Read Textual Sermon from Robert Jeffress
America’s Christian Heritage
Jesus declared, “You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” With so much darkness creeping into our schools and communities, now is the time to answer that calling.
“You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:13–14, NKJV)
Joseph Story was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1811 by James Madison. If you know anything about American history, you know James Madison is said to have been the architect of our Constitution. So James Madison is the one who appointed Joseph Story, who said this is a Christian nation and talked about impostor religions. Now, do you think James Madison—who knew the Constitution backwards and forwards, was its architect—would appoint some imbecile to the Supreme Court who didn’t understand the purpose of the Constitution? Of course not. He appointed Joseph Story because he knew Story understood the Constitution.
Later in his career, Joseph Story went on to write a commentary on the entire United States Constitution that was, for years, used in law schools around the country. In his notes on the First Amendment about the Establishment Clause, he said it is absolutely without debate that the founders’ intention in that Establishment Clause was to keep from elevating one Christian denomination over another Christian denomination. But never in the founders’ imagination did they think that would be used to make Christianity subservient to other non-Christian religions.
Consider also the Christian influence in our country for the first 150 years of our nation. Did you know that for the first 150 years of our country, a schoolbook called the New England Primer was used in schools across our country? The Primer was filled with creeds, prayers, and even Scripture verses that the students had to memorize. In fact, if you were going to graduate from the third grade, every student had to learn this acrostic from the New England Primer—every letter of the alphabet represented a verse that the students had to memorize. For example:
- A. “A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.”
- B. “Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble.”
- C. “Come unto Christ all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and He will give you rest.”
- D. “Do not the abominable thing which I hate, saith the Lord.”
- E. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
That’s what our students had to memorize in school. Can you imagine what would happen with such a textbook today? We’re not even allowed to acknowledge that there might be a Creator up there somewhere—some intelligent Designer who made us. Do you think that has any relationship with the increasing violence we’re seeing in our schools? When you teach children that they’re nothing but animals, don’t be surprised when they act like animals.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10, NKJV)
But what I’m sharing with you is this was the spiritual foundation on which our nation was built.
The Shift in Church and State
So the natural question is, what happened? How do you explain this seismic shift in the attitude toward faith in the public square that we’ve witnessed in these last decades?
First, the first stone that was laid in the erection of the “wall of separation between church and state” actually happened in 1947. This was the Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education. This is the first time the words “separation of church and state” were ever mentioned in a Supreme Court decision. Isn’t this interesting? For the first 150 years of our nation’s history, not one Supreme Court decision ever talked about the separation of church and state. The first time it was mentioned was in 1947. You have to ask, if this is such a principled and foundational doctrine of our country, why didn’t the Supreme Court refer to it for 150 years?
The first time it was mentioned was in the case of Everson and the Board of Education. This case dealt with the State of New Jersey using tax dollars to support religious schools. Now remember, back then most all religious schools were Catholic schools. Remember that the justice of the Supreme Court who delivered that decision in the Everson case was Justice Hugo Black. In that decision, Hugo Black talked about his desire to build a “high and impregnable wall” of separation between the church and the state.
What you need to know about Hugo Black is this: he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And the only people the Ku Klux Klan hated more than Black people were Catholic people. Many people now believe—including two recent justices on our Supreme Court, the late Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—that Hugo Black’s wall of separation was really an expression of his anti-Catholic bigotry. He wanted to keep the Catholic Church from receiving any support whatsoever. In fact, Justice Clarence Thomas said this, in essence: This doctrine of the separation of church and state—born in bigotry—should be buried.
There you have the first stone in 1947. Then built upon that was the second stone in 1962, Engel v. Vitale. In this case, the Court ruled that students in New York City could no longer recite this simple 22-word voluntary prayer: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” Can you imagine saying that’s unconstitutional? But the Court said even though it was a to-whomever-it-may-concern prayer—not addressed to any particular god—it was still breaching the so-called constitutional wall of separation between the church and state. In fact, the Court went on to opine that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.
That sounds so enlightened to us today. But remember what John Quincy Adams said: the highest glory of the American Revolution is this, that it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government and the precepts of Christianity.
Ironically, even though this court case said you cannot pray in the public school, it’s interesting that even today the United States Congress begins every session in prayer. I was privileged a couple of years ago to lead one of those prayers to begin the congressional session. Those prayers are recorded every day in the Congressional Record. But in 1970, the Supreme Court said that it is unconstitutional for students to voluntarily read aloud the prayers recorded in the Congressional Record. That is absolute lunacy. But that’s where we’re going.
The third stone was laid in 1963: Abington School District v. Schempp. This case said students could no longer voluntarily read ten verses of the Bible at the beginning of each school day. The prosecution brought in so-called expert testimony that said if portions of the New Testament were read without explanation, they could be psychologically harmful to the students, and therefore you can’t do it.
Yet compare that to what the Supreme Court had said decades earlier, in 1844, in theGirard case: Why may not the Bible, especially the New Testament, be read and taught as divine revelation in the schools? Why can’t its general precepts be expounded, its evidences explained, and its glorious principles of morality inculcated? Do you see the shift there?
