The professor’s lecture today (“The Bible and the Founding Fathers”) focused not on Jefferson and walls, but on late 18^th Century political texts and the Bible.  FRC will be making the lecture available on the website shortly, and I urge anyone interested in American history to watch it.

The bottom line is that political discourse in the Founding Era was replete with Biblical references.  Interestingly, the most commonly referenced book of the Bible was Deuteronomy – a book that summarizes many of the principles and history found in the other books in the Torah.  (Deuteronomy is also the most quoted book in the New Testament.)  Deuteronomy is a book concerned with the establishment of a just and godly society, so it is fitting that it was used often when our new government was being created.

Additionally, Driesbach demonstrated that the subtlety with which the Bible is referenced indicated a very high level of Biblical literacy in the populace, so much so, that allusions without citation were expected to be understood.  Analysis of texts by Washington and Patrick Henry were particularly illuminating in this regard.

One more point: after the lecture, Professor Dreisbach informed me that, in August 2009, he published a collection of primary source materials on religious liberty and church-state relations in the Founding Era.  The book is The Sacred Rights of Conscience (Liberty Fund Books, 2009).  Here is some information from the publisher’s webpage:

The Sacred Rights of Conscience provides students and scholars a rich collection of primary sources that illuminate the discussions and debates about religious liberty in the American founding era. This compilation of primary documents provides a thorough and balanced examination of the evolving relationship between public religion and American culture, from pre-colonial biblical and European sources to the early nineteenth century, to allow the reader to explore the social and political forces that defined the concept of religious liberty and shaped American church-state relations.

Including material that has been previously unavailable or hard to find, The Sacred Rights of Conscience contains original documents from both public and private papers, such as constitutions, statutes, legislative resolutions, speeches, sermons, newspapers, letters, and diary entries. These documents provide a vivid reminder that religion was a dynamic factor in shaping American social, legal, and political culture and that there has been a struggle since the inception of the Republic to define the prudential and constitutional role of religion in public culture.

Having personally known one of the girls shot at Virginia Tech on April 16th, 2007, my heart breaks every time I hear of college-related violence and the pointless death of innocent students.

Today, my heart goes out to the family of Yeardley Love, a 22-year-old lacrosse player and student at the University of Virginia, murdered this week by her on-and-off 22-year-old boyfriend.

The thought of such a tragedy makes me wonder why my experience at college has been so different from a majority of the campuses across America. In four years, my school has not had a single murder, suicide, or violent crime.

Considering that the USA Today calculated 857 college student deaths from 2000 to 2005, how does one school manage to escape unscathed? It’s certainly not chance or luck. For Patrick Henry College, it’s in our Christian culture.

Critics mock us for our strict rules – like no dancing or drinking on campus, no members of the opposite sex permitted in your dorm room, nightly curfew hours – and the lack of a social atmosphere it creates. We have been the subject of books (God’s Harvard), television shows, op-eds, and countless blogs who rant against our brand of overbearing right-wing Christianity that poisons society’s freedom.

Yet, what is the cost of students being able to “express” themselves? Is that freedom worth the cost of drunk driving deaths, drug related violence, and love affairs turned fatal?

I’m certainly not saying that Christians are not capable of committing the same, if not worse crimes. But the culture of Christianity and the rules we hold ourselves to at Patrick Henry lay substantial roadblocks to violent or illegal behavior.

Granted, our entire school population would be one or two classes at UVA, but the fact remains that Patrick Henry College has it’s own recipe for student safety that is active and working. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve broken the college’s rules, but as I look back, I realize that in many ways those same laws saved me from myself.

Non-Christians who are reading this right now are sure to be shaking their heads at me. How can you use one unfortunate crime to wave your rules over our heads and try to enforce your agenda on us? I understand that many people are turned off by Christianity and its giant “rulebook.” But as the number of college related attacks and crimes rise, and as more campuses are scarred with senseless deaths, I hope universities will consider the facts before them and realize that there is a way to prevent future heartbreaks – commit to enforcing tough, moral laws and foster a community of students who want to uphold those laws.

Christopher Beach is Associate Producer of Bill Bennett’s nationally syndicated radio show, Morning In America, and a senior at Patrick Henry College. He blogs at Beach Notes.

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Roethlisberger, suspended for six games by the NFL for credible allegations of sexual assault against a 20 year-old woman in Milledgeville, Georgia, received a letter from League Commissioner Roger Goodell stating that “there is nothing about your conduct in Milledgeville that can remotely be described as admirable, responsible, or consistent with either the values of the league or the expectations of our fans.”

