Commentary About the 1954 U.S. Congressional Amendment Trampling Freedom of Religion

Wasn't it the search for religious freedom that first brought the Pilgrims to the American continent, to Massachusetts, in the year 1620? Wasn't that earnest search for assurance that natural law and the inalienable right of mankind (and Americans especially) to worship God according to the dictates of conscience finally rewarded by the creation of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, which declared that no government, specifically the U.S. government, has the right to restrict the free practice of religion? There is no ambiguity about that distinct meaning of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion." In that one sentence, every aspect of religious activity is subsumed by the succinct proscription. The faith and belief in nature's God, and the actions which such faith and belief produce, comprising all speech and ritual worship that declare the innermost and utterly sacred declarations of mind and conscience, these sacred aspects of religious activity are protected by the First Amendment.

Persuasive sophistry has, however, allowed enemies of religious freedom to twist and distort the statements of the Framers for their own evil intents and purposes. The tritely used remark originally quipped by the great Thomas Jefferson, coined by the man in 1802 in a speech to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, has been greatly misinterpreted through sophistry. His statement follows:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."

There have been many popular sophists who, through the years and decades, have, with deliberateness, established a meaning to Jefferson's words that conveys a total separation of church and state, which restricts American government from consorting with religious practice, and from the People introducing religious principle and practice into American government. Contextually, this was not what Jefferson meant in his statement.

First off, you have to consider that Jefferson was a very personal man who believed in Jesus Christ and the universal resurrection, but not in organized religion. Dumas Malone, the great biographer of Jefferson, has established these facts by careful study of Jefferson's letters, records, and the letters and documents written about himby his closest friends and associates. Secondly, you have to believe that Jefferson firmly believed in the First Amendment prohibition against federal government restriction of religious freedom. A one-way wall had been firmly established by the First Amendment, erected so that the federal government was totally restricted from establishing a state church and restricting, to any degree, freedom of religious practice. But the fact ignored by these sophists that they consider inconvenient to mention in their sophistic renderings of faulty logic, is that the same men who proclaimed the First Amendment as sacrosanct began and ended each session of the 1789 Constitutional Convention with prayers to Almighty God, and invoked the name of God countless times during the Convention.

Is it so difficult to understand that the Founding Fathers believed in nature's God in their own individual and distinct ways, and established by their own actions the importance of the presence of religious principle and practice in government, and by the leaders of government? Is it so hard to understand why George Washington, during heated debate between members of the Constitutional Convention, in 1790, declared loudly, "Gentlemen, let us bow to pray to God that our minds and hearts will be knitted together?" It was only after that prayer that the assembly there was able to unify and produce an original constitutional document. Is it so hard to understand why each session of the U.S. Congress has traditionally commenced with a prayer to nature's God since the 1st U.S. Congress first convened?

There is an inalienable separation between Church and State, but it is only configured as an impenetrable one-way wall, which forbids any branch of the U.S government from forcing state religion upon the people and restricting the free practice of religion. It is as inalienable as the right of every American citizen to worship God, saying to Him, and any human being within sight or hearing, what he, or she, wants to say in His sacred name.

So, it is extremely difficult to understand why the U.S Congress so quickly chose to trample upon this scared, inalienable, and constitutional right in 1954 by creating a law restricting what ministers, priests, preachers, pastors, or rabbis utter in sermons to their congregation of American people about political issues and politicians. Lyndon B. Johnson must have really had a duped following in the U.S. Senate, supposedly the senior watchdogs of American liberty. Johnson must have been greatly practiced in the art of sophistic deception to have been able to so quickly persuade so many of the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives, that imposing a tax law upon churches, which would ensure that clergy did not speak-out against corrupt politics, or in favor of political issues, for fear of losing tax-exempt status, was perfectly alright and constitutional.

Why haven't the collective American people indignantly risen to vehemently proclaim denial of religious liberty as a result of this contemptible tax law? Why haven't Congresses, since 1954, sought to repeal and abrogate a law that was so hastily, and indiscriminately, legislated in that sad year, which was so obviously unconstitutional? Just think, the enraged people of Boston got together, painted their faces, and tossed into the Boston Harbor the tea on which such an outrageous tax had been declared by a tyrannical king? What do you think they would have done if King George III had placed a tax on churches that chose to oppose him verbally? What type of rebellion do you think such a British tax law would have produced among the people? It was Thomas Jefferson who also said, "A little rebellion is good every now and then;" and I am quite sure he fully meant that such rebellion should occur in the face of laws contravening the inalienable and natural laws and rights accorded by nature's God, such as the contemptable 1954 tax amendment.

A link to the "White Paper Pulpit Initiantive" put forth by the Alliance Defense Fund is provided. I encourage all Americans who read this commentary to also read the "Initiative," and to get involved in a fervent rebellion to get this egregious law abrogated.