Rejecting Historical Revisionism And Refuting The Lies Of The Secular Left

By Thomas McInerney LTG, USAF (Ret) and Paul E. Vallely MG, US Army (Ret)

The biggest obstacles the secular left faces in trying to destroy the America of our Founders are the true and recorded history of our country and our nation’s Christian heritage. The unaltered history of the United States clearly and undeniably refutes the lies, distortions, and obfuscations secular leftists are trying to foist on school children, college students, and the American public at large. It also clearly demonstrates America has a strong Christian heritage. Secular leftists fear more than anything the truth about America’s history and its Christian heritage. Together, these two factors stand in the way of everything secular leftists are trying to accomplish with their war on America and Christianity.

Secular humanism and Christianity are two diametrically opposed worldviews; they cannot peacefully co-exist. America was founded by Christians and built on a solid foundation of Christian principles and values. Christianity is antithetical to everything the secular left believes and is trying to do. Therefore, to destroy the America of our Founders, the left must first destroy our history. Secularists must rewrite America’s history to exclude even a hint of Christian influence, and that is exactly what they are trying to do.

Unfortunately, Americans are notorious for their ignorance of U.S. history. Our ignorance of history can be attributed to the propensity of Americans to look to the future not the past, and the fact that secular leftist ideologues control the public schools and most colleges and universities. These two facts have made it easier for secularists to deny our country’s Christian heritage.

It is, therefore, essential for Americans who believe in the vision of our Founders and who want to preserve that vision to learn our nation’s true history and embrace it. When you examine the unaltered historical record, what becomes undeniably clear is the United States of America was founded by Christians and built on a solid foundation of Biblical principles and Christian values. It is these principles and values that will save our country from the left.

THE LEFT’S PLAN FOR REWRITING AMERICA’S HISTORY

Secular leftists have a three-part plan for rewriting America’s history in their own image. Part one of the plan involves writing a new—albeit fictional—history of America and substituting it for the true history. Part two of the plan involves employing one of the favorite stratagems of Hitler’s Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels: tell big lies and repeat them over and over until they are accepted as truth. The third and final part of the plan is to alter the historical record by expunging material the left does not want known from history books and the public square.

Later in this chapter, we explain all three parts of the secular left’s plan for rewriting America’s history as well as what you can do to help reject historical revisionism and refute the lies of the left. But before getting into the details of the secular left’s plan and how to defeat it, we provide an overview of secularization, explain why so many Americans are buying into this destructive concept, and summarize the tragic consequences of secularization. Americans who want to help save our country must understand those who are trying to rewrite, alter, and distort our history and why they are so determined to do so.

SECULARIZATION: A DESTRUCTIVE CONCEPT

If you are going to stand up to and speak out against the secularization of American society, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the concept. Secularization is the process of systematically eliminating God from the culture. It is accomplished by removing the Bible, prayer, Christian symbols, and Christian influence from a nation’s institutions, the public square, and all aspects of daily life.

It is ironic that secularists have gained so strong a foothold in America. Our country’s Founders were guided in every instance by Biblical principles in the deliberations, decisions, and actions that led to the establishment of our nation. However, in the America of today secularists reject any Christian influence in matters of government, public policy, education, and daily life. Therefore, they find it necessary to deny, distort, and rewrite the historical record. The secularization of America began long ago, but it didn’t gain a foothold until 1947 when the Supreme Court handed down one of the most biased decisions in its history: the “separation of church and state” ruling in Everson V. Board of Education.¹ This decision overturned 150 years of legal precedent and is an example of legislating from the bench, a practice that amounts to unconstitutional judicial usurpation. Continuing the practice of judicial usurpation, in 1962 the Supreme Court outlawed sponsored prayer in public schools in Engel v. Vitale.² The Court followed that decision with another outlawing Bible reading in public schools in the case of Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963.³ Both decisions were victories for secular humanists. These Supreme Court decisions gave secular activists the ammunition they needed to begin a frontal assault on Christianity in America.

A key principle of the secular humanist philosophy is moral relativism. Whereas Christians view right, wrong, truth, and falsity as absolute concepts established by God and revealed in Holy Scripture, moral relativists reject God’s Word as the source of truth and claim there are no moral absolutes. To a moral relativist, right, wrong, truth, and falsity are matters of individual choice; people decide for themselves what is right, wrong, true, or false based on their own set of personal beliefs, values, and more to the point, desires.

