Faith Of Our Fathers Is Key To American Recovery

This article was originally published in the Washington Times, by Don Feder.

It took less than a week for the Fargo School Board in North Dakota to reverse a decision to stop saying the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings. A skirmish has been won. The war continues.

In the sacred name of inclusiveness, the Fargo School Board had voted 7-2 to end recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings. After a public outcry and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum pushing legislation to guarantee an opportunity to say the pledge before all public meetings, anti-pledge forces beat a hasty retreat.

The initial move was led by board member Seth Holden, who called the pledge an (oh, no!) “noninclusive act.” 

Since the word God in the pledge is capitalized, therefore, “The text is clearly referring to the Judeo-Christian god and therefore it does not include any other faith such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, all of which are practiced by our staff and students,” Mr. Holden explained.

Imagine the trauma endured by members of said faiths walking around with pieces of paper in their pockets proclaiming, “In God We Trust.” They must send them to me immediately so they can be disposed of properly.

Using its megaphones in education and the media, the left consistently misrepresents the connection between God and America. For all the average product of public education knows, Muslims landed on Plymouth Rock, the Founding Fathers were Hindus, and the U.S. cemetery at Normandy is full of graves marked with Dharma prayer wheels.

Still, the Declaration of Independence does contain no fewer than five noninclusive references to “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” “The Supreme Judge of the World” and “Divine Providence.”

All 45 of our presidents have taken the oath of office on a Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, despite the psychic pain thereby inflicted on the atheists, agnostics, Wiccans and Zoroastrians forced to witness the noninclusive ceremonies.

It takes a studious act of will to ignore the reality that America was founded on those values common to Judaism and Christianity. You will not find ideas like “Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue” in the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita or the teachings of the Buddha. 

An America not founded on Judeo-Christian principles would be unrecognizable. It might look like Pakistan or India — where Muslims and Hindus have spent decades since independence (and centuries before) merrily murdering each other — when they’re not killing Christians. Non-Western religions do not have a tradition of tolerance.

Fargo School Board President Tracie Newman had said she wanted to replace the pledge with a “shared statement of purpose that would bring us together” at the start of the meetings — such a “woke” manifesto might acknowledge the primacy of race, the goal of social justice, the obligation to fight fossil fuels and the need to eliminate any restraints on sexual expression.

Since the Enlightenment, the priority of revolutionaries everywhere has been to replace the God of the Bible with one of a number of secular “isms” — atheism, egalitarianism, collectivism, nationalism and racism among them.

This drive invariably ended in guillotines and gulags, Cultural Revolutions and the Killing Fields.

It was the noninclusive Judeo-Christian tradition that kept us out of the clutches of these maniacal attempts to remake humanity.

Alexandre Solzhenitsyn declared: “The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all of the major crimes of this century.”

In examining the tragic history of his country, Solzhenitsyn explained, “The subtle poisons of secularism permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles.”

Sound familiar?

There is no area of modern American life where progressives wield more power than education — with everything from critical race theory to gender ideology. Surveys show that the longer one spends in a progressive playpen, the least likely he is to believe in God.

Raging battles that were unthinkable a few years ago today dot the cultural landscape. Who could have predicted that a Virginia gubernatorial race would turn on contentious school committee meetings, or that parents who objected to brainwashing would be labeled domestic terrorists by the attorney general of the United States?

In order to succeed at reshaping humanity, progressives must substitute their god (call it progress, equality or democracy) for our own. That’s why a simple oath, spoken before public meetings, is so vitally important. 

It’s a recognition of the roots of American order and the key to recapturing our greatness.

About the Ruth Institute

The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

To get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.

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