chambers said in his book Witness, “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that have become indifferent to God and died.”

Yet, media have become immoral and violent and we accommodate.  Schools expose our children to dubious ideas and we accommodate.  Judges take the law into their own hands and we accommodate.  Marriage is remade and we accommodate.  When have we accommodated so much that we no longer have a shape that we recognize and our world is unalterably transformed?

What were we doing that so absorbed our time and attention that we thought accommodation was the preferred path?

The war in heaven mirrors the cultural war we face today, and we use it to demonstrate how deadly earnest this struggle is.  It is as old as the struggle between good and evil and the stakes are as high.  Some things are worth fighting for, and their loss would be inestimable. 

Faith and Freedom

Faith and freedom are inextricably linked.  They cannot be discussed separate and singly. This is demonstrated in the history of the founding of the United States, a series of events Latter-day Saints understand as having been inspired.

Give up the moral underpinnings of a nation and ultimately you give up freedom.

In the United States, considerable effort has been expended to revise history and teach a false version of the founding, absent the pervasive influence of God.  This is, in fact, another deliberate attempt to transform the very nature of this country.  God is being stripped from our public square and whitewashed from our history.  History textbooks of fifty years ago, for instance, depicted that first Thanksgiving with the pilgrims showing their gratitude to God.  Today’s textbooks paint a fallacious version, saying the pilgrims were expressing their gratitude to the Indians.

Yet, America’s Founding Fathers could not envision a nation that did not rely on the critical link between faith and freedom. Self-government depended upon a nation that could produce men and women of strong enough moral character that it could succeed. Government remains limited only to the extent that citizens exhibit the virtue that brings restraint.  Morality is the check upon the people that makes the Constitution viable.

Founder and second U.S.president John Adams wrote, “Statesmen may plan and speculate about liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which liberty stand.” [v]   He said, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. [Without these checks] avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through the net.”

He concluded, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [vi]

George Washington cautioned in his Farewell Address, “[National] morality [cannot] be maintained without religion… Reason and experience… forbid us” to expect anything else.” [vii]

Some might say that they know people who exhibit great moral character and are not religious.  However, to the extent they are living a life that appeals to a code of conduct beyond their natural passions, beyond the “natural man,” they are borrowing from a religious legacy that informs their choices and their society whether it is acknowledged or not.

This God and religion to which the Founders so often referred has a unique character. The Founding Fathers called him “Creator,” “Judge,” “Providence,” and Divine Governor” of the universe, but his characteristics only match the Judeo-Christian concept of God found in the Bible.

Michael Novak pointed out that “the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom — founding-era documents defining the idea of religious liberty that is embodied in the First Amendment — all appeal to a particular concept of God, with a fairly narrow range of characteristics: 

The religion this understanding of God inspires is based in both faith and reason, appealing to the faculties of the mind and conscience.  True Christianity said Adams, is “the religion of the head and heart.” [ix]

The classic American definition of religion and the foundation for religious liberty comes back to this God.  “Uniquely, this God wishes to be worshipped in spirit and truth, in whatsoever manner conscience directs, without coercion of any sort.  This God reads hearts, and is satisfied only with purity of conscience and conviction.  Those who belong to any other religion or tradition, or who count themselves among agnostics or atheists, are thereby given by this God equal freedom.  They, too, must follow their individual consciences…

“The duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” [x]  

Thus it is the Biblical God of the Judeo-Christian tradition that makes the Muslim free to practice his religion in America.  It is God who gives the atheist freedom to disbelieve.  His laws, based in freedom, supercede any prejudices in the laws that man might create.

Protection from a Higher Law

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in The Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, “he was appealing to a higher law, pronouncing the Biblical conviction that these rights are the pre-existent gifts of God to all his children; rights that no king, no House of Lords, no House of Commons can abridge, eradicate, or claim to create.” [xi]

Our rights are only preserved and protected from being trampled because of the acknowledgement that the government did not give them to us, and therefore the government cannot take them away.  Fighting for the abolition of God — the Judeo-Christian God — is a fight over the very nature of our nation.

A radio interviewer asked a man in a legal battle hoping to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance where we get our rights.  He answered, “From the people,” which, of course, translates into “From the government.”

That is indeed a dangerous proposition.  We have seen in history how tyrannical governments can decimate a person’s rights.  If government, however, acknowledges a Higher Power as the source of those rights, they are inviolate.

No Concentration of Power

This introduces a second idea critical to the Founding Father’s concept of government.  America would have no kings, nor any concentration of power in any of the branches of government that would allow tyranny.  Checks and balances were introduced so that no person or group of persons should be able to snatch too much power.

Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, wrote, “Where, say some, is the king of America?  I’ll tell you friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain… Let a day be set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the Divine Law, the Word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve monarchy, that in America, the law is king.  For as in absolute government the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

For this same reason, the Founding Fathers were also not establishing a pure participatory democracy that depended entirely on the whims of the people.  Why?  Because it is nothing more than the people as sovereign, whether virtuous or corrupt.  It wasn’t just the king who had wronged them, but parliament.

