LETTER: God needs to stay in society

Editor,

Each year during the holidays I am surprised and distressed at the attacks made on Christmas. The stories abound: Target stores not allowing the Salvation Army to set up on the store’s property, school districts banning music containing any references to Christmas (not just Jesus, but also to Santa Claus!), nativity scenes disallowed by city and county governments, etc. These are not only attacks on one Christian holiday, but also an ongoing attack on American values and the principles on which our great country was founded.

Part of this problem stems from the misinterpretation of the First Amendment. The “establishment clause” was written to prevent anything similar to the official Church of England, a state religion operated and run by the government, from starting here in America. That is the single reason for that clause in the First Amendment. Nowadays, the court’s phony “separation of church and state” interpretation is used as a weak excuse to dissolve any connection between religion and government, any mention of God in anything related to the government. This presents a serious problem, as any student of our history or government will recognize, because God is mentioned quite frequently in our nation’s founding documents and these principles are clearly stated. If you need to refresh your memory, read through the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. (On a side note, I wonder how many of us actually have our own copies of these essential documents?)

The question is: If those who are instigating these attacks have their way, what will be next? Will the Constitution and other founding documents be banned from schools? Impossible, you say, yet there are school districts that have already tried to ban the Declaration of Independence and “The Rights of the Colonists” by John Adams because of references to God! Will Moses and the Ten Commandments have to be removed from the U.S. Supreme Court building? Will Lincoln’s speech mentioning God carved inside the Lincoln Memorial be defaced? Will religious programmers and broadcasters be denied the FCC’s permission to use “public airways?”

Something must be done.

Ben Nilson