Then as I was driving home, I looked at the invoice. Something caught my attention. Look for yourself. Notice anything?
Yes, I get my fundie message of the day free with my purchase.
Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord.
Now, this business has every right to put whatever they want on their invoices. Hell, they could put the Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument in there for all I care. It is a private business. The Bill of Rights does not forbid expressions of religions in the private sector. Indeed, it protects it from government interference. Attacking a business for its expression of religion is not the point of this article.
The point is revealed in the bible passage itself.
Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord.
That, my friends, is the exact motiviation behind our fundie friends. This Psalm is the basic mission statement of every theocrat and religious zealot out there. They fervently believe that if the United States does not follow the Christian Lord, and if the the United States does have the Christian Lord as it's official "God" or religion, then we as a nation are not blessed. And if we are not blessed, we are evil and in league with the Devil and all that is evil in this world.
You don't believe that is the religous right's clarion call?
Then listen to the Fundies themselves:
Blessed is the Nation Whose God is the Lord
September 22, 2001 (Intersting date -- DD)
It was not a coalition of gods that brought our Pilgrim forefathers to this continent. It was not a coalition of settlers (Hindus, Muslims, and Christians) that brought the open Bible to the shores of this great land to establish a government based on the Law of God, and whose mission was to advance the Gospel of Christ. It was Jesus Christ Himself who brought the tiny Mayflower safely to the shores of this land, and it was the blessing of Jesus Christ Himself that made our nation great (a city set on a hill).
Our Pilgrim forefathers never tired of mentioning and praising His Name. Listen to this quote from the Old South Leaflets written on September 26, 1637, concerning the rules and precepts of Harvard College: "Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and his studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of sound knowledge and learning..."
Our Founding Fathers never tired of mentioning and praising His Name. Patrick Henry declared: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."
Henry was right. It was precisely because our nation was founded upon the Rock of Christ that America became a haven of liberty and an asylum for so many of the persecuted and downtrodden of our world.
Just before the Revolutionary War, one of the Crown-appointed governors wrote back to England of the condition of the colonists and their resolve to fight: "If you ask an American, who is his master? He will tell you he has none, nor any governor but Jesus Christ." The war cry that spread throughout the thirteen colonies still resounds to this day: "No King but King Jesus!"
Yes, our Pilgrim forefathers and our Founding Fathers knew that it was to Jesus and Jesus alone that we owed allegiance. We Americans need to remember the Rock from which we were hewn. We need to stop apologizing for the Name of Christ and begin praising Him. He is God, and apart from Him there is no other!
Evangelical Christians have always existed in the history of our nation. Those crazy Pilgrims were merely the first ones. And they are partly right about our founding fathers being religious. Listen to Benjamin Franklin as he stood before the Constitutional Convention to call on the assembly to unite in prayer:
To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need His assistance? I have lived . . . 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 His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, sir, in the Sacred Writings, that "except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.
But here is where the Evangelicals and us normal people part ways. The Evangelicals seem to forget the fact that Benjamin Franklin and the rest of the Founding Fathers went on to write the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, guaranting religious freedom and prohibiting the Government from establishing any one religion as the national religion.
The Religious Right has been content for many years with our Constitution. They were, and still are today, free to practice their faith as wildly and as fervently as they saw fit. Mr. Els at the tire shop is free to put on his invoices any religious message he wants. If people do not like it, they are free to their their money and cars elsewhere.
But for some reason, that is no longer good enough for the Fundies. Now they want the whole thing. They want our government. They want a national official religion. They want biblical law to be our law. So that we can truly be blessed in their eyes.
Why the change?
Because over the last 50 years, during the corresponding growth of the Religious Right as a powerful political force in this country, technology advanced to the point that they truly saw this nation for what it was. Where this country was once isolated, now it is open for all to see. THe internet, television, Movies, and radio show us what we once only dreamt off.
Remember, for a long time our citizen's worlds were limited to their own towns or counties. And more often than not, they lived with people like them. People with the same faith. Like in "Little House on the Praire." It was not hard to believe that our country was truly blessed back then, because everyone the fundies of ages past knew were as religious as they were. And as technology evolved, they came to see that there was more to this country than just their towns. They came to learn, in their view, that perhaps we as a nation were not as blessed as they thought, for not every citizen followed the Christian Lord as they did.
And if they could not convert the rest of us, they could gain control of the next best thing....the government. If the citizenry is not blessed, then by God the government will be.
Blessed is the Nation Whose God is the Lord.
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