Family Research Council

Audio of Rear Admiral Lee Addressing Regulations Restricting Religious Liberty

by FRC Media Office

May 6, 2013

In an emotional moment at last week’s National Day of Prayer service, Coast Guard Rear Adm. William D. Lee stood at the microphone and said that he had 10 minutes of carefully prepared remarks ready but decided to “speak from the heart” instead. He told the story of so many servicemen searching for reasons to live, and talked about one 24-year-old who had tried to commit suicide and failed. Despite the protocol, Lee said he felt strongly that he should give the soldier a Bible. “The lawyers tell me that if I do that, I’m crossing the line,” he told the crowd. “I’m so glad I’ve crossed that line so many times.” To a standing ovation, Admiral Lee promised not to back down from “my right under the Constitution to tell a young man that there is hope.” 

Listen to the audio

A Response to “Why Tolerate Religion?”

by Rob Schwarzwalder

May 3, 2013

Freedom of Religion encompasses more than intellectual assent and private, enclosed worship services. It includes the integration of one’s faith into all spheres of life, such that one’s deeply held religious convictions are allowed to animate, unhindered, speech and conduct in the public, professional, and community spheres.

It is for this reason that the Bill of Rights lists freedom of religion as its first enumerated freedom: The Founders recognized that allegiance to God has to precede allegiance to the state, or else the state itself would usurp the role of God. This is directly opposed to the essential principle of America’s very existence, that our rights come from our Creator, not the government.

University of Chicago law professor Bruce Leiter thinks otherwise. In his new book, Why Tolerate Religion, Leiter asserts, “no one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument for tolerating religion qua religion - that is, an argument that would explain why, as a matter of moral principle, we ought to accord special legal and moral to religious practices” (p.7).

I wonder if Prof. Leiter has every read a survey of Western history, perhaps one that contains sections on the persecution of the early church, the Inquisition, anti-Catholic violence, or the Holocaust? Perhaps he should spend a few minutes reading official federal government reports on the ongoing and massive oppression of Christians and other people of faith around the globe.

The assertion that a “principled” case for religious liberty remains unmade is so striking in its ignorance that it invites the derision a serious academic should find embarrassing. As my friend Joe Loconte, professor of history at The King’s College in New York, writes:

The author seems astonishingly unaware of the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition and its contribution to the foundations of liberal democracy. The scientific revolution, the concept of human dignity, an ethos of compassion for the poor, the political ideals of equal rights and government by consent — all of these developments are unthinkable without the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. (Source: Standpoint Magazine)

The University of Chicago Law School often is hailed as one of America’s premier institutions of legal thought and training. It’s luster has been dimmed by Prof. Leiter’s uninformed and prejudicial rant. However smooth his prose, the absence of logic, factuality, and dispassion - ostensibly the very foundations of legal reasoning - does not deter him from publishing one of the most troubling and intellectually discreditable books by a serious American scholar in some time.

My distinguished colleague Bob Morrison summarizes the case for religious liberty this way: “One’s right to worship God and follow his conscience according to the principles of his religious faith was foundational to all morality. A man whose religious faith was repressed could never be a loyal citizen, since the state was usurping his first allegiance and costing him his primary, or first, freedom.”

Anyone presenting himself as an interpreter of American law and justice who fails to grasp these truths should read an interesting couple of texts he might find rather arresting, namely the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Remembering the Creator to Whom the Declaration refers and Whose bestowal of rights and liberties is the steel beam of American public life might prove useful to Prof. Leiter and all who, like him, would reduce religious and, thereby, all liberty to the whim of the state, the very thing against which a brave and thoughtful generation of Americans revolted in the 1770s.

But if not…

by Robert Morrison

April 19, 2013

Columnist George F. Will once wrote about the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France in 1940. The rapid advance of Hitler’s Panzer divisions, supported by the terrifying new air weapon of his air force, the Luftwaffe, was crushing French and British opposition. The Germans had broken through on May 10^th, the same day that in London Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister. Churchill knew he would have to evacuate his surrounded troops from the embattled city of Dunkirk, one of the French Channel ports. He also knew that he would have to order some of his soldiers in Calais, another Channel port, to fight to the death to cover the BEF retreat.

