Religion and Patriotism

Religion and Patriotism

by Dr. Frank Creel (Virginia)

Address given during Freedom Forum of the IAP National Conference, July 14, 2001, Salt Lake City, Utah. Dr. Creel is Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Independent National Committee, the IAP State Contact for Virginia, and Founder of the Constitution Action Party.

There is the story about the homeless man who, for many years, had been destroying his brain cells with excessive consumption of alcohol, so much so that he was considered a madman.

One day he found himself in Grand Central Station. In a loud voice he called out to the travelers: "Listen up, you idiots. All you idiots better listen." He kept this up for so long and with such vehemence that a crowd began to form around him.

He fell silent and surveyed the crowd around him. Then he spoke again: "I will never understand how they manage to gather in one place so many idiots."

The next time I tell this story I will change Grand Central Station to the Headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Now inside the beltway, where I just came from, people like me are considered madmen. I can tell you, things sure do feel different here in Utah. In Utah, I feel almost normal.

Coming from inside the beltway, it is difficult for me to understand how this many patriots can be gathered in one place.

I am honored to be among you. It is refreshing to be surrounded by Americans who already know that the Democratic and Republican Parties have failed in their responsibilities to the American people. Who love the Constitution given to us by our Founding Fathers. Who have a passion for liberty. Who acknowledge the fathership of the Lord God, Creator of the Universe, and who strive to abide by his commandments. And who recognize their solemn duty to maintain the safety and sovereignty of America against all threats for the sake of their children and grandchildren.

I salute you, my fellow patriots!

My assigned topic for today is Religion and Patriotism. I gave Bruce [National Chairman Bruce Bangerter] alternative titles, Faith and Love of Country, and Christianity and Americanism. My talk will range over and above and through all these themes.

Nature of Religion

Let us first gain a better understanding of the essential nature of religion, then a better understanding of American patriotism. Then we will see what the relationship between them is.

I ask you to be patient with me for the next five or ten minutes. I will be going over some material that I know all of you are already familiar with. But bringing it all together in one place is crucial to the argument I will be making.

The Gospel of St. John is the most theological of the four gospels. The synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke have a more historical flavor. In my opinion, one reason John was the disciple Jesus especially loved was the Lord's foreknowledge that it would be John who would give the world the most profound depiction of what lay in the mind and heart of the Son of Man. And what lay in the mind and heart of Jesus all have their origin in his Eternal Father.

At Jacob's well, the Samaritan woman told Jesus that she knew the Messiah was coming and that "when he comes he will tell us all things." Jesus replied, "I who speak with you am he." When his disciples asked him to eat, he replied: "My food is to do the will of him who sent me." When certain Jews criticized him for curing people on the Sabbath, he replied: "My Father works even until now, and I work."

Jesus continues: "The Father himself, who has sent me, has borne witness to me. But you have never heard his voice or seen his face."

He continues: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him...everyone who has listened to the Father, and has learned, comes to me."

These things Jesus taught in the synagogue in Capernaum.

Later, in the temple, Jesus exclaimed, "what my Father has given me is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch anything out of the hand of my Father. I and the Father are one." The Jews took up stones to stone him because they thought he was blaspheming, because "you, being a man, make yourself God."

Jesus asked them if they accused him of blasphemy "because I said `I am the Son of God'? If I do not perform the works of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do perform them, and if you are not willing to believe me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in me and I in the Father."

At the Last Supper, knowing that he would die the next day, Jesus told his disciples: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me." Philip asked him to show them the Father. Jesus replied: "Have I been so long a time with you, and you have not known me? Philip, he who sees me sees also the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?...he who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. But he who loves me will be loved by my Father."

Jesus concludes this magnificent discourse with the following: "I came forth from the Father and have come into the world. Again I leave the world and go to the Father...just Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you, and these have known that you have sent me."

I will pass over the fact that there are people today who call themselves Biblical scholars, who presumably have read and studied the Gospel of John, and who yet say that Jesus never claimed divinity for himself. Such people have clearly been blinded by an agenda that has little to do either with honest scholarship or with Christianity.

These passages from the Gospel of the beloved disciple are crucial to a proper understanding of Christianity. Because Christianity is the true religion, they are also crucial to a proper understanding of religion per se.

