This is the nonsensical world in which we live — and in which our children are growing to believe that public prayer is actually outlawed. You have to wonder how, as a nation, we will come to anything but total secularism when our right to free speech seems more often to extend to those who want to bash religion than to those who seek to practice it?
In his new book, "To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tackles the misunderstanding of our Constitution's establishment clause, which causes improper rules such as the one briefly imposed in Port Wentworth.
"Among some Americans … it has become unchallenged conventional wisdom that the First Amendment's establishment clause — 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion' — means the U.S. government must purge all religion from public life. … [This argument] is fatally flawed because America's historic conception of rights is clearly dependent upon a higher moral order than the laws of man. … How then can a purely secular worldview account for the original American understanding of our rights and freedoms? It cannot."
But what's the point of imposing secularism?
Mr. Gingrich explains that the left "shares a vision of a secular, socialist America run for the interests of the political machine that keeps them in power. It will be an America where government dominates the people, rather than represents them."
Simply put, a faithful people will resist the intrusion of the government into their lives, while a secular society will embrace government as its supreme authority. That shift is essential to the "remaking" of America now under way.
Except, it seems, in places like Port Wentworth, where they're still praying over their chicken and rice and they know God is far from apathetic.