Come to learn how to better engage your church congregants in responsible Christian citizenship. We will be presenting some incredible upcoming events and we will network and strategize how to best impact our community for the 2012 elections and to promote a biblical world view in our community.

The Church Liaison Training Seminar is open to all who wish to become better informed and equipped to promote responsible Christian citizenship within their congregations. Pastors are encouraged to come with the person they have selected to be their Church Liaison or to come and investigate before selecting the church’s liaison.

The purpose of this initial seminar is to learn some of the do’s and don’ts for pastors (as pastor of the church and as an private citizen) and churches to do with what is legal concerning any non-parisan civic activities.  Some of the legal non-partisan activities include becoming informed on ballot issues (churches may actively support or oppose ballot issues),  doing voter identification and registration, voter survey distribution, get out the vote on election day, distribution of  a variety of  literature and  inviting candidates to speak at your church.

You will also learn of many civic ideas for your congregation such as holding Citizenship Sundays, recognizing and honoring elected officials, teachers, members of the military and their families to name just a few.

We will also discuss plans for the 2012 election cycle and how we can promote responsible Christian citizenship to better influence public policies that impact us all.

Church Liaisons are not expected to attend CTV Shiawassee’s monthly meetings. This training seminar is the first of at most three to four seminars for the 2012 election year. In non election years, there would likely be no more than two seminars.

For more information call Rick Ross at 989-723-5517 or Tom Emery at 517-625-1649 or go to www.ctvmichigan.org and search for Church Liaisons.

Justice Markman will present his white paper The Coming Constitutional Debate as the main presentation. The theme of Justice Markman’s presentation is the U.S. Constitution is and will continue to be changed by activist judges while “we the people” are unaware unless the people become aware and take action to address the issue according to constitutionally provided means.

Join us to to gain insight into how our constitution can and must be preserved and only changed via constitutionally approved means whereby any proposed changes are done through an open and deliberative process as opposed to judicial fiat.

There is no charge for the event.

The following is an introduction to the Seek the Peace study:

Build for the Future

By T. M. Moore|Published Date: March 20, 2012

T.M. Moore serves as the general editor of the Worldview Church. He is the Dean of the Colson Center’s Centurion program, a ministry to equip both pastors and lay leaders in service of the Kingdom of God.

“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce…Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you…” Jeremiah 29:5, 8

God had revealed to Jeremiah that the people of Jerusalem would be in exile in Babylon for seventy years. This meant that many of those who were being taken into captivity would die in Babylon. Indeed, it is quite possible that most of the exiled Israelites believed that would be the case for them. When prospects are bleak, incentive to build for the future can be in short supply. Why work hard and seek to prosper if it’s all going to be taken from you anyway?

The way people view the future definitely affects the way they live in the present. If one’s attitude toward the future is that things are only going to get worse, the bad guys are going to increase in strength, and the good guys will be reduced to a small remnant, waiting for the Lord to lift them out of their troubles into heavenly bliss – if that’s what we believe, it will have a huge effect on how we do our work, raise our children, and seek the welfare and peace of our neighbors.

Today there is no shortage of preachers and evangelists declaring just such a view of the future. Their counsel to the Church is, “There’s nothing we can do to avoid the growth and progress of evil. We just need to hang on until Jesus comes and raptures us up to heaven.” The Jews in Jeremiah’s day might have been of a similar mind, but God commanded them instead to build for the future, to seek prosperity for themselves and their families, and to contribute to the social, cultural, economic, and spiritual wellbeing of the people around them. Circling the wagons and hoping for the best was simply not an option.

The Scriptures teach the followers of Christ in every age to build for the future. We are to grow in the grace of our Lord; take every thought captive for Jesus; reconcile all things back to God; and live for His glory in every area of our lives. The Daystar has arisen, John declared in 1 John 2:8-17, and the Light of Christ was even in John’s day advancing against the darkness, bringing truth, hope, and new life to a world long-shrouded in darkness and unbelief.

In exile in Babylon, Daniel saw the Kingdom of God as a growing stone. From its beginnings in the time of the Roman Empire throughout the course of history, God’s Kingdom would grow, expand, overcome all opposition, and fill the earth with the knowledge of God and His glory (Dan. 2:44, 45; Hab. 2:14). This is not the vision of the future held by many Christians today. But God calls us always to build for the future, to lay the foundations of blessing and spiritual advance in every area of life in our own day, so that those who inherit our “houses and fields” will find them strong and fruitful in their day as well.

