The secularizing pattern, beginning with the 1963 Supreme Court decision outlawing school prayer, has built such momentum that two Connecticut Democratic legislators introduced a bill that would have effectively driven the Catholic Church out of their state.

Furthermore, in the 2010 U.S. Senate special election in Ma.s.sachusetts (a colony founded by Puritans searching for religious liberty), Democratic nominee and state attorney general Martha Coakley suggested Catholics shouldn't serve in emergency rooms because they might hold unacceptable pro-life views. In a similar attempt at exclusion, the Left are trying to restrict the activities of faith-based social service agencies that believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

Religious expression is also under attack in our courts: a plaintiff in Southern California has filed a lawsuit seeking to knock down a cross erected in 1934 in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Other lawsuits are trying to stop us from uttering the phrase "one nation under G.o.d" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Traditionally, America has been a religious society based on the fundamental belief that there is something out there larger than ourselves. Our subordination to G.o.d sets boundaries for what we can or should do to ourselves and others. It also creates expectations for us to live up to; a belief in G.o.d turns a wasted life into a betrayal of G.o.d's gifts.

If we are endowed by our Creator with the right to pursue happiness, we also have a responsibility to use G.o.d's gifts to pursue happiness (remembering that happiness in this context means wisdom and virtue).

There is a profound reason Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-step program stresses the importance of G.o.d. Simply read the twelve steps and imagine what little would be left if G.o.d were removed from this process of saving and rebuilding lives.

THE TWELVE STEPS OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS10.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of G.o.d as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to G.o.d, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have G.o.d remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with G.o.d, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

A federal official once proposed that a federal anti-addiction program be developed based on Alcoholics Anonymous-but "without all the G.o.d stuff." That shows the depth of anti-religious antipathy in elite circles: AA may be the world's most successful addiction recovery program, but the government apparently could improve it by banishing G.o.d.

Chuck Colson, with his extraordinarily effective prison ministry, faces similar opposition from secular elites. The prison ministry system undoubtedly works; it has enabled thousands of people to leave prison as profoundly changed men and women, able to lead decent, productive lives. But many elites would rather condemn prisoners to hopeless lives of secular despair than risk saving them through religious faith. Sadly, simply due to this kind of prejudice, there is significant resistance to prison ministry activities.

Chasing religion from the public square inevitably lowers public morality. That's because a belief in G.o.d limits our tendencies toward hedonism, exploiting others, and abusing power. If you are subordinate to G.o.d then by definition you are subordinate to rules that transcend your own ego and your own personal appet.i.tes.

The Founding Fathers overwhelmingly agreed that religion was crucial in sustaining the culture of responsibility needed to keep the country free.b The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 says, "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

Note the order: first comes religion. Then comes morality. Knowledge is the last goal.

The move toward secularism has harmed American society. Look at the problems affecting today's teenagers, compared to the same data for 1963, the year the Supreme Court banned school prayer.

* Drug addiction is up.

* Teenage pregnancy is up.

* Drinking is up.

* Violence is up.

* Rape in schools is up.

* a.s.saults on teachers are up.

* The display of disrespectful att.i.tudes is up.

Did the elimination of school prayer help our schools? No. To the contrary, the decline of morality in school and in society overall has given rise to a destructive pattern that the late Senator Pat Moynihan captured perfectly in his article, "Defining Deviancy Down."

The secular-socialist effort to drive G.o.d and morality to one hour a week in Church, Synagogue, Mosque, or Temple, but to preserve the other 167 hours a week for secularism, has deeply weakened our capacity to distinguish right from wrong and to sacrifice short-term gratification for a commitment to permanent moral principles.

Perhaps more than any other area, the Left will fight any rise in religious expression. Secularism is their guiding philosophy, which they enforce with ruthless intolerance. If they find a cross in the middle of the Mojave Desert unacceptable, imagine how they will fight the restoration of G.o.d to the public square.

Through any means necessary, from violent street protests to the insidious expansion of bureaucratic power, the Left have spent the last four decades tightening their grasp over America and its most important inst.i.tutions-the federal bureaucracy, academia, Hollywood, Big Labor, and even big business. From that dominating position, they have propagated a completely foreign set of secular-socialist values. Rejecting American traditions of hard work, self-sufficiency, and honesty, they encourage Americans to learn how to game the system-sucking the maximum resources out of our country while contributing the minimum.

Once people accept this outlook, they quickly realize the bigger government gets, the more opportunity there is to game it. A small government with relatively few resources and strict oversight is difficult to cheat. In a leviathan like the Left want to create, however, with more bureaucrats controlling more money, it's much easier to buy favors and abuse programs. This is a lesson we should learn from Europe, where the ma.s.sive, largely unaccountable EU bureaucracy is mired in waste, fraud, and inefficiency.

The struggle between America's historic value system and that of secular socialism will be intense. The Left did not fight this long just to give up when they're so close to victory: creating a socialist system where a voting majority, dependent on the state's largess, will permanently vote for the party of big government. And so Americans who prefer traditional America to the socialist vision are left with one option: to stand up and fight.

