Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore Says First Amendment Only Protects Christians

This is a few days old but still worth talking about.
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore preached a sermon recently in which he said the First Amendment only applies to people who believe in the God of the Bible.
Here is the video:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY8xf1uJOqI[/youtube]
At 1:15, Moore said:

Everybody, to include the Supreme Court, in the United States has been deceived as to one little word in the First Amendment called religion. They can’t define it. That’s what the 10 Commandments’ case was about, I wanted to define it but they backed off just decided not to take the case because they can’t, can’t define it the way Mason, Madison and even the United States supreme court defined it, “The duties we owe to the Creator and the manner of discharging it.” They don’t wanna do that, that acknowledges the Creator God. Buddha didn’t create us. Muhammad didn’t create us. It’s the God of the Holy Scriptures. They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship. Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.

I’ve been over this before. The Founders used the word religion to signify a person’s conscience and beliefs about God, however conceived. Some, such as early Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, claimed that the framers meant “sects of Christianity” but those who debated the Constitution in the states and some of the Founders took a different point of view. There is no religious test for public service in the Constitution. See the links below for more on why the First Amendment does apply to all religions.
Moore has been supported by the Institute on the Constitution and aligns with the Christian reconstructionist movement. I feel sorry for the citizens of Alabama.
For further reading on this topic, see:
Did the First Amendment Create a Christian Nation?
Politifact Debunks Bryan Fischer’s Christianity Only View of the First Amendment
Does Ted Cruz Believe the First Amendment is Only for Christians?
Answering Matt Barber on Jefferson and the First Amendment
Dean of Liberty Law School Says Islam Not Protected by the First Amendment
AFA takes a stand on religious freedom
David Barton: Pluralism not the goal of the First Amendment

Mars Hill Church Wants $40 Million to Buy Bellevue College Building and Build New Church

According to a February 2014 communication from Mars Hill Church Executive Pastor Sutton Turner to MHC staff and elders that I obtained this week, Mars Hill Church is seeking to raise $40 Million to buy a Bellevue Community College building and build a new church. The building is in Bellevue, WA at 10700 Northup Way. Here is the pitch to buy the facility:

Why?

  • Jesus has called us to be a Jesus-loving, Bible-preaching, multi-generational church.
  • We want to see more people saved by Jesus, more people grow in Jesus, and more people be on Mission with Jesus for generations and generations.
  • It’s all about Jesus.

How?

  • We have a vision to plant 50 church across 50,000 people. It is a specific prayer of ours to see Jesus lead 4,000 people to get baptized in a single year.
  • We must serve and love all of our churches more effectively. We also must train up the next generation of leaders. Finally, we must continue to stay rooted in and faithful to the Bible and to Jesus.
  • It’s all about Jesus.

What?

  • To do all of these things, it requires a Ministry Center that will house Mars Hill Schools (College and Seminary), Ministry Development, Leadership Development, and all Mars Hill support staff. It will be critically important that we are all connected and rooted in a local church.
  • We need to raise $40M. This allows us to purchase the land, purchase the Ministry Center building, and build an 1,800 seat church building debt-free.
  • It’s all about Jesus.

Who?

  • Every staff member
  • Every leader
  • The entire Mars Hill family
  • It’s all about Jesus.

Please earnestly seek the Lord’s guidance about how he is leading you to join in this generation-changing opportunity. Pray, and then here to sign in to your global account and make your pledge. As of today, all staff and elders have the ability to post your pledge. You should see this pledge box appear when you sign in.

 

Mars Hill has been looking for a large property in Bellevue since at least last year. The current location is slated to be the site of a massive project managed by the Rockerfeller Group. Since they need to move, MHC made an offer on a building owned by International Paper in 2013 only to find that Seattle Sound Transit had first refusal on the building. According to an October 2013 Seattle Times article, Mars Hill spokesman Justin Dean said the International Paper building was the property God intended for MHC to have.  The church still has a page on the website where members can contact the Sound Transit Board to advocate for Mars Hill to purchase the International Paper building. The last tweet in the campaign #goodforbellevue was in November, 2013. I cannot find anything on the Mars Hill website which indicates that the congregation has been informed of the Bellevue College initiative.
I have asked MHC Executive Pastor Sutton Turner for comment and will add new information as it become available. A source with knowledge of the situation tells me that the real estate project could be jeopardized due to declining donations.
Note: Mars Hill removed most of the original links I used to research this post. I have saved many of the pages and have some archived pages substituted for the original links. It appears Mars Hill leaders would like to scrub the history of this incident.

