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By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter

A new study reveals that less than one-third of Americans believe the Bible should serve as the foundation for determining right and wrong, even as most people express support for traditional moral values.

The fourth installment of the America’s Values Study, released by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University Tuesday, asked respondents for their thoughts on traditional moral values and what they would like to see as “America’s foundation for determining right and wrong.” The survey is based on responses from 2,275 U.S. adults collected in July 2022.

Overall, when asked to identify what they viewed as the primary determinant of right and wrong in the U.S., a plurality of participants (42%) said: “what you feel in your heart.” An additional 29% cited majority rule as their desired method for determining right and wrong, while just 29% expressed a belief that the principles laid out in the Bible should determine the understanding of right and wrong in the U.S. That figure rose to 66% among Spiritually Active, Governance Engaged Conservative Christians.

The only other demographic subgroups where at least a plurality of respondents indicated a desire for the Bible to serve as the determinant of right and wrong in the U.S. were respondents who attend an evangelical church (62%), self-described Republicans (57%), theologically defined born-again Christians (54%), self-identified conservatives (49%), those who are at least 50 years of age (39%), members of all Protestant congregations (39%), self-identified Christians (38%) and those who attend mainline Protestant churches (36%).

By contrast, an outright majority of respondents who do not identify with a particular faith at all (53%), along with half of LGBT respondents (50%), self-described moderates (47%), political independents (47%), Democrats (46%), self-described liberals (46%) and Catholic Church attendees (46%) maintained that “what you feel in your heart” should form the foundation of what Americans view as right and wrong.

Sizable numbers of adherents to a faith other than Christianity (45%) and respondents who identified as both Republican and moderate (38%) said the same, as did pluralities of Americans between the ages of 18-29 (47%) and 30-49 (44%). The view that “what you feel in your heart” should form the foundation of what Americans characterized as right and wrong extended across all racial demographics, both genders and all marital statuses.

The report found that 71% of those surveyed indicated support for the “traditional moral values” of integrity, justice, kindness, non-discrimination, trustworthiness, free expression, property ownership, individual self-expression and self-control. A majority of those who identified as liberal on social and political issues (52%) supported traditional moral values compared to 70% of respondents who classified themselves as moderates on such matters and 89% of self-described conservatives on social and political issues.

The overwhelming majority of Christians expressed support for traditional moral values (82%), followed by smaller shares of non-Christians (67%) and those who do not have any particular faith at all (50%). A strong majority of respondents who believe the Bible is God’s true word have traditional moral values (83%), along with 63% of those who do not view the Bible as the true and accurate words of God.

Ninety-one percent of adults who identified the Bible as their source of moral guidance espouse traditional moral values, as do 74% of those who primarily seek moral guidance from society, 71% of respondents who rely on their family as their primary source of moral guidance, 67% of those who turn to themselves for such guidance and 50% of those who point to science as their source of morality.

Support for traditional moral values also extended across all age groups. However, support for traditional moral values was measured at 76% among those aged 30 and older and just 56% among respondents between the ages of 18 and 29.

“Three-quarters of Americans maintain that people are basically good, and less than half of all Americans believe in God or that the Bible is God’s true, relevant and reliable words to humanity,” said George Barna, the director of research at the Cultural Research Center, in response to the survey's findings.

“Consequently, Americans have become comfortable with the idea of being the arbiters of morality. In the same way that most Americans contend there is no absolute moral truth, they now believe that there is no divine guidance required or even available to define right and wrong,” Barna said, lamenting that most Americans “are now more likely to take their moral cues from government laws and policies than from church teachings about biblical principles.”

He added: “Americans have historically said when they elect a president that they choose a president they are choosing a chief executive, not a pastor-in-chief, but that distinction appears to be passe. One could reasonably argue that the nation’s ideas about right and wrong are now more likely to come from the White House and the halls of Congress, than from our houses of worship.”

Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post

https://www.christianpost.com/news/most-dont-see-bible-as-main-determinant-of-right-and-wrong-poll.html

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(Another article from the archives [June 1992] that illustrates how Papal Catholicism works behind the scenes to influence American policy and fulfill its agenda) RG
By JOHN M. SWOMLEY

THE VATICAN has had a tremendous influence on White House policy with respect to foreign affairs and such issues as abortion and birth control, according to Time magazine, Feb. 24, 1992. In “The Holy Alliance,” Time described the way in which a group of Roman Catholic members of the Reagan administration collaborated with the Polish pope to overthrow the existing government of Poland.

However, in a subsidiary story in the same issue, “The U.S. and the Vatican on Birth Control,” Time described the Vatican’s success in changing U.S. policy on birth control, quoting Reagan’s first ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson: “American policy was changed as a result of the Vatican’s not agreeing with our policy.. . . American aid programs around the world did not meet the criteria the Vatican had for family planning. AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] sent various people from [the Department of] State to Rome, and I’d accompany them to meet the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family and in long discussion they finally got the message.” “They” means personnel from AID.

This is the first major disclosure in a widely-read magazine of what the Vatican has been doing for years. The Vatican has intervened in American politics to determine U.S. policy with respect to sex, reproduction and other matters. In addition to “behind-the-scenes” work with the CIA and top administration officials, the Vatican has lobbied Congress through Mother Theresa and the Vatican-appointed bishops in this country.

A chronology of the bishops’ opposition to birth control would have to begin in 1921 when New York Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes arranged for the arrest of Margaret Sanger to prevent her from delivering a speech on birth control. Such a chronology would take many pages, but some recent highlights follow.

In 1970, Father James McHugh, director of the Family Life Division of the U.S. Catholic Conference (now Bishop of Camden, N.J.), testified against federal funding of family planning and research in contraception. He told the House Subcommittee on Public Health and Welfare, “We are opposed to the utilization of public monies for the funding of private agencies whose whole intent is to promote birth control. . . . It places the prestige of government in support of one ideological position.”

In 1976, the RC bishops pressured President Carter to put a Roman Catholic in the Cabinet post of AID administrator. Carter did as asked. Joseph Califano, who got the Cabinet post, ordered the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw its approval of an effective contraceptive, Depo-Provera.

It is still not available in the U.S. though used in more than 90 other countries. The new AID administrator ended the 1966-79 tenure of R. T. Ravenholt, M.D. as director of the State Department’s global population program. Thereafter, although the bishops have never stopped opposing birth control, their strategy was to get public funds for RC programs. In 1980, Sen. Frank Church (D. Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, stating, “Catholics. . . are requesting . . . that any aid program that we may embark upon in any foreign land include information and services which relate to and support natural family planning [NFP] methods.”

In 1984, the Reagan administration, at the request of the Vatican, announced at the World Conference on Population in Mexico City that it was reversing its many-years’ commitment to international family planning and agreed, in the words of Time, to ban the “use of any U.S. aid funds by either countries or international health organizations for the promotion of birth control or abortion.” The U.S. then withdrew funding from the UN Fund for Population Activities and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

AID, in succumbing to pressure from a NFP group, Family of the Americas Foundation, a RC institution, and from then-Vice President George Bush, administratively dropped a rule that required its recipients to provide access to all family planning methods.

In 1985, the U.S. Catholic Conference, leading Catholic clergy, and Mother Theresa lobbied Congress with intense pressure to prevent it from legislating a requirement that AID restore its “informal consent rule” whereby all providers of family planning give access to all family planning methods.

Throughout the U.S. Catholic Conference, the organization of the RC bishops used its pro-life groups to lobby not only for NFP but to prevent government funding of family planning which referred to or gave information to anyone about abortion.

In 1986, the U.S. Catholic Conference lobbied Congress to stop U.S. funding of contraceptive research. The bishops also insisted that new Title X regulations redesign family planning by making NFP, with its prolonged period of abstinence, as the preferred method of family planning.

In the 1980s, according to Conscience, a publication of Catholics for a Free Choice, “Despite increasing requests by third world countries for a full range of birth control services, AID has become the single largest donor to NFP training and research in the world, at the same time as it has significantly reduced its support for other family planning initiatives.”

