When God Returns to the Public Square

'Hence, the next time [we] say, “God bless America,” [we] should contemplate that God will bless America when America returns back to God.'

From Crisis

By Fr Mario Alexis Portella, JUD

The Left's decades-long push to strike God from society is finally facing resistance.

The State of Louisiana, this June, became the first state in our country to enact a requirement for displaying the Ten Commandments in schools since the U.S. Supreme Court, in Stone v. Graham (1980), struck down a Kentucky law that had a similar directive. In that case, the Court found that the law violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 

The new legislation is being contested by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, to name a few, as a violation of the separation of church and state as stipulated by the First Amendment, as if the Commandments, like “Honor they Father and Mother” or “Thou Shall not kill” are an actual infringement. The aforementioned associations are reportedly acting on behalf of nine “multi-faith families” who have students enrolled in Louisiana public schools. The families involved in the lawsuit include parents who are “Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist, and non-religious.” 

Governor Jeff Landry, who signed the bill into law, responded to critics, saying:

When the Supreme Court meets, the doors of the Supreme Court on the backside have the Ten Commandments. Moses faces the U.S. Speaker of the House in the House chamber. He is the original giver of law. Most of our laws in this country are founded on the Ten Commandments. What’s the big problem? That’s the part that I don’t understand. 

Incidentally, alongside Moses, on the North Wall Frieze of the U.S. Supreme Court building is the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (483–565), who commissioned the codification of Roman Law and published Corpus Juris Civilis and, believe it or not, the Prophet Muhammad holding the Koran. (I refer to Muhammad as the “Prophet” as per the historical appellation associated to him and not as a true prophet.) 

While the former, like Napoleon who is also depicted (for formulating the Code of 1804, better known as the Napoleonic Code, which the State of Louisiana follows), Muhammad is recognized in his role in transmitting the two revelatory textual sources that form the basis of Islamic law, i.e., the sharia: the Koran and hadiths (the sayings and traditions of Muhammad). Both are faulty in that sense since the Koran, notwithstanding mentioning Muhammad just four times, neither describes a specifically legislative role for him nor systematically connects Allah’s “Prophet” with legislation. The hadiths themselves are unreliable, to say nothing of how violent so many of the Koranic verses and hadiths are.

All things being equal, those who argue the Louisiana law trespasses on one’s freedom to publicly worship God (or not to), they withhold the fact that the amendment itself never stipulates any separation from God, vis-à-vis the norms that regulate society, let alone that God cannot be implored by public officials—as both houses of Congress do on a daily basis before they respectively open their sessions. 

In truth, the U.S. Constitution, in this case the First Amendment, must be first and foremost interpreted via the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the “Creator” as well as the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”—an archaic term developed by the Anglican clergyman Richard Hooker in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594)—which equate to the natural law and God’s divine precepts.

John Locke—perhaps the philosopher who influenced the Founding Fathers the most—in his Two Treatises on Government, likewise identified the laws of nature and nature’s God as God’s moral legislation inscribed in the heart of man. This is because man himself is by nature unable to know the divine moral directives, such as doing good unto others.

In addition, one must also look at the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, who constantly based American democracy on God.

In his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785), James Madison, Father of the U.S. Constitution and fourth president of the United States, sustained that the duty to the Creator “is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.” 

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, went so far as to say any questioning of God as part of the body politic is irrational, especially with regard to the safeguarding of our liberty: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” 
This is a reason why President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1954, attached to the phrase “One Nation” in the Pledge of Allegiance the words: “under God.”

In truth, the politically-correct Left have been seeking to strike any mention of God from society, as President Joe Biden did during his invocation during the National Day of Prayer in 2021, or as he did in his Thanksgiving Proclamation last year. The paradox is that the dating within the same proclamation, which is required for each presidential executive order, reads: “…in the year of our Lord [Jesus Christ].” Hence, the next time they say, “God bless America,” they should contemplate that God will bless America when America returns back to God.