In God We Trust

 In God We Trust

Recently, I have been receiving phone calls on a daily basis regarding my political position. Are you “conservative” or “liberal” they ask? Then they proceed to rattle off a list of candidates and ask for my position on various issues. They never fail to ask two questions:

1) Is the country going in the right direction or the wrong direction?

2) What do you believe to be the most important issue facing the country, or the state at this time?

They are never surprised when I answer question number one with a resounding “No”! After all I am quite sure they have been hearing that same answer across the largest cross-section of the calls they have made that day. But there is always dead silence when I answer question number two. It is almost amusing to just allow the silence to continue while they try to find words to place my response in  the appropriate category.

So what is this response that befuddles the canvasser every single time? I respond with the following; “I am an evangelical Christian. Our country was founded as ‘One Nation Under God’ and there is no one running for office that supports my views.” They sometimes ask; “Would that make you more of a conservative?” My answer further confuses their political enigma. I tell them that “I am an American, who believes in the constitution and the fact that our country was founded on Godly principles.”

Considering they have probably never heard these kinds of responses, at least not up here in the northeast, I can only imagine what they must be pondering once they hang up the telephone. Are they confused? Are they bewildered? Are they challenged? Are they angry? Who knows but I can tell you this. As we plunge headlong into a Godless, amoral, sociological conundrum where hope is measured in the things that we have and despair is fostered by the notion that we are either blessed or we are not, the practical existence of faith in God, determination and hard work are vanishing in the mist of self-indulgence and fiduciary dependence.

As I consider the state of the union I wonder how our founding fathers would view our sociopolitical culture today. When you look at the declaration of independence it just seems that God, government and people are inextricably linked and the intention was that it stay that way. The famous line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” holds a special connection between “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and the fact that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”.

Our forefathers recognized that we, as a nation, could not depend on secular government alone for liberty, security or happiness. As our government becomes more and more secular it begins to build in a frictional bias against those who diverge from the government’s perspective. That friction progresses until we reach a point where that bias is transformed into secular focus on the sociopolitical environment rather than the foundational truth espoused by our founding fathers thus rendering the freedom of those who believe in those God based, unalienable rights, become marginalized, ostracized and minimized to the degree that they actually begin to be criminalized.

I am blessed to live in this great nation but I am becoming increasingly concerned as I see the tides changing and the currents moving toward the direction of a secular, humanistic, atheistic, government centered existence.

I’d say that in conclusion that I pray each day for this nation and I still declare in each prayer; “In God We Trust!”