In 1981, the U.S. funding was $80,000 for NFP, but by 1985 it had grown to $7.8-million. AID also made a $20-million grant to a Catholic institution, Georgetown University, to review all international NFP projects. It gave a $6.8-million grant to Family of the Americas Foundation which promotes NFP in other countries, condemns contraception, and does not supply information on other methods.

In 1981, the bishops succeeded in getting the Adolescent Family Life Act adopted, which requires grant recipients to involve religious organizations in their programs and prohibits the distribution of funds to groups that provide any abortion-related services, including counseling, referral or subcontracting with any agency that provides such services. In other words, the bishops succeeded in getting millions of dollars of tax money for Roman Catholic institutions by this device. The above by no means exhausts the record of the U.S. Catholic Conference pressure or administration efforts to do the bidding of the bishops. In each state with a significant Roman Catholic population or a number of bishops, there is a state Catholic Conference on the same pattern as the National. These state lobbying groups put pressure on Congressional representatives and senators from their state.

The New York Catholic Conference has an annual lobby day when all the bishops, and more than 2,000 Roman Catholics, descend on the legislature to ask for adoption of agreed-upon legislation. In a visit to one state I learned that children in RC parochial schools are taught how to lobby against abortion and birth control.

Almost all Protestant churches are silent about Catholic pressures on Congress and state legislatures. They have no comparable or effective lobby and speak with no unified voice. I have been told at the highest levels that there are ecumenical understandings that keep Protestant periodicals from publishing articles critical of other churches, the chief beneficiary of which is the RC hierarchy which works its will in Washington without public scrutiny except as some progressive RC writers refer to the actions of the hierarchy in the Catholic press. Rarely does a secular newspaper or magazine provide information such as Time printed in its Feb. 24 issue. The chief losers from this ecumenical secrecy are not only the general public but also progressive Roman Catholics who often do not know what the bishops do in their name.

Dr. Swomley is Emeritus Professor of Social Ethics, St. Paul School of Theology, Kansas City, Missouri. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science, is Chairperson of ACLU’s Church-State Committee, and is Associate Editor of The Human Quest.

http://www.population-security.org/swom-92-05.htm

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Jerusalem Post
MSN, August 28th
by Sherwin Pomerantz:

I am certainly not one to dare assume to know what goes on in the mind of the God I believe in, and consider it a bit arrogant to go down that path. Nevertheless, at the risk of being labeled an old fool, it is a challenge for me to believe that the series of “plagues” that have befallen the United States of America of late are not part of some heavenly master plan.

From the end of World War II and for 70 years thereafter, America “worked.” The triumph of democracy and freedom over fascism and national land grabs energized the American body politic to take responsibility and rebuild the world after the devastating losses in the war. The world was put back in order, nations devastated by battle were rebuilt (much of that through US programs like the Marshall Plan), while people felt secure enough to plan for careers, family, education and retirement.

America’s role as the world’s police officer, resentful as that made some nations feel (everyone remembers the term “ugly American”), kept the world in check. For sure there were devastating skirmishes (Korea, Vietnam, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Rwanda, to name a few), but a nuclear crisis never actually materialized, and the world overall was a relatively safe place.

Domestically, politicians in opposing parties actually reached across the aisle and compromised on what was best for the country; elections were generally not contested; and the experiment in democracy set out by the founders of the US in the late 18th century proved to be sustainable. Or so we all thought.

Why has America and its role as the world’s police begun to fall apart?

However, 77 years after the end of the war, it all seems to be falling apart. Why? What happened? For sure, US foreign policy changed beginning in the Obama years, when it started to move away from the country’s self-defined role as the world’s police officer. Yes, countries do alter their foreign policies without their cultures going downhill. Yet over these past 13 years, with the advent of the smartphone and the exponential rise of social networking, hardly a day goes by that we don’t see some catastrophic event or trend that does not augur well for the continued success of the world’s greatest democracy.

Some examples may help prove the point.

A US civil war between Republicans and Democrats

Politically, whether people want to admit it or not, the country is in the midst of a civil war, though for the moment, not one where both sides have taken up arms, one against the other (although that, too, could eventuate).

Nevertheless, a look at opinion polls on the 2020 election is enough to prove the point. For the population in general, 30% of the people polled do not believe President Biden won the 2020 election, while among Republicans, that number jumps to 70%. There has never been a time in modern history where such numbers were this high 18 months after the election itself, with the former president continuing to parrot the line that the election was stolen even in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary.

Functionally, the legislative branch of government finds itself in a position where any proposal put forth by one party is not something that the other party will support. Even something as basic as the recent gun legislation passed in the House of Representatives saw just 14 Republican legislators voting with the Democrats. In most cases, reaching across the aisle to get legislation passed has been thrown into the dustbin of history, along with so many other traditions that enabled the legislature to function.

The US mass shooting crisis and gun ownership

There have been over 300 mass shootings in the US this year as of early July, the largest number by far of any country in the world. A 2015 Politifact article cited data from 2000 to 2014 trying to prove that mass shootings do indeed happen in other advanced countries. However, the article conceded that the US experienced 133 shootings during that five-year period, while the next-highest total was Germany with six. This year, the US is on track to see over 600. Why is the situation so bad only in the US? No other Western country has this kind of problem.

Along with the issue of mass shootings is the issue of gun ownership. A Swiss-based worldwide small arms survey in 2018 showed that there are 120.5 small arms for every 100 people in the US, which is twice as large as the next country, Yemen, with 52.8. Even Israel, where people wrongly think that everyone has a gun, does not make it into the list of the top 20 worldwide. And the number of privately owned weapons has only grown since then. There is, of course, the related issue of what type of weapons people own. One can easily question why individual citizens need to own high-powered assault rifles in the first place, yet those proliferate legally as well.

The catastrophic weather in the US

Then there is the weather. On average, the US experiences fewer than 1,500 tornadoes a year. Through June, there have already been 940 reported tornadoes there, which means the country is on track to see 2,000 or more, a 33% increase year-on-year.

The nightly news out of the US for the past few months shows tens of millions of people under extreme weather risk every day, often in three different areas of the country simultaneously (upper Midwest, East coast and the Southeast region). In the west, a long period of drought has been drying up reservoirs and spawning massive forest fires. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) statistics show that as of July 5, 34,478 fires have already burned 4,582,301 acres. This is above the 10-year average of 27,346 fires, and twice the average of 2,026,917 acres burned. The odd thing is that very little of this occurs just north of the US in Canada, or just south in Mexico. It all seems to be centered in the US.

American homeless crisis

Add to this the homeless situation, where in California alone there are more than 161,000 homeless, according to the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. Right behind California is New York, with 91,000 homeless, a large percentage of whom are, in fact, sleeping on the street.

No other Western country has the number of street people at that level. In Los Angeles, seemingly every underpass is chock full of homeless tents, which can be seen on the coastal beaches as well during the warmer weather. And the US domestic airline system is so broken right now that the odds of getting anywhere on time and with one’s luggage are low. Moreover, I have not even mentioned corona, which is still with us as well.

Why? Why this bad and why (except for corona) only in the US?

If one accepts the religious concept that whatever happens in the world is part of God’s plan for the world (and not everyone accepts that, to be sure), it is possible to postulate that God had a plan for the United States of America. After all, it was Abraham Lincoln who opined in 1865 that America was the “almost chosen people,” placing the issue of faith and the existence of a heavenly plan for the US squarely in the culture of post-civil war America.

If one does accept the God construct, then for the 70 years after World War II America continued to carry out His plan, creating an order in the world that had never existed before – and life was good.

However, there has never been a time in post-civil war history as now where the US has been so broken, where so many things seem to be going wrong simultaneously, and where the political leadership seems powerless to deal with all of it.

It is almost as if God is now expressing displeasure with his servant, the US, in the course it has taken.

The hope, of course, is that at some point the political leadership will get its act together and find a way to address the myriad of problems that the country is presently facing. However, if one accepts that this is perhaps a manifestation of God’s disappointment with the USA, perhaps the nation should turn to God and pray for a return to normalcy.

When Americans turn to prayer in crisis

It would not be the first time in history that prayer was invoked on behalf of a country. We need only follow the lead of the last person any of us would have expected would turn to prayer, and look at the example of General George S. Patton, Jr., head of the US’s Third Army in Europe in World War II.