Institute on the Constitution Pretends to Have an American Club at Calvin College

The Institute on the Constitution is a pro-Confederacy, Christian reconstructionist organization based in Pasadena, MD. Recently, they have promoted clubs in high schools and colleges called American Clubs. IOTC makes the ACs sound like an all-American enterprise but the presentations promote the merger of Christian reconstructionist religious views and civil government. Peroutka teaches that any law not in line with the Bible is not a real law. IOTC also promotes nullification which proposes that states and local jurisdictions can ignore federal laws if officials in the local jurisdictions believe the law to be unconstitutional. They are certainly entitled to their views and apparently these clubs have equal access, but parents should be aware of what the IOTC is bringing to school.
I don’t know how these clubs are being received in schools. There is one in Spanish River High School in FL. And Peroutka recently put pictures on his Facebook page of what he said was a high school in Hudsonville, MI. Other pictures of the same school room had a caption placing the school in nearby Grand Rapids.  While in Michigan, he also visited Calvin College and according to his Facebook page said an American Club had been established. However, according to Calvin College representatives, there is no approved American Club on campus. A group of students heard a talk but there is no officially recognized club at Calvin College.
That fact hasn’t stopped IOTC from using the picture of the Calvin College students as a promotional picture on their website for the American Clubs. See below:

Now compare this picture with the Facebook picture of the Calvin College group. They are the same.
In a way, it is fitting that IOTC is pretending that the Calvin group is a club. IOTC pretends to be a pro-American group when in fact Peroutka is a former board member of the League of the South, a group that advocates for the South to secede from the nation and set up a white Southern homeland. Senior instructor David Whitney at IOTC is the chaplain of the VA/MD branch of IOTC. Peroutka called the Confederate army the real American army in a op-ed on the IOTC website. Articles on the IOTC website justify discrimination and Southern slavery and attack Lincoln. As with the picture, there is a lot of pretending going on.
 
 

More Fractured History Lessons in Glenn Beck's Sermon to Liberty University: The Bible, Cake and Witches

In two prior posts (here and here), I addressed Glenn Beck’s faulty reference to the purple triangle worn by Jehovah’s Witnesses while imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during WWII.  Beck said Bible scholars were made to wear the triangle without telling the audience that Jehovah’s Witnesses were known as Bible students in Germany at the time. Very few  people (some say less than one percent) from other religions wore the purple triangle.
After he held up the purple triangle, Beck then held up a Bible he said belonged to Louis the 15th and a prayer book he said belonged to British King George III. He remarked that the books were hardly used and proposed the lack of Bible usage led to various problems for the French and British.  He then held up a Bible he said stopped the Salem witch trials. Finally, he told a story about the death of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint church. Because I anticipate the Joseph Smith story will raise different issues than the Bible stories, I will take it in a separate post. For now, I want to examine Beck’s claims line by line. Prepare for whiplash.
Here again is the sermon:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYNjZ55nctE[/youtube]
At about 10 minutes into the video, after identifying several colored triangles the Nazis used to identify prisoners, Beck said:

…what got you sent to the concentration camps for the purple triangle? You were a Bible scholar. The Bible is the enemy to fascists.
Why?
When we went to war as a country there were two other great powers on earth one of them was England and the other was France. At the time King Louis was the King of France. This is King Louis the 15th’s Scriptures. If you look at the gilding, it’s perfect, it’s perfect. It’s never been read! How could you live in that society and say let them eat cake? What led to the revolution where the guillotines were the answer? He never read his Scriptures. The other great power that we broke away from was King George. This is King George his book of morning prayer. If you look through this, it is absolutely perfect. I don’t think the pages were ever turned.
What do your Scriptures look like? Will someday somebody say this is my mom, this is my dad, this is my brother, this is my sister’s Scriptures. Look at they’re in perfect condition, or will they have been poured over, dog-eared, written in that tells the story of your life and your path. This [holding up a Bible] is what freed the world and this came at a great price. This is an original William Tyndale Bible, and if you see, it was owned by a Puritan because every time there’s the face of price it’s been blotted out. This was smuggled page by page in bags of rice smuggled in. When they tied him to the stake, he said my only crime is that I believe that you should be able to read God’s Word in your own tongue. Now we have God’s Word in our pocket. We can access it anywhere, in any language. Does it mean anything to us anymore? Is it just a series of words put together?
This is the Bible that’s stopped the Salem witch trials. People will say that the Salem witch trials were caused by Christians, but how come the witch trials happened for decades in Europe but lasted very short period of time here? Why? Because of preachers, preachers that knew their Scriptures and took this Bible and said your misreading the Scriptures, and that Sunday the governor got up and stood in front of the congregation weeping, “I am sorry, I misread.”

There are several problems here. Let’s start with:

When we went to war as a country there were two other great powers on Earth one of them was England and the other was France.