With moral relativism, what is right or true for one person may not be for another. The ultimate source of truth for a moral relativist is the individual rather than the God of Holy Scripture. In other words, to secularists—based on their principle of moral relativism—each individual human being is his or her own god. Whereas Christianity is the worship of the sovereign God of Holy Scripture, secularism is a manufactured religion in which men and women worship themselves.

Putting aside for the moment that moral relativists reject God as the ultimate source of what is right and true, one could drive a truck through the holes in the logic or, better said, lack of logic underlying their philosophy. For starters, to state there are no moral absolutes is to state an absolute. Said another way, moral relativists state absolutely there are no absolutes. Worse yet, they fail to see the glaring contradiction in this. Further, moral relativists do not really believe what they claim to believe in the first place. Their philosophy is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. For example, moral relativists will admit individuals cannot decide for themselves if murder is wrong. The same goes for stealing. To get around these kinds of inconsistencies in their philosophy, moral relativists claim anything an individual decides to do is right unless it harms someone else. But this is grasping at straws. For example, moral relativists support abortion despite the fact the child who is aborted, its mother, and society in general are all harmed.

The child who is aborted is not just harmed, he or she is killed. Mothers are often harmed when they suffer post-abortion regret, depression, and other emotional problems. Finally, society is doubly harmed. First, aborting thousands of unborn babies devalues human life and contributes, as a result, to such tragedies as gun violence, mass shootings, road rage, and suicide. Second, abortion robs society of an unknown number of individuals who might have changed the world for the better had they lived, individuals who might have become Nobel Prize winners, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, astronauts, political leaders, educators, physicians, pastors, writers, engineers, poets, or presidents.

It is hubris of the worst kind to claim individuals can do anything they want provided their actions do not harm anyone else. Who decides what is harmful to others or to society? Just because an individual thinks his actions are not harmful does not mean they are not. In many cases, the harm may not be readily apparent; it may not manifest itself until years later. This is often the case, for example, with post-abortion regret and depression. Individuals are not equipped to be God and make the kinds of decisions only God can make. This fact alone invalidates secular humanism and moral relativism.

WHY SO MANY AMERICANS ARE BUYING INTO SECULARISM

People without strong Biblical convictions are easy prey for secularists because secular humanism appeals to the sinful nature of man. Secular humanists reject God not because they do not believe in Him, but because they do not want to live in accordance with His Word. They are like the man who claims smoking does not cause cancer simply because he does not want to give up cigarettes. Secular humanism is a hedonistic belief system based on satisfying the self-centered desires of its individual proponents. Secular humanists believe if they want to do something they should be able to do it without the inconvenience of the moral constraints that come with Christianity.

Although its proponents deny the fact, secular humanism is a religion, one that allows individuals to be their own gods. Their guiding principle of moral relativism introduces several inconsistencies into the religion of secular humanism. As a result, secular humanists struggle to answer inconvenient questions raised by the principle of moral relativism, questions such as this: What happens when one secularist believes something is right and another believes it is wrong? How do secularists resolve these kinds of differences between and among the little gods who make up their constituent group? The answer to this question is simple: They cannot.

The principles of secularism are the opposite of the Biblical principles upon which our nation was founded. America’s Founders knew the Bible and what it teaches. This knowledge led them to adopt specific principles and values that helped shape America and make it the most powerful, prosperous, and free nation on earth. Traditional values associated with the Biblical principles that guided our Founders include freedom, individual rights, justice, peace, equality, personal responsibility, upward mobility, fair competition, free enterprise, the rule of law, self-determination, private property, and service above self through charity and volunteerism.

Individual human beings who view the world through the lens of self-interest are not capable of conceiving such selfless values. These kinds of values run counter to human nature because human nature is fallen and, thus, guided by sin. Only a Holy God who is incapable of sin could be the originator of the kinds of values America’s Founders envisioned. The Founders did not originate the values that made America great; they adopted them from the Word of God.