In December 1944, fog, clouds, rain and snow over Europe were hampering US war efforts. A frustrated Patton contacted Chaplain James O’Neill, a Catholic priest, and asked for a prayer for good weather that would improve the chances of victory. In the presence of Patton, there was only one response the chaplain could offer and that was “Yes, sir.”

The chaplain wrote this prayer, which was then distributed to the 275,000 Third Army troops along with a Christmas greeting that read:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression of wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.

The results? The weather cleared for the next six days, and Patton’s allied forces were victorious, vanquishing the German army. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is another moment in history when civilization needs an intervention from the “immoderate” forces that are besieging us.

“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.” George S. Patton

When hope eluded him, Patton, the battle-hardened cynic, asked his troops to turn to a higher force. What he later said about people in such a quandary is noteworthy: “Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”

Maybe the time has come for everyone to bury the cynicism and look up. There is certainly no downside in doing so, while there is every possibility that our prayers will be answered.

https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/article-715454

Prophetic Link:

“When God’s presence was finally withdrawn from the Jewish nation, priests and people knew it not. Though under the control of Satan, and swayed by the most horrible and malignant passions, they still regarded themselves as the chosen of God. The ministration in the temple continued; sacrifices were offered upon its polluted altars, and daily the divine blessing was invoked upon a people guilty of the blood of God’s dear Son and seeking to slay His ministers and apostles. So when the irrevocable decision of the sanctuary has been pronounced and the destiny of the world has been forever fixed, the inhabitants of the earth will know it not. The forms of religion will be continued by a people from whom the Spirit of God has been finally withdrawn; and the satanic zeal with which the prince of evil will inspire them for the accomplishment of his malignant designs, will bear the semblance of zeal for God.” Great Controversy, page 615.1.

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Kimberly Wehle
Wed, August 10, 2022 at 4:30 AM

Many legal scholars in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical decision to reverse Roe v. Wade have focused on the dangerous implications of the court’s centuries-old worldview on protections for things such as same-sex marriage and contraception. This concern is real, but there is another issue with equally grave constitutional consequences, one that portends the emergence of a foundational alteration of American government itself.

Considered alongside two First Amendment rulings last term, the Dobbs decision marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.

The energy behind this idea was apparent in Justice Samuel Alito’s speech last month for Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome. Calling it an “honor” to have penned the 6-3 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and mocking international leaders for “lambast[ing]” the ruling, Alito spent the bulk of his remarks lamenting “the turn away from religion” in Western society. In his mind, the “significant increase in the percentage of the population that rejects religion” warrants a full-on “fight against secularism” — which Alito likened to staving off totalitarianism itself. Ignoring the vast historical record of human rights abuses in the name of religion (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and even his own Catholic church’s role in perpetuating slavery in America), Alito identified the communist regimes of China and the Soviet Union as examples of what happens when freedom to worship publicly is curtailed. Protection for private worship, he argued, is not enough. Because “any judge who wants to shrink religious liberty” can just do it by interpreting the law, Alito insisted that there “must be limits” on that power.

The limits that Alito is referring to have begun to emerge as the court explicitly seeks to anchor its understanding of constitutional rights in early American history—or even earlier, under the English monarchy. Alito and his fellow conservatives evidently pine for a return to a more religiously homogenous, Christian society but to achieve it they are deliberately marginalizing one pillar of the First Amendment in favor of another. The dots connecting Alito’s personal mission to inculcate religion in American life and what the conservative majority is doing to the Constitution are easy to see. They begin with Dobbs.

Dobbs is significant not just because it reversed 50 years of precedent under the “due process clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (under which the Court has recognized certain rights, even if unenumerated in the Constitution, as so bound up with the concept of liberty that the government cannot arbitrarily interfere with them). In Dobbs, Alito subverted that notion and fashioned a brand-new, two-part test for assessing the viability of individual rights: (1) whether the right is expressed in the Constitution’s text, and if not, (2) whether it existed as a matter of “the Nation’s history and tradition.” This second part of the test is the crucial one when it comes to religion — and in particular, its installation in government.

Under Dobbs’ step two, Alito time-traveled back to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868, when women could not even vote and, in his words, “three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.” Alito then regressed even earlier, to 13th century England (before America’s birth), to shore up his dubious quest to excavate historical authority rejecting abortion rights. Alito gave no guidelines for identifying which chapter of history counts in this calculus. Nor did he grapple with ancient law that actually went the other way. All we know going forward is that, for this majority, text is paramount and, barring that, very old history is determinative.

Except if the text appears in the First Amendment’s “establishment clause.” In a pair of other decisions, the same conservative majority pooh-poohed explicit constitutional language mandating that “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion,” holding that a competing part of the First Amendment — which bars the federal government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion — is the more important and controlling.

The government cannot establish an official religion or ban public worship. But which clause governs if a government employee openly endorses religious beliefs at work in a way that could be attributed to the government or feel coercive to subordinates? Do the employee’s free exercise rights supersede the government’s obligation to maintain secularity?

Up until this term, the answer was that government employees can worship freely like the rest of us, just not necessarily in their official capacities. In Employment Division, Department of Human Resources v. Smith, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court in 1990 that so long as a generally applicable law is not written in a way that targets specific religious practices, it is constitutional under the free exercise clause even if it affects religious practices. And under Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Court held in 1971 that for establishment clause purposes, the government can touch upon religion only for secular reasons, such as busing children to parochial schools, and not to promote religion, inhibit religion or foster excessive entanglement with religion.

In June, a 6-3 majority in Carson v. Makin buried the establishment clause under the free exercise clause. It held that Maine’s requirement that only “nonsectarian” private schools can receive taxpayer-funded tuition assistance violates the First Amendment because it “operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.” Maine’s requirement did not single out any religion, so it passed the Smith test for free exercise claims. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in dissent, “this Court has long recognized” that “the establishment clause requires that public education be secular and neutral as to religion.” By “assuming away an establishment clause violation,” she argued, the majority decision forces Maine taxpayers to fund religious education — in that case, schools that embrace an affirmatively Christian and anti-LGBTQ+ ideology. “[T]he consequences of the Court’s rapid transformation of the religion clauses must not be understated,” she warned, because it risks “swallowing the space between the religion clauses.”

But there’s more. In an opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the same majority in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District championed a public high school football coach’s insistence on publicly praying on the field after a game, effectively overruling Lemon as an “ahistorical approach to the establishment clause.” “Here,” Gorsuch wrote, “a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance . . . on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech.” The problem again, as Sotomayor complained in another dissent, is the pesky establishment clause: “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.”

Especially alarming, though, is Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Kennedy. Under the free speech clause, he noted, the Court has held that “the first Amendment protects public employee speech only when it falls within the core of First Amendment protection —speech on matters of public concern.” Other types of on-the-job speech can be restrained. But Thomas added: “It remains an open question . . . if a similar analysis can or should apply to free-exercise claims in light of the ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ of the free exercise clause.” (Emphasis supplied.) In other words, although free speech in government employment is limited, U.S. history and tradition may signal a different outcome for religion in government.

After Dobbs, history and tradition at the time of the framing of the Constitution are now the linchpin of constitutional interpretation. And Thomas has explicitly connected the founding period — and national identity — with Christianity. In September 2021, he delivered a lecture about his Catholicism at the Notre Dame School of Law, linking Christianity and the founding as motivation for returning to his own faith: “As I rediscovered the God-given principles of the Declaration [of Independence] and our founding, I eventually returned to the Church, which had been teaching the same truths for millennia. [T]he Declaration endures because it . . . reflects the noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.” In his recent speech, Alito recounted a personal experience in a Berlin museum when he encountered a “well-dressed woman
and a young boy” looking at a rustic (presumably Christian) wooden cross. The boy asked, “Who is that man?” Alito perceived the child’s question as “a harbinger of what’s in store for our culture” — “hostility to religion or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors.”

Although less publicly explicit than Alito and Thomas about his views on religion in government, Gorsuch privately spoke in 2018 to the Thomistic Institute, a group that “exists to promote Catholic truth in our contemporary world by strengthening the intellectual formation of Christians . . . in the wider public square.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett has written that “[Catholic judges] are obliged . . . . to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters,” and gave a commencement address to Notre Dame law graduates advising that a “legal career is but a means to an end, and . . . . that end is building the kingdom of God.”

