Our God-given freedoms

As Americans, we recently celebrated the Fourth of July. Yet too many Americans are oblivious to the reasons for celebrating and the day’s unique historical significance. The founding principles and issues that culminated on July 4, 1776, are at the core of our past, present and future as a free people.

What are these principles that allow your neighbor to be an atheist instead of being forced to practice a religion; that prohibit government from removing weapons from law-abiding citizens and seizing one’s property; that allow the American Civil Liberties Union and the Ku Klux Klan to exist; that allow dissent and disagreement in the press?

All documents leading to the founding of the United States, from the 1215 Magna Carta and the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are all based on Judeo-Christian principles. These, and only these, principles allow for the unique experiment of a government based on Creator-endowed worth and power of individual choice.

We, the people, individually, have the power and lend this power to the government through our elected representatives. All 10 amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights are prohibitions against government, not the people.

Examples of our founding principles are all around us, available for all to see and read, but we ignore them.

Our monuments, buildings, statues, inscriptions, paintings, coinage, National Archives and thousands of volumes written over the past 200 years (100 volumes by George Washington alone), detail the principles and intent of our founding.

Carvings, paintings and statues in the Capitol chronicle our founding Christian principles. Images of Moses and the Ten Commandments appear on and in the Supreme Court building. (But not in Giles County High School.) There’s no ambiguity when taken as a whole.

One doesn’t have to be religious or believe in any particular ideology to be a citizen.

But each citizen must respect and defend the Judeo-Christian principles upon which the U.S. was founded, or we will all lose the choice to do so.

No other religious basis, lack of religion or other ideology allows our form of government to exist. To earn freedom requires nothing; it’s a gift from the Creator that cannot be earned. But to secure freedom requires everything, as many of our military have sacrificed over the past 237 years.

May God continue to bless America as we celebrate the real meaning of July 4th.

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