Which ‘religion’ will prevail in America?

By Bill Connor

Months ago, we all learned the full extent to which secularization has engulfed the Democratic Party. According to a Pew poll of December 14, 2021, only 55 percent of Democrats claimed belief in God. Only 28 percent of Democrats identified as Evangelical, which, in comparison, is only around half that of Republicans at 58 percent. Democrats who attend church weekly has dropped to only 29 percent, and only 47 percent of Democrats hold religion as “very important” in their lives. Important to the context of politics, only 29 percent of Democrats look to religion for moral guidance, compared with 44 percent of Republicans, and only 23 percent of Democrats now believe in absolute standards of right and wrong, compared with more than double that number with Republicans. Along with it comes the rise in secular “beliefs,” and that biblical faith is now an enemy. It is time for believers to accept that one “religion” will prevail in the public square, and it is high time to boldly defend their biblical faith from being vanquished from that square. Let me explain.

First, it’s important to contrast political views between a now primarily secular Democratic Party, a somewhat secular Republican Party and the rest of America. As secularism marginalizes religion, we all see the breakdown of the American family, the explosion of crime, rising depression, drug use, and suicide. These rising maladies correlate directly with the decline in Christian belief. Beyond this, freedom is also being lost with secularism. 

A January 13, 2022, Heartland Institute and Rasmussen telephonic poll showed how the average Democrat has jettisoned the idea of God-given rights. According to that poll, an astounding 48 percent of Democratic voters believe government should be able to imprison and/or fine those who question the efficacy of COVID vaccines (In contrast, only 27 percent of all Americans hold that view.) Although the vast majority of Americans oppose government fines on the unvaccinated, 55 percent of Democrats support it. A whopping 59 percent of Democratic voters claim to support confining the unvaccinated to their homes. Around a third of Democrats (29 percent) support the unvaccinated losing custody of their children.

Secularists argue they are only maintaining an alleged Constitutional “wall of separation of church and state” as they push secularism. They are wrong. First, the Constitution doesn’t contain that phrase and only prevents any “law recognizing the establishment of religion.” Second, the left “is” pushing “their” religion into the state. Laws are being advocated based on critical race theory (CRT), for example. Take in this from famed author and university president Dr. Voddie Baucham, on CRT: “Racism as normative (it’s normal, it’s everywhere and it’s unavoidable). CRT teaches that the only way to know the truth is to elevate black, marginalized voices and listen to their stories. People and their feelings become arbiters of truth, and anyone who disagrees with those feelings is either racist or has internalized racism … CRT advocates, such as Ibram X. Kendi, criticize white Savior theology, which maintains that people need to be saved from their sins … Instead, they tout Black liberation theology, which maintains that people (as identity groups) need to be delivered from oppression.”

https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/394150-voddie-baucham-critical-race-theory.html  

Non-believer Helen Pluckrose wrote in The Critic: “The reason the social justice movement is causing so much trouble at the moment is because it is a quasi-religious movement posing as an authority … It has been allowed to set itself up as a secular moral authority because our laws and principles of secularism have not yet expanded to include belief systems that do not fit our outdated understanding of ‘religion.’” https://thecritic.co.uk/how-secularism-can-save-us-from-the-social-justice-movement/

The founding fathers were in agreement about the importance of religion. As John Adams put it: “This Constitution was written for a moral and religious people, it is wholly unsuited for the governance of any other.” Non-religious and “Deist” Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, said the following on June 28, 1787, at the start of the Constitutional Convention, “I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without [H]is notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without [H]is aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that ‘except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without [H]is concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall be become a reproach and a bye word down to future age.”

By the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked about America saying, “There is no other country on Earth in which the Christian religion retains greater sway over the souls of men.”

The United States will have a religion in the public square, and it’s only a question of which religion. We have all seen the results of secularism, and most know we cannot continue down this road to becoming the “reproach” Franklin warned about. It’s time for Americans to unabashedly stand up for biblical faith to hold the place our founders intended.

Bill Connor is a 1990 Citadel graduate, 30-year Army infantry colonel (ret.) and combat veteran. He is a writer and attorney and lives in the Charleston area.