Again and again in these passages we see the Son speaking lovingly and obediently of his Father, asserting their unity, and explaining in clear, open language how every Disciple of Christ is to approach the Father, namely, by loving the Father's Son, proving that love by keeping his commandments, and by believing firmly that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life.

True religion, then, is to know, love and obey the Father through Christ and in Christ, because the Son and the Father are one. Any religion that departs from this core truth in any degree can legitimately refer to itself only as a variant.

Disciples of Christ

Now, anyone who today calls himself a Disciple of Christ must first of all acknowledge that, in America in the year 2001, such faith, such love and such discipleship are no longer the majority sentiment. We who so believe are in the minority. And, increasingly, we are an oppressed and repressed minority. Except in places like Salt Lake City, for a speaker to arise and speak as I am speaking today in a political setting would be frowned on almost everywhere in America. If there were any journalists in America interested enough in my remarks to report on them, the story would undoubtedly be littered with adjectives like "rigid," "inflexible," "doctrinaire," "bigoted," "intolerant," and, most damning of all, "non-inclusive."

But one of the Lord's commandments is: "Fear not!" He warned us that if we embraced him as the way, the truth and the life, we would be hated and persecuted by the world, which knows nothing of his Father.

Today the shapers of worldly opinion would have us believe that there is no absolute truth, that all truth is relative, that each individual person is entitled to define his own truth. As for me, I take pride in the fact that I am too rigid for such nonsense.

Our secular commentators solemnly assure us that no one is justified in intruding upon a woman's private decision to abort the new life forming in her womb. As for me, I take pride in the inflexibility of my belief that God's commandment, thou shalt not kill, applies inside and outside the womb and that no man or woman is ever excused from the admonition of Christ that whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters we do also to him.

For decades now, the pompous editorial writers of the New York Times and the Washington Post have pontificated that homosexuality is a genetic or at least deeply ingrained predisposition, and that denying gays and lesbians full freedom to act out the inclinations of their sexuality is a gross social injustice. I myself remain unpersuaded and doctrinaire, much preferring the inspired writings of the Old Testament and the solemn judgment of St. Paul that all sexual behavior outside the holy bonds of matrimony is abominable in God's sight.

In short, in this age that finds a civil right in every particularism, it is Christians and Christians alone who find themselves crudely described as bigoted and intolerant and non-inclusive for the simple reason that they strive to remain faithful to the words and the commands of the Son who was sent by the Father.

Fear not. He overcame the world. He will again overcome the world in which we find ourselves situated. And it will be our peculiar and eternal glory that he chose us as his instruments in overcoming it. Do not be afraid.

I hope I have been able to show in these remarks that true religion and true Christianity are, as the philosophers say, coterminous. They are one and the same. And grasping this truth is not beyond our comprehension. It is not overly complex. It is not something accessible only to sophisticated philosophical intellects.

In fact, the intellectual pride that routinely accompanies the possession of magnificent mental gifts is a common impediment on the short road to simple truths. Names such as Hobbes, Machiavelli, Hume, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche and Jung are ample proof of this. The Lord Jesus was almost nowhere more luminously divine than when he thanked his Father for revealing to babes and infants what he concealed from the proud and the powerful.

We now have a pretty good idea of what true religion and true Christianity consist of. What, now, of American patriotism?

American Patriotism

My thesis is that, for an American, true patriotism consists of loving and promoting the historical mission given to America by Providence. Understanding American patriotism therefore requires a firm grasp of just what that mission is.

First, we should outline some of the assumptions behind our analysis. For one thing, because Jesus is the divine Son of the Father, he knew all things, and that includes his foreknowledge of the prominent role America would assume at this juncture of human history.

Second, God created man in his own image. To a large extent this means that God made man free, just as he himself is free. God gave Moses the Commandments, which are an indirect reflection of God's commitment not to revoke man's freedom, for we are always free to obey or disobey those Commandments.

The sin of Adam and Eve is the first confirmation of the radical freedom of man. God did not foreordain their failure to obey him. He created Adam and Eve perfect and sinless and not subject to disease or death, or even to the inclination to stupidity or evil induced by our passions. Adam and Eve were in perfect control of their passions. Yet, in their freedom, they chose to sin.

