'Thou shalt have no other gods be-

fore me." --The First Command-

ment, Exodus 20:3 (A.V.).
Although he is the last human being
on earth entitled to ask this question,
the question is, nonetheless, valid and a
piercing one that cuts to the heart of
what we have become as a people. And
the fact that it has not yet been an-
swered is very revealing.
In a meeting while he was here,
when questioned about human rights,
Siegheil Gorbachev snapped:
"What moral right does America have
to assume the pose of a teacher? Who
has given it the right to teach us moral
John Lofton is what G.K.
Chesterton called the only heretic in
modern times: an orthodox, Bible-
believing Christian. He writes a 3-
times-a-week column for The
Washinl!ton Times newspaper; he
was editor of the Conservative
Digest; he was a commentator on
the Mutual Radio Network; and he
was editor of the. weekly publication
of the Republican National
Committee.
John Lofton has been on all the
major network news prQgrams, as
well as the Cable News Network's
Crossfll'e pr02ram and ABC's
Nighlline ana Phil Donahue and
Oprah Winfrey and the Morton
Downey Jr. prog-ram, where he has
debated every leltwing goofball
imaginable, and some not
imaginable but who do, alas, exist.
He lias debated Madalyn Murray
O'Hair, Ralph Nader, Jimmy
Breslin Car1 Rowan and various
for the American Civil
Uberties Union and People for the
American Way on such topics as:
AIDS, abortion, homosexuality,
capital punishment,. religious
liberty, politics ana culture.
This article won Mr. Lofton the
$10,000 1987 Amy Writing Awards
First Prize. He is marrieato his
original wife, Barbara. They have
three children and he is a
grandfather. He never went to
college, for which he thanks God.
He is an associate of the Chalcedon
Foundation in California.
John Lofton can speak about or
debate almost any toJ>ic. He can be
reached at (301) lJ90-lH04, or by
writing him at: 313 Monmomery
Street, Laurel, Maryland 20707.
lessons?"
Excellent questions.
What right does America have to
lecture anybody about morality when
ours is a nation that has "legalized,"
since 1973, the murder of more than 20
million unborn babies? When ours is a
nation where sodomites march openly
in defense of the "right" to commit bug-
gery, and exercise this "right" to spread
death in the form of AIDS, which may
ultimately kill millions?
My answer would be: not much of a
right at all. But the revealing thing is
that in this country -- which, as recent-
ly as 1922, G.K. Chesterton could des-
cribe as "a nation with the soul of a
church . . . . the only nation in the
world that is founded on a creed" -- Mr.
Gorbachev's questions could be greeted
with a thundering silence.
On ABC's "This Week," when asked
how Mr. Gorbachev could pull the
wool over President Reagan's eyes,
George Will, who had no time to look
up an appropriate quote in "Bartlett's,"
could say only that, well, Mr. Reagan
is an American "to his chromosomes
and Americans are constitutionally and
genetically unable to understand men-
talities quite unlike our own."
Ugh.
But this was not always so. There
was a time when the average American,
if asked about his country's right to lec-
ture others about their morality, would
have responded, extemporaneously,
with a lengthy and convincing sermon.
Yes, a sermon. There was a time when
virtually no American would have had
the wool pulled over his eyes by the
likes of a Communist thug like Mr.
Gorbachev. And this was a time when
America was a godly nation, a Chris-
tian nation. And do not be deceived.
There was a time when we were a Chris-
tian nation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In his book, "Errand Into the Wilder-
ness" (Harvard University Press, 1956),
Perry Miller, historian of our Puritan
era, writes about his realization of the
uniqueness of the American experience
which he says is: that our beginnings
in the 17th century were theological,
that this was where American thought
began, but "historians are apt to slide
over these concepts in a shockingly
superficial manner because they have so
little respect for the intellect in
general."
Indeed, Mr. Miller documents in de-
tail how the Puritans were a people for
whom it was not possible to segregate
a man's spiritual life from his com-
munal life, a people for whom govern-
ment was established by God to save
depraved men from their own depravity,
and a people for whom "God was the
sovereign; His fiats were law and His
wishes took' precedence over all other
considerations; the magistrates and min-
isters were His viceroys.''