These views represent a marked departure from traditional judicial conservatism on the Supreme Court. In Zuni Public School Dist. No. 89 v. Department of Education, Justice Scalia in 2007 heavily criticized the Court’s 1892 declaration in Holy Trinity v. United States that the historical record of America demonstrated that the United States “is a Christian nation.” The Court has since “wisely retreated from” that view, he retorted.

Historical accounts at the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention indicate that the Framers and political leaders largely believed that governmental endorsements of religion would result in tyranny and persecution. There was a “concerted campaign” from the Anti-Federalists to “discredit the Constitution as irreligious, which for many of its opponents was its principal flaw,” along with repeated attempts to add Christian verbiage to the Constitution. The ultimate rejection of religious language demonstrates that the Founders intended constitutional secularity. In his dissenting opinion in Carson, Justice Stephen Breyer quoted James Madison to underscore the point: “[C]ompelled taxpayer sponsorship of religion ‘is itself a signal of persecution,’ which ‘will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion, has produced amongst its several sects.’”

As scholar Mokhtar Ben Barka explains, however, by the time the Court issued the opinion in Holy Trinity, “nineteenth-century America was a mild form of Protestant theocracy. In this period, Protestantism was America’s de facto established religion” and Protestants overwhelmingly held power in the government. Alas, there are plenty of historical cherries to pick if the Court – as it did in Dobbs – decides to tether non-secular government in “history and tradition.”

Keep in mind, too, that as Elizabeth Dias recently chronicled for the New York Times, the push for a Christian government is sweeping GOP politics, as well. At Cornerstone Christian Center, a church near Aspen, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) received a standing ovation after urging that “[t]he church is supposed to direct the government.” Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano, likewise called the separation of church and state a “myth.” “In November we are going to take our state back,” he said. “My God will make it so.”

Although polls show that declaring the United States a conservative Christian nation is a minority view, the same was said about the reversal of Roe. This Supreme Court clearly doesn’t care.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-supreme-court-wants-end-083000613.html

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NBC News
September 23, 2022·10 min read

MIAMI — In a luxury Miami resort earlier this month, leading conservative politicians, influencers and academics gathered to formulate a grand path forward for the American right.

Repeatedly, speakers here framed the ongoing fight against the American left in biblical terms — a “religious battle” in which Republicans must be unafraid to use state power to thwart progressive goals not just in government, but the private sphere, too. Those at the gathering often argued both the culture wars and a changing economy are a battle of Christian ideals vs. a new age secularism.

Again and again throughout the three-day National Conservatism Conference, or NatCon, these right-wing thinkers argued for putting an end to the era of small-government conservatism while promoting religion at the center of public life.

Closing the conference, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued the divide in the country was one between Christian theology and a “woke religion that is raising itself up as the official state ideology,” adding that “insofar as conservatism as a movement has a future, it is a future that is going to be increasingly tied to explicit theological claims.”

Hosted by The Edmund Burke Foundation, a 3-year-old conservative organization aimed at promoting right-wing nationalism across the globe, and sponsored by some of the largest right-aligned advocacy groups and donors in the country, the conference was held at the J.W. Marriott Miami Turnberry resort in a space nestled between a swimming pool and two 18-hole golf courses, and with a restaurant serving up lobster rolls, short rib and filet mignon.

The conference serves as a gathering of so-called national conservatives, a movement that seeks to organize a cohesive, nationalist agenda in light of former President Donald Trump’s ascension in the GOP.

But Trump, while the subject of some praise, was hardly at the center of the gathering. This year’s conference featured warm welcomes for Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Rick Scott, R-Fla.; tech mogul and megadonor Peter Thiel; and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was introduced at the conference as the “future president of the United States.”

The conference distilled the animating forces of the American right at a time when Democrats control the presidency and Congress: a no-holds-barred approach to the culture wars; a turn away from laissez-faire economic policy toward one in which the cultural interests of conservatives are prioritized in decision-making; and, perhaps most importantly, a push for more religion in school and eliminating any separation between church and state. “Without the Bible, there is no modernity.

Without the Bible, there is no America,” Hawley said, criticizing the view of gender as a “social construct” as well as arguments that the U.S. suffers from systemic racism. “And their real target in all of this, I submit to you, is the inheritance of the Bible. What they [the
left] particularly dislike about America is our dependence on biblical teaching and tradition.”

National conservatism is far from the mainline conservative ideology espoused in Washington, D.C., and on the campaign trail, but it is ascending within the GOP. But rather than celebrating their momentum, these conservatives raised concern over the sense that their views are underrepresented not only in elected government, but across the federal bureaucracy, in corporate boardrooms, on major online platforms and in the military. Meanwhile, the broader American left was repeatedly denounced as the “enemy” and a “regime” with “evil” ideas.

“I firmly believe that we American Christians — and in truth, Americans of any traditional faith and convictions — that we’re now living in exile,” right-wing writer Rod Dreher said in his address, adding, “We don’t know how much time we have before the persecution starts. But we can be confident that it is likely to come.”

(Dreher has called for the GOP to embrace the politics of Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which has gained a larger audience among American conservatives in the past year. At the conference, representatives from Hungarian think tanks spoke on panels and handed out related literature.)

The conference was backed by substantial donations from conservative advocacy groups and think tanks that included the Common Sense Society, The Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute. Among other major contributors were Cathy and Alex Cranberg, both prominent school choice advocates, and Tom Klingenstein, chairman of the right-wing Claremont Institute, who in his speech assailed “white guilt” as “killing” conservative momentum and described Trump as someone who “may have been the worst president in any other time, but in this time, we were blessed to have him.” Trump, he said, “had just the constellation of assets that fit with our particular war.”

Many of the conference’s speakers and organizers signed a statement of principles that called for a “rejection of imperialism and globalism,” said economic policy “must serve the general welfare of the nation,” and pointed to declines in marriage and childbirth as grave threats to “the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations.” The Bible, the signatories agreed, should be taught as a source of “shared Western civilization in schools and universities.”

“Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private,” the document continued, adding that other religious minorities “are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children.”

Brad Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, told NBC News that “the necessity of leaning explicitly into the Christian foundations of American political order” has become “more emphatic” with each passing conference.

“You have to recognize that it is a religious battle,” Littejohn, who spoke on a conference panel, said of the divide between left and right, adding, “Progressivism has taken on increasingly religious overtones.”

“So a large percentage of Americans who don’t consider themselves particularly religious are still going to have to grapple with the fact that their political order is being shaped by a religious conflict,” Littlejohn continued. “And we want to make the case that the America that they would rather live in is one in which the values and political norms that come from Christianity are on the ascendant, rather than those that are coming from the kind of radical woke left.”

The question of Christian nationalism

The conservative promotion of religion is no new phenomenon. As one Republican strategist recently told NBC News, Republicans have been campaigning for 30-plus years on “God, guns and babies.” But the conference came as some Republican candidates and officeholders embrace what has been described as “Christian nationalism,” a strain of right-wing nationalism that calls for America to be an explicitly Christian nation in its laws and customs.

In Pennsylvania, GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano — who has ties to a right-wing social media site whose founder is a prominent promoter of Christian nationalism — infused such themes into his campaign, arguing that the U.S. is a Christian nation and calling separation of church and state a “myth.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has called for Republicans to label themselves “Christian nationalists.” Meanwhile, the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, saw some rioters featuring Christian nationalist imagery.

A University of Maryland survey conducted in May found that 61% of Republicans favor the U.S. officially declaring itself a Christian nation, though just 43% of Republican respondents said the Constitution would allow for such a distinction. Of the general public, 38% of respondents said they favored such a declaration.

This strain of nationalism was a subject of some debate at NatCon. One panel featured a presentation titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christian Nationalism,” though some attendees saw a more clear distinction between the two nationalist ideologies.

“Sometimes people get swept up in the ideas of Christian nationalism,” Jordan Esrig, a senior at Vanderbilt University who attended the conference, said. “But I don’t think that is the aim [of national conservatives]. I think the aim really is to restore the moral roots of this country, which are in itself a restoration of the religious prudence of America.”