Similarly, even though God has assigned a mission to America, neither our success nor our failure is preordained. Whether future historians will look back on the country called America and see one of the great shining lights of human civilization, or will dismiss it in messy footnotes as one of history's most spectacular flameouts - all of that is still very much up in the air.

It is also still very much up in the air whether our children and grandchildren will honor and revere us for our wisdom and devotion to duty, or whether they will curse the very memory of our generation.

America's Mission

With these assumptions, what then shall we say about the mission of America? What is our destiny?

What I am about to say to you is the product of many years of reflection, and that reflection has been heavily influenced by my personal experiences. That is obvious, of course, for anyone who has anything to say about anything.

But my experiences have perhaps been a little more varied and searing than most. Most of you became familiar with my checkered past in our getting-acquainted session yesterday.

I had married during my military service. My first daughter was born in the middle of my Vietnam tour. We had another daughter and a son. They are all grown now and out of the house. On June 26, my oldest daughter gave birth to a son, our first grandchild. This, of course, has been my most interesting and challenging experience in life, being a father and now a grandfather. It is the experience which gives me the most passion in my political endeavors. I am gripped by fear that America will fail to fulfill her destiny during their lifetimes, and that the negligence and apathy of my generation will be the chief cause of that failure.

Let me now describe what I see as America's mission.

Our mission, I think, is to give the world a lasting lesson on how a free people governs itself successfully. Our mission is to serve as an example of political stability, economic dynamism and cultural sanity. The design of Providence is to use America as a global schoolhouse in which other countries learn to treasure freedom, promote the social and economic dignity of their citizens, and yearn for lasting peace among the nations of the world.

If America is successful in fulfilling its mission, there is a reasonable prospect that the religious, ethnic, cultural and economic strains and divisions plaguing the human race can gradually be alleviated, that military spending can safely be reduced, and that the incidence of warfare on the planet can be significantly minimized if not eliminated.

If America fails, in my opinion, the results will be catastrophic for the greater portion of the earth's population.

Now, I beg you, look outside this room. Look east towards Washington, DC, where the Democratic and Republican Parties govern America in a strange coalition. Look west toward California, and especially Hollywood, where celebrities and producers and screenwriters are engaged in curious rituals of cultural incest and successfully transplant their twisted notions of healthy living into the minds of tens of millions of our fellow citizens.

I ask you, do these vistas, east and west and north and south, make you believe that America is on the road to success or to failure? Does what you see out there beyond this room give you hope for the future, or tempt you to despair?

Our Constitution

Let us focus for the moment on one aspect of America's historical mission, the written Constitution our Founding Fathers gave us.

Consider first how clearly the finger of God appears in this scene. It takes place in what was then universally regarded as a colonial backwater of the mighty British empire. Yes, those farmers and colonists had gained their independence from that empire six years earlier, but they were still squabbling among themselves and had very little political or economic influence on the rest of the world.

Today, however, the names of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison are among the most prominent in the history of human politics. The French Revolution began the summer after the first American Congress was sworn in, and it, too, has had great historical impact. But the names of the American leaders are usually associated with wisdom and vision, while Robespierre and Danton are still largely known for their shortsightedness and brutality during the infamous reign of terror.

We, the descendants of those great Americans, must always look upon that period with awe, and with gratitude to the Lord of the Universe for blessing our country with such a remarkable concentration of talent and wisdom. It was nothing short of miraculous that such a marvelous collection of intelligent and sober men emerged to take charge of the founding of the country destined to eclipse the secular majesty of the empire that gave her birth.

David Broder, Washington's dean of political commentators, who is generally very liberal on the issues, wrote in his 4th of July column that "it really does appear a sign of God's favor that we were blessed with such leaders at the birth of the nation."

It would be folly, I think, to imagine that God did not take an active role in these historical developments. Something similar happened in the five centuries that preceded the birth of Christ. Would it not be folly to imagine, as almost every secular mind does today, that the convergence of a solid philosophical grounding, in the persons of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, with the millennium-long pax romana, enforced by the mighty Caesars of Rome, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Father's decision to send the Redeemer, his own Son, to the fallen human race right smack-dab in the middle of that millennium?