As the delegates left Constitution Hall in 1787, a woman approached Benjamin Franklin and asked:   “Well Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?”  To which he replied:  “A republic if you can keep it.”

Historian David Barton wrote, “The difference between a republic and a democracy is the source of its authority.  In a democracy, whatever the people desire is what becomes policy.  If a majority of the people decide that murder is no longer a crime, in a democracy murder will no longer be a crime.  However, not so in a republic.  In our republic, murder will always be a crime for murder is always a crime in the word of God.” [xii]

Recognition of God as our Father and the only King of the universe and the author of law also brought another political leap for man — the conviction that “all men are created equal.”  This is a principle deeply rooted in religious theology and history, springing from the knowledge that we are all children of a common God.

As God’s children we are endowed with agency and capacities and ought to have an equal right to consent to the laws that govern us.  We do not live with a privileged political or religious class.  Instead we are all equally accountable and equally free before the law.

The First Amendment’s Aim

The first right detailed in the Bill of Rights reflects the Founders’ emphasis on the importance of religion in the government they produced.  It is the famous “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  It was designed to protect the free exercise of religion, but the last fifty years of jurisprudence have inverted it to mean enforcing the freedom from religion. The famous “wall of separation between church and state,” (which does not appear in the Constitution but in a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson) is getting thicker.

The 1971 US Supreme Court, in Lemon v. Kurtzman (taking a page out of the French Revolution, rather than that revolution which their oath of office required they pay homage to) formulated the Lemon Test.  As articulated by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the test’s first two requirements were a) that a statute must have a secular legislative purpose and b) that its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

It almost sounded benign.  It wasn’t and isn’t.  It was and is a revolutionary change from what the freedom of religion meant.  How could an “only secular motives need apply” policy result in anything else?

It mandates not only a “be quiet about your faith” policy, but a “you had better not even think about it,” “you had better not even be motivated by your faith in public life” policy.

Just look at the scrutiny Christian judges face in the confirmation process as a result — a veritable religious test in reverse.

The Lemon Test made it so that state by state, case by case, momentum grew into a new standard of law that demanded not only secularism, but freedom from men and women in office or on the bench or in the classroom or in various so-called public settings who might legislate or rule or teach or imply ideas and symbols according to their conscience, according to their core beliefs, according to the American tradition.

Just as significantly, a policy that restricts faith to private arenas only, coupled with an ever-expanding-government employee base (now America’s largest employer), and legal rulings that have expanded the definition of just what is public to include historically private settings, leave very few safe sanctuaries for faith to be freely practiced without severe scrutiny.

What is public now?  Streets, sidewalks, parks, privately owned malls, privately owned businesses, privately owned manufacturers, private homes  (where parents patria comes into play, and a new U.N. Children’s Bill of Rights hopes to rule), even church charities and church schools that receive any public funding, direct or induced (e.g. student loans and grants), and Boy Scout groups and other private clubs.

The handwriting is on the wall that the sanctity of the pulpit itself will soon be under scrutiny for its lack of neutrality on such issues as gay marriage and abortion.  This already is the case in Europeand Canada, where preaching against homosexuality has become a hate crime — and in the United States, where efforts have been underway for more than a decade to prosecute anti-abortionists under RICO law. 

Catholic Charities in California must now offer its employees contraceptives, as a health benefit.  And attempts have been made to force The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Brigham Young University to make their dormitories co-ed, and their Temple Squareto a public place where protesters may set up shop at will.

Prayer has been taken out of the textbooks.  All references to God have been taken out of the textbooks, even when such references are central to our history and vital to our viewpoints on law.  Yet, in historical and political case studies, where religion looks bad, such as the European state churches, or the Salem Witch Trials in America, religion is front and center stage.  Likewise, while Christianity is out of the college campus, Eastern Religious Studies are becoming sub-departments in many psychology departments across the country.

Clearly, this is not about neutrality but hostility toward religion, especially of the Judeo-Christian order.  Clearly, this is not what the American Founders intended by the First Amendment. 

Alarming

So, let us connect the dots.  The Book of Mormon tells us that we will prosper as a nation If Jesus Christ is our head and his principles are our foundation.  But we live in a time when both the head and the foundation are under relentless assault by those who want to remake our society.  The movement is hostile to religion and to morality.  What can we do?

Before Moroni unfurled that title of liberty in behalf of faith, family and freedom, he did something of great note.  He “fastened on his head plate, and his breastplate, and his shields, and girded on his armor about his loins.”  He was being clothed in righteousness, putting on the whole armor of God. Then he “prayed mightily unto his God for the blessings of liberty to rest upon his brethren, so long as there should be a band of Christians remain to possess the land.” [xiii]

“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep:  The night is far spent, the day is at hand:  let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.” [xiv]

“Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

“Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand jn the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” [xv]

Editor’s Note:  These were my thoughts as we formed the Family Leader Network.  Certainly they are the thoughts of many Latter-day Saints as they consider our times.  Become educated about what’s happening to family, faith and freedom by subscribing to Family Leader by clicking here. To volunteer to help, contact RoseMarie Briggs at rkbriggs@verizon.net