We now know, of course, that Churchill and his War Cabinet had hoped to get as many as 100,000 troops rescued from the beaches and brought home. So desperate was their situation that they thought that might be the largest number they could hope for. Those 100,000 soldiers would have to abandon all their tanks, trucks, and artillery in France. Even their rifles. At home in England, elderly men of the all-volunteer Home Guard were drilling on village squares with only broomsticks in place of rifles on their shoulders.

George Will wrote of these desperate days in a column some years ago. He wrote not of the 336,000 troops of the BEF and their Free French and Polish allies who were eventually brought off from Dunkirk. This was hailed by Churchill as “a miracle of deliverance.”

Columnist Will wrote instead of some of those who guarded the rear of the BEF, those brave warriors French and British who made it possible for the great host—that third of a million—to be rescued. One of the commanders of that doomed division sent a short message back to Whitehall, in London. The War Cabinet read this three-word transmission.

BUT IF NOT

In those biblically literate days, as they faced the prospect of invasion and enslavement, the British at home were stirred as they had never been stirred in the two thousand-year history of their island home. They instantly recognized those three words. They were spoken by the three young Israelites in the Book of Daniel. The full quote follows the description of the fiery furnace into which King Nebuchadnezzar would throw the young men if they refused to bow down to his Golden Image:

“But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods nor the golden image that thou hast set up.” [Daniel 3:18]

The three-word message was all that these brave men could send to their commanders. Many of those defenders of the Dunkirk evacuation prayed, no doubt, that God would deliver them. But if not, they were saying, they would not bow down to Hitler’s New Order in Europe. Thousands of those who were not killed were captured and would spend the war in Nazi captivity, where not a few of them died.

Dr. James Dobson encourages us to read Five Days in London, by John Lukacs. That book tells the story of Britain in her hour of maximum danger. I read that short volume every spring. And Dr. Dobson likes to remind us of the National Day of Prayer that was specially called for by the British government as their trapped men gathered on those beaches.

Winston Churchill, it is true, was impatient, oppressed by many “hard and heavy tidings” from France. He really didn’t want to break away to attend the Prayer Vigil at Westminster Abbey. But he was not yet secure in his own political position. He had clashed with his Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax. Halifax was a famous Anglican churchman. Halifax pressed Churchill for two things—a positive answer to “peace feelers” from Italy’s Fascist dictator, Mussolini, and a National Day of Prayer.

Churchill had to give Halifax—whom he called that Holy Fox—something. Oh, alright then, a National Day of Prayer. But the Prime Minister sent ahead word that he would only attend for 10-30 minutes. A vicar welcomed him and said he would so like to tell the faithful that their Prime Minister was a pillar of the Anglican Church, like Lord Halifax. Churchill puckishly replied: “You may say I am a flying buttress. I support the church, but from outside.”

Although Churchill had little faith in the efficacy of prayer, he may have had a mustard seed. The English Channel, that 23-mile anti-tank ditch, was usually stormy, even in May. During the Dunkirk evacuation, the Channel was, as many of the escaping soldiers testified “as calm as a millpond.” German U-boats were kept at bay. And Stukas dive bombing the soldiers hunkered down on the beach found many of their bombs’ explosions were muffled by the sand and surf.

Today, we are not being asked to stand up to Hitler. And I do not charge our adversaries with being Nazis. I do not hate them. But this much should be clear: The end of marriage equals the end of liberty. They cannot bring about this unnatural change without crushing freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of religion. The end of liberty equals the end of America. The stakes are that high.

We are indeed being asked to bow down to a golden image. It is President Obama’s fundamental transformation of the American Republic. And the avatar of that transformation is “Julia,” the White House’s fictional everywoman. Her entire life is lived in dependence upon the government. The only man in Julia’s life is Barack Obama.