As another historian, Clinton Rossi-
ter, has observed: "The colonial mind
was thoroughly Christian in its ap-
proach to education, philosophy and
social theory." And Professor Donald
Lutz, in an article in a 1984 issue of
the American Political Science Review
about our early history, says: "If we ask
what book was most frequently cited by
Americans during the founding era, the
answer somewhat surprisingly is: the
Book of Deuteronomy."
Professor Mel Bradford notes that of
our 55 Founders, with no more than
five exceptions (and perhaps no more
than three), "they were orthodox mem-
bers of one of the established Christian
communions: approximately 29 Angli-
cans, 16 to 18 Calvinists, two Metho-
dists. two Lutherans, . two Roman
Catholics, one lapsed Quaker and
time Anglican, and one open Deist -
The Counsel of Chalcedon, August, 1988
- Dr. Franklin, who attended every kind
of Christian worship, called for public
prayer, and contributed to all denomina-
tions."
University of California Assistant
History Professor Ruth Bloch, in her
book "Visionary Republic: Millennia!
Themes in American Thought, 1756-
1800" (Cambridge University Press,
1985), writes of the millennium -- the
idea that human history is divinely or-
dained and is leading to a period of
heavenly perfection on earth -- that, in
early America, "millennialism ....
was basic to the formation of American
revolutionary ideology" and was the
way in which "many Americans under-
stood the ultimate meaning of the
revolutionary crisis and the birth of the
American nation."
And Alan Heimert says, in his book
"Religion and the American Mind" (Har-
vard U. Press, 1966) -- which stresses
that our War for Independence is incom-
prehensible apart from an understanding
of the Christian Great Awakening
which preceded it -- that a pure rational-
ism might have declared America's inde-
pendence, but could never have inspired
our people to fight for it.
And as recently as the early part of
the last century (1834), Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote, in "Democracy in
America," that in this country "Chris-
tianity reigns without obstacles, by uni-
versal consent; consequently, as I have
said elsewhere, everything in the moral
field is certain and fixed . . . . So the
human spirit never sees an unlimited
field before itself: However bold it is,
from time to time it feels that it must
halt before insurmountable barriers."
But something happened in this coun-
try toward the latter part of the last
century, as University of Massachusetts
Associate Professor of History James
Turner describes it in his "Without
God, Without Creed: The Origins of
Unbelief in America" (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985). And this some-
thing is typified by a letter Charles
Eliot Norton (the co-founder of the
Nation magazine and son of a well-
known Unitarian theologian) wrote to
his friend John Ruskin in 1869:
"There is a matter on which I have
The Counsel of Chalcedon, August, 1988
been thinking much of late. It does not
seem to me that the evidence concern-
ing the being of a God, and concerning
immortality, is such as to enable us to
assert anything in regard to either of
these topics. What education in these
matters ought I to give my children? ..
. . It is in some respects a new experi-
ment."
Well, indeed this idea of no God was
a new experiment in an America where
heretofore, according to Mr. Turner, "it
is not so clear that any atheists actually
existed" and searching for them before
the 18th century resembled a unicorn
hunt.
Incidentally, Mr. Turner says unbe-
lief was not something that happened to
religion. On the contrary, religion
caused unbelief by "trying to adapt
religious beliefs to socio-economic
change, to new moral challenges, to
novel problems of knowledge, to the
tightening standards of science." And by
doing this, "the defenders of God slowly
strangled Him."
And the result is that now, long be-
fore Gloria Steinem hoped for this, well
before her hoped-for year 2000 goal,
America's children have been raised "to
believe in human potential, not God,"
with a consequence being that Ameri-
cans are struck dumb when browbeaten
by a Gorbachev who asks: Who are we
morally to judge his country on human
rights?!
Yes, ideas do have consequences, as
Mr. Weaver observed.
In his book "Communism and the
Conscience of the West" (Garden City
Books, 1948), Fulton J. Sheen declared
that the way out of our nation's crisis
"is basically spiritual, because the
trouble is not in the way we keep our
books, but in the way we keep our
souls," that the real struggle "is
between the Kingdom of mass atheism
and the Kingdom of God." And
(emphasis his) "Communism is not to
be feared just because it is anti-God, but
because we are Godless."
Amen. But how many of our leaders
would dare to say this with a straight
face? Indeed, how many of our leaders
even believe this anymore? May God
have mercy on our nation -- although,
at times, I can offer no reason why He
should. D
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