In contrast, USA Today notes that Tebow’s Christian faith has motivated him to travel “to impoverished hamlets, prisons and hospitals around the world.” Tebow’s unapologetic commitment to the sanctity of unborn life became widely known when, during this year’s Super Bowl broadcast, he was featured in an ad with his mother. As USA Today reports, “Pregnant with Tim in the Phillippines (where the Tebows were missionaries), his mother became ill, suffering internal bleeding … Doctors, fearing for her life, recommended an abortion. She decided to have the baby.” Now that baby has been selected in the first round of the NFL draft.

Tebow makes no pretension of moral perfection, but his dedication to living a life of integrity, purity and conviction, all on behalf of his Savior, is a striking reminder that Christian witness and servanthood can inspire and encourage.

As to Mr. Roethlisberger, we can pray that he will, in the words of the prophet Haggai, consider his ways. The way Mr. Tebow is following – the Way, in fact – is worth emulating.

Should we be subjected to those whose self-appointed mission is to bully their way through communities where their crusade to annihilate Christianity is neither wanted nor welcomed? Furthermore, must we be forced to accept that their patronizing destruction of Judeo-Christian traditions is “good for us?” Sooner or later, the ACLU and others like them may have to acknowledge that the majority of Americans adhere to the Christian faith and don’t want the empty exchange they have to offer. We enjoy our faith – we enjoy our God, and in spite of our many shortcomings, Scripture is clear that God enjoys us. And whether or not the ACLU approves, that is a lifestyle worth celebrating.

“Among the actions to be taken in the near-term are:

(1)   Expand the pilot program to fully deploy eGuardian as the DoD-wide force protection threat reporting system to handle suspicious incident activities. The eGuardian system, which is FBI-owned and maintained, will safeguard civil liberties, while enabling information sharing among Federal, State, local, and tribal law enforcement partners, including interagency fusion centers.

(2)   Complete the deployment of the Law Enforcement Defense Data Exchange system (D-DEx) allowing all DoD law enforcement agencies to share criminal investigation as well as other law enforcement data as appropriate. D-DEx  will be a consolidated database to enable organizations across the Department  to query, retrieve, and post criminal investigation and law enforcement data in a single repository.

(3)   Establish the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs as the DoD lead for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force program.

(4)      Strengthen DoD’s antiterrorism training program by incorporating lessons learned from the Fort Hood incident, Department of Homeland Security best practices on workplace violence, and civilian law enforcement active shooter awareness training.”

Shooter awareness training? What in the world is that supposed to mean? Can any American take any comfort from this dismal report? Does anyone think anyone at Fort Hood—or in the nation, for that matter–had any problem being aware of the “active shooter” in their midst?

I am surprised the report did not advocate advance positioning of grief counselors—good grief—and offer to distribute candles for memorial services before the next outbreak.

Here’s my recommendation:

Step 1. Require every member of the Armed Services, officer, non-com, and enlisted, to take an oath. The oath might say something like this:

I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

What’s that you say? They already take such an oath? That you’ve even seen them take it? That it looks like this:

Very well. Then that brings me to Step 2.

ENFORCE THE OATH.

Nidal Hasan was commissioned in the Army of the United States. He took this oath, along with millions of other Americans. For years, he was allowed to spew venomous anti-American and anti-Christian statements. He was cosseted and coddled in the interests of diversity.

Every time he spoke up for jihad he was in violation of his oath. And he got away with it. Treason is not diversity. Sedition is not diversity. Insubordination is not diversity.

By winking at Hasan’s treasonous statements, the army brass created the conditions for this mass killing. They were enablers of Hasan’s murderous rampage. For the troops to see such treasonous statements going unchallenged and undisciplined is to undermine morale at every level.

Once, in the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln heard that one of Gen. McClellan’s officers, a Major John Key, had been loudly telling his fellows that the reason McClellan did not pursue the retreating Gen. Lee and the rebel army was because the “game” was to fight the war only to reach a stalemate; then, Major Key said, the generals North and South would intervene to force a negotiated settlement. Key’s sentiments were by no means as dangerous, as treasonous as Nidal Hasan’s were. But Lincoln summoned Key to the White House and dismissed him from the army on the spot. Although Lincoln was a famously merciful man, he never relented in his determination to banish disloyal sentiment from the army.

That’s the kind of leadership that is missing here. With this kind of pathetic report, filled with all the usual vapid sentiments, the typical bureaucratic gobbledygook, who among our all-volunteer services can have confidence that their seniors will truly look out for them?

Our military has historically been a great place to bring Americans from all backgrounds together. Men and women from different regions, races, religions, ethnic and social groups work together, fight together, live together, pray together. The military has been a great unifier for our country. Our armed forces have survived and prevailed over every enemy that has come against them. But they cannot survive political correctness.