George Will has long since given up. He says the opponents of unmarriage are literally dying off. That word did not reach the young French who attended our March for Marriage. Or the 400 young Korean-Americans who rode through the night by bus from Flushing, Queens to stand for marriage. Nor has it reached the young people of MarriageGeneration.org

I am younger, though not by much, than George Will. I named the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 because I wanted people to learn that marriage itself was under attack. I will not give in. I expect we will win, Mr. Will. But if not…

Blessed is the Land: Plow Day 2013

by Robert Morrison

April 18, 2013

Our family made its way to Maryland’s Eastern Shore recently. Mount Hermon’s Plow Day 2013 was the attraction. We had gone to two previous Plow Days, but this time we would take our grandson and our twin granddaughters. It was an all-hands evolution.

Cool and clear weather made the day perfect for plowing. Farmer Gaylon Adkins and his wife, Tammy, have hosted Plow Day for seven years. This farm festival celebrates rural life and agriculture. Hundreds come from all over Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and many of the plowing teams-of—oxen, mules, and horses—come from as far away as North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The basic idea is for young men of the county to compete by plowing up the land for spring planting. The competition is popular and the contestants help raise money for local charities. There’s no government to direct it, but this festival springs up from the nature of rural living.

We’re often told that Americans are individualists, even rugged individualists. That may be so in our relation to government, but it has never been so in farm country. Farm communities learn cooperation from the start. The owners of those teams that come to Mt. Hermon Plow Day will show off their skill and celebrate their pride in achievement with these magnificent animals. And Mr. Adkins will get his farm land plowed. Every one benefits from this event. Barn-raising and quilting bees were just two examples of cooperation and community.

Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord (Ps. 33:12) reads the sign we all see as we enter. Farm values just seem closer to our origins. Everyone on the farm is needed. It’s naturally a family-friendly, child-welcoming environment. The lady in the old fashioned skirt and bonnet who welcomes us boasts of her eight children.

Children watch the exhibits wide-eyed. They learn how the wool comes from the sheep, how it is carded and woven into cloth. They see the cow with her twin bull calves in their pen. She is getting restive and we move on, thinking it best not to bother Bossie.

The petting pen houses sheep and goats. Scripture tells us there will be a winnowing of sheep and goats on the great day. That’s a good thing, since I am not always sure what I am looking at myself. Still, grandchildren love to pet willing sheep and goats.

An eight-mule team comes by, harnesses shining and jingling. They are truly beautiful animals. And powerful, too. I learn that oxen are not driven with reins. Instead, a single man walks alongside the yolked creatures with a long stick. His rod he uses as a guide and prod, but gently.

Percherons are large, beautiful, and very powerful horses. I engage one of the owners—a lady from Westminster, Maryland, in a conversation about her horses. I tell her the only thing I know about these horses comes from reading Shelby Foote’s classic history of the Gettysburg campaign of 1863, Stars in their Courses. The great Southern author wrote of these farm animals:

…the magnificent-looking horses, the great Percherons and Clydesdales, turned out to be a disappointment in the end. Consuming twice the feed, they could stand only about half the hardship of what one [rebel] artilleryman called “our compact, hard-muscled little horses.”

Mrs. Westminster’s smile was gracious, but dismissive. Not everyone who writes books (or quotes them), her smile seemed to say, knows anything about horses.

Which is another reason I love Plow Day. I make no pretense of knowing about farming. And the good people here are only too eager to teach me. And my family. I think it’s important for them to know where their daily bread comes from. And where it’s grown.

Early in our history, 95% of all Americans lived on farms. Most Americans were fully familiar with farming—even if they did not hail from the farms themselves. Great Americans like Ben Franklin and Sam Adams were city men—but they understood farming far better than most of us urban and suburban Americans do today.

I recall a story told about Calvin Coolidge, Jr. The 15-year old lad was working on a farm in Western Massachusetts through the summer of 1924. He awoke one August morning to startling news. His employer told him that the senior Calvin Coolidge had been sworn in as President of the United States the previous evening on the unexpected news of President Harding’s death in San Francisco.