Beware the false prophets who counsel a defeatist, withdrawing attitude toward the future. God has plans for our future, to fill us with hope, make Himself known, and use us as His people to bless the nations of the world. Let’s work toward what God has promised, not what we’ve been taught to fear.

First published on the Colson Center website on May 21, 2010 as part of the series Seek the Peace.  You can download this free 7-part series, designed for the small group and Sunday School setting.

For additional information on this topic, get the book, Evangelicals in the Public Square, edited by J. Budziszewski, from our online store. Or read the article,“Wise as Doves,” by Charles Colson.

Paul Marshall
Senior Fellow
Hudson Institute

Blasphemy and Free Speech

PAUL MARSHALL is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. He has published widely in newspapers and magazines, including theNew York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, First Things, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books on religion and politics, including Their Blood Cries Out, Religious Freedom in the World, and Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion. Most recently he is the co-author, with Nina Shea, of Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., on February 3, 2012.
A growing threat to our freedom of speech is the attempt to stifle religious discussion in the name of preventing “defamation of” or “insults to” religion, especially Islam. Resulting restrictions represent, in effect, a revival of blasphemy laws.

Few in the West were concerned with such laws 20 years ago. Even if still on some statute books, they were only of historical interest. That began to change in 1989, when the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, declared it the duty of every Muslim to kill British-based writer Salman Rushdie on the grounds that his novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous. Rushdie has survived by living his life in hiding. Others connected with the book were not so fortunate: its Japanese translator was assassinated, its Italian translator was stabbed, its Norwegian publisher was shot, and 35 guests at a hotel hosting its Turkish publisher were burned to death in an arson attack.

More recently, we have seen eruptions of violence in reaction to Theo van Gogh’s and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film Submission, Danish and Swedish cartoons depicting Mohammed, the speech at Regensburg by Pope Benedict XVI on the topic of faith, reason, and religious violence, Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, and a false Newsweekreport that the U.S. military had desecrated Korans at Guantanamo. A declaration by Terry Jones—a deservedly obscure Florida pastor with a congregation of less than 50—that he would burn a Koran on September 11, 2010, achieved a perfect media storm, combining American publicity-seeking, Muslim outrage, and the demands of 24 hour news coverage. It even drew the attention of President Obama and senior U.S. military leaders. Dozens of people were murdered as a result.

Such violence in response to purported religious insults is not simply spontaneous. It is also stoked and channeled by governments for political purposes. And the objects and victims of accusations of religious insults are not usually Westerners, but minorities and dissidents in the Muslim world. As Nina Shea and I show in our recent book Silenced, accusations of blasphemy or insulting Islam are used systematically in much of that world to send individuals to jail or to bring about intimidation through threats, beatings, and killings.

The Danish cartoons of Mohammed were published in Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in September 2005. Some were reproduced by newspapers in Muslim countries in order to criticize them. There was no violent response. Violence only erupted after a December 2005 summit in Saudi Arabia of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The summit was convened to discuss sectarian violence and terrorism, but seized on the cartoons and urged its member states to rouse opposition. It was only in February 2006—five months after the cartoons were published—that Muslims across Africa, Asia, and the Mideast set out from Friday prayers for often violent demonstrations, killing over 200 people.

The highly controlled media in Egypt and Jordan raised the cartoon issue so persistently that an astonishing 98 percent of Egyptians and 99 percent of Jordanians—knowing little else of Denmark—had heard of them. Saudi Arabia and Egypt urged boycotts of Danish products. Iran and Syria manipulated riots partly to deflect attention from their nuclear projects. Turkey used the cartoons as bargaining chips in negotiations with the U.S. over appointments to NATO. Editors in Algeria, Jordan, India, and Yemen were arrested—and in Syria, journalist Adel Mahfouz was charged with “insulting public religious sentiment”—for suggesting a peaceful response to the controversy. Lars Vilks’ later and more offensive 2007 Swedish cartoons and Geert Wilders’ 2008 film Fitna led to comparatively little outcry, demonstrating further that public reactions are government-driven.