In the following chapters, I'll explain the goals and methods of the secular-socialist machine in more detail, and propose policies and strategies to help save America from its manipulations.

CHAPTER TWO.

Why "Secular- Socialist Machine" Is the Only Way to Describe the Left.

While it may sound alarmist, the best way to describe the opponents of American liberty is this: they are a secular-socialist machine.

Many people, especially on the Left, will reject this term. So let me explain why it's the only honest description of the way Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the many left-wing power figures and organizations operate.

The "Left" is a term stemming from the seating of political parties in the National a.s.sembly during the French Revolution. The radicals were seated on the left and the conservatives on the right. Today, the Left comprise a range of opinion favoring various levels of state control over society and over the economy. So the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda is indeed leftist, but it is also a unique collection of policies and att.i.tudes that deserves a more specific description.

"Liberalism" also fails to capture the values and beliefs that animate this agenda. Originally describing the nineteenth-century movement for free markets and limited government, liberalism later came to signify President Roosevelt's New Deal. FDR's liberalism, however, was so much more accepting of G.o.d (see his national radio prayer on D-Day, for example), so much more pro-work, and so much more concerned with defending America (FDR tried German saboteurs by military tribunal and executed them within six weeks of their capture), that the modern Left can honestly be characterized as a radical break from FDR's worldview.

Today, it's not liberalism but secular socialism that drives the Left's policies, which are enacted through a political machine. Because defining the Left in these terms will be controversial, we should briefly examine the interlocking relationship of secularism, socialism, and machine politics.

SECULARISM: ONE COUNTRY WITHOUT G.o.d.

Describing the Left as "secular" will be controversial for two reasons. First, when you discuss a left-wing politician's secular policies, many on the Left, abetted by the mainstream media, will indignantly insist you are accusing them of being atheists or apostates. Don't take the bait. We cannot know what is in the hearts of other men and women, and any speculation is an exercise in hubris and futility.

Instead, our central argument lies in the second reason for controversy. It is one rooted in historic fact and American history, which makes it a winning argument for us. But it requires a calm, steady, and repeated explanation of the facts to counter the bed of lies that has obscured our understanding of the "separation of church and state" and "religious freedom."

Among some Americans, particularly the academic elite, 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. To understand just how wrong this interpretation is, we need to discuss what the term "secular" actually means.

The Latin root of "secular" is "saeculum," which meant "an age," or roughly, a human lifespan. It is closely related to the word "century," or 100 years. The connection from this original meaning to the term's modern understanding as "non-religious" is its emphasis on the "current" and "the now" rather than being concerned with an afterlife.

A purely secular outlook does not acknowledge G.o.d. It does not consider the implications of one's actions beyond the impact they make within one's own life. It does not recognize any higher moral order beyond that which human beings have rationally developed.

The argument that the Const.i.tution's establishment clause requires a purely secular government is fatally flawed because America's historic conception of rights is clearly dependent upon a higher moral order than the laws of man.

For example, the Declaration of Independence, America's founding political doc.u.ment, boldly proclaims, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

This extraordinary sentence makes some key a.s.sumptions: that G.o.d is sovereign over the affairs of the universe; that G.o.d created man; and that man must obey an order of justice G.o.d Himself has inst.i.tuted.

How then can a purely secular worldview account for the original American understanding of our rights and freedoms?

It cannot.

The secular-socialist Left bitterly oppose anyone who speaks the truth about the central role of "our Creator" in the Founders' formulation of our rights and freedoms. When confronted with the facts, they often resort to ad hominem attacks, arguing that if you oppose militant secularism in the public square, then you must be endorsing a theocracy. This is a ludicrous, insulting charge, especially when so many people throughout the world today are enslaved by religious dictatorships.

When forging the Const.i.tution, the Founding Fathers did not see the need to choose between the fraternal twin oppressions of a militantly secular government or a state-sponsored and imposed religion. Their new, American model was a country with no official national religion where everyone could worship as they pleased. But they were also careful not to shut out religion from public life. The Founders saw religion as vital to the survival of republican government because they believed the maintenance of liberty requires virtue.

That's why, in addition to the establishment clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. . . . "), the First Amendment also contains the free exercise clause (". . . or prevent the free exercise thereof").

That's why George Washington declared, "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensible supports."

That's why John Adams said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human pa.s.sions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Const.i.tution as a whale goes through a net."

And that's why Thomas Jefferson, probably the least religious of the Founding Fathers, stated, "Reading, reflection, and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts . . . in which all religions agree."

It's worth focusing on Jefferson, because he is the Founding Father most cited by militant secularists. Jefferson, of course, wrote the phrase "separation of church and state," which appeared in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists. For fifty years, a deeply anti-religious court system has used this phrase to justify banning school prayer, tearing down crosses on public land, and even threatening the Boy Scouts, whose program includes a multi-denominational religious component.

The importance of this five-word phrase from one of Jefferson's private letters has been exaggerated and its meaning completely distorted. In fact, if you look at Jefferson's public actions as vice president and later as president of the United States, it's clear he did not intend the establishment clause to ban religion from the public square.