Not so. Another possibly greater power on Earth at the time was China. According to the British Museum, the Chinese empire of Qianlong “was the wealthiest and most populous country in the world. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were 200 million Chinese.” This is an important point because Beck wants to make a case that the Bible is somehow involved in a nation’s political fortunes. Obviously, the Chinese did not seek to base their culture on the Bible.
Beck continued:

This is King Louis the 15th’s Scriptures. If you look at the gilding, it’s perfect, it’s perfect. It’s never been read! How could you live in that society and say let them eat cake? What led to the revolution where the guillotines were the answer? He never read his Scriptures.

I looked for information regarding King Louis’ Bible and have not yet found anything. However, I assume King Louis had more than one Bible and it seems presumptuous to make much out of the condition of this item unless one has additional primary source confirmation that the King never read any Bible.
Beck then leaps wildly through French history to link Louis’ purported lack of Bible reading with the phrase, “let them eat cake” and the French Revolution. The phrase “let them eat cake” is widely attributed to Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, the grandson of Louis XV. However, historians believe she never said the phrase. Instead, the phrase has been attributed to a Spanish princess before Louis the 15th was born. The phrase was also used by Rousseau in the book, Les Confessions, who said an unnamed princess uttered the words. Regarding the French Revolution, Louis XV died in 1774, 15 years before the revolution started. In short, Beck links Louis XV’s alleged lack of Bible reading to events that happened before he was born and after he died.
About King George, Beck said:

This is King George his book of morning prayer. If you look through this, it is absolutely perfect. I don’t think the pages were ever turned.

Again, I have found little on this. Was this King George’s only copy? According to this British Royal Collection website, a Bible, psalter and prayer book used by King George is safely in the Royal Collection. A rare book house has a description of one of King George’s prayer books. In fact, the description says that “George III was deeply devout and spent hours in prayer, making this volume emblematic of his rule at that time.” We do know that King George called for prayer against the colonists and issued a book of prayers beseeching God to turn back the rebellion. King George also may have suffered from an illness which caused mental instability. In any case, without examining the evidence for this item, and given Beck’s other misleading statements, it is possible that the condition of the book he has means nothing about King George’s beliefs and practices.
Beck then claimed he has the Bible that stopped the Salem witch trials:

This is the Bible that’s stopped the Salem witch trials.

I have asked several historians about this with no one knowing what he means. I can’t tell if he means the actual Bible or if he is referring to the version of the Bible which was in common use at the time. Beck continued:

People will say that the Salem witch trials were caused by Christians, but how come the witch trials happened for decades in Europe but lasted very short period of time here? Why? Because of preachers, preachers that knew their Scriptures and took this Bible and said your misreading the Scriptures, and that Sunday the governor got up and stood in front of the congregation weeping, “I am sorry, I misread.”

There is no dispute that the witch trials were conducted by people who claimed to be Christian. Indeed, there were periods of hysteria in Europe, just as there was here. Salem was not the only town in the colonies to experience witchcraft hysteria. Connecticut did as well on at least two occasions. Both were related to Christians who believed witches were responsible for various problems in the community and should be handled in the manner taught by Old Testament law. Marc Carlson has compiled a comprehensive list of nearly 300 people tried as witches in trials in America from 1622 through 1878. There were more incidents in Europe but there were more people in Europe and the duration of the count was over a longer period of time.
The religious leaders in MA initially believed they were in the right. It was when allegations of witchcraft were directed toward prominent members of the community that caution came into play. An appeal to the Bible may have helped support that caution but there can be no mistake that an appeal to the Bible was the foundation for the hysteria in the first place.
All in all, the significant historical problems in this sermon raise questions about the accuracy of the rest of it, including his story of Joseph Smith’s last days. I will take that up in a future post.

Calvin College Says Institute on the Constitution American Club is Not Recognized on Campus

Last week, I reported that the Institute on the Constitution had visited Calvin College in late April. According the IOTC Facebook page, Peroutka spoke to an American Club on Calvin’s campus.

 
Because the existence of such a student group at Calvin did not ring true, I asked Calvin College about it. As I suspected, Calvin does not have an approved American Club on campus.
Bob Crow, Dean of Student Development, informed me that the Institute on the Constitution’s Director Michael Peroutka met with a small group of students when he visited campus. However, about an American Club, Crow said, “I can confirm that no such student organization exists at Calvin College.”  Furthermore, given the affiliation of Mr. Peroutka with the neo-Confederate League of the South, Mr. Crow said, “it is unimaginable that such a group could exist here.”
As is true of most colleges, Calvin requires recognized student organizations to go through an application process prior to approval. IOTC’s Facebook posting is misleading in that it implies the American Club is an approved Calvin College organization. According to Mr. Crow, the future does not look bright for the IOTC at Calvin.
Since I posted the information about IOTC at Hudsonville, MI and Calvin, a couple of the IOTC posts regarding Peroutka’s visits to the schools have disappeared from the Facebook page.  Still can’t find out what high school in Hudsonville Peroutka visited; perhaps he was in nearby Grand Rapids.