Young Calvin calmly took in the information and then said: “Sir, what field would you like me to work this morning?” The farmer, surprised at the boy’s reaction, said:

“If my father had just become president, I wouldn’t worry about going to work the next day.”

Smiling, Calvin, Jr., replied: “I your father were my father, you’d go to work.”

That story rings true because faith, family, and honest labor have always been a part of America’s rural heritage.

The event closed with organizer Owen Perdue mounting a haystack. Two young men pitchforked twelve feet of hay from the stack into a wagon. It was hard and sweaty work, despite the cool air. Both of these men had served multiple tours in Iraq, we were told.

Mr. Perdue informed us the hay had been stacked last fall, a week before Tropical Storm Sandy had ripped through the area. Now, we would see if the bushels of white potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, and apples had made it through the winter. This was how so much of farmers’ produce wintered over, before refrigeration. They are not frostbitten or rotten. And Mr. Perdue bites down on his apple to show how crispy it still is.

Last year, I heard Owen Perdue’s son-in-law tell me about farm families: “We may not be the richest, we may not be the ones the media focuses on. But we know where we we get our daily bread.” Acknowledging his lead, I replied: “Yes, seek ye first…” He nodded agreement. We understood one another. It’s why we keep coming back to Plow Day.

Your Sex Life: More Like Your Religion than Your Race

by Cathy Ruse

April 10, 2013

Here’s a new approach to the chief argument made by same-sex marriage proponents: When they say limiting marriage to man-woman unions is like committing racial discrimination, tell them they’re using the wrong analogy. 

Read more from William Mattox, member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors…

President Endorses Intelligent Design!

by Robert Morrison

April 8, 2013

In a letter of this date, a two-term President of the United States, writing to his predecessor, wrote this:

…the Theist, pointing to the heavens above, and to the earth beneath, and to the waters under the earth, asked if these did not proclaim a first cause, possessing intelligence and power; power in the production, and intelligence in the design, and constant preservation of the system; urged the palpable existence of final causes, that the eye was made to see, and the ear to hear, and not that we see because we have eyes, and hear because we have ears…

Well, as you will readily discern, dear reader, this is not President Obama’s or President George W. Bush’s accustomed style of writing.

This letter, dated April 8, 1816, was penned by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and addressed to his reconciled friend, John Adams. It’s worth parsing the eighteenth century language because it’s a keen insight into the minds of our Founding Fathers.

In this letter, the former president, Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading scientific minds of his day, rejects the atheism of some of the French philosophes with whom he shared so many ideas. He ascribes to the Creator “power in the production, intelligence in the design, and constant preservation of the system…”

Jefferson’s ideas of Intelligent Design were put to a court test in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005. The federal judge in that case came down hard against any students in the public schools learning what Jefferson actually believed about origins of our universe. The judge found Mr. Jefferson’s reasoning a form of religious indoctrination that was wholly unconstitutional.

Today, liberals routinely cite Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptists as their source for all church-state jurisprudence. No matter that they have completely twistified (Jefferson’s own word) what he thought and what he wrote.

Noted author Eric Metaxas shows where such twistifying leads. It leads to a doctrine of religious freedom that is narrowly construed to permit “freedom of worship” and which at the same time comes down hard on “free exercise.” The First Amendment doesn’t just guarantee freedom of worship. It is broader than that.

Here’s a portion of Eric Metaxas’s recent speech at CPAC:

Let me begin with my hometown, Danbury, CT. Some of you know that Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists in [1802], in which he uses the phrase “separation of church and state” — and in case there is anyone who doesn’t know it, the sense in which Jefferson uses that phrase is actually the opposite of how it’s generally thought of today. Today we often hear that it means that the state needs to be protected from religion, and that religion should have no place in government or society.

Jefferson and the Founders thought the opposite. They knew that the State was always tempted to take over everything — including the religious side of people’s lives. So they put a protection in the Constitution that the government could not favor any religion over another… and could not prohibit the free exercise of religion.