“Small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht” is what Rich calls the apparent excesses of a tiny minority of anti-Democratic health care bill protestors.  His own crypto-racist presuppositions are apparent in Blow’s evisceration of those he terms “extremists:”

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Let me posit for Mr. Blow an alternative scenario: For the Left,

Even the optics must be disturbing.  A (nationally recognized) woman (Sarah Palin) opposed the health care bill that passed the House.  The bill’s most visible and vocal opponents included a practicing Catholic (John Boehner) and a Jew (Eric Cantor).  And prominent black men (former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and former Godfathers Pizza chairman Herman Cain) didn’t want the black man in the White House to sign the bill into law.  It’s enough to make a New York secular liberal go crazy.

Frank Rich., fueled by the same reactionary unction as Mr. Blow, writes something eerily similar in his piece:

The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Again, allow me to rephrase:

The conjunction of a black Republican National Committee Chairman and a female conservative vice-presidential candidate – topped off by a wise African-American conservative on the Supreme Court and a powerful evangelical committee chairman – would sow fears of disenfranchisement among the tiny self-anointed secular elite in the media and the academy no matter what policies were in play.

However, unsatisfied with smarmily tarring all conservatives with the base brush of bigotry, Rich returns to the 1964 Civil Rights Act as further evidence of the Right’s calumny (apparently ignorant of the fact that more House Republicans voted for it than Democrats).  Blow goes one better, asserting that Tea Partiers, per a Quinnipiac University Poll, shows them to be “disproportionately white, evangelical Christians and ‘less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack’.”

Ah, the Evangelical Slur rears its head: conservative Christians just don’t have the smarts the rest of society possesses.  This assertion is to intellectual credibility what the Big Mac is to nutrition.  The tired asseveration that evangelicals are pear-headed ignoramuses fails the test of serious scrutiny.  According to a comprehensive poll done in 2004 by GreenbergQuinlanRosner Research for the PBS program “Religion and Ethics,” “About 22 percent of white evangelicals hold 4-year college degrees, compared with 27 percent of the general population. (One) quarter (27 percent) of white evangelicals have some sort of post-secondary education, compared to 26 percent of the general population.”

Sadly, Blow and Rich were silent when images of a decapitated George W. Bush, of guns being placed to his head, and tee-shirts bearing the message, “Kill Bush” were rampant among the Left.  Throughout most of the 2000s, the blogosphere was flooded by horrible messages of hate and vileness and violence directed at the 43^rd President.  Most of us on the Right attributed these sickening things to a minority of political opinion, yet remained troubled that MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and other pop culture “acceptables” accepted and encouraged Bush hatred as though it were merely boisterous patriotism.  Jonah Goldberg correctly calls this “liberal fascism.”  Now that a handful of people go too far, suddenly conservatives (both Tea Partiers and Republicans) are (I derive this list from exactly two op-eds over a three day period in the New York Times):

• Frothing
• Copper-faced
• Apoplectic
• Goons
• Vigilantes
• Unglued
• Homicidal (at least rhetorically)
• Apocalyptic (not to be confused with apoplectic – see above)
• Petulant
• Hysterical
• Bullies
• Desperate
• Extremists
• Angry
• Frustrated
• Nefarious
• Mad (Tea Partiers)
• Anemic (Republicans)
• Bigoted (Tea Partiers)
• Violent (Tea Partiers)
• Anachronistic

And most are, I suppose, bad dressers, to boot.

Both Blow and Rich conclude triumphantly that white conservatives are a dying breed and that the demographics of America doom the (overwhelmingly white) Tea Party movement to failure.  Here, to borrow a phrase from the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, Blow and Rich experience “an isolated spasm of lucidity.”

America’s racial and ethnic composition is indeed changing.  Conservatives need to take seriously the reality that sometime in the mid- to late-century, American whites will become merely the largest plurality in a multi-ethnic nation.  We have to do a far better job of winsomely and thoughtfully engaging people of color and persuading them that the conservative vision of personal responsibility, limited government, lower taxes and true social justice (for the born and the unborn) is the best course for our – and I emphasize, our – nation.

But Blow and Rich should consider the wisdom of America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln (a Republican, no less!): The hen is the wisest of all the animals because she never cackles until her eggs are hatched.

The battle over the ideas and convictions that should shape our country should never include in its ranks those pathetic souls on either extreme whose malevolence, whether racial, ethnic or ideological, inspires their political conduct.  But Charles Blow and Frank Rich should beware of cackling too soon.

Whose country is it?  All of ours.  Of “We, the people,” who lived not under a whimsical state manipulated by a Leftist bourgeoisie elite, but a constituted political order grounded in a written text and the unwritten but palpable virtue of an informed citizenry.  Conservatives are fighting to keep it.  And we’ve just begun to fight.