NatCons vs. corporate America

The most praise was reserved for conservatives who were seen as unafraid to command state power to advance their cause — none more so than DeSantis, widely seen as one of the most likely Republicans to carry the 2024 presidential nomination aside from Trump himself.

Speaking before a packed ballroom, DeSantis argued that conservatives need to curb their deference to the private sector. This year, the Florida governor signed legislation stripping Disney of longtime benefits it has enjoyed in the Sunshine State — home of Disney World — after the company lambasted the Parental Rights in Education legislation, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, that he championed. In blocking funding for a new Tampa Bay Rays training facility, he pointed to the team’s social activism. The team had donated to a gun safety advocacy group just beforehand.

“Corporatism is not the same as free enterprise,” DeSantis said. “And I think too many Republicans have viewed limited government to basically mean whatever is best for corporate America is how we want to do the economy.”

“If you want to have an American revival, yes, it requires electing good people, having good policy, but it also requires a recognition that it is just not in the electoral realm,” he said. “It’s also in the administrative realm. And it’s also more and more increasingly in the corporate and technological realm.”

Another star of the conference was West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore, a leading critic of environmental, social and governance investing — an increasingly popular framework in the financial world for making socially conscious investments — by major financial institutions. West Virginia was the first state to pull out of an investment fund because of its commitment to net-zero emissions, and Moore now leads a 15-state coalition seeking to combat socially and environmentally conscious lending and investment.

At the conference, Moore lambasted ESG programs as “an unholy merger of left-wing cultural and corporate economic power that seeks to destroy the American fossil fuel industry by starving it,” adding that conservatives “cannot be afraid to use executive power on behalf of our people in their interest.”

In an interview with NBC News, Moore said the conference helps illuminate a growing conservative distancing from the libertarianism that has dictated GOP policy for decades.

“We need, in an overarching perspective, to be able to conserve the very unique culture and economy and country that we have here,” he said. “And it’s not just platitudes and talking points towards that. It’s like these things we’re talking about as actual implementation of that through policies and also, where appropriate, executive power.”

Channeling this energy, speakers including Scott and Thiel called on conservatives not to merely lament what they dislike, but to embrace a proactive agenda. Both men figure prominently in Republican efforts to recapture the Senate, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promoted an alternate strategy of framing the election entirely around objections with Democratic governance.

Thiel said Republicans should rally around “a program positive vision, something like that, to be credible.”

“And certainly my scoring on the '22 cycle is we’re doing even less well than the '94 Contract [With] America, we’re doing less well [than] in 2010, the tea party stuff in 2010,” said Thiel, who is a major benefactor of GOP Senate candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. “And we’re leaning way too far into the pure nihilistic negation.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-future-involves-waging-religious-205707647.html

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Grace Panetta and Brent D. Griffiths
Jul 31, 2022, 6:55 AM

As former Republican senator Rick Santorum addressed Republican lawmakers gathered in San Diego at the American Legislative Exchange Council policy summit, he detailed a plan to fundamentally remake the United States.

It would become a conservative nation.

And the transformation, Santorum said, culminates with an unprecedented event: a first-of-its-kind convention to rewrite the Constitution.

"You take this grenade and you pull the pin, you've got a live piece of ammo in your hands," Santorum, a two-time GOP presidential candidate and former CNN commentator, explained in audio of his remarks obtained by the left-leaning watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. "34 states — if every Republican legislator votes for this, we have a constitutional convention."

The December 2021 ALEC meeting represents a flashpoint in a movement spearheaded by powerful conservative interests, some of whom are tied to Trumpworld and share many of Trump's goals, to alter the nation's bedrock legal text since 1788. It's an effort that has largely taken place out of public view.

But interviews with a dozen people involved in the constitutional convention movement, along with documents and audio recordings reviewed by Insider, reveal a sprawling, well-funded — at least partly by cryptocurrency — and impassioned campaign taking root across multiple states.

Notably fueling them: success.

During an extraordinary few weeks in June, the Supreme Court's three new Trump appointees powered the reversal of Roe v. Wade. They fortified gun rights and bolstered religious freedoms. Future presidents now have less power to confront the climate crisis. Each win is the product of a steady, and in some cases, decades-long quest by conservatives to bend the arc of history rightward.

This isn't an exercise, either. State lawmakers are invited to huddle in Denver starting on Sunday to learn more about the inner workings of a possible constitutional convention at Academy of States 3.0, the third installment of a boot camp preparing state lawmakers "in anticipation of an imminent Article V Convention."

Rob Natelson, a constitutional scholar and senior fellow at the Independence Institute who closely studies Article V of the Constitution, predicted to Insider there's a 50% chance that the United States will witness a constitutional convention in the next five years. Whether it happens, he said, is highly dependent on Republicans' success winning state legislatures during the 2022 midterm elections.

But not everyone in the conservative constitutional convention movement believes such a gathering is so imminent. It will likely take years more work to reach their goal, if they ever do. At minimum, Republicans will need to flip several Democratic-controlled state legislatures and convince remaining GOP holdouts of the necessity for a convention.

But during the past several decades, they've made progress. Lately, a lot.

And now, they have a plan.

Conservatives are pushing a never-before-tested convention

Article V to the US Constitution provides two ways to amend the nation's organizing document — the most difficult, but most dramatic way to alter American society's very foundation.

The first is for a two-thirds majority of Congress to propose an amendment, with three-fourths of states ratifying it. This is how all 27 of the current amendments to the Constitution were added, but it's a path that today is largely blocked because of intractable partisan divisions. No American under 30 has experienced the nation amending the Constitution in his or her lifetime.

The second method — never before accomplished — involves two-thirds of US states to call a convention. The power to call for a convention belongs solely to state legislatures, who would pass and ratify amendments without a governor's signature, Congress' intervention, or any input from the president.

Some states have tried and tried — without result — to prompt a constitutional convention. They've together issued hundreds of pro-convention resolutions or calls over 200 years to reroute constitutional amendment powers away from Washington. What's new now is the ever-evolving power coupling of a corporation-backed ideological juggernaut led by ALEC, a nonprofit organization with close ties to large tobacco and drug companies, and a determined Republican Party increasingly dominating many of the nation's 50 statehouses.

If they were successful, a constitutional convention led by conservatives could trigger sweeping changes to the Constitution.

Their goals include gutting federal environmental standards, nixing nationwide education requirements, and creating an incredibly high threshold for Washington, DC, or a territory to earn statehood. Some would like to make it difficult, if not impossible, for someone — National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony

Fauci, for example — to work for decades within the federal government.

Former President Donald Trump, close to announcing a campaign for a second term in office, would find much to love about the convention movement.

He's argued that Article II gave him sweeping presidential powers akin to Richard Nixon's famous declaration that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Trump also attempted to claim that he could unilaterally end birthright citizenship (he could not) and repeatedly argued the White House didn't have to comply with congressional subpoenas.

The planks of the Convention of States' movement — such as term limits for federal bureaucrats in addition to members of Congress — stand to attract acolytes of Trumpism savoring the means to MAGA-fy the Constitution, and therefore, the nation.

In fact, it already has. Constitutional convention boosters include many of Trump's current and former allies, including conservative legal scholar John Eastman, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

Eastman, who recently had his phone seized by federal agents investigating Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, attended a 2016 mock convention hosted by the Convention of States.

"It's the most extraordinary thing in my career that I've ever been a part of," Eastman said in a video produced by the convention simulation organizers. "The process actually works."

Six years later, the Academy of States 3.0 is taking place Sunday ahead of the National Conference of State Legislatures' 2022 summit in Denver. On its website, the group boldly forecasts that a new constitutional convention could take place in 24 months and quotes former President Barack Obama in emphasizing, "You can't change Washington from the inside."

"It's a heavy lift, but it's not out of reach," Arn Pearson, the Center for Media and Democracy's executive director and a close watcher of the convention movement, told Insider. "I think it's a real threat."

Conservative activists are playing the long game

Conservatives have embraced the political long game in achieving their most prized policy goals, like the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and the movement to call a convention may be no different.

