Political Polytheism

Gary North describes his book Political Polytheism in this column: Kevin Craig, Libertarian candidate for U.S. Congress, comments in this column:
Long Description  
Who Is Lord Over The United States?  
      A Christian citizen knows the answer: Jesus Christ. But if this really is the true answer, grounded firmly on the Bible, then why is it that so few Christians are willing to proclaim this fact publicly, and why is it that no Christian political candidate dare mention it? I am one political candidate who dares to mention it.
      There is a reason: the theology of political pluralism, the dominant public theology in our day. "Pluralism" has many different meanings. Wikipedia speaks of

North is speaking of the idea that all religions are given equal weight and respect by political institutions.

Clearly, the U.S. Federal Government today does not believe in this kind of pluralism. In one sense, all religions are equally discriminated against, in favor of the religion of secular humanism. In another sense, all religions except Christianity are tolerated. Government schools will allow a presentation of the religion of Islam, or of Wicca, and students might even be encouraged to dress up in Islamic attire and learn Islamic prayers as a tool of religious tolerance, but never will government students be encouraged to be tolerant or accepting of Christianity.

America's Founders declared that Christianity was the true religion and all others were false religions. This is not "pluralism." However, the Founders also limited the power of the federal government to discriminate between Christian denominations. This might be called "denominational Christian pluralism."

For the first 170 years under the Constitution, courts never treated any other religion as equal to Christianity. The clearest evidence of this is in the way courts treated the Mormons.
      Political pluralism is not simply a political philosophy: it is a theology. It is America's civil religion. This theology teaches that there must never be a nation that identifies itself with any religion. Well, not quite. The nation of Israel is grudgingly allowed to do so, as are the Islamic nations. But no nation is ever supposed to identify itself as Christian. "A Christian nation is self-contradictory!" North is correct in saying that today the idea of America being under the Lordship of Christ is not accepted by the government or its schools and media.
      So we are told. But who tells us?
  
• Secular humanists who are dedicated to wiping out all political opposition.
• Also, Christian teachers who teach in tax-supported schools.
• Also, professors in Christian colleges who attended either state universities or secular humanist private universities, which are the only accredited universities in the United States that grant the Ph.D. degree.		  
      Also, the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Constitution does not rule out America being a Christian nation.  The U.S. Constitution is not a "secular" document.
      This is the problem. God-fearing Christian Americans have been told that the Constitution teaches the absolute separation of Church and State. They have been told correctly. But what they have not been told is precisely where it says this. It does not say this in the First amendment. The First amendment says only that Congress shall make no law regarding religion or the free exercise thereof. So, where does the Constitution prohibit a Christian America? In a section that has been ignored by scholars for so long that it is virtually never discussed—the key provision that transformed American into a secular humanist nation. But it took 173 years to do this: from 1788 until 1961. The phrase "absolute separation of Church and State" is not one frequently employed by courts. Probably most Americans believe the "separation" in the U.S. is not "absolute" as it is in the Soviet Union (Art. 52). The word "church" does not occur in the U.S. Constitution or any of its Amendments. Therefore, to say "the Constitution teaches the absolute separation of Church and State" is a risky statement. It appears that this phrase means "a prohibition on America being Christian." Not a single person who had a hand in creating or ratifying the Constitution intended this result. To ask "where does the Constitution prohibit a Christian America?" is to assume a fact not yet proven. The section North is talking about is Article VI. The 1961 Court case he refers to did not base its decision on Article VI, but on the First Amendment, which North says did not teach the "absolute separation of Church and State." It would be difficult to find a single Founder who said that Article VI prohibits a Christian America. The Framers understood Article VI to prohibit a denominational "test oath," but permitted denominational pluralism. So it would seem that every proposition in this paragraph by North is mistaken.
      Political Polytheism discusses this crucial provision in detail—the first Christian book to do so in over two centuries.  
      But if Christ is Lord over the United States, yet the citizens of the United States either publicly deny this or are afraid to affirm it publicly, and if the elected politicians and appointed officers of the nation are legally prohibited from pursuing the implications of this fact, then what does this mean for the nation? It means that God intends to bring American under judgment. Why? Because this nation was originally founded as a Christian nation, covenanted with God, and then it broke the covenant. The results are predictable: This paragraph is true and accurate, but North's claim that the Framers of the Constitution intended this result is at this point unproven, and has been shown to be wrong. (See the links in this column.)
And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish, As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God.
(Deuteronomy 8:19-20)
 