Repression based on charges of blasphemy and apostasy, of course, goes far beyond the stories typically covered in our media. Currently, millions of Baha’is and Ahmadis—followers of religions or interpretations that arose after Islam—are condemned en masse as insulters of Islam, and are subject to discriminatory laws and attacks by mobs, vigilantes, and terrorists. The Baha’i leadership in Iran is in prison, and there is no penalty in Iran for killing a Baha’i. In Somalia, al Shebaab, an Islamist group that controls much of that country, is systematically hunting down and killing Christians. In 2009, after allegations that a Koran had been torn, a 1,000-strong mob with Taliban links rampaged through Christian neighborhoods in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, killing seven people, six of whom, including two children, were burned alive. Pakistani police did not intervene.

Throughout the Muslim world, Sunni, Shia, and Sufi Muslims may be persecuted for differing from the version of Islam promulgated by locally hegemonic religious authorities. Saudi Arabia represses Shiites, especially Ismailis. Iran represses Sunnis and Sufis. In Egypt, Shia leaders have been imprisoned and tortured.

In Afghanistan, Shia scholar Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, editor of Haqooq-i-Zen magazine, was imprisoned by the government for publishing “un-Islamic” articles that criticized stoning as a punishment for adultery. Saudi democracy activists Ali al-Demaini, Abdullah al-Hamed, and Matruk al-Faleh were imprisoned for using “un-Islamic terminology,” such as “democracy” and “human rights,” when calling for a written constitution. Saudi teacher Mohammed al-Harbi was sentenced to 40 months in jail and 750 lashes for “mocking religion” after discussing the Bible in class and making pro-Jewish remarks. Egyptian Nobel prize winner in literature Naguib Mahfouz reluctantly abandoned his lifelong resistance to censorship and sought permission from the clerics of Al-Azhar University to publish his novelChildren of Gebelawi, hitherto banned for blasphemy. Mahfouz subsequently lived under constant protection after being stabbed by a young Islamist, leaving him partly paralyzed.

After Mohammed Younas Shaikh, a member of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, raised questions about Pakistan’s policies in Kashmir, he was charged with having blasphemed in one of his classes. In Bangladesh, Salahuddin Choudhury was imprisoned for hurting “religious feelings” by advocating peaceful relations with Israel. In Iran, Ayatollah Boroujerdi was imprisoned for arguing that “political leadership by clergy” was contrary to Islam, and cleric Mohsen Kadivar was imprisoned for “publishing untruths and disturbing public minds” after writingTheories of the State in Shiite Jurisprudence, which questioned the legal basis of Ayatollah Khomeini’s view of government. Other charges brought against Iranians include “fighting against God,” “dissension from religious dogma,” “insulting Islam,” “propagation of spiritual liberalism,” “promoting pluralism,” and, my favorite, “creating anxiety in the minds of … Iranian officials.”

Muslim reformers cannot escape being attacked even in the West. In 2006, a group called Al-Munasirun li Rasul al Allah emailed over 30 prominent reformers in the West, threatening to kill them unless they repented. Among its targets was Egyptian Saad Eddin Ibrahim, perhaps the best known human rights activist in the Arab world. Another was Ahmad Subhy Mansour, an imam who was imprisoned and had to flee Egypt, in part for his arguments against the death penalty for apostasy. The targets were pronounced “guilty of apostasy, unbelief, and denial of the Islamic established facts” and given three days to “announce their repentance.” The message included their addresses and the names of their spouses and children.

Mimount Bousakla, a Belgian senator and daughter of Moroccan immigrants, was forced into hiding by threats of “ritual slaughter” for her criticism of the treatment of women in Muslim communities and of fundamentalist influences in Belgian mosques. Turkish-born Ekin Deligoz, the first Muslim member of Germany’s Parliament, received death threats and was placed under police protection after she called for Muslim women to “take off the head scarf.”

But the story gets worse. Western governments have begun to give in to demands from the Saudi-based OIC and others for controls on speech. In Austria, for instance, Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolf has been convicted of “denigrating religious beliefs” for her comments about Mohammed during a seminar on radical Islam. Canada’s grossly misnamed “human rights commissions” have hauled writers—including Mark Steyn, who teaches as a distinguished fellow in journalism at Hillsdale College—before tribunals to interrogate them about their writings on Islam. And in Holland and Finland, respectively, politicians Geert Wilders and Jussi Halla-aho have been prosecuted for their comments on Islam in political speeches.

