Religious Attacks

Just before WWII, Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party began making Jews the scapegoat for all of Germany’s problems. By the end of the war millions of European Jews were murdered by the Nazis, simply because people bought into Hitler’s twisted logic.Luckily for Americans, we have the First Amendment to our Constitution, which guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What this means, in simple terms is that the federal government will not establish a national religion where everyone is compelled to practice that religion (like England did a few hundred years ago). It also means that the government will not prohibit you from exercising (or not exercising) the religion of your choice.

What the First Amendment does not say, is that people cannot practice or display their religion in a public place, such as a school, courthouse, park, etc., which is what some people are perceiving it to mean. Recently, there have been people trying to ban children from voluntarily reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because it mentions the word “God”. These people, in some elementary schools this past holiday season, caused music departments to sing only winter songs like “Frosty the Snowman”, but no Christmas songs like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” simply because they feel that the voluntary singing of these songs in a public school violates some student’s First Amendment rights.

One California elementary school in particular, this past holiday season, placed such restrictions on their holiday music program, but still thought it was OK to sing Jewish Chanukah songs. One brave parent pulled her child from the holiday concert, because she felt that her child would receive the wrong message about their religious beliefs due to the school’s decision to remove Christmas songs from the concert. If it wasn’t for this brave parent, who discussed her case on national television, I wouldn’t know about this problem, nor would anyone else who lived outside that local area.

At this point you may be wondering, why I mentioned the problem the Jews had in Nazi Germany, and how it relates to the problems we are having today in America. After all the First Amendment protects us, right? Well, yes, it does, but only if it is interpreted and applied correctly. The way it is being interpreted and applied, however causes a major problem. What is happening, is that Atheists and other groups are beginning to complain that it isn’t OK for a person with a particular religious belief to practice their religion in public because it may offend someone who does not share the same religious beliefs. In many cases, particularly in California and other typically liberal states, these people are taking their cases to court and winning because they claim that these religious acts in public places violates the separation of church and state.

The real threat to our freedom of religion comes, not from the anti-religion nuts (although they were the catalyst that started the threat), but rather it’s from members of the government who agree with their position. Currently, people with these views are a minority in government, but as they gradually gain in numbers, it will become much easier for them to impose their views on the rest of us with little to no opposition (since being anti-religion will become the Politically Correct thing to do).

I wouldn’t doubt that pretty soon, the anti-religious groups will claim that having a church in view of a public road violates their First Amendment rights because it is imposing someone else’s religion on them when they use the public road. They will wind up getting their government friends to place zoning restrictions on churches, prohibiting any place of worship from being visible from public lands. As we saw in Nazi Germany, nothing good can come from the government placing restrictions on our religious beliefs, no matter what they may be, because these restrictions will only lead to harsher restrictions.

The First Amendment gives us the freedom of religion (to practice the religion of our choice), not the freedom from it.