Republican Jody Hice from Georgia, who is a potential Congressional candidate, said on his radio show earlier this month that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was accurate in commenting recently about faith in American society. While delivering a speech at Colorado Christian University, Scalia had said government endorsement of religion is in fact constitutional and it is in America’s best interests to abide by the Biblical law.
“I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion,” Scalia said to the heavily Christian audience.
Scalia then went on to urge his audience to “honor God” in the Pledge of Allegiance as well as in all other public ceremonies.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” the Reagan-appointed justice said. “It is in the best of American traditions, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists to impose it on all of us through the Constitution.”
On October 16, Hice also echoed Scalia’s message, despite the phrase “under God” not being added to the United States Pledge of Allegiance for as long as 60 years after it was written in 1892 and despite the Establishment Clause of the American Constitution’s First Amendment forbidding the federal government from endorsing any one religion.
“To be in the midst of a fight against secularists who are trying to impose on all of us that it is unconstitutional to acknowledge God and to honor God,” said Hice, “The secularists want to tell us that that’s unconstitutional. And Scalia is arguing that not only is that, in fact, constitutional, but it is in the best interests of who we are. One of the biggest dangers that we are facing today is judges who think that the Constitution is some sort of living document that changes with the times.”
Hice continued to discuss how he believes there is a problem with Americans viewing the Constitution through a “lens of secularism” as that is not what God intended his children to do.
“Folks, that is problematic, that is an enormous danger,” said Hice. “When it comes to the idea of religious liberty, it is not constitutional for the state, if you will, just to be neutral towards religion.”
According to Hice, religion is an entrenched part of all Americans’ identities and a fundamental part of who they are. God-fearing governments apparently produce moral people who are capable of governing themselves and thus do not need a bigger arm of intrusive governance around them.
“God-fearing governments,” he said, produce “a moral people who are self-governing of their own lives and thus don’t need the big arm of intrusive government all over us. Because we are self-governing people. You remove God and you remove religion and you remove the state from encouraging religious belief and you get more secularism, you get more problems, you get more crime, you get all, whatever, fill in the blank out there. … End result, you get bigger government. … Government has a responsibility to encourage religious belief because that is the foundation, as I said earlier, of how limited government can exist,” he concluded.
Photo Credits: Mother Jones