In America, the First Amendment still protects against the criminalization of criticizing Islam. But we face at least two threats still. The first is extra-legal intimidation of a kind already endemic in the Muslim world and increasing in Europe. In 2009, Yale University Press, in consultation with Yale University, removed all illustrations of Mohammed from its book by Jytte Klausen on the Danish cartoon crisis. It also removed Gustave Doré’s 19th-century illustration of Mohammed in hell from Dante’s Inferno. Yale’s formal press statement stressed the earlier refusal by American media outlets to show the cartoons, and noted that their “republication…has repeatedly resulted in violence around the world.”

Another publisher, Random House, rejected at the last minute a historical romance novel about Mohammed’s wife, Jewel of Medina, by American writer Sherry Jones. They did so to protect “the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.”

The comedy show South Park refused to show an image of Mohammed in a bear suit, although it mocked figures from other religions. In response, Molly Norris, a cartoonist for the Seattle Weekly, suggested an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” She quickly withdrew the suggestion and implied that she had been joking. But after several death threats, including from Al-Qaeda, the FBI advised her that she should go into hiding—which she has now done under a new name.

In 2010, Zachary Chesser, a young convert to Islam, pleaded guilty to threatening the creators of South Park. And on October 3, 2011, approximately 800 newspapers refused to run a “Non Sequitur” cartoon drawn by Wiley Miller that merely contained a bucolic scene with the caption “Where’s Muhammad?”

Many in our media claim to be self-censoring out of sensitivity to religious feelings, but that claim is repeatedly undercut by their willingness to mock and criticize religions other than Islam. As British comedian Ben Elton observed: “The BBC will let vicar gags pass, but they would not let imam gags pass. They might pretend that it’s, you know, something to do with their moral sensibilities, but it isn’t. It’s because they’re scared.”

The second threat we face is the specter of cooperation between our government and the OIC to shape speech about Islam. A first indication of this came in President Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, when he declared that he has a responsibility to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam whenever they appear.” Then in July of last year in Istanbul, Secretary of State Clinton co-chaired—with the OIC—a “High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance.” There, Mrs. Clinton announced another conference with the OIC, this one in Washington, to “exchange ideas” and discuss “implementation” measures our government might take to combat negative stereotyping of Islam. This would not restrict free speech, she said. But the mere fact of U.S. government partnership with the OIC is troublesome. Certainly it sends a dangerous signal, as suggested by the OIC’s Secretary-General, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, when he commented in Istanbul that the Obama administration stands “united” with the OIC on speech issues.

The OIC’s charter commits it “to combat defamation of Islam.” Its current action plan calls for “deterrent punishments” to counter “Islamophobia.” In 2009, an official OIC organ, the “International Islamic Fiqh [Jurisprudence] Academy,” issued fatwas calling for speech bans, including “international legislation,” to protect “the interests and values of [Islamic] society.” The OIC does not define what speech should be outlawed, but the repressive practices of its leading member states speak for themselves.

The conference Secretary Clinton announced in Istanbul was held in Washington on December 12-14, 2011, and was closed to the public, with the “Chatham House Rule” restricting the participants (this rule prohibits the identification of who says what, although general content is not confidential). Presentations reportedly focused on America’s deficiencies in its treatment of Muslims and stressed that the U.S. has something to learn in this regard from the other delegations—including Saudi Arabia, despite its ban on Christian churches, its repression of its Shiite population, its textbooks teaching that Jews should be killed, and the fact that it beheaded a woman for sorcery on the opening day of the conference.

* * *
The encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas. Nor will it bring social peace and harmony. As comedian Rowan Atkinson warns, such laws produce “a veneer of tolerance concealing a snake pit of unaired and unchallenged views.” Norway’s far-reaching restrictions on “hate speech” did not prevent Anders Behring Breivik from slaughtering over 70 people because of his antipathy to Islam: indeed, his writings suggest that he engaged in violence because he believed that he could not otherwise be heard.

In the Muslim world, such restrictions enable Islamists to crush debate. After Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was murdered early last year by his bodyguards for opposing blasphemy laws, his daughter Sara observed: “This is a message to every liberal to shut up or be shot.” Or in the words of Nasr Abu-Zayd, a Muslim scholar driven out of Egypt: “Charges of apostasy and blasphemy are key weapons in the fundamentalists’ arsenal, strategically employed to prevent reform of Muslim societies, and instead confine the world’s Muslim population to a bleak, colourless prison of socio-cultural and political conformity.”

