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Why Judges Must Promote a Christian America
Whether America thrives or flounders in the 21st Century could primarily depend upon who wins the battle for the courts in this generation. Will it be those judges who remember our Biblical roots or those who want to replace them with secular substitutes?
For 150 years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed America’s freedom from England, our leaders universally recognized the Biblical foundations that undergirded our nation’s legal system. President Abraham Lincoln, who emancipated the slaves after the Civil War, still rightly understood in the mid-19th Century that God alone was the grantor of America’s rights. He understood that the Almighty had given these rights to every person in all times and in all places, including those African slaves who had been brought to America against their will.
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Prior to 1900, American lawyers all studied the law using a book by William Blackstone called Commentaries on English Common Law. The first 140 pages of this book outlined the Biblical principles that controlled both British and American common law. America’s Founders used Blackstone’s principles to undergird a new legal system in their emerging nation. In fact, Blackstone’s four-volume Commentaries, published a decade before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, became more popular in America than in England. America was a blank slate for formulating a new legal system based entirely on the principles of the Bible.
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When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws. --EXODUS 18:16
One of the surest measures of a man are the words by which he lives. Patrick Henry, one of the Founding Fathers, understood the clear need for a Biblical Foundation to establish firm footing for a fledgling republic. His passion for liberty is unrivaled in America's history.
It is clear from an objective reading of our founding documents that the language of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, of James Madison in the Constitution, and of the original constitutions of all thirteen colonies prior to 1776 mirrored the language used by William Blackstone. His Commentaries were published in the 1760s, just in time for the American experiment in freedom. These Commentaries sold more copies in America than in England, where the law was already moving away from these Biblical moorings.
Blackstone’s Commentaries outlined the development of English common law, which began as far back as 1000 A.D. When Jesus did not return at the first millennium as many expected, the church had to reorient itself toward discovering how societies could best live together in this world. Medieval thinkers began formulating a political and legal system for the long haul, first using canon (church) law and then developing common (civil) law from that religious legal base.
These deeply religious thinkers recognized that the Bible contains a double revelation of God—a revelation of faith to guide us in our relationship to God, and also a revelation of morals to guide us in our relationship to others in society. This legal compilation of God’s fixed, uniform, and universal moral laws governing all societies in all times and in all places occurred over a period of several hundred years. It was this civic or common law that Blackstone finally wrote down in his Commentaries, complete with Scripture references on almost every page. And it was this book that inspired America’s Founders and educated every generation of lawyers and judges in America.
First and foremost, Blackstone, the Founders, and all early American lawyers and judges recognized that God had created humanity for Himself. Therefore, all people were entirely dependent, not only on the physical laws of the universe, but also on equally applicable moral laws. God’s moral laws are as immutable and fixed as the laws of gravity and physics, said Blackstone.
Following these moral laws in society, Blackstone said, was essential for the happiness of citizens. This was the basis for the “pursuit of happiness” language in the Declaration of Independence. All citizens had also been given life (personal security) and liberty (personal freedom) as part of the image of God bestowed upon Adam and Eve, but clouded by sin at the Fall. If sin had not entered the world, Blackstone noted, Adam and Eve could have discerned the moral laws (natural law) of the universe in the same way that scientists can discover the physical laws set in motion by God. But because sin entered the world in the Fall, God was obligated to supplement His natural law (referred to as “the law of Nature” in the Declaration of Independence) with an additional written revelation in the Bible (“the law of . . . Nature’s God” in the Declaration).
Thus equipped with a conscience (though fallen) and with the written Bible, citizens can discern the moral principles of government that best lead to the happiness of all human societies. The “pursuit of happiness” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence was a phrase recognizing that mankind’s happiness depends on a right understanding and implementation in society of the fixed, immutable, and unchanging moral laws of God. No law enacted by man, Blackstone said, is legitimate unless it reflects the moral law of God revealed in the Bible. That is the primary reason, for instance, why murder, adultery, theft, and lying are wrong. These basic principles are found in the Ten Commandments—the basis for both Biblical faith and American law.
All governments, Blackstone said, must be grounded in God’s moral revelation in order to function properly. Therefore, all societies must be based on God’s foundational principle of families, beginning with one man and one woman united for life. That Biblical revelation is the real reason why homosexual marriage is wrong for all societies. It is also the primary reason why today’s homosexual advocates and many judges who support this movement are so intent on simultaneously undermining the Biblical basis for law in America through an invented legal principle of “separation of church and state,” which was first imposed on America in a 1947 United States Supreme Court decision.
Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the Presidency on the premise that the moral law of God and the inherent equality of man invalidated the Supreme Court's decision to uphold slavery in the Dred Scott case. His stand for Biblical morality as the foundation of law ultimately led to passage of the 14th Amendment in 1866, designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently freed slaves.
The Supreme Court’s support of abortion in 1973 is illegitimate for the same reason. Supreme Court justices do not have the authority to contradict God’s moral code and call it law. The erroneous legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade, as well as in other recent Supreme Court rulings on homosexuality and other moral issues, is merely the logical conclusion of an evolving secular legal philosophy that began heading down the wrong road in 1872 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. first declared the death of God in the legal world.
The Founders declared the principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence, based on the God who created us all. Abraham Lincoln still recognized America’s foundation in the moral law of God when he declared in his 1859 Presidential campaign that slavery and the Supreme Court’s decision upholding it in the Dred Scott case were not law because they contradicted the moral law of God. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, recognized that all men, whatever their ethnicity, truly are imbued with the image of God and are, therefore, all guaranteed the rights of life (personal security), liberty (to perform their duties to God) and the pursuit of happiness (the freedom to conform to God’s laws which was recognized as the only path to true happiness). Some legal commentators have noted that the third inalienable right (the pursuit of happiness) also involves the right to own property, another foundational right recognized in the constitutions of all the original thirteen colonies. In no case, however, did the pursuit of happiness ever imply the licentiousness that characterizes its understanding in modern American law.
William Blackstone and America’s Founders recognized that these three rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) are inalienable because they are part of the image of God, which is given to everyone at Creation. Therefore, like the legal concept of inalienable property, citizens are not able to sell, give away, or otherwise divest themselves of these rights. These rights are a foundational part of what it means to be a human being created in the image of God. These rights are merely recognized, not bestowed, by government.
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