Let us Christians not be guilty of such naivete. God created all things. He maintains in existence, or re-creates, all things from moment to moment. His Kingdom was announced by his own Son almost two thousand years ago. He governs us from beginning to end, both in our personal and in our national lives. He is too good to tax us. He does not draft us and send us away from our families to fight in foreign wars. He is distant from the incredible maze of the United States Code, and he never submits interested-party comments on rules proposed for inclusion in the Code of Federal Regulations. He probably had a preference in the impeachment proceedings against former President Bill Clinton, but he never made it known to us.

Still, he governs us. But he governs us in mercy and kindness and tender love, the love of a father, and in impeccable deference to the freedom and liberty he instilled in our very natures when he created us in his beautiful image.

And he governs us with the intangible and largely unseen gossamer strings of historical development, in the unparalleled philosophical genius he incubated in the city states of classical Greece, in the pagan religious fervor and military and political brilliance he cultivated in Rome, and, in the modern era, in the spectacular florescence in the remote American colonies of mankind's most durable and effective experiment in self-government.

When God, working silently through many cycles of birth and regeneration, fashioned the genes and the minds and hearts of George Washington, George Mason, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, James Monroe, John Adams, Samuel Adams and many others of what is indisputably, Tom Brokaw notwithstanding, America's greatest generation, the generation of the Founding Fathers, he personally intervened in time and space, just as surely as he did when the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary and planted in her human womb divine life.

The Constitution for the United States is the chief product of that divine intervention. If our historical sense is too stunted to appreciate that central fact, then our patriotism is doomed to be too shallow to exert any lasting influence on the course of events.

I don't want to suggest, of course, that the Constitution deserves the kind of respect and reverence we reserve for holy scripture. The American political dispensation is a divine gift mediated through all the imperfections and limitations of its human creators. Holy scripture is God's own, direct revelation of himself to mankind.

Still, in the secular sphere, there is no document more worthy of our respect than the Constitution for the United States of America. That document is an integral part of the mission God has given to America. By the same token, there is no more sure nor rapid way to undermine that mission than to disregard the wisdom embodied in that Constitution.

The Constitution is not a mere toy in our hands. It is not a plaything. It is, indeed, a living Constitution in the sense that it has an organic relationship with our ability to fulfill our national destiny, and in the sense that it can be adapted to meet new circumstances.

But it is not a living Constitution in the sense intended by the liberals of today. It was not meant by its drafters to be that malleable. Its meaning is not supposed to change with every violent wind that blows through popular sentiment, nor with every shifting Supreme Court majority.

The Constitution can be adapted to changing circumstances through the amendatory process it itself prescribes. All other adaptations are fundamentally illegal. All other adaptations radically undermine the very notion of having a Constitution in the first place.

Here, then, is where we find our essential connection between religion and politics, between patriotism and Christianity. As human beings, we must have, so to speak, a solid peg where we can hang our hats, a rock we can cling to when the floods come.

As Christians, we cling to the strongest rock in the universe, the word made flesh, the Eternal Son of the Father, the Messiah, Jesus Christ our Redeemer.

As Americans, the rock that we dare not let go of is that precious document created by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. We cannot fulfill our national destiny or carry out the mission God has given America without it.

Knowing the Founders

There is another connection between our religion and our patriotism that I wish to bring to your attention. It is actually more like an historical coincidence, a parallel set of circumstances, a striking similarity.

Namely, just as the enemies of Jesus were his enemies precisely because they did not know his Father, so do the enemies of our Constitution seek to destroy it because they know nothing of the Founding Fathers.

In the Gospel of John, we heard Jesus repeating again and again the people's ignorance of his Father. "You have never heard his voice or seen his face," he said. When he spoke about his Father, he had to add parenthetically, "whom you do not know." When he addressed his Father in prayer at the Last Supper, he stated: "The world has not known you."

So it is that we can say to the present-day enemies of the Constitution: "You do not know the Founders. You do not know the Fathers."

When Congress passes a law that increases federal control of education, we can say to Congress: "There is no Constitutional warrant for any federal control of education. You do not know the Fathers."

Because Congress passed the Brady Bill and outlawed the import of assault weapons and established waiting periods for the purchase of firearms, we can say: "You do not know the Fathers, for the Fathers intended the Second Amendment to be a safeguard against the emergence of a tyrannical government, and the Second Amendment clearly states that the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed."

The Fathers knew the meaning of "infringed." Present-day congressmen cannot understand the words "shall not be." They do not know the Fathers.