President Obama should put an end to discussion of speech with the OIC. He should declare clearly that in free societies, all views and all religions are subject to criticism and contradiction. As the late Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, and head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization, wrote in his foreword to Silenced, blasphemy laws

. . . narrow the bounds of acceptable discourse. . . not only about religion, but also about vast spheres of life, literature, science, and culture in general. . . . Rather than legally stifle criticism and debate—which will only encourage Muslim fundamentalists in their efforts to impose a spiritually void, harsh, and monolithic understanding of Islam upon all the world—Western authorities should instead firmly defend freedom of expression. . . .
America’s Founders, who had broken with an old order that was rife with religious persecution and warfare, forbade laws impeding free exercise of religion, abridging freedom of speech, or infringing freedom of the press. We today must do likewise.

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are (1) the sanctity of human life, (2) the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and (3) the rights of conscience and religious liberty. Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Human Life

The lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are ever more threatened. While public opinion has moved in a pro-life direction, powerful and determined forces are working to expand abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Although the protection of the weak and vulnerable is the first obligation of government, the power of government is today often enlisted in the cause of promoting what Pope John Paul II called “the culture of death.” We pledge to work unceasingly for the equal protection of every innocent human being at every stage of development and in every condition. We will refuse to permit ourselves or our institutions to be implicated in the taking of human life and we will support in every possible way those who, in conscience, take the same stand.

Marriage

The institution of marriage, already wounded by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is at risk of being redefined and thus subverted. Marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all. Where marriage erodes, social pathologies rise. The impulse to redefine marriage is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil law as well as our religious traditions. Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and

-more-Manhattan Declaration Summary Page 2

not, in any intrinsic way, about the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life. Marriage is not a “social construction,” but is rather an objective reality—the covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize, honor, and protect.

Religious Liberty

Freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized. The threat to these fundamental principles of justice is evident in efforts to weaken or eliminate conscience protections for healthcare institutions and professionals, and in anti- discrimination statutes that are used as weapons to force religious institutions, charities, businesses, and service providers either to accept (and even facilitate) activities and relationships they judge to be immoral, or go out of business. Attacks on religious liberty are dire threats not only to individuals, but also to the institutions of civil society including families, charities, and religious communities. The health and well-being of such institutions provide an indispensable buffer against the overweening power of government and is essential to the flourishing of every other institution—including government itself—on which society depends.

Unjust Laws

As Christians, we believe in law and we respect the authority of earthly rulers. We count it as a special privilege to live in a democratic society where the moral claims of the law on us are even stronger in virtue of the rights of all citizens to participate in the political process. Yet even in a democratic regime, laws can be unjust. And from the beginning, our faith has taught that civil disobedience is required in the face of gravely unjust laws or laws that purport to require us to do what is unjust or otherwise immoral. Such laws lack the power to bind in conscience because they can claim no authority beyond that of sheer human will.

Therefore, let it be known that we will not comply with any edict that compels us or the institutions we lead to participate in or facilitate abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, euthanasia, or any other act that violates the principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family.

Further, let it be known that we will not bend to any rule forcing us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality, marriage, and the family.

Further, let it be known that we will not be intimidated into silence or acquiescence or the violation of our consciences by any power on earth, be it cultural or political, regardless of the consequences to ourselves.

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

The purpose of this initial seminar is to learn some of the do’s and don’ts for pastors (as pastor of the church and as an private citizen) and churches to do with what is legal concerning any non-parisan civic activities.  Some of the legal non-partisan activities include becoming informed on ballot issues (churches may actively support or oppose ballot issues),  doing voter identification and registration, voter survey distribution, get out the vote on election day, distribution of  a variety of  literature and  inviting candidates to speak at your church.

You will also learn of many civic ideas for your congregation such as holding Citizenship Sundays, recognizing and honoring elected officials, teachers, members of the military and their families to name just a few.

We will also discuss plans for the 2012 election cycle and how we can promote responsible Christian citizenship to better influence public policies that impact us all.

Church Liaisons are not expected to attend CTV Shiawassee’s monthly meetings. This training seminar is the first of at most three to four seminars for the 2012 election year. In non election years, there would likely be no more than two seminars.

