At his inauguration, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not use the Bible to take his oath of office. Asserting his freedom of religion, he confessed his Islam faith by placing his hand on the Quran. For centuries here in the United States of America, men taking their oath of office have publicly demonstrated their submission to God by placing their hand on His Holy Word, the Bible. During his inauguration, our first president, George Washington, also kissed the Bible, and many followed him in that statement of faith in Scripture’s God.
Not Mayor Mamdami. He rejects the Only True God, declaring his faith in Allah.
But Allah is no god. As the Bible testifies over and over again:
For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the LORD made the heavens. (Psalm 96:5)
Do the residents of New York City trust that their mayor’s public repudiation of the God of the Old and New Testament has no bearing on his fitness for office nor his fulfillment of his oath?
This Quran is a first among the mayors of New York City. Doing something unprecedented, Mayor Mamdami has chosen the Quran as proof of his religious commitment to fulfill his oath of office, thus announcing the arrival of Islamic power here in the United States of America. It is a profoundly symbolic act for him to begin his rule there at the heart of America’s largest city.
This is a sea-change in our national life, so let’s ask whether Mayor Mamdami’s stake in the heart of America’s Christian public rituals in our public square is just a ho-hum thing which is required of us by our First Amendment’s Establishment Clause:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
For decades, Secularists have fought to remove Christian content from America’s public spaces and rituals. Their battle cry has been “separation of church and state,” but to say “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” is far from saying “Congress shall make laws enforcing a complete separation of church and state—what they claim to be a naked public square.
To make no law establishing religion is a negative duty. This you must not do.
To separate church and state is a positive duty. This you must do.
The success of Secularists in replacing the first duty with the second in the consciousness of American citizens is shown by the constant repetition of “separation of church and state” in common parlance. Hardly anyone knows or speaks of “the Establishment Clause” any longer.
Upon the occasion of Mayor Mamdami’s replacement of our Bible with his Quran, two things need our attention.
First, when Secularists’ Separation Clause replaces the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, don’t think this means religion is banned from the public square. It’s what they want you to think, but it’s a lie.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Secularists are at their most intense in their denial that their Secularism is a religion, but that intensity of denial has a religious fervor.
Christians know no man is godless. God the Father Almighty created us for worship and this principle of worship is so fundamental to man that even his rebellion against God is an act of worship.
Every university community attracts young men claiming to be atheists who hang around on the edges of Evangelical campus ministries. Talking with them, the Christian soon realizes his rejection and rebellion against God the Father Almighty is what is driving him—not any rejection of Thor, Vishnu, Apollo, Deva, Gaia, Mother Earth, or Allah.
Keep in mind that the sexual degradation of the Gentiles described in Romans 1 which God “gave them over” to is specifically said to be His judgment upon them for their sin of turning away from worshipping Him, to the worship of His creation instead:
Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 1:24-25)
The religion of Secularists is their rejection, also, of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Like the Gentiles in the Ancient Roman Empire, atheists and Secularists today repudiate God for the sake of “the lie,”1 which still today is the worship of the Creator’s creation instead of the Creator Himself. Charles Taylor writes:
Perhaps one might imagine a society in which people would live without any reference to God, without any awareness of this negative fact… Perhaps an atheist might look forward to this utterly Godless society. Whether it ever could exist or not, it plainly is very different from our present society. But there are serious reasons to doubt whether it could exist….
But the interesting issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated. A condition of absence of religion which would no longer deserve the name unbelief. (A Secular Age, Charles Taylor; p. 268)
For too long, Christians have accepted, and even given credence to, the Secularists’ claim that they are not religious at all, and that to enforce their negation of the Creator and His Moral Law across our public square, instituting instruction in that negation as the core curriculum of our nation’s government schools, is merely the separation of church and state required by our Constitution.
Everywhere this lie that Secularism is no religion at all rears its evil head, Christians must respond, “Secularism is a religion of negation, with its own temple prostitutes, sacraments, sacred places and texts, priests and priestesses, and endless orgies of child sacrifice.” Like all the pagans before them, Secularists worship bloodshed.
Atheists and Secularist alike are fools united in their denial of the true God and their demand that all bow down to their gods. The Secularist is intense in his opposition to the God of Gods, and his demands in behalf of his own god named “Not Religion” and “Not-God.” He’s been so successful in his evangelism that he’s been able to get taxpayers to fund his own religious educational institutions going by the name of “public education.” He claims his “non-sectarian public education” is merely the enforcement of “separation of church and state.”
Which brings us back to the question of the proper definition of “religion?” Here’s Wikipedia’s generously inclusive first statement in its lengthy entry under “religion”:
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.
There is no areligious education. Not of preschool students. Not of college and graduate students. Education is intrinsically religious. As a matter of fact, life is religious, and so is living. As Augustine observed, we sleep religiously. Not just Christians and Muslims, but atheists and Secularists.
We who follow Christ have made up the majority of the electorate throughout the decades of the growth of Secularist hegemony across our continent which has left the true religion, the true Moral Law, and the true God of Christianity banned from the public square, and the non-gods of Secularists ruling us. We were too scared or nice to fight them, so now the Muslims are flexing their Quran and jihad in the name of Allah. Across the country, they presently make up only about one percent, but in our federal prisons, Muslims are closing in on twenty-percent of our prison population.
What about New York City?
Their new mayor is a socialist and ran on promises he’ll transfer investors and workers’ wealth to the poor. This has gotten all the attention, yet Mayor Mamdani’s socialism is insignificant when placed next to his religion. The home of Islam’s 9/11 slaughter is now governed by a Muslim taking his oath on a Quran.
It’s a lie that the U.S. Constitution requires that, with respect to religion, the public square must be stripped naked. Speaking for myself as a citizen of the United States of America, I am opposed to electing rulers who are Muslims. I oppose any Christian who says electing Muslims is a thing of indifference. Whatever his color or race, no Christian citizen of the United States of America should ever think the assumption of significant authority by election of an Allah-confessing Muslim is in any way indifferent.
Yes, I oppose the movement labelling itself “Christian Nationalism.” I’ve written a lot explaining that. Yes, I oppose works seeking to establish Reformed Protestantism as the legally recognized and codified national religion. Yes, I oppose Secularists promoting their grasp on civil authority based on the lie that they and their ideological commitments are in any way areligious.
Every civil authority will be religious. He is incapable of suppressing his innate drive to worship, and thus the only question will be whether He will worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Whom Scripture reveals to eternally exist One God in three Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit?
So, having dispensed with the Big Lie that the public square must be stripped of religion, and the other Big Lie that anyone—especially Secularists—is areligious, the question for individual Christians is whether or not we will oppose firmly and publicly the promotion of Muslims to authority over us and our fellow citizens of this land of ours, bequeathed us by God and settled by our fathers and mothers two and three centuries ago?
To oppose the takeover of this land by worshippers of Allah does not require the reversal of our Establishment Clause, nor does it necessitate government by Reformed Protestant theonomists. It’s simply an act of kindness to the citizens of our country to guard them from Islam.
| ↑1 | The definite article is in the original. |
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