"For the last 25 years, people in the pro-life movement did the blocking and tackling necessary for this day to come," Santorum said at the December 2021 ALEC summit. "No one five years ago would have said that Roe vs Wade would be overturned. No one in this room."

The GOP spent decades investing in control of state legislatures through well-funded and resourced groups like the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has spent tens of millions over the last few decades locking down GOP control of state legislatures, statewide offices, and judgeships.

Those sustained investments have secured GOP dominance in state legislatures for a generation — and guarantee the GOP would also have the upper hand in a convention.

A new report by the Center for Media and Democracy first shared with Insider finds that Republicans would control at least 27 and up to 31 out of 50 delegations to a convention, based on delegate selection processes in applications passed thus far.

That's still a tad short of what would ultimately be needed to make any changes: two-thirds of the state legislatures are needed to call a convention and three-fourths must vote to ratify any amendments. Notably, governors, Congress, and the White House have no role in this specific process.

But the movement's most devoted supporters, like Santorum, say they are in for the long haul — and they argue that changing the Constitution is a goal existential to America's existence that looms larger than a single election cycle.

"Yeah, we'll have a good election. But the movement is inextricable. Why? Because every institution in America is against us," Santorum said, invoking the founders and their vision of federalism. "I say to you, as Republican state legislators, that you actually have the key."

Activists also say that with Congress sharply divided, a convention would send an unmistakable message to Washington that lawmakers need to change their way — or be prepared to get run over.

"The states have sort of lost their voice, and all we can do now is beg from the cheap seats and say, 'Hey, don't do that," said state Rep. Bill Taylor of South Carolina, who led his state's push to pass a call for a convention.

Faced with a Washington dominated by Democrats, many conservatives want to unleash a force to put the nation's Capitol on notice.

"The idea of states coming together is going to scare the living hell out of Washington," Taylor told Insider. "They are going to be terrified of the states."

The right isn't alone in pursuing a convention. On the left, Cenk Uygur, a progressive commentator, founded Wolf PAC in the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that accelerated an era of big-money politics. Five Democratic states passed Wolf PAC's call for a campaign finance reform-focused convention: California, New Jersey, Illinois, Vermont, and Rhode Island.

Uygur's organization is pressing forward even as Illinois and New Jersey rescinded their calls out of fear of a conservative-dominated convention. Wolf PAC's early momentum also spooked some on the right, an illustration of the unusual alliances on both sides of the movement. In 2012, the Republican National Committee went so far as to pass a resolution formally opposing the convention movement.

But now in 2022, convention proponents have political winds at their backs.

"The movement right now seems to be gaining steam. And what's interesting is it seems to be gaining steam on both left and right," Karla Jones, senior director of international relations and federalism at ALEC, told Insider. "The feeling that Washington, DC, has become a cause for the nation's problems rather than a solution … is becoming universal on both sides of the aisle."

A convention is gaining momentum but still far away

So far, 19 GOP-controlled states, including four in 2022 alone (Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), have passed applications and calls for a constitutional convention under the model pushed by the conservative nonprofit group Convention of States, an offshoot of Citizens for Self Governance.

Because of their efforts, "it's the first time any of these applications have had this much movement in quite some time," Viki Harrison, director of Constitutional Convention and Protecting Dissent Programs at Common Cause, told Insider. She called the passage of four new convention calls in states including South Carolina "a brutal loss."

Citizens for Self Governance and Convention of States, led by former Tea Party activist and ex-Parler CEO Mark Meckler, are relatively newer and well-funded players on the scene with connections to wealthy and powerful conservative interests.

Tax filings obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy reveal the groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, have received millions from the Koch-connected DonorsTrust, the Mercer family, and groups linked to powerful conservative lawyer Leonard Leo. A 2020 internal audit of Convention of States obtained by the group revealed that a $1.3 million donation made in Bitcoin made up 16% of the group's budget in 2019. Two donations totaling $2.5 million accounted for 36% of the group's 2020 budget.

While the various offshoots of the movement may have momentum on their side, they don't yet have the math to get to 34 states, as would be necessary to call a convention. Some are skeptical they ever will, no matter how well Republicans do at the polls in 2022 and beyond.

"It's clear to everybody working on this that the convention proponents have no honest path to 34 states," David Super, a professor, and constitutional law expert at Georgetown University Law Center, told Insider. "They've reached their limit."

But several convention organizers and supporters say they don't even need a convention to change the Constitution. They point to how fed-up states pushed for a convention to directly elect US senators after the Senate, for years, refused to consider resolutions calling for direct election. The 17th amendment, ratified in 1912, is a testament to that strategy.

More than a century later, one prominent Republican sees history — at least procedurally — repeating itself.

"What is most likely is that as we move closer to a convention of the states that at the last minute, Congress will blink and pass the underlying amendments. That's what history shows us is likely to happen," GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a former presidential candidate who is eyeing another run in 2024, told Insider.

Cruz, who is himself pushing a term-limits amendment, also did not express definitive support for a convention.

The fear of a 'runaway' convention looms large in the debate

Because the states have never called a convention under Article V since the Constitution's creation, the exact mechanics are the subject of intense debates between legal scholars and activists

The prospect of a free-for-all convention has scared lawmakers away from other historic efforts to rewrite the nation's Constitution, fearing that a debate on imposing term limits or a balanced budget could
quickly morph into a full-fledged redesigning of gun, abortion, religious, or free speech rights.

Right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society oppose a convention out of fear that it could open the door to weakening constitutional rights.

So does Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, a staunch Trump defender who wrote an entire book, "The Con of the Con-Con," about the dangers of conventions.

"In states where you would have expected this to pass because they have Republican leadership, they're firmly on our side because they're scared about losing guns," Harrison said.

Natelson, who has published numerous writings and academic articles on Article V, charged that people who fear a runaway convention "don't know what they're talking about" and GOP legislatures that have resisted calling a convention out of those worries "have been sold a bill of goods."

"Those academics who go before the legislature and say things like, 'we don't know anything about the process, it could be a runaway convention' without exception, are people who have never published any scholarship on the subject," he said.

And advocates for a constitutional convention have pushed narrow visions for a convention that they say would bind future delegates from passing extreme amendments. Natelson argued that not a single convention of colonies, compact of states, or simulated convention held since the nation's founding has "run away" from its mandate.

At the Convention of the States' 2016 mock convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, delegates, including Eastman, voted out six amendments, including a proposal that would eviscerate the 16th Amendment, which grants Congress the ability to impose an income tax.

The resolution the group is pushing would limit a convention to amendments that "impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress."

But limiting "the power and jurisdiction" of the federal government is an expansive mandate that could encompass virtually anything and enable delegates to pass extreme amendments while technically staying within the bounds of the convention.

"I defy you to name a Constitutional amendment that you might want that I couldn't characterize as one of the three things in the Convention of States," Super said. "You want to repeal the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause? That's limiting the power of the federal government to interfere with state laws. Almost anything you want, you can characterize as one of those things."

'A brilliant strategy for controlling a political agenda'

Recent blog posts on the Convention of States' website explicitly reference the need for a convention to limit federal overreach on abortion, guns, and immigration.

"The Supreme Court has said that amending the Constitution is a political question in which the federal courts cannot get involved," Super said. "The president has no role at all in the process. And the whole point of the convention route is to sideline Congress. So Congress can't overrule the convention … there's no one to intervene. There's no one to stop a convention from doing whatever they want to do."

States have the flexibility to caveat their calls for a convention, and some have included penalties to keep delegates in line. Indiana and Florida have even made it a felony for convention delegates to defy the legislature's intent, measures they passed alongside their pro-convention resolutions.

Super, however, said that criminal penalties punishing rogue delegates are not "constitutional" or "enforceable" because of the Supreme Court's 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore that their home state's laws don't bind state officers performing national duties.

Legal constraints aside, Natelson argued that a runaway convention could only happen in "horse and buggy times" with minimal communication between delegates and legislatures, and would be "practically impossible" in 2022, a world driven by a 24-hour news cycle and instant methods of communication like calling and texting.

"They're going to be under the glare of publicity, and everybody's going to be watching every minute," Natelson said.