In a series of decisions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the supreme court gradually evolved the so-called "Doctrine of Incorporation," by which they meant that the various rights and reservations spelled out in the Bill of Rights were actually individual rights which the federal government was entitled to assert against the sovereignty of the several states. As the Ninth and Tenth Amendments make perfectly clear, this is a complete perversion of the Founding Fathers' understanding of what they were doing in agreeing to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. All those Supreme Courts did not know the Fathers.

And, God help us, when the Supreme Court of the United States created out of whole cloth the right of privacy and then, searching in the penumbras of that alleged right, discovered the right of a mother to dismember and kill the fruit of her womb, we can shout, and all the angels of heaven will add their voices, that those seven men who voted in favor of this Constitutional and moral atrocity did not know the Fathers!

The Abortion Holocaust

Dear friends, good and wise patriots that you are, let us reflect deeply on these things, for we, too, shall give an accounting.

Every day of my life, I examine my own conscience. I ask myself if somehow, in word, or action, or sign, or omission, I have allowed myself to be contaminated by the pervasive evils of our times. Our liberties have been eroded. We have surrendered the fates of most of our children to the subtle perversions and insidious indoctrinations of a godless educational establishment.

We have stood by and watched a relentless attack on the Boy Scouts by groups offended that the scouts will not allow themselves to become the sexual targets of those groups. The American family, the single most important factor in all our past success and the most indispensable element of our ability to survive in the future, is being steadily eroded by soaring divorce rates, absentee fathers, economic pressures taking mothers out of their homes, and wild-eyed feminist rhetoric in our newspapers, TV sitcoms and university campuses.

Worst of all, most tragic of all, most sickening of all, the holocaust of our own most defenseless citizens goes on and on and on. Since I began this talk, more than a hundred babies have been slaughtered. Every time I turn a page, three more babies have been killed.

Three babies with souls that will live for all eternity, who were created by God to take part in his plan for the salvation of America and the salvation of the world. May God have mercy on us and take pity on America. How can we do this?

Two of those three were little girls. And the grown women who argue most passionately in defense of their right to kill them have the gall to call themselves feminists.

Two of those three were black or Hispanic. And the grown men who argue most passionately in defense of their right to kill them have the gall to call themselves civil rights advocates.

Now I ask myself, what do I have the gall to call myself? Can I call myself a Christian if I have not sufficiently raised my voice against this bloody slaughter? Can I call myself a patriot if I have not spent myself, body and soul, against this Constitutional travesty, this senseless, mindless, evil genocide of the rising generation of Americans? Can I call myself a man, a son of the Heavenly Father, a brother of the Redeemer if I fail to exhaust myself against the bloody moat of this diabolic castle, this monstrous pile of black injustice, the stench of which rises to the throne of the Almighty Father and begs for justice?

My fellow patriots, the questions answer themselves. I have not done enough. I have fallen short. I am an American in a democracy in which, where there is passion and knowledge and energy and goodwill, everything, everything can be changed almost overnight. I am complicit, I am guilty, I am blameworthy in this general defect of modern American society that nothing will change tonight, or the next night, or the next year, and that we will soon witness the 30th anniversary of this shameful blot on our national conscience.

Less than two weeks ago, the Washington Post had a front-page article about the Serbs who had guilty consciences over the atrocities and massacres in Kosovo two years ago, truck drivers, ditch diggers, soldiers and policemen. Because of their guilty consciences, they are beginning to speak up, and the truth is beginning to pour out.

Searchers of graves and records believe the truth will help heal an open wound in Kosovo, where more than 10,000 people, Albanians and Serbs, were killed. The deputy head of the Serbian police criminal investigations unit was quoted as saying that he knew it was wartime and people were under stress, but he quickly added, "I am ashamed that something like this could happen in Serbia." Still, he defended individual soldiers, saying, "What is one soldier? Their guilt is incomparable to the ones who organized this."

My friends, how many Americans are ashamed of what is happening in America? Ten thousand people is a horrible toll, indeed. The Abortion holocaust in America tallies that many victims in fewer than three days. Since Roe v. Wade, America has inflicted the equivalent of four thousand Kosovos on its own citizens. The individual mothers who choose to abort their children should certainly not be excused, but as that Serbian policeman pointed out, their guilt is incomparable to those who organized this shameful holocaust, the Supreme Court justices, the shameless politicians, organizations like NARAL, the ACLU, Norman Lear's people for the American Way, the so-called mainstream media and, sadly, even many churches.

