Commentary: Freedom of Worship isn’t Freedom of Religion

As an American do you enjoy freedom of religion or freedom of worship and what’s the difference?  President Obama likes to refer to “freedom of worship” and it now appears his phraseology has trickled down through his administration.  This story attests to the subtle changes.  For the uninformed there are 5 liberties enumerated in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  These are God given rights to freedom of religion, press, assembly, petition and speech.  Religion encompasses your relationship with the Creator of the universe and He was recognized by the founders as the originators of your rights.  Not government.

The Obama shift in language betrays a goal of the American left.  You may remember the younger brother of New York State’s leftist Governor, Andrew Cuomo, recently telling a guest on CNN your rights are not granted by God but by government.  If Washington grants you these rights then Washington can take them away.  Knowing especially there is resistance to this approach among the God fearing religious the left now insists it’s only freedom to worship.

Government now says you’ve a right to go into a temple or church once every week and praise for one hour an entity the left doesn’t believe exists.  For better effect Mr. Obama and his allies believe they’re being generous by allowing the superstitious fools their rituals out of sight and behind walls for a few minutes weekly.  You’re the bitter clingers he once described and he’s proud of his attention to the dumb animals living amongst the new and enlightened general population.  It was Hitler and Goebbels who believed if you repeated a lie long enough and frequently it then becomes the accepted truth.  So, you now have only freedom of worship.  Beyond your hour Sunday morning or Saturday night you’re not supposed to speak of your faith or try and live it in the workplace and anywhere in the public sphere.

Writing today at the Wall Street Journal the author Charlotte Allen portrays the vast majority of American media as complicit in the ruse.  “Media sympathy for the Kleins’ claim that being forced to participate in a same-sex wedding would violate their consciences ranged from nonexistent to . . . nonexistent,” she says.  Allen, who has written about the historical Jesus, doesn’t mince words when it comes to attacks on Christian bakers, photographers and pizza parlor owners.  ” The victors have dropped their conciliatory stance. Bubonic plague-level hysteria surged through the media, academia and mega-corporate America in March after Indiana passed a law—modeled on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993—that would enable religious believers to opt out of universally applicable laws under some circumstances,” she explains.  A link can be found here to her entire column.

This rapid shift in our culture has happened with breathtaking speed.  When I was working my first few jobs in news media in the late 1980s the power of not only the Christian right but traditional Christians was still very much respected in state houses and on Capitol Hill.  And very much in the White House by a faithful ally named Ronald Reagan.  Many young idealists at the time were polar opposites of the frothing-at-the-mouth hippies who spread their virus across the landscape just twenty years before.  Many thought it a turning point in America but now in hindsight it looks as if it was only one last gasp of tradition.  The threat to people of faith has so permeated social mores and thinking that corporations now find Christians controversial and the radical left a larger market for products.  Let’s be forthright, the corporate types aren’t much for value judgments.  It’s about sales.  Demographic research reveals people of faith are a shrinking slice of the consumer pie.  Instead as the road to Gomorrah increasingly resembles a heavily trafficked Los Angeles freeway the bottom line is in hot pursuit.  It’s why as this link shows us there isn’t any fear of not only alienating people of faith but a need to punish them.  The punishing draws the approval of the licentious and the godless.  Corporate sales craves approval and dollars.

A few years ago I was lunching with a close friend.  His father, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher had been a classmate of Billy Graham.  The legendary evangelist had asked my friend’s father to be a singer on crusade.  When Reverend Plack, who had been offered a church in Pennsylvania declined, Graham then turned to George Beverly Shea.  My friend that day at lunch was telling me our country was ready and on the cusp of the next Great Awakening.  His confidence gave me a shot of adrenaline.  A good half-a-decade has since passed following our talk and I’m disappointed.  Reverend Graham was a Christian and American icon.  A Wesleyan friend once joked Graham was the Protestant equivalent of the Roman Catholic Pope.  There was much truth in the description, however.  Graham’s children have taken his place in ministry and have made no changes in the message their father took to all coasts and around the planet.  He was respected.  Today mainstream media reviles his children as much as it reviles all God’s faithful flock.

How and where did we lose the world?