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Confessions of a “Christian Constitutionalist”


Authored By Dr. Jerry Newcombe | April 19, 2018

After a recent column on “fake news,” someone sent me an email, accusing me of propagating fake news by saying the Bible had anything to do with the founding of America.

The email stated the common charge that the Constitution was the product of men of the Enlightenment, with Masonic influence as well. Unfortunately, this reader, like so many others, fails to understand the historical truth that the Bible played a unique role in helping to create the U.S. Constitution.

The Biblical concept of covenants gave rise to the Puritan-type covenants. The Pilgrims began the process in the Mayflower Compact of 1620, which was done “in the name of God,” in which they declared their purpose was “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” as they formed “a civil body politic.” After this Compact, there came about a hundred or so Bible-inspired covenants, frames of government, and articles in America, leading all the way to the U.S. Constitution in 1787. 

One of these Puritan documents was the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639, which says they started their colony for the “liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” The Fundamental Orders was the first complete constitution written on American soil and is believed by historians to have impacted the U. S. Constitution. This is why Connecticut calls itself “the Constitution State.”

The U. S. Constitution itself says that it was done “in the year of our Lord”—meaning Jesus. But also it was done in the 12th year of independence. The Constitution is predicated on the Declaration of Independence—our national birth certificate, which mentions God four times.

Was all this the product of men of the Enlightenment?

The late Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute made a great point about the Enlightenment. It was not monolithic, and there were really two types of Enlightenment thinkers: those that were solidly within the Judeo-Christian tradition (e.g., Montesquieu, John Locke, Sir William Blackstone) and those not (e.g., David Hume, Voltaire, Diderot).

America’s founders quoted heavily from the Bible, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke—in that order.

  • In his The Spirit of Laws, Baron Montesquieu wrote: “We shall see that we owe to Christianity, in government, a certain political law, and in war a certain law of nations—benefits which human nature can never sufficiently acknowledge.”

  • Sir William Blackstone, who has often been quoted by the Supreme Court, said that the laws of nature were written by God and were supplemented by the Holy Scriptures. He wrote: “This law of nature being…dictated by God Himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity if contrary to this.”

  • John Locke penned: “The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men.” I used to have a Sunday school teacher, Dr. Greg Forster, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale studying Locke and became a Christian because of Locke’s classic book, The Reasonableness of Christianity.  

Although not all framers of the Declaration and Constitution were orthodox Christians, about 95 percent of the founding fathers were active members of Trinitarian Christian churches. To many of them, the Christian faith was central in their lives:

  • In his “Circular to the States” (1783), George Washington said that America could never hope to be a happy nation unless we learned to imitate Jesus, “the divine author of our blessed religion.”

  • In his Inaugural Address (1797), John Adams calls “a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service.”

  • Thomas Jefferson said that Jesus is the reason we can have religious freedom. To force people to believe in religious views they don’t share are a departure from Him, “the holy author of our religion.” Jefferson wrote this in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777, adopted 1786).

  • James Madison, a key leader in the creation of the Constitution, wrote that our obligations to God come before those to the state: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.”

As to the Masonic charge, I view it as an anachronistic charge. The Masons in America did not become anti-Christian until the 1830s and thereafter, long after the time of the framing of our founding documents. 

God and the Bible are greater than anyone or any country. But I think we do a disservice to our history to discount the incredibly positive role the Scriptures played in helping to shape this nation.

In the email that prompted this column, I was accused of being a “Christian constitutionalist.” Guilty as charged.

### 

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is an on-air host/senior producer for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written/co-written 29 books, e.g., The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, The Book that Made America, Doubting Thomas (w/ Mark Beliles, on Jefferson), and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (w/ D. James Kennedy) & the bestseller, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (w/ Peter Lillback)   djkm.org  @newcombejerry      www.jerrynewcombe.com

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Early American Legal Scholar Called the 2nd Amendment “A Palladium of Liberty”


waving flagWritten by Onan Coca

URL of the original posting site: http://eaglerising.com/34535/early-american-legal-scholar-called-the-2nd-amendment-a-palladium-of-liberty/

2nd Amendment Gun Shall Not be Infringed

“This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…The right of self defense is the first law of nature: in most government it has been the study of rules to confirm this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color of pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”

— St. George Tucker from View of the Constitution of the United States

(palladium2/ /pəˈleɪdɪəm/  noun 1. something believed to ensure protection; safeguard)Hey Leftist

Taylor Millard at HotAir, and Damon Root from Reason Online recently did every American a favor by dredging up the important writings of an early American legal scholar by the name of St. George Tucker. Tucker was a Law Professor at the College of William and Mary before being named as a justice on the Virginia Supreme Court in the early 1800s (1804 – 1811). After several years of service to Virginia, he was called to the Federal bench by Presidents Madison and then Monroe where he served as a US District Court Judge. So the man knows of what he speaks when it comes to commenting on the 2nd Amendment and the Constitution. The above mentioned bloggers used the furor surrounding the Orlando terrorist attack and the subsequent calls from Democrats for gun control to remind us all about the true meaning of the 2nd Amendment… and it’s not hunting.

Portrait of St. George Tucker by Charles B.J.F. de Saint-Mémin.

Portrait of St. George Tucker by Charles B.J.F. de Saint-Mémin.

Millard points out that Tucker’s words echo loudly today because it’s almost as if he were answering the very objections modern Democrats continue to raise about what the Founders intended when it came to guns. Democrats often argue that they only spoke of muskets, to which Tucker replies “not so fast.” Democrats also complain that England (from where we get much of our legal tradition) has outlawed guns, to which Tucker responds, ‘Tyranny’!

Here’s what Tucker had to say about England’s early attempts at gun control:

In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorize the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

Then over at Reason, Root, further uses Tucker to illustrate that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written with today’s Democrats in mind (and not in a good way).

James Madison, the primary architect of the new Constitution, took seriously such Anti-Federalist objections. “The great mass of the people who opposed [the Constitution],” Madison told Congress in 1789, “dislike it because it did not contain effectual provision against encroachments on particular rights.” To remove such objections, Madison said, supporters of the Constitution should compromise and agree to include “such amendments in the constitution as will secure those rights, which [the Anti-Federalists] consider as not sufficiently guarded.” Madison then proposed the batch of amendments that would eventually become the Bill of Rights.

What “particular rights” did the Anti-Federalists consider to be “not sufficiently guarded” by the new Constitution? One right that the Anti-Federalists brought up again and again was the individual right to arms.

2ndFor example, Anti-Federalists at the New Hampshire ratification convention wanted it made clear that, “Congress shall never disarm any Citizen unless such as are or have been in Actual Rebellion.” Anti-Federalists at the Massachusetts ratification convention wanted the Constitution to “be never construed…to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable, from keeping their own arms.”

Meanwhile, in the Anti-Federalist stronghold of Pennsylvania, critics at that state’s ratification convention wanted the Constitution to declare, “that the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own State, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals.”

It seems pretty clear, based on the writing and observations of one of America’s foremost early legal scholars, that the 2nd Amendment was intended to be sacrosanct. In fact, Tucker wasn’t just any old legal scholar… his work, View of the Constitution of the United States, was the very first systematic commentary on the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

When liberals try to argue that the Founders never intended for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to protect American ownership of firearms, end their ignorance and point them to St. George Tucker.

H/T HotAir and Reason

This was crossposted at Constitution.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca

Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Liberty Alliance media group. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. You can read more of his writing at Eagle Rising.  Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children.

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