Thomas Jefferson once famously wrote that when he considered that God is just, he trembled for the future of America. Our generation must rejoice that God is also merciful and kind and patient. Were he not, his justice would long ago have obliterated the country we love from the pages of history.

We can never allow ourselves a single moment of complacency. A majority of our fellow citizens may be content that William Jefferson Clinton no longer sullies the oval office, and that a Republican from Texas, presumably a bit more respectful of the Constitution, presumably just a little more pro-life and pro-family, now sits in the White House.

Do not let yourselves be deluded. America lost ten million more of her precious babies during the eight years that Clinton held office. And America surely would have lost another ten million if Al Gore had been elected. But does anyone think that, if he gets reelected in 2004, Bush will not also preside over the slaughter of another ten million American citizens?

Every year that passes like this, with the holocaust continuing and with the deconstruction of the Founding Fathers' masterpiece proceeding apace, our Heavenly Father's mercy, kindness and patience are further strained. We can pray for his continued mercy, but if we provoke his justice it will be swift and it will be terrible.

Our Duty

My dear friends, what is to be done? What does the intersection of religion and politics that we have been exploring today compel our consciences to decide?

First of all, we must reject the idea, very common in religious circles, that religion and politics are incompatible, and that all politics is doomed to failure. In May I had lunch with Howard Phillips and Joe Sobran. Howard sent me some tapes to listen to, a series of talks by Steve Schlissel entitled "Obey Your Leaders."

Mr. Schlissel had a lot of very sensible things to say, but he also claimed that politics could achieve nothing, that the essential work was the work of the churches in converting men's hearts. If the churches did their job, good national policies would be the natural outcome. If the churches did not do their job, all attempted political solutions to our problems would remain fruitless.

There is a very large kernel of truth in this, but the flaw in his analysis lies in his assumption of an either-or necessity. The churches should, indeed, be doing a much better job than they have been doing, and if they do the work of the politicians will be much easier. But so should the politicians, and so should the voters who are picking those politicians, and if they do the work of the churches will be much easier.

A Christian who considers himself a patriot must see politics as a healthy and legitimate field of endeavor. He must work on the assumption that government and religion can be hand-in-glove, with government officials inebriated by their religious sense of duty, and with religious citizens acknowledging the God-given authority of the state.

Care must always be taken, as our Founding Fathers well understood, that the power and authority of the state are never employed in the service of any sectarian advantage, but this does not mean, Constitutionally, that there is really such a thing as a "wall of separation" between church and state. Nor, most assuredly, does it mean that the state should be actively hostile towards religion.

A second thing that we must do, if we are to consider ourselves modern American patriots, is to ensure that true religion, true Christianity, permeates all our political thinking and that we make a conscious effort to rid ourselves of all political positions and attitudes that were not so formed.

This sounds very general, but I am using it to point at a very specific problem. In the past, too many politicians and too many citizens who thought of themselves as Christians have not been very Christian towards particular groups of their fellow Americans. I refer in particular to the shameful treatment of our African-American brothers and sisters in the century or so following the Civil War.

African-Americans

I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just 12 years after there were race riots in that city. Most of the victims of the riots were black. The riots broke out when a young white woman claimed a black man made a pass at her. He himself was arrested and escaped with his life, but scores of other innocent blacks were killed and thousands were burned out of their homes.

The riots shocked my Christian parents, and they were careful to ensure that mindless racism of that sort would not infect their three children. My father told me dozens of times when I was growing up that all people are God's children regardless of the color of their skin. He was a very well known baseball and basketball coach in Tulsa, and he later did his part to teach true Christianity to the city at large by scheduling games with the black kids and making sure the games got reported in the city newspapers. That was in the early and mid 1950s, long before it was cool to be a civil rights activist. We were lucky, I guess, that our house was not firebombed.

Yes, I know, our African-American brothers and sisters are not blameless. They have made themselves into the principal constituency of the Democratic Party, which for decades shamelessly bought their votes with federal and local dependency programs. They vote in overwhelming numbers for the very politicians who are most adept at murdering their children through abortion. The sociological statistics on African-American family life, with their high rates of teenage pregnancy, drug use, juvenile crime, venereal disease and absentee fatherhood, are nothing short of catastrophic. African-American support for affirmative action is very solid and a very shameful exhibition of tolerance for public racism on the part of those who have been most victimized by private racism.

