In God we Trust

Mr. Forbes:
Mr. Speaker, on April 6 of this year the President of the United States
traveled halfway around the globe, and in the nation of Turkey essentially
proclaimed that the United States was not a Judeo-Christian nation.

Now, I don’t challenge his right to do that, nor do I dispute the fact that
is what he believes. But I wished that he had asked and answered two
questions when he did that. The first question was whether or not we ever
considered ourselves a Judeo-Christian nation; and the second one is if we
did, what was that moment in time where we ceased to be so?

If you ask the first question, you find that the very first act of the first
Congress in the United States was to bring in a minister and have Congress
led in prayer and afterwards read four chapters out of the Bible.

A few years later when we unanimously declared our independence, we made
certain that the rights in there were given to us by our creator.

When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 that ended the
Revolutionary War and birthed this Nation, the signers of that document made
clear that it began with this phrase: “In the name of the Most Holy and
undivided Trinity.”

When our Constitution was signed, the signers made sure that they
punctuated the end of it by saying “in the year of our Lord, 1787.”

And 100 years later in the Supreme Court case of Holy Trinity Church
v. The United States, the Supreme Court indicated, after recounting the long
history of faith in this country, that we were even a Christian nation.

President George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson,
Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert
Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy,
and Ronald Reagan all disagreed with the President’s comments and indicated
how the Bible and Judeo-Christian principles were so important in this
Nation. And Franklin Roosevelt even led this Nation in a 6-minute prayer
before the invasion of perhaps the greatest battle in history, the Invasion
of Normandy and asked for God’s protection.

After that war when Congress came together and said
where are we going to put our trust, it wasn’t in our weapon systems, or our
economy or our great decisions here, but it was ``In God We Trust”
which is emboldened directly behind you.

So if in fact we were a Nation that was birthed on those Judeo-Christian
principles, what was that moment in time when we ceased to so be?

It wasn’t when a small group of people succeeded in
taking prayer out of our schools, or when they tried to cover up the word
referencing God on the Washington Monument, or they tried to stop our
veterans from having flag-folding ceremonies at their funerals on a
voluntary basis because they mentioned God, or even when they tried in the
new visitor center to change that national motto and to refuse to put “In
God We Trust” in there. No, it wasn’t any of those times because they can
rip that word off of all of our buildings, and still, those Judeo-Christian
principles are so interwoven in a tapestry of freedom and liberty that to
begin to unravel one is to unravel the other.

That’s why we have filed the Spiritual Heritage resolution to help reaffirm
that great history of faith that we have in this Nation and to say to those
individuals who have yielded to the temptation of concluding that we are no
longer a Judeo-Christian Nation to come back, to come back and look at those
great principles that birthed this Nation and sustain us today
because we believe if they do they will conclude, as President Eisenhower
did and later Gerald Ford repeated, that without God, there could be no
American form of government, nor an American way of life.

Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic expression of
Americanism. Thus, the Founding Fathers of America saw it, and thus with
God’s help it will continue to be.  END

---

“‘Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they
are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for
worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great
horror,’ declares the LORD. ‘My people have committed two sins: They
have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own
cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.'”
Jeremiah 2:11-13