      This book presents a new vision of politics and a new vision of America, a vision of self-consciously tied to the Bible. It challenges the political myth of humanism: many laws, many gods.  
Inside Flap  
In 1787, every nation on earth was openly religious. Rulers and citizens around the world affirmed the existence of a particular god, and they called upon their god publicly to defend the nation, bless it, and bring his will to pass in history. Even in those religions that affirm no god, such as Buddhism, the people affirmed their faith in a particular religion. Nations were explicitly religious.  
      There was only one exception to this rule in all the earth, one isolated political experiment that had affirmed the possibility—even the moral necessity—of avoiding all public references to religion in its covenantal charter. Its founder believed that no city, not state, and no nation should ever publicly affirm the existence of any particular god or religion. This was the first public experiment in secular humanism. In 1787, it had been in operation for a century and a half. That experiment was called Rhode Island.  
  This is not accurate. Gary North himself describes the facts about "The Rhode Island Experiment" (Political Polytheism, pp. 313-14):
Roger Williams fled Massachusetts . . . in the winter of 1636 . . .and headed into the Wilderness of what was to become Rhode Island. Williams successfully created a new colony. . . .
In 1642, the General Court of Rhode Island organized a new government. It required an oath of office from magistrates to "walk faithfully" and [was] taken "in the presence of God." . . . The colony . . . admitted the existence of "our different consciences touching the truth as it is in Jesus," and affirmed "each man's peaceable and quiet enjoyment of his lawful right and liberty. . . ." They enacted civil laws and sanctions for various crimes, including murder, rebellion, misbehavior, witchcraft, adultery, fornication, perjury, kidnaping, whoremongering, etc. [T]hey made this statement:

These are the laws that concern all men, and these are the penalties for transgression thereof, which, by common assent, and ratified and established throughout the whole colony; and otherwise than thus what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, everyone in the name of his god. And let the saints of the most high walk in this colony without molestation in the name of Jehovah, their God for ever and ever, etc., etc. [cf. Micah 4:1-7]

(North's Ph.D. in history was from the University of California, and his specialty was Puritan history. All quotes are from "Organization of the Government of Rhode Island, March 16-19, 1641/42," in Kavenaugh, ed., Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History, 3 vols, (NY: Chelsea House, 1973) I, p. 343-9)