But our main duty does not involve an examination of the merits or demerits of those who stand in political opposition to us. Our main duty is to examine our own positions in the light of Christ's revelation of the Father to us, and in the light of political imperatives arising from the mission the Father has given America.

Those of you who are involved in the Genesis Project [a Utah program for black members of the LDS Church], you are doing the Lord's work. Please continue to give your hearts and hands to this vital apostolate. If the Christian community is able to rescue our African-American brothers and sisters from the stranglehold of the Democratic Party, it will largely be due to your noble efforts.

Some Predictions

I have been known to make predictions. For some strange reason, when I was ten years old I went around telling my playmates that Americans would be walking on the moon in our lifetimes. In the summer of 1958, I informed my parents that Jack Kennedy would be our next president. They laughed and patiently explained to me all the reasons a Catholic could not be elected president. (In retrospect, they were right, for it is now clear that Jack Kennedy was never really a Catholic, just as his younger brother, Teddy, cannot claim to be a Catholic so long as he remains a public supporter of the culture of death.)

In 1962 I argued to one of my economics professors that the Soviet Union could not possibly survive very long because so-called scientific materialism totally misreads human nature and because the Soviet attempt to micromanage the economy would sooner or later result in unsustainable economic weakness. Dr. Jones replied that the Soviets could not be boycotted into submission because they had more than their share of natural resources and because their guiding principle of autarky, or economic self-sufficiency, shielded them from outside pressures.

In 1964 I concluded that our adventure in Vietnam would soon turn into a national disaster and went around saying so to all my fellow Peace Corps volunteers. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, I wrote several times in my weekly column about my old conviction that the creaky Soviet system could not long survive a sustained external challenge, and I chided those Americans who, in effect, were trying to give the Soviets a new lease on life with their proposal for a nuclear freeze and with their opposition to Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

I mention these predictions because I want you to take seriously this prediction:

If patriotic Christian Americans of the 21st century do not succeed in throwing off most of the counterproductive and totally unnecessary baggage that bogged down the cause of patriotic Christianity in the 20th century, America will not survive into the 22nd century. We will fail in the mission God has given us. This failure will cause unspeakable misery and turmoil around the globe, and the repercussions of that catastrophic turbulence will also take down America.

That excess baggage consists of much more than the relationship between white Christians and our African-American brethren. Our guiding principle in the way we pursue our political endeavors in the 21st century must be: If the path we are on leads us toward hatred of any other human being, we have lost our way. If the wind in our sails is the love of Jesus Christ for all, all his Father's children, then, and only then, are we on the right course.

Homosexuality

For example, I recently received an email from a visitor to CAP's [Constitution Action Party] website. He wrote that he wanted to make a contribution to CAP, even though he is not a rich man, because of the good work we do. He wanted to know what to do about the gays, saying that he was very concerned about the exposure of his children to their propaganda. I replied to him as follows:

"Thank you for your offer of support. What you say about the promotion of the gay agenda in America is certainly true. Our children are, indeed, put at risk by the public school system and especially by the Sex Ed programs presenting "alternative lifestyles" as normal, and by the so-called "values clarification" pushed by these programs (which essentially teach the children that values are relative, that they are entirely free to form their own values without reference to religious authority or the authority of parents). Very much harm is done to the youth of America every day in these pernicious programs.

"At the same time, we must be careful not to lose our own Christian values in our dealings with gay persons. The ancient Christian adage of hating the sin but loving the sinner is appropriate in every case.

"In contemporary America, this is not only our religious duty. It is also a practical political necessity. Very many Americans, probably a majority, have been swayed by the PR campaign of the gay establishment and are on the verge of conceding that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is very much like discriminating against some Americans because of the color of their skin. We must work very hard to win back such Americans to our point of view, and the best way to do that is to be like Christ himself, patient, loving, forgiving, but always unalterably devoted to the truth. I welcome your support of our program, but I urge you to keep this essential distinction always in mind."