For more information call Rick Ross at 989-723-5517 or Tom Emery at 517-625-1649 or go to www.ctvmichigan.org and search for Church Liaisons.

Jesus: The True American Dream

By Jeremy Egerer

America, though often derided and hated — perhaps not explicitly, but silently — by the left, oftentimes experiences the opposite problem from its most ardent admirers, the conservatives.  Through their admiration, perhaps condensed most perfectly into what is known as the American Dream, men elevate a nation into idolization because the nation elevates men.  One does not have to look far to see that in American literature, in the movies, and in even the world of politics, Americans believe on a sincere level that in the United States, opportunity can be had by all who truly seek it, and that for this reason America is worthy of glorification.

I am not writing this article to say the opposite is true — that somehow America was never a place in which the poor could, through innovation and labor, become wealthy, or that America is not and has never been a land of opportunity.  But it must be made known that long before America existed, the dream had already been established elsewhere — and perhaps not even elsewhere, but rather within a person, and through that person, in a religion.

It is in the Proverbs and in the Law that one finds the order and justice and character by which wealth is accrued, proclaiming opportunity not to those already well-situated, but instead to the wise and honorable.  It is in the Scriptures that man sees the faithful wandering nomad exalted, becoming history’s greatest patriarch.  It is by the hand of God that one sees the eleventh of twelve brothers — the weakest — raised above the rest, eventually becoming second only to Pharaoh and preserving his entire people.  It is in the Bible that one reads of the outcast Moabitess becoming the ancestor of King David and the Messiah, the young shepherd who slays the giant and becomes king of Israel, the coward from the weakest Israelite clan who delivers his nation from its oppressors, the fig-pruner called to become a prophet, the tax collectors and fishermen who become apostles, and the poorest of carpenters who sits at the right hand of God.

Far beyond the glories of the American Dream, Christianity is not a nation of elevation, but the religion of elevation.  It is not confined within borders, defended with physical arms, or subject to recessions; it is not subject to decay and decline; it does not find itself under excellent administration one day, and the next under poor.  It is a kingdom for which its citizens wait in temporary exile, establishing the effects of dominion wherever it has truly transformed their hearts, building Zion slowly as a glacier moves, a convert at a time.  It raises the dead, gives hope to the hopeless, and turns sinners into saints.

“Blessed are the meek,” says He of those who rely not upon themselves, but upon Him for their strength, “for they shall inherit the earth.”  ”Blessed are the poor in Spirit,” says He, “for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven,” and “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” says He, “for they shall be filled.”  This hunger, this spiritual and temporal poverty, leads men to reliance upon the Almighty.  It is the Almighty who establishes men in righteousness, and it is righteousness which establishes true prosperity.  And should one of God’s elect not be endowed with material riches, he will be none the poorer.  He will have a promise of eternity, the presence of the Holy Spirit, a regenerate heart, and a camaraderie within a community which surpasses earthly expectations.  If honor and grace and peace from God Himself will not satisfy a man, then he will certainly never be satisfied with material gain, even should he come to own the earth and all that is in it.

Should it be said by Americans that America herself grants men their liberty and prosperity, they would be woefully wrong, for that would be confusing the end with the means.  It is God Himself who establishes nations, who smiles upon His children, bringing grace to the humble, righteousness to the sinner, and wealth to the poor.  For what is liberty, if not within the laws of nature and of nature’s God?  What is law without unalienable rights?  From where do these come, if not from above?

So let Americans not look to America for their dream, but let them look to their Savior, the God-man Jesus Christ.  He will establish America in goodness, as the song goes:

America! America!

God mend thine ev’ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law.

America! America!

May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness,

And ev’ry gain divine.

In Him will they find Law.  In Him will they find liberty.  In Him will they find righteousness.  And should a nation be so graced by His children — not those proclaiming Him in word only, but those whose hearts have been transformed by His Holy Spirit — it is then that such a nation will truly be established in opportunity.  History declares such of our ancestors, from the first Puritans forward, and should we be so pious as they, then God’s providence will smile upon us until we cannot even wish for more.  Christ must be exalted, and then He will exalt.  This truth is recorded in the annals of history, and it is the future of all who not only call themselves such, but are truly Christian.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/jesus_the_true_american_dream.html#ixzz1hg0BF8qJ