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Let's face it: the separation of church and state in America can be confusing as all get-out. Just when you think you've got Jefferson's "wall of separation" down pat, every now and then a Supreme Court ruling comes along and turns everything you thought you knew upside down. Now I'm not much of a church-goer, but there is something deeply wrong-indeed, deeply anti-American-about eliminating the use of the Bible for swearing-in ceremonies and in courtrooms. It seems perfectly ok for atheists and secularists to deny the existence of God, which they have every right to do. But when someone believes there are objective moral values in the world, all of the sudden he is a fanatic. And if those objective moral values happen to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, why, the very public acknowledgment of that view becomes a violation of the Constitution.

What nonsense. The campaign against the Bible is merely the philisophical cover for an attempt to deny the existence of objective moral values. Instead of arguing the merits of the issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side is bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy.

Nothing sticks in the craw of secularists more than the explicit references to God in our currency, national seal, legislative prayers, "Pledge of Allegiance," national anthem, and oaths sworn in federal courts. Such motifs, religious and unapologetic, are portrayed as double standards, a virtual endorsement of one religion over another by the federal government, a breach of the American tradition of pluralism, free-exercise, liberty and justice.

That portrayal is denial masquerading as constitutional purity. You want Darwinism? You want atheism? How about a people who proclaim the death of God, commit all manner of socially unacceptable behaviors, like stealing, with the rationale that there is nothing to prove that molesting child is really wrong? If the Ten Commandments are irrevelant, do objective moral values really exist? Says who? Without the Bible, there is no absolute right and wrong which does not change.

But the truth is that objective values do exist, and we all know it. Actions like rape, torture, child abuse didn't just become wrong over the years as natural products of evolution. They were always wrong. The man who says it is morally acceptable to murder is just as mistaken as the man who says 1+1=3. And so the Founders, mindful as they were of inherent human depravity, gave us a Constitution that, while truly a secular document, clearly bears the mark of the men who believed in universal rights as given by God and that those objective moral values were permanently enshrined in the Bible. And not even Jefferson, the most secular of the bunch, had any doubts about that.

Learn more about this author, Jeffrey Jason Hill.
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