This man described himself as a "Bible-believing, God-fearing, washed-in-the-blood born-again Christian." I have no reason to doubt his description. But he replied to my reply by asking if CAP could support the death penalty for "homos". He thought the death penalty was needed as a warning to homosexuals not to engage in their perversion. So I replied to him again as follows:

"You are doing your children a serious disservice if you are teaching them to hate homosexuals.

"Of course, we must do everything in our power to protect our children from the political and cultural agenda of the organized homosexual activists. But the death penalty does not belong in that mix.

"Do you listen to the Bible answer man (Hank Hanegraaf) on radio? Just a couple of days ago, his guest was a reformed homosexual who now works in the army of Christ. He is extremely articulate and argues persuasively that, while we must never swerve from presenting Biblical truth, we unconsciously do much harm to our cause by showing aversion and hatred of our homosexual brothers and sisters.

"By the way, Hank's guest was an ordained minister who had fallen from grace, not only with a homosexual relationship but also by having an affair with his best friend's wife, and he was, as I recall, into his late twenties before he repented and returned to Christ. Since you favor rehabilitation only for those younger than 16, your proposal would have put to death a man who is now serving Christ with his whole heart and soul.

"I hope that you will write me back with a promise to show more Christian love toward those who have strayed. This kind of love never demands that we compromise with the truth."

I sent out this reply on June 25th. The man never wrote again. I think he has probably changed his mind about making a contribution.

America's Future

Of all the things that we must do in order to succeed in the mission given America by our Heavenly Father, the most important is undoubtedly, undoubtedly, to achieve unity among ourselves. We must be one with Christ, as he is one with the Father. We must also be one with one another. If we continue on our separate courses, all our paths will lead to destruction.

This will not be easy. We who believe in God's authority over man, who take seriously his commandments, who revere the Bible in which he revealed himself to us, we have a tendency to be certain of our own judgments because we know our judgments have been formed in the light of God's revealed truth. When we encounter people who disagree with our judgments, our first inclination is to dismiss such people as fools, as poor victims of one of the many insidious snares of Lucifer.

Now, I am quite certain that I have said some things today that not all of you agree with. Some of you, I'm sure, hold opinions that I could not agree with.

If we focus on these disagreements, if we dwell on our differences, we will never achieve unity. The only way to achieve unity is to persistently, obdurately, stubbornly keep our attention focused like a laser on what we most assuredly agree on.

Unless I have completely misread my audience, I think everybody in this room can agree with the following propositions:

First, America must return to her Constitutional roots. We must recover the legacy our Founding Fathers gave us, and which irresponsible congresses, power-hungry presidents, and wilfully ignorant supreme courts have left in tatters.

Second, America must protect the institution of the family. That means standing up against rabid feminist rhetoric, against the agenda of the homosexualist lobby, and against the corrosive influence of the nation's secular educational establishment.

Finally, America must preserve and maintain her sovereignty against all threats, internal and external. We must oppose the United Nations, the European Union, international bankers, multinational corporations, socialist groups, and hostile states that seek to dilute our sovereignty and weaken our resolve in pursuit of a chimerical World Government.

There are a number of political parties that hold these three propositions as self-evident truth. Yet, we have not yet achieved unity among ourselves. All of us should be asking ourselves why not. All of us should recognize that none of these propositions will gain the allegiance of a working majority of the American people unless we present a united front. All of us should stand in fear of God's judgment because of our continuing disunity. We should fear his judgment all the more precisely because we know the truth of these propositions, and because this knowledge makes us his chosen instruments in carrying out the historic mission he has given to America.

Let me summarize. We have seen that true religion is the same as true Christianity, and that the core of Christianity is to know, love and obey the Father through Christ and in Christ.

We have also seen that the Father has a plan for America, that we are intended to serve for the entire world as a model of political stability, economic dynamism, and cultural sanity. We have seen that we cannot possibly succeed in carrying out the Father's plan if we do not recognize the Constitution our Fathers gave us as the fundamental bedrock of our political program. We have seen that we must consider politics and religion as complementary endeavors and acknowledge that success in one will facilitate and promote success in the other.

Mother Theresa once said that God does not demand that we succeed, only that we make our best effort. I know that every person in this room is doing that. Let us today resolve to continue on this course, fighting the good fight, running the race until the end, and leaving the final disposition to the mercy and wisdom of our Eternal Father, always bearing in mind that we have no hope of transforming the world if we do not first permit Christ to transform us. Thank you.