Put another way, if virtue is not the companion of our private doings, it will be absent from our public lives, and the larger cultural life of our country.  This is logical deduction, of course, and leads to inevitable consequences for our society at large.

Consider former Senator John Edwards (D-NC), who had an adulterous affair with filmmaker Reille Hunter.  It occurred while he was a credible candidate for the presidency of the United States and married to a woman suffering from an incurable recurrence of cancer.  Yet Ms. Hunter now effuses about their torrid relationship as if it were a thing of rare beauty:

“I know he loves me. I have never had any doubt at all about that,” Hunter told Gentleman’s Quarterly.  “We love each other very much. And that hasn’t changed, and I believe that will be till death do us part.”

A mistress using the language of the marriage vow about a man still married to another woman: This is the rhetorical equivalent of pulling fingernails across a blackboard.  But Ms. Hunter’s exposition of moral philosophy is even more striking: “I think that he thinks that he (Sen. Edwards) is a much wiser and a much better and a more truthful and a more integrated human being” because of their affair, Ms. Hunter tells us.

John Edwards betrayed his wife, his children, his supporters and, in a profound way, his country, in that he did his best to contribute to the moral erosion of our society and our politics.  But, contra Ms. Hunter, he has not found truth, not unless it’s the truth about himself – that he lacks an inner foundation of decency, honor or loyalty.

My purpose in this piece is not to fulminate against Sen. Edwards or Ms. Hunter.  We all have fallen short of God’s perfect standard, but He offers redemption to us in His grace. It is my hope they will find it.

Rather, what animates my concern is Ms. Hunter’s remarks.  She says what she does with a straight face, claiming that promises made before God lose force when emotional affection wanes and justifying corrupt conduct by asserting it can bring about “self-integration” (recipe: one part lust, one part selfishness and one part irresponsibility, all fitted together nicely, thank you).

This is wrong.  It is wrong based on the teachings of Judeo-Christian revelation.  Wrong based on the transcendent, cross-cultural, natural understanding of what it means to stay faithful and do right.  And wrong because as a national figure, John Edwards had a duty to set an example, and failed to the point that he fathered a little girl with a woman not his (dying) wife.

Sen. Edwards has not found truth, he has abandoned it.  Truth is found in living faithfully with your husband or wife “in sickness and in health.”  Beauty and love are found there, too.  I’m grieved that John Edwards has lost these irreplaceable gifts, and instead has torn asunder yet one more section of the fabric of American life.

That’s because many anti-Federalists, who had failed to block adoption of the Constitution, were gathering strength to radically overhaul the Framers’ work in 1789. They sought to amend away some of the newly adopted Constitution’s provisions, ones that had been so carefully crafted at Philadelphia.

James Madison had to fight to get elected to the First Congress. Virginia anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry and George Mason—revered patriot leaders—were working to defeat Madison. They carved out a district for the U.S. House of Representatives in which it would be harder for Madison to be elected. Today we call this practice “gerrymandering.” The word came from Massachusetts anti-Federalist leader Elbridge Gerry, who carved out some districts that looked like salamanders. Gerrymanders, they were and still are.

Henry and Mason even recruited Revolutionary War hero James Monroe to run against “the great little Madison.” Madison had not expected to have to campaign for election, but he did so. And he campaigned most effectively.

In January, 1789, he rode around the newly-formed congressional district in a carriage with his good friend Monroe. They debated in churches. At Hebron Lutheran Church, they were welcomed inside for the worship and hymn-singing, but church elders in that “nest of Dutchmen (Germans)” required the two political candidates to go out into the snowy churchyard to discuss political matters. They did so, for a long three hours, with the Lutherans paying strict attention. Even fifty years later, Madison would point to his nose and note that he had gotten it frost-bitten on that frigid Sunday afternoon! (It gives new meaning to the phrase, the “frozen chosen.”)

Madison won that election and yet maintained a lifelong friendship with Monroe. Madison proceeded to the temporary capital of New York, where he crafted and successfully shepherded through a sometimes reluctant Congress the amendments that would later become our revered Bill of Rights. And here’s another irony: Gerry went on to serve faithfully as Madison’s vice president.

Atheizers of today—outfits like the ACLU and professional grousers like Barry Lynn—would have you think that a political candidate going to a church to ask for the votes of Christian citizens is a violation of the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. It traduces the “separation of church and state,” they claim.

They think they know more about the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights than the man who actually wrote them. Is it likely that James Madison would have gone to New York to make unconstitutional the very process by which he had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives?

The Founders thought Liberty was sacred. Madison’s great friend Thomas Jefferson spoke for all when he wrote: “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.”