Two more: DeSpain v. DeKalb County (1967). This let stand a lower court ruling in 1966 that said a kindergarten teacher could no longer allow her students to recite this simple poem: “We thank You for the flowers so sweet. We thank You for the food we eat. We thank You for the birds that sing. We thank You for everything.” The court said you can’t say that anymore in a school. Why? Because even though this poem does not mention God, it might cause the children to think about God, and that is unconstitutional.
The culminating ruling: 1980, Stone v. Graham. This case involved the display of the Ten Commandments in the halls of Kentucky schools. Private donors had allowed the Ten Commandments—without any explanation at all, just the Ten Commandments—to be posted in the hallways of the public schools. Yet the Supreme Court said, “No longer can you do that. No longer can you post these copies of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie. Thou shalt not murder.” Why did they say that was no longer constitutional? The Court said that if the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, they will induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps venerate, and obey the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Again, how do you reconcile that with what the Court had said 150 years earlier—“Why may not the New Testament be read and taught as divine revelation, and its principles of morality inculcated?” How do you reconcile that with the words of John Adams, who said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”? And yet now the Supreme Court says you can’t even tell students they’re not to lie, steal, and kill.
Has the Constitution changed and somebody didn’t tell us? No. What happened is this: we’ve allowed the atheists, the secularists, the infidels to pervert our Constitution into something our founders never intended. And we cannot allow that to happen any longer. It is time for us to stand up and say without apology, America was founded as a Christian nation.
Consequences of Abandoning a Christian Foundation
I read an interesting commentary about me, and a liberal writer was talking about this controversy in our church, and he made an amazing concession. He said, “You know, Jeffress probably has a point. As you look back at the evidence, there is evidence that our nation—from the writings of the founders to the early court opinions—was decidedly biased toward the Christian faith.” He conceded that. He said, “But our nation was also biased and prejudiced, and there are court rulings that supported slavery, and we don’t think that is right. And we needed to change from that. We needed to change and move away from our Christian foundation as well.” Well, isn’t that interesting—that somebody would equate slavery with following God and obedience to God as a nation?
But let’s test his argument. Has it been a positive thing for us as a nation to unhitch ourselves from our Christian forefathers and move into a secular direction? Is our society better today or worse off today than when this assault on Christianity began 60 or 70 years ago? Let’s look at the statistics.
William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, back in the 1990s, released what he called the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators to show what happened in our nation between 1960 and 1990—when this all-out assault was beginning upon our Christian nation, when you saw all of these antagonistic court rulings and the abdication of prayer and Bible reading and the Ten Commandments from the schools. What happened during that 30-year period? During that time there was a 419% increase in illegitimate births, a quadrupling in divorce rates, a more than 200% increase in teenage suicide, a drop of almost 80 points in the SAT scores, and a 560% increase in violent crime.
And today, that pattern still continues. Today, over 10 million teenagers in the U.S. drink alcohol regularly, and 20% of those engage in binge drinking. Nearly 2,800 children die each year as a result of gun violence, and another 14,300 are injured. Nearly 1 million babies were murdered in the womb last year, and one in four women in the U.S. will have aborted at least one of their children by the age of 45. In 2011, over a half-million teenagers became pregnant, with about 30% of those pregnancies ending in an abortion.
Are those statistics just a coincidence? Not at all—not when you consider God’s warning to His own people, the nation of Israel; a warning that is just as applicable to us today as it was 3,000 years ago:
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.” (Hosea 4:6, NKJV)
God is no respecter of persons or nations. The nation that reverences God will be blessed by God. The nation that rejects God will be rejected by God.
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.” (Psalm 33:12, NKJV)
Conclusion and Call
As I close today, I won’t close with a Bible verse or even a quote from a so-called “rabid conservative fundamentalist.” Instead, I want to close with a quote from a very unlikely source: a man named Earl Warren. In the 1950s and 1960s, Earl Warren was the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Growing up in the South, I was led to believe that Earl Warren was a villain of the American people—he was a liberal, a “communist pinko.” That’s how people in the South referred to Earl Warren. As I look back, the reason they hated him was because he believed in racial equality—that had as much to do with it as anything. But Earl Warren, an avowed liberal in many ways, gave this assessment in 1954 of our nation’s Christian heritage. Listen to what he said:
“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have, from the beginning, been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia or the charter of New England or the charter of Massachusetts Bay or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it—freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition; the dignity of the individual; the sanctity of the home; equal justice under the law; and the reservation of powers to the people. I like to believe that we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”
The nation that reverences God will be blessed by God. The nation that rejects God will be rejected by God. The choice is ours.
Selected Scripture (KJV/NKJV)
“You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5:13–14, NKJV)
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10, NKJV)
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” (Hosea 4:6, NKJV)
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.” (Psalm 33:12, NKJV)
“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Proverbs 14:34, NKJV)
Questions This Sermon Answers
- What historical evidence suggests America’s founding was influenced by Christian principles?
- How did key Supreme Court cases from 1947 to 1980 change the role of faith in public education?
- Why did the founders intend the Establishment Clause to prevent preference among Christian denominations rather than suppress Christianity?
- What cultural consequences are cited as results of moving away from a Christian foundation?
- How do specific Scriptures frame the blessings or consequences for a nation regarding its stance toward God?
- Why is the Christian’s role as “salt and light” vital in today’s cultural climate?
