By David Martin ——Bio and Archives--September 1, 2024
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Since the late 18th century, people have wrestled to interpret the Amendment Clause of the First Amendment, known as Separation of Church and State, and have often missed the mark. This is especially true in our time when communists have sown confusion by placing their own spin on the Constitution.
The Amendment Clause works conjointly with the “Free Exercise Clause” and together read:
This is said with respect to Christian denomination, not to Christianity. What it means is that Congress neither supports nor repudiates any particular denomination while making basic Christianity (Ten Commandments) the law of the land.
In the mid-1600s, Roger Williams, Rhode Island’s founder, proposed a “wall or hedge of separation” between the secular world and the church, which Jefferson later coined in 1802 as a “wall of separation between church and state.”
This means that the state may not infringe on the Church. Separation of Church and State is all about keeping the state out of the Church. It never meant that the state was to be separated from God, quite obviously, since we were declared "A Christian Nation" in which "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind." (Supreme Court Declaration, 1892)
Hence our laws must comply with Christian principle in order for them to be valid. The 1892 SCOTUS declaration didn’t propose anything new but simply made official what already was the case.
Washington himself said, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.” In every which way he demonstrated that God must be at the center of our peace and freedom. He famously said, “Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.”
And how interesting to note that Washington converted to the Catholic Faith before his death. As president he forbade anyone to speak against the Catholic Church and was often found attending Mass at Church.
Suffice to say, Separation of Church and State is all about protecting the Church, not the state. It’s about locking the state out of the Church so that religious freedom can flourish without interference from the state.
Translated into our time, it means that government may never impose an elitist, socialist, or globalist religion that inhibits the people from professing Christian morals in the public square as advocates of sacred family values. It means that the government may never impose godless values on “a moral and religious people” (John Adams) and may not force them to dignify LGBT, feminism, abortion, climate action, or to yield up their hard-earned money (sin-tax) to fund these and other like criminal causes.
It also means that the state may never threaten to revoke the tax-exempt status of church groups for endorsing or denouncing political candidates, since the censure or support of candidates on the basis of morality is part of their Christian freedom that is protected by the First Amendment. Tax-exempt status is revoked for engaging in lucrative enterprises, not for preaching morality and sound politics.
Separation of Church and State also means that the state may never impose lockdowns or restrictions on the Church as we saw during the Covid crisis. Bureaucratic overreach has become so habitual these days that the state thinks it has the sovereign right to rule over the Church. Sadly, many have been duped into believing this.
For instance, most Catholics today see it as standard protocol to follow state rules to obtain a marriage license before getting married. This is absurd. From a religious perspective marriage is one of the 7 sacraments of the Catholic Church, so in the same way the state is in no position to oversee and record the sacraments of the Eucharist and confession, it likewise is in no position to oversee and record the sacrament of marriage.
Authorization for being married is procured by getting married in the Church by a priest. Nothing more is needed. This alone validates the marriage, this alone makes it official, this alone authorizes couples to live together as married. This is your marriage license.
If the marriage is to be recorded with the state this has to be the decision of the Church, not the state. The state cannot oversee Catholic marriage because by definition it is a sacrament and not a civil union.
Some will argue that obtaining marriage licenses was started by the Church in the 16th century, which it was, but these licenses were obtained from the Church, not from the state. In the past century the state has horned in with all manner of bureaucratic overreach, which the Church should bar from its midst. The Church is never subject to the state since it stands above the state. If the Church obeys just civil laws it’s only because these are Christian laws upon which the state founded them.
In our form of government the state serves the people, especially a moral and religious people that abide by Christian values. John Adams said, “As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it.”
“Consent” here is used in the sense of “approval,” which means the people approve the government, not vice-versa. For the people elect their leaders to represent their cause of American liberty – a liberty that excludes licentious or satanic liberty.
What we are witnessing today is the approach of a totalitarian communist government that seeks to place the U.S. under the rule of internationalist despots. If communist Kamala Harris is placed in the Oval Office our country will be reduced to a communist state where religious liberty will be a thing of the past. The people would then serve the state.
America must make sure that this never happens.
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David Martin is the former moderator for St. Michaels Radio which is the one radio program of our time specializing in Catholic prophecy. He has also authored numerous articles on the Church and the Papacy which have appeared on various blogs and websites.
David presently resides in Los Angeles, California where for thirty years he has coordinated a Catholic ministry. He is a daily communicant in his parish church and strongly supports Benedict XVI’s aspiration to see the Traditional Latin Mass returned to every Catholic parish of the world.