The framers also added a second buffer to the process. Conventions or Congress can propose a constitutional amendment, but three-fourths of the state legislatures, 38, need to ratify it into the Constitution, a process that is also not subject to a governor or president's veto.

Conservatives and liberals alike say this requirement would doom hyperpartisan or plain loony amendments.

"The convention has way more safeguards than Congress itself," Nick Tomouldies, executive director of US Term Limits, a group pushing for a convention solely focused on imposing congressional term limits, told Insider. "Controversial issues like taxes and guns and abortion need not apply, because you're never going to get through that gauntlet."

But Pearson countered that a convention just passing a polarizing amendment would allow conservatives to play the long game and "dominate the political debate in the country for the next decade" with contentious ratification battles in the states.

"It's a brilliant strategy for controlling a political agenda for quite some time," he said.

The Convention of States movement is 'the full package'

Behind closed doors, Meckler, Santorum, and Natelson pitched a convention to GOP lawmakers gathered at a December 2021 ALEC workshop as a way for ordinary citizens to force sweeping changes to every facet of government.

"We would be aiming at the Deep State and potentially the federal judiciary as well," Meckler told lawmakers in the closed-door session, a recording of which was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider.

Meckler argued in the session that a convention focused on only term limits, which he criticized as "dangerous," or only a balanced budget amendment, wouldn't be enough to rein in the federal government — or to mobilize enough people behind the convention movement.

"We have to be able to show people that they have a chance to get their hands around the throat of the federal government and put it back in the Constitutional box," he said in the audio obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. "None of the individual efforts do that. The only thing that provides the narrative that drives 5 million people to participate in Convention of States … is the full package."

Moments later, Meckler said his effort could be judged by its "enemies," railing against a slew of "leftist" advocacy groups who oppose a convention.

"It's every leftist group in America, radical leftist group in America that stands for, I would argue, the destruction of America, the destruction of babies in the womb, the destruction of life itself," he said. "They hate America, they want to destroy America, and they're against Convention of States."

Santorum also assured lawmakers that conservative interests would be strongly represented in a one-vote-per-state convention due to the outsize influence of lower-population states, saying, "we have the opportunity, as a result of that, to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with."

The conservative movement isn't resting on the laurels of its victories in the Supreme Court arena but is aggressively pioneering new frontiers to reshape every aspect of American law and society.

And while a no-holds-barred Constitution convention may seem far-off, the ideological fervor driving the convention movement and the ambitious aims of its proponents guarantee it won't be going away anytime soon.

"This is the opportunity the founders gave you, state legislators. They gave you the power to fix this country," Santorum told lawmakers gathered at the 2021 ALEC meeting, his voice booming. "With all due respect, how dare you not try? How dare you, in the face of what's going on in this country?"

https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7

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Robert Montgomery
July 10, 2022·4 min read
Asheville Citizen-Times

Most Americans remember how we won in the Revolutionary War. We fought against a much stronger professional army, often retreating and losing battles, yet in the end succeeded in defeating the British, with important help from the French Navy.

The nationalistic fervor of the American revolutionaries played an important part. Nationalism is very useful when opposing outside domination as America did in its Revolution. America’s Revolution became an inspiration for many peoples to obtain their independence from outside domination.

I remember the nationalistic fervor in China where I grew up. Foreigners were called “foreign devils” everywhere we went. There was good reason for the resentment against foreigners after the “century of humiliation” of unequal treaties that included the coercion of China to buy opium in the name of “free trade.” In the competition between the Communists and the Nationalists after World War II, the Communists were able to win eventually because they were able to identify themselves as more nationalistic than the Nationalist Party. The Communist showed their extreme nationalism by expelling all foreigners.

Ho Chi-Min was a waiter in Paris after World War I and was inspired by President Wilson’s vision of the right of national sovereignty. Although Ho wanted to meet Wilson, he did not get the opportunity. History might have been different, if Wilson had met Ho. America was so blinded by the danger of Communism that it did not see that the basic desire of the Vietnamese was to gain national independence. They had fought the domination of their northern neighbor, China, for 1,000 years. The American defeat in Vietnam was in large part accomplished by the ability of the North Vietnamese to identify themselves as more nationalistic than the corrupt autocrats we were allied with. After America left Vietnam, it became one of our good friends.

America has also been involved in a series of nations in the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan) where internal groups harnessed nationalistic fervor to oppose, and in some case remove, the forces we backed. Right now, the leader of Ukraine, President Zelensky, is using nationalistic fervor to overcome the Russian invasion, and it appears to be succeeding.

For some reason, leaders of outside forces seem to underestimate the power of the emotions behind nationalism and the power of nationalistic forces against superior outside forces. This is surprising because Americans were very inspired by nationalism in our Revolution. You have to feel nationalistic fervor in yourself to realize its power. Unfortunately, nationalistic fervor can combine with other emotions that people have. One is from ethnicity. Nationalism can be mixed with ethnic consciousness and especially fear of the loss of ethnic identity. “Replacement theory” is attempting to call on such fear to oppose development of a diverse society in which people of every ethnic background can create a unified society in America that benefits everyone.

Another dangerous connection is when people mix religion with nationalism. We are seeing that in America in the “Christian nationalism” movement. They want their nation to endorse and protect their religion from non-believers. Autocrats and non-democratic movements have a history of using religion to gain support. Remember Constantine? The quasi religion of Communism has used resentment against foreign domination to gain support from populations. Western colonialism helped to create many nationalistic movements against Western domination. The nationalistic spirit can be used by both autocrats and democracies. Unfortunately, nationalism can also be used against those who seek cooperation with other nations. The “America First” slogan represents a non-cooperative nationalism. “America First” people use this slogan to oppose important areas of international cooperation, such as the UN, the World Health Organization, and NATO. A healthy ethnically mixed democracy like America balances international cooperation with national needs, such as domestic industries, international trade, and defense.

A basic need for a democracy is to maintain a healthy nationalism. It is wise to realize the power of nationalism, but to avoid extreme nationalism that uses people’s emotions in unhelpful and destructive ways. Nations should be able to protect their national identity, but at the same time interact with other nations in ways that are mutually beneficial. The health and well-being of stronger nations is enhanced by contributing to the well-being of weaker nations. For example, we see this clearly in relation to pandemics, but also in general economic development. Another example: America can and should do much to aid the countries to our south to be strong democracies with strong economies.

Rev. Robert L. Montgomery, who holds a Ph.D. in social scientific studies of religion, lives in Black Mountain.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: 'Replacement theory' and the danger of mixing religion and nationalism

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By Michael Brown, CP Op-Ed Contributor
CP VOICES | TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2022

Before you read another word, if you are a Trump hater, you should know that the purpose of this article is not to bash the former president. If you are a Trump lover, know that this article is not here to extol him. Instead, the focus is on followers of Jesus, not Donald Trump.

Are we ready for another, potential bid for the White House by the former president? Can we remain uncompromised in our ethics and with our Christian witness intact, whether we are for him or against him? That’s the question I’m posing here.

Do I believe that Trump, in the midst of his many positive accomplishments, had a profoundly negative affect on much of the Church of America? I certainly do.

But I don’t blame President Trump for that. That’s on us, not on him.

After all, he was the man he had always been: a rough and tumble, often contentious, frequently nasty, quite narcissistic, wealthy New York businessman turned politician. And while many of us hoped he would change, he did not.

But to repeat, that’s the man we voted for. He remained in character during his tenure as president and he has remained in character to this day.

The great surprise was that he did so many excellent things and kept his promises to his conservative Christian base. That’s what stood out as exceptional. In four short years, despite constant opposition and harassment, he did a tremendous amount of good on both a national and international level.

But if we voted for him hoping he would change and he did not, we can’t blame him for that. That’s the risk we took or the calculation we made when voting. He simply continued to be who he had always been.

The fact that many of us exalted him as some kind of political savior is our fault.

The fact that we enjoyed watching him belittle and mock his political opponents, often in crude and cruel ways, is our fault.

The fact that we divided over him so passionately, some to the point of literally loathing him and others to the point of talking about him more than they talked about Jesus, is our fault.

The fact that he changed us more than we changed him, with some of our social media pages looking more like
political attack sites rather than the pages of Jesus lovers, is our fault.

