Friday, December 11, 2009

Gary North on Daniel Dreisbach and "Religion Is Left to the States"

North holds a PhD in history from the University of California system, in case anyone is interested. His e-book, though not without its flaws, is meticulously footnoted and uses an historical method superior to the overwhelming majority of "Christian America" scholarship.

From Conspiracy In Philadelphia:


[Daniel Dreisbach] argues that the Constitution’s silence about God, although a radical break with Western political history (except for Rhode Island, which sent no delegates to the Convention), was not based on secularism. It was merely an attempt by the members of the Convention to keep Congress out of ecclesiastical matters.14 In my view, this argument has served as an anesthetic for Christians ever since 1787. The unitarians and freemasons who engineered the coup used similar arguments and sentiments to strip God out of the nation’s founding covenantal document for the civil order.

For all of his footnotes, he nevertheless winds up providing lots of evidence for my original book’s central thesis, namely, that there is no neutrality, and that any attempt to achieve it in covenantal affairs inevitably winds up favoring covenant-breakers in their active pursuit of God-defying agendas. This is what happened to the Constitution, as I argued in 1989 and I argue here. The myth of neutrality is a myth, and every attempt to implement it judicially works to undermine the kingdom of God. Dr. Dreisbach seems almost surprised that a series of Supreme Court decisions after 1960 secularized the nation judicially. “Gosh all whillikers, how did this happen?” he seems to ask. In this book, as in Political Polytheism, I argue that this development was built into the original covenantal document. (pp. xxvii-xxviii.)

2 comments:

Tom Van Dyke said...

Gary North can't carry Dreisbach's jock and serves as a useful contrast: North's religious orthodoxy colors his historical analysis in a way that Dreisbach's does not.

If I've read him right, North is another of those who uses orthodox theology to define "Christian" out of the Founding.

What happens is, proponents of the "Enlightenment" as America's founding philosophy use the Norths to eradicate Christianity and then jump into the void, to stake their claim by default as if America had no political theology. Cheap. Sophistic. Avoiding all burden of proof for the Enlightenment.

It's a tactic, not a truth, and Daniel Dreisbach is smarter than to be used as a tool by such folks.

Richard A Jones said...

I'm giving Tom Van Dyke an "A" for ad hominem par exellence here. North's magnum opus in this case, Conspiracy in Philadelphia, is free online for all as a PDF. I wonder if Mr. Van Dyke took time to read it?