Reliance on God’s Law – Utopia or a Dangerous Thing?

On February 22, 1756, John Adams wrote in his diary his thoughts regarding the Bible as a law book. This diary entry was written about twenty years before the Declaration of Independence and about forty years before Adams became the second President of the United States.

Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited! Every member would be obliged in conscience, to temperance, frugality, and industry; to justice, kindness, and charity towards his fellow men; and to piety, love, and reverence toward Almighty God…What a Eutopia, what a Paradise would this region be. (emphasis added) [Diary entry quoted by: William J. Federer, America’s God and Country – Encyclopedia of Quotations, (Coppell, Texas: FAME Publishing, Inc., 1996), p. 7]

While a senator, President Barak Obama gave a speech in 2006 titled “Our Future and Vision for America.”

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values….I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will…Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing… (emphasis added)

It is evident that the anchor for Adams’ law was the objective truths or absolutes found in the Bible and called by various names: permanent things, universals, first principles, eternal truths, and norms. However, the anchor for President Obama’s policy making is man’s law. Man’s law is based on the humanists’ belief that all social constructions are culturally relative as they are shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity. Thus, there can be no universal truths because all viewpoints, lifestyles, and beliefs are equally valid. As a result, no man or group can claim to be infallible with regard to truth and virtue. Rather, truth is produced by the free give and take of competing claims and opinions—that is, truth can be manufactured. In the modern vernacular, Obama’s truths are anchored in moral relativism which denies the existence of an objective moral order and objective truth. Under man’s law fashioned upon a rudderless moral relativism, there can be no room for finding objective truth or judging something based on the concept of right or wrong.

Unlike our Founders it is apparent that President Obama and many of our modern-day leaders see our promise in being a secular nation and, more specifically, a secular nation that is not a Christian nation.

However, the Founders were religion specific—and the basis for their religion was the God of the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians as recorded in the Bible. It was those biblical values that the Founders would not compromise, and it was those values that became the central cultural vision of the United States.

Larry G. Johnson