Also, codeemax, I too lived through the VietNam era. It was horrible watching friends go off to war like it was a death sentence. No one was supporting them. When they returned there was no fanfare. Where I was living, religion wasn’t prevalent and looking back if God was helping us make decisions, it would have been a better time. It was a very dark time for teens where I lived. Everything was crumbling around us.

Our faith needs to drive our decisions our actions, our mouths, our pocketbooks, and to help us understand how we are to handle all aspects of our lives we must study His Word and pray, then serve!

The Quakers and Puritans came to America to escape persecution in England to set up their own colony. This is the fundamental start of the United States of America.

Declaration of Independence signers such as Samuel Adams and Charles Carroll cited religious freedom as the reason they became involved in the American Revolution. Almost half of the signers of the Declaration (24 of 56) held what today would be considered seminary or Bible school degrees. In fact, the Declaration of Independence acknowledges God (Creator) in the statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The problem is that revisionism is what is being taught in schools today. The “separation of church and state” has been revised to mean that there shall be no religion in government instead of it’s original intent which was to prevent the use of a state run religion from subverting freedom of religion like what was being done with the Church of England against the Puritans and Quakers.

I would encourage anyone reading this to visit: http://www.wallbuilders.com/
They have an incredible amount of historical documentation on the role of religion in the American government.

Phillip

I don’t want to pick only the subject of ‘war’ out of all the other important parts of this ‘gray’ puzzle, but I have a theory that no government official or representative should be allowed to start a war unless they have actually been in one and huddled in a hole or a vehicle with a dead comrade or two—experiencing all the bloody stuff that goes along with that.

In that context, sending folks off to kill other folks is not just a chess game.

Overall I think there is one issue underneath this bigger issue of faith and politics that people forget. The key question is what is the best mechanism to right society’s wrongs as Adam might put it. I would argue Government is not the best mechanism. The church is the best mechanism.

A good book to read on the subject is “What if Jesus was never born” by the late Dr. James Kennedy. He showed in the book that the Christian faith has done so much for the development of Western Society. The book and Adam both showed how the first hospitals in the world was started by the church, not GOVERNMENT. The first Universities and public schools in general were first started by the church, not the GOVERNMENT. If you look at the institutions with the best records of helping people it is the churches, not GOVERNMENT programs.

I would argue that the Jesus teachings were aimed at individuals, not government policy. He even says in Mark 12:16 to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Yes, our individual actions should be motivated by the bible, not government policy.

The founding fathers feared big government. That is one of the reasons they set up a system of checks and balances on power. Several feared big government out to help that they put in the bill of rights to limit government. Thomas Jefferson said “That government is best which governs least” Power in government comes may ways, through laws and through money. Large programs to “FIX” problems in the past has only created more problems. Look at the Johnson war on poverty in the 60s. All we did was spend billions and the problem got worse. Look at the public school system in general and that proves the point by itself.

I want to urge people to look carefully at their decisions in the election. Be careful of voting for candidates which promise large government programs out of compassion and sympathy. Don’t let the sad pictures in campaign ads or TV shows motivate you in the ballot box. Yes, something should be done for those things. I just say the government shouldn’t be the device. Feeding government out of this guilt feeling from prosperity will only create problems. It will only drain public money, raise taxes, and generally make the problem worse than it was before. The accompanying implementation regulations on the “help” programs will only squash individual freedom and cost us a ton of money.

Use that guilt feeling you have from success to start something within the confines of the church to “fix” the problem. For if we don’t and vote for the bigger government we will wake up in 8 years and realize what President Reagan said “Government is the problem and not the solution”.

I also think that faith plays a great role in international politics and relationships among countries. When the political leaders of any given country are tied too closely with a particular faith tradition there is the potential of confusion between conflict with the nation or with the faith. I think that this will continue to be a critical issue in international affairs.

You’ve looked at a lot of walls in DC. Sounds like you’ve been inspired and for good reason.

May I suggest you look at one more wall before you leave? That would be the one not far from where MLK gave his most inspiring speech—the Vietnam Memorial. Almost sixty thousand ‘dead Americans’ are honored there, some of them my close friends and comrades.

There is a lesson there—directly connected to ‘religion and politics’. It’s most important, as important as anything else you’ve mentioned in your blog.

I’m not sure how you view the casualties of war, especially unjust wars, but they most certainly represent one of the failures of our government—the absence of a national morality—perhaps a failure of ‘the church’ to influence, represented by the people we Christians help elect to office.

What can we do?