They wanted churches and religions to be protected from the government — from Leviathan. Why? Because they knew that what people believed and their freedom to live out and practice one’s most deeply held beliefs was at the very heart of this radical and fragile experiment they had just launched into the world.

Okay, so where are the threats to Religious Freedom in America today? Well, for one thing, understand we are not talking about Freedom of Worship. In a speech 18 months ago, Hillary Clinton replaced the phrase Freedom of Religion with Freedom of Worship — and my hero and friend Chuck Colson noticed and was disturbed by it. Why? Because these are radically different things. They have Freedom of Worship in China. But what exactly is Freedom of Worship?

In my book Bonhoeffer I talk about a meeting between Bonhoeffer’s friend, the Rev. Martin Niemoller, who early on in the Third Reich was one of those fooled by Hitler. And in that meeting he says something to Hitler about how he, Niemoller, cares about Germany and Third Reich — and Hitler cuts him off and says “I built the Third Reich. You just worry about your sermons!”

There in a few words you have the idea of Freedom of Worship. Freedom of Worship says you can have your little strange rituals and say whatever you like in your little religious buildings for an hour or two on Sundays, but once you leave that building you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state! We will tell you what to think on the big and important questions. Questions like when life begins and who gets to decide when to end it and what marriage is… And if you don’t like it, tough luck! That’s Freedom of Worship and that have that in China and they had it in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s day…

Freedom of Worship is limited to the four walls of your church or synagogue. It creates the “naked public square” that the late Richard John Neuhaus warned about. It crushes civil society and puts everything under the power of the all-encompassing State.

In 2010, in celebration of the Fourth of July, the National Archives breathlessly informed us they had found an early draft of the Declaration of Independence. In that rough draft, Thomas Jefferson scratched out the word Subjects and replaced it with Citizens. The archivists were right to point to the significance of this change of language. It was the first time we Americans thought of ourselves as Citizens of a republic and not Subjects of a king.

Citizens govern themselves. Subjects have to obey Mandates from a distant HHS. Citizens have a right to free exercise of religion. Subjects are granted mere freedom of worship by the overawing power of the State.

Does Anything’s - or Anyone’s - Size Matter to God?

by Rob Schwarzwalder

April 2, 2013

The observable universe is about 93 billion light years in diameter. According to NASA, “To obtain an idea of the size of a light-year, take the circumference of the earth (24,900 miles), lay it out in a straight line, multiply the length of the line by 7.5 (the corresponding distance is one light-second), then place 31.6 million similar lines end to end. The resulting distance is almost 6 trillion (6,000,000,000,000) miles!”

When we go to the other end of the size spectrum – to atoms – their almost infinite quantity presents us with a mathematical evaluation equally stunning: The federal Energy Department’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility says that an average adult is composed of “approximately 7*10²⁷ atoms. That is, 7 followed by 27 zeros.”

For all practical purposes, the size of the universe and the number of atoms in a single body has this in common: Our universe, our world, and our physical beings are composed of units so enormous as to be pragmatically incalculable. From near-infinite smallness to near-infinite breadth, not to mention near-infinite numbers of stars and planets, the counts are so exhaustive as to be mind-numbing.

These things point to a central truth about the nature of God. To Him, size as we understand it is immaterial. He created the smallest sub-atomic particle as well as a universe so large that astronomers qualify it as “observable” and “non-observable.”

It’s important to realize that God does not live in the universe; He made it, and lives outside it. If He made it, our grasp of its immensity is not commensurate with His perspective but only our own, a grasp limited by human finitude. Such finitude is immeasurably miniscule compared to God’s.

Some critics of Christianity charge that the notion of God becoming a man is pretentious to the point of being laughable because who are we, on this tiny planet in a vast galaxy. ABC News reports that “of roughly 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a new analysis of Kepler (Space Telescope) data shows that around 17 percent of them have Earth-sized planets orbiting them, meaning there could be as many as 17 billion Earth-sized worlds.”