This is clearly "theocratic" government. It is not "secular." Nobody -- not even Roger Williams -- would support the ACLU's idea of an omnipotent secular federal government that is not Under God. Not a single one of the Founding Fathers. NOBODY.
      Three and a half centuries after its founding, Rhode Island's vision of political order has conquered the Western world. Nonsense. The ideas above — "walking in the Presence of God," "the truth as it is in Jesus," laws against witchcraft, and quoting Micah 4 — have hardly "conquered the Western world" in the 21st century, though they arguably had conquered the Western world in the 1640's.
      Forty miles north of Providence, Rhode Island, another experiment was in progress in 1640. In Boston dwelled the Puritans, the most self-consciously biblical people in history. They had turned to the Bible in search of moral and political order. Their Body of Liberties (1641) served as their political charter, and that charter was biblical to the core, even citing specific Bible verses to justify its laws. Roger Williams argued against the Massachusetts clergy on Biblical grounds. It is a real debate as to who — Williams or the Massachusetts clergy — were more "Biblical." The evidence indicates that Williams had a rebellious and contentious temperament, which attracted unstable personalities to his cause. But Williams was not trying to construct an atheistic state in rebellion against a Christian one. He was trying to create denominational pluralism in contrast to denominational monopoly.
      It was against the Puritans' vision of a New Israel in the New England wilderness that the citizens of Rhode Island rebelled, and in doing so, they led the world, step by step, into a politically conspiracy against God.  
      Governor John Winthrop in 1630 had hoped that Massachusetts would serve the whole world as a city on a hill, a bright beacon of biblical Christianity that would persuade men to construct a biblical civil order in their lands. But it was not Winthrop's beacon that illuminated the future; it was Roger Williams' beacon, a blinding light that promised autonomy from God for humanist political man. Williams defended autonomy from clergy, but not autonomy from God.
      That light has blinded Winthrop's Christian heirs. The thought that a nation can and should be explicitly, publicly Christian is unacceptable to men and women who openly affirm the need for Christian families, Christian schools, and Christian everything else. Tragically true.
      "There is no neutrality," they proclaim, until someone mentions civil government. Then they back off. Here, apparently, there has to be neutrality. Somewhere. Somehow.  
      Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union takes another small town into court for putting up a manger scene at Christmas on public property. Meanwhile, another high school coach is threatened with dismissal for praying with his team before a game. Meanwhile, evolution is taught as a fact in just about every public school biology textbook.  
      Neutrality, you understand. Just good, old fashioned neutrality.  
      Believe that, and you'll believe anything.  
      Boston vs. Providence, Winthrop vs. Williams: in this classic confrontation we can see the beginning of a war that has lasted for three and a half centuries, a war not just for American civilization but for world civilization. For the most part, American Christians have applauded Williams. Also for the most part, they are in political and cultural bondage.  
      In Political Polytheism Dr. Gary North sets forth a challenge to the reigning political philosophy of our day, a philosophy which says that God's people must remain politically silent, that neutrality is a valid religion, and that the King of history must confine Himself to the home, the church, and the funeral parlor. Everything else belongs to autonomous man, this religion asserts.  
      Not so, says Dr. North. Everything belongs to the God of the Bible, and the only way that mankind can build a free society and maintain it is to honor this principle in every area of life.  
      Political Polytheism pulls no punches. It takes on all comers: humanists, Christian philosophers, and historians. Especially historians. Dr. North, himself a trained historian, shows how a conspiracy of silence has joined with another conspiracy—first, to capture the government, and then to rewrite American history.  
      Political Polytheism challenges the myth of neutrality, they myth of political pluralism, and the myth of the Constitutional Convention. There has never been a book like it. The book is designed to launch the hottest political debate since 1787. It asks the most controversial political question that can be asked today: If there is no such thing as neutrality, then whose law should rule supreme, God's or man's? For two centuries, American Christians have refused even to ask the question, let alone answer it.  
Catalog Description  
No political order can be religiously neutral, and the modern political order in the United States and other Western nations, called "pluralism," is in reality polytheism. As in the ancient world, polytheists are offended at those who claim that there is only one God, and this is why orthodox Christianity is increasingly under assault in the United States and throughout the Western world. In this book, Gary North brings his many years of theological and historical research to bear on the question of how this polytheistic state of affairs came about, and what must be done about it. In a powerful argument, sure to be controversial, North points a finger at the framers of the Constitution of the United States, who self-consciously broke with 1000 + years of Western heritage by not referring to the Trinity and to Christ as King. This was the hole in the dike, North contends, through which modern secularism has poured. No one concerned about the state of the American nations can afford to ignore this book. "Polytheism" exists only during the transition from Christian to secular. During that transition, Christ is Lord at some points, while Humanist Man the would-be god is lord at other points. "Pluralism" is a peace treaty proposed by the losing side, until the losing side can re-organize the troops and impose its will in totality.

 

There is no such "self-conscious" break. All the states that ratified the Constitution were Christian Theocracies, and would not have ratified a Constitution that turned them into atheistic theocracies, with man as god. The Framers referred to the Trinity (see for example, John Adams' declaration of March 6, 1799), and the Supreme Court acknowledged that America was a Christian nation in 1892.
Created By: debbie on 05/13/96 at 02:05 PM  
My book on the Constitution (free, on-line) goes into the right-wing Enlightenment and Freemasonry: Conspiracy in Philadelphia: Origins of the United States Constitution (2004). This is an update of Part 3 of my book, Political Polytheism (1989).