That is the man we voted for, and it’s entirely our fault that many of us were negatively impacted by his negative traits.

To give an analogy, it’s as if we elected a comedian famous for telling dirty jokes, hoping that once he was in office, he would stop telling jokes, especially dirty jokes. Not only did he not stop telling those joke — again, that’s who he was — but we started laughing at the dirty jokes.

Worse still, we started repeating them ourselves.

Will we do any better with Donald Trump if he decides to run again?

In my first Trump-related book, published in 2018, I devoted a chapter to the subject, “Evangelicals and Donald Trump: A Match Made in Heaven or a Marriage with Hell?” The title of my second, Trump-related book, published in 2020, asked the question: “Will We Pass the Trump Test?”

By the “Trump test” I meant, “Can we vote for Trump and still preserve our Christian witness?” And “Can we remain united around Jesus even if we disagree about Trump?”

The answer to these two questions is a resounding no. While we could easily justify our vote for Trump as followers of Jesus (as opposed to voting for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden), the way many of us joined ourselves to him deeply hurt our witness. So, it was not voting for Trump
that hurt our witness, but our actions as Trump supporters that did.

In many ways, by our carnal behavior, by our obsession with the elections, by our over-exalting of a man, by our savaging each other over our differences, by our following false prophecies, by our embracing of QAnon conspiracy theories, we deeply hurt out witness to a watching world, becoming better known as the Trump supporters than as the Jesus followers.

What’s worse, many of our spiritual leaders were at the forefront of these divisions, railing on those who dared oppose Trump (or support Trump), and focusing more on winning the elections than on winning the lost.

But it’s not as if this hit us blindly.

In the first book, I listed 7 priorities for the Church if we were to get things right when it came to our relationship to politics in general and Trump in particular. And I was hardly the only one sounding this alarm.

In the second book, I listed 10 more priorities for the church, all of them weighty and important. And, to say it again, I was hardly the only one saying these things.

Then, in the last chapter of my brand new book, The Political Seduction of the Church: How Millions of American Christians Confused Politics with the Gospel, I recapped these 17 priorities, evaluating how we fared.

By my count, we failed on 15 out of the 17 items listed. Yes, 15 out of 17. That is what you call failing badly.

And note the very title of this book: The Political Seduction of the Church. Seduction is normally covert rather than overt, looking so attractive before it stabs us in the back. That’s why it is so seductive.

In the case of Trump, there were so many good things he stood for, so many admirable things he championed, so much courage he displayed, so much of our burden that he shared, that it was all too easy for us to get seduced. (By seduced I don’t mean voting for him; I mean acting the way we did.)

In the process, we compromised our witness, put our trust in the political system, and divided over the president rather than united around Jesus. Will we do better if Trump decides to run again?

This much is sure: If we don’t recognize our past errors, take stock of our own lives (and/or ministries), and make serious adjustments at the root level, we will not be ready for Trump 2024.

To repeat: that’s on us, not him. (And to be clear, the purpose of this article is not to advocate voting for him or against him if he decides to run. My purpose is to call the Church to be the Church in the midst of election fever.)

*No sooner had I written the last words of this article than I opened a new email sent to our ministry by a pastor who wrote: “We would be honored to have you speak regarding your new book as it pertains to what I have been trying to preach to this congregation for the past few years after I watched politics seduce and divide our people and even break up families.” This is why we must do better, in 2022, in 2024, and beyond.

Dr. Michael Brown(www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. His latest book is Revival Or We Die: A Great Awakening Is Our Only Hope. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.

https://www.christianpost.com/voices/is-the-church-ready-for-trump-2024.html

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(This date holds special significance to Christian salvation history and of course to SDA historical emergence. This article is a cautious reminder of a subtle danger that has magnified itself today and has gained almost universal acceptance) RG

Leroy Edwin Froom, 1944

The pioneers of this message, and their early successors, were pre-eminently men of the Book. They were conspicuously students of the Word. Their grasp of great Biblical truths and basic prophetic principles was astonishing. It was, of course, this intensive study of the Word on their part that laid the foundations of this heaven-indited message. Their mastery of the text of Scripture was often phenomenal, because they spent most of their study time mastering the essential message of the Book.

These pioneers could quote its passages and cite its texts as well as expound its principles with a facility that shames most of us today. We have allowed the pressure of a thousand temporal things to crowd out that singleness of devotion to Bible study which marked their simpler life. We have time, and we take time, seemingly, for everything else. These other things must be done. But the pressure of our crowded life has pushed deep, continuous Bible study back into the corners of time that are left. The tragic result is seen on every hand—in the pulpit, the classroom, the Bible study, the daily life, and in the substitute expedients so pathetically drafted upon.

Proportionately, the pioneers had fewer college graduates than we—though they were not unlearned and ignorant men. But those men studied fundamentals in a way that we but rarely begin to match today. We scatter our efforts and dissipate our strength over secondary details, in an attempt to be broader than they. And there were practically none, of course, among our founding fathers, with advanced degrees. But they had that which advanced degrees do not inherently give—that which seldom comports with advanced degrees and all they involve ; namely, they knew the Book and its basic message.

We, their spiritual descendants, have drifted into the actually superficial, albeit apparently learned, in the study of the Book. We know more about some things, at the price of fatal losses in other things. As a matter of fact, we today spend more time and effort studying books about the Bible than We do in mastering the Bible itself. We look up and cite a wealth of "authorities," and peruse countless commentaries, in an attempt to be—and to appear—learned, and to have proper scholarly support from the world's scholars. We often seem more concerned over what men say than over what God says. Something has happened to our thinking.

Our scholars are often erudite, for example, in the Greek or Hebrew text, but all too often they have lost the fundamental intent and larger relationships of the text itself amid the speculative niceties of their acquired technicalities. The basic truth at issue is lost in the display of erudition. They follow, doubtless unconsciously, in the wake of their teachers back in the universities of Babylon. And how could it be otherwise? That training was sought ; and now it constitute S the background and colors the attitude, the emphasis, and the outlook.

Such is the source of much of the unconcealable weakness and loss of message virility to be found among some of our advanced students, as relates to the Word. Pray tell : Just how can we expect to get actual light on God's divine message for today from men steeped in the Sunday-sabbath concept, committed to the natural immortality of the soul theory, ensnared by the evolution hypothesis, antagonistic toward the sanctuary and judgment-hour truths, denying the principle of the historical interpretation of the prophecies, scoffing at the year-day principle, repudiating the Spirit of prophecy and its inspired guidance for study and research, and scoffing at the supreme truths of the imminent second premillennial advent of Christ?

Those men are committed to the beguiling theories of evolutionary development, gradual world betterment, a nebulous future antichrist, a ruinous past fulfillment of all prophecy, a spiritualized concept of the prophetic symbols and time prophecies, and the temporal return of the Jews ; and are enmeshed in the postulates of that neopaganism, behavioristic psychology, that controls their thinking and molds their research.

How dare a man contemplate, or have the temerity to present, the degree of doctor of divinity, gained in the universities of Babylon, as a credential for teaching or preaching this threefold message, the second stipulation of which is, "Babylon is fallen, is fallen.... Come out of her, My people." How dare we accept such a Babylonian credential in lieu of mastery of the truth? Shall a man go into Babylon to gain strength and wisdom to call men out of Babylon? To ask the question is but to disclose how far some have compromised with Babylon, as they have gone back to Babylon to drink from her wells of wisdom. Oh, for the living waters of truth fresh from the Word!

Someone needs to sound an alarm. We need to grip ourselves and halt a growing trend that, if it becomes entrenched, will bring disaster through neutralizing our message.' We need to give ourselves to the study of the Wald until we are again known pre-eminently for our mastery and sound exposition of Scripture. Otherwise we shall go the way of all other religious bodies before us, who started out with a heavenly message, but who have bogged down in the morass of worldly scholarship with its erudite haziness, its loss of spiritual vision, and its blurring of truth, until its virility and its power to witness have virtually disappeared. We must not lose the very heart of our message to the world. We who proclaim it to others must not violate its mandate that we may be better prepared to announce the theory to others.

L. E. F.

https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1944/04/the-subtle-inroad-of-scholasticism