Yet if we understand the insignificance of size to the God presented to us in the Bible, the location and circumference of the earth become irrelevant. The New Testament claims that God came to our planet in human form. He was Jesus of Nazareth, through Whom the Father created the world and sustains its existence (John 1:3, Hebrews 1:2), incarnate Deity, a first century laborer from a little town in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. This assertion would be ludicrous were not the evidence for it so convincing.

If we use our view of size as a means of defining value, the tallest and fattest person on earth is the most valuable and the littlest and thinnest is the least. How far this is from the biblical estimation of human value. According to Scripture, we were knit-together in our mothers’ wombs, and our “unformed bodies” are seen by the eye of God (Psalm 139). From conception onward, we are persons of such value that God superintends every moment of our growth.

A God like this – One who speaks the grandeur and complexity of the universe into being, Who composes DNA with hundreds of billions of atoms – is bound by neither the size of the created order nor the complexity of the human body. He intervenes daily in both, affirming the magnificence of His character and the tender care He has for those made in His image and likeness.

Don’t Forget Our Brothers and Sisters

by Nathan Oppman

February 21, 2013

In a recent Fox News article, the plight of house churches in China is said to be getting worse. The government has increased its crackdown on these churches which pose a threat to its power. Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid, and a former pastor himself in China, said the government is employing “new tactics of persecution.” Please remember to pray for our brothers and sisters in China that God would preserve them and strengthen them. And remember to thank God for the benefit of religious freedom that we have in America. Stand up for religious freedom here in America so that we can be a beacon of hope to those oppressed around the world.

In case you missed it, FRC recently held a panel discussion of religious liberty in America and will host Bob Fu for a further look at the Chinese church’s persecution in April.

Pandering on Sexual Morality = Church Decline

by Rob Schwarzwalder

February 6, 2013

John Lomperis at the Institute of Religion and Democracy has written a convincing, tightly-argued piece that old-line Protestant churches that compromise their allegiance to biblical moral truth are failing. It’s well worth reading. Here are two particularly potent quotes from it:

** “The spiritual and existential end of a Christian denomination (United Church of Christ) with such a rich heritage should drive any disciple of Jesus to mourn.”

** “Recently, some voices have argued that if non-mainline evangelical churches are to survive among younger generations of Americans, they too must move their approach to sexual morality closer to that of the UCC. In light of the above, the best response this young adult can offer is: Seriously???”

FRC in the News: January 25, 2013

by Nicole Hudgens

January 25, 2013

The Pro-Life March Continues

Jessica Prol, FRC’s Managing Editor for Policy Publications, wrote about the history and the dangers of legal abortion in an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Times. She celebrates life on the day of the famous March for Life today in Washington, D.C. and tells the story of a sweet baby girl, Naomi, who will prayerfully experience one of God’s greatest gifts—life.

Robert Morrison, FRC’s Senior Fellow for Policy Studies, wrote an op-ed that appeared in Human Events today about abortion giant, Planned Parenthood, and the future of the pro-life movement.

General Boykin in the NY Times and on Fox News Sunday

This Sunday, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (Ret.-USA), Executive Vice President at FRCwill be featured on Fox News Sunday and was recently quoted in the New York Times with his expertise concerning women in combat roles. Boykin, whose long career includes much time in the Special Forces Operations, made the statement that “the people making this decision are doing so as part of another social experiment.” Read Boykin’s response on the FRC website and op-ed that appeared in USA Today about women in frontline combat.

You Can Fight for the Country’s Freedom, But be Denied Your Own

FRC President Tony Perkins commented on a story done by Fox News Radio that explained how the Army ordered a cross and steeple to be taken off of a chapel in Afghanistan. Tony stated that “Under this Administration, the military has become a Christianity-free zone. As a veteran, there’s an irony here. You put on the uniform to defend freedom — chief among them is freedom of religion. And yet, you are stripped of your own freedom to practice your faith.”