A key point of contention between Christians and secularists is the sovereignty of God. Christians believe the individual rights spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights come from the God of Holy Scripture. Secularists believe these rights come from government. They also deny the authority of God, substituting instead the authority of individuals to determine what is right for themselves. Secularists reject God because they want to be guided in life by their own personal desires without the inconvenience of answering to a higher power. As a result, they are like lost hikers stumbling around in a forest without a compass, unsure of where they are or where they are going.

TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES OF SECULARIZATION

When they boarded the Mayflower, the Pilgrims were not seeking adventure, wealth, or fame. Rather, they risked everything sailing to America seeking something of much greater value to them: religious freedom. To be able to worship God without interference from kings and queens or their minions meant more than life itself to these intrepid early settlers. After a difficult voyage of sixty-six days, the Pilgrims got off to a shaky start in the new land, but they persevered and, with God’s help, endured. What they began at Plymouth Rock on November 11, 1620, would eventually become the United States of America on July 4, 1776. Of course, a long and costly war had to be fought before the dream of America could become a reality. The new nation described in philosophical terms in the Declaration of Independence and practical terms in the Constitution would be richly blessed by God. Fast-forward to the present. Much has changed since 1776 when thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, and the changes have not been for the better.

Ignoring or, worse yet, denying our country’s Christian heritage, many Americans today reject God. In addition, anti-God activists and organizations have used the courts, public schools, colleges, universities, textbook publishers, the entertainment industry, politics, and the media to chip away at our religious liberty, attempting thereby to remove God from the lives of Americans. These attacks have degraded the culture in ways that are harmful to all Americans, including the secularists who blindly employ them. As a result, all Americans are suffering the tragic consequences of secularization, including secularists.

Consider just a few of the problems that have resulted from the secularization of American society. Abortion is common, widespread, and legal up to the moment of birth. Worse yet, advocates of this heinous practice have even tried to legalize post-birth abortions. Drug abuse and alcoholism have reached epidemic proportions. Pornography, including child pornography, is ubiquitous. Gun violence, mass shootings, human trafficking, child abuse, teen suicide, and corruption in government and business are now so common they have become a normal part of the culture. In late 2021, there was a cancel culture move to eliminate Thanskgiving.

Even worse than the societal problems that have resulted from secularization is the attitude of secularists toward the church. The religion clause of the First Amendment was intended to protect the church from government, but secularists conveniently ignore this fact choosing instead to claim government and, in turn, the American people must be protected from religion. Secularists claim this need to protect people from religion gives government the right to control the church. This distortion of the intent of the First Amendment was used by public officials to advance their secular agenda during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021. Governments in some states used concerns for public safety—people meeting in groups—to force churches to close their doors. Even churches that applied all the precautions recommended by the government’s own healthcare agencies were forced to close their doors.

At the same time, secular state officials allowed people to congregate in bars, frequent liquor stores, and shop at major retail outlets as if people in groups in these settings were somehow immune to COVID-19. Even more ironic or hypocritical, state, and municipal governments in numerous large cities allowed thousands of people to congregate for the purpose of demonstrating and rioting. Applying the most convoluted logic imaginable, secular public officials declared religious services nonessential but bars, liquor stores, and riots essential.

Those who reject God are in the ascendency in America. Secularism is on the rise and Christianity is in decline. Whereas the church once influenced society and established cultural norms, society is now influencing the church. As a result, cultural norms are now controlled by secular ideologues in government, education, the entertainment industry, and social media. Whereas education, government, the public square, the culture, and society in general were once strongly influenced by Christianity, that influence is in decline as increased Americans join the secular-humanist movement and get their guidance from television, movies, and the Internet rather than Holy Scripture.

As Christians, we cannot justify sitting back and ignoring what is happening all around us, nor can we justify surrendering a nation blessed by God to secular ideologues who reject him. Remaining silent in the face of evil is the same as condoning evil. If Christians do not unite with one voice and stand up to the onslaught of secularism our churches are going to become like the Alamo, tiny fortresses surrounded by an enemy bent on their destruction. God makes clear in His Word what is expected of Christians when faced with challenges such as the growth of secularism. In James 4:17 we read: “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” As Christians, we know the right thing to do. We are to strap on the armor of God, become Christian soldiers, and do the demanding work of reclaiming America for Christ. Christians who remain silent when they should speak up and who sit idly by when they should act are committing the very sin the Apostle James warned about in his epistle to Jewish Christians.

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