The most obvious example is that two days after he penned the letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson attended church in the U.S. Capitol building. These services were acceptable to Jefferson (and James Madison, who also attended) because they were voluntary and non-discriminatory; many different preachers, and eventually priests, from various denominations led services. Jefferson also allowed other executive branch buildings to be used in a similar manner.

It's hard to square Jefferson's support for church services in the U.S. Capitol building with the secular insistence that all matters of faith be banned from public life.

Instead, it's clear that Jefferson, like the rest of the Founders, wanted a government that allowed for public religious expression, but did not endorse any particular denomination. Doing so would preserve the rights of Americans of all faiths (and of no faith), while recognizing the importance of religion and morality to the Republic's survival.

The plain facts of our nation's history have not stopped anti-religious bigots in the judiciary, academia, and in elected office from insisting that religious belief is inherently divisive and that the discussion of public affairs can only occur in secular terms. Consider the oppressive effect of this secular worldview in our public schools:* School officials prevented a New Jersey student from reading his favorite story to the cla.s.s because it came from the Bible.

* A Pennsylvania school suspended a teacher's a.s.sistant because she wore a necklace with a cross.1 * A Colorado high school valedictorian was refused a diploma unless she apologized for mentioning Jesus in her commencement speech.2 Such absurdities, of course, hardly display the "tolerance" that the Left claim to value above all else. And recent court cases are even more disturbing:* A federal court in California found that the leasing of parcels of parkland to the Boy Scouts was unconst.i.tutional. While the case was stayed pending a related decision, the fact that the plaintiffs were found to have standing to bring the suit, in the words of six dissenting judges on the Ninth Circuit, "creates a new legal landscape in which almost anyone who is offended by anything has standing to air his or her displeasure in court."3 * The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is arguing on behalf of a parks service employee to remove the 76-year-old World War I Memorial Cross in the Mojave National Preserve.4 The cross has been covered with a plywood box until the Supreme Court decides the case. An organization I founded called Renewing American Leadership, headed by Rick Tyler, has filed an amicus brief along with Citizens United in support of maintaining the cross. To be clear, the Mojave cross is in the middle of the desert, eight and a half miles away from any major roadway. Imagine for a second the mindset of a militant secularist who is so terrified and offended by a cross in the middle of a desert.

* In DeFuniak Springs, Florida, a judge ordered that a copy of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse be covered during a murder trial because he did not want the jurors to see the commandment "Do not kill."5 * In June 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found the words "under G.o.d" in the pledge of allegiance to be unconst.i.tutional. The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2004 upon procedural grounds rather than on its merits. In early 2010 the issue was brought up again in the Ninth Circuit, and this time the court ruled in favor of keeping "under G.o.d." Michael Newdow, the atheist behind this string of lawsuits, has vowed to appeal the ruling.6 The wall of separation these secularists seek to enforce is really one between the historic America and the radically different America they want to create-an America without G.o.d, traditional values, or knowledge of its own history.

SOCIALISM: SPREADING THE FAILURE AROUND.

Describing the Left as socialist will also be controversial because the Left hate accurate language about their goals. But any fair a.s.sessment of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid economic policies shows they are indisputably socialist.

Broadly defined, socialist policies favor increased central planning of the economy by politicians and bureaucrats instead of allowing entrepreneurs, businesses, and customers to make decisions in the free market. Socialists also favor government attempts to collectivize the means of production and to divvy up the national wealth. Socialists favor these methods because they insist on equality of results, rather than the traditional American belief in equality under the law. Therefore, they champion a strong central government to impose equality of outcomes, as Joe the Plumber found out during the 2008 campaign when he was told by then-candidate Obama that taxes needed to be raised in order to "spread the wealth around."

It's hard to imagine, but as late as the 1970s, before the Reagan revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism had not yet been thoroughly discredited in the United States. Meanwhile, conservatism, while growing in force, was not yet the dominant ideology in America or even in the Republican Party. American politics was stuck in a cycle arguing between slower and faster routes toward big government. Favoring the fast route, many Democratic Party leaders sought to impose a form of socialism on America.

With that in mind, it's important to recognize that most of today's powerful Democratic congressional committee chairmen were first elected in the 1970s. In other words, today's Democratic leaders joined Congress at a time when socialist, big-government solutions were in the mainstream in their party.

Coupled with the current Speaker of the House, who is a legitimate representative of the left-wing values of her home district in San Francisco, is it any wonder the new Democratic majorities have aggressively pursued big-government, socialist policies?

Look at the signature bills considered by the House and Senate under President Obama, the committee chairmen responsible for their development, and when these chairmen were elected to Congress.

* The Employee Free Choice Act (Education and Labor Committee: Chairman George Miller, 1974) Last year, the House pa.s.sed the EFCA card check legislation that would strip American workers of the right to a secret ballot when deciding whether to join a union. It would also inst.i.tute "binding arbitration" that takes power away from U.S. employers and employees and gives it to new arbitration bureaucracies. The political rationale for this bill is that unions-long-time power centers of the global socialist movement and a powerful Democratic const.i.tuency-have been shrinking in size and influence over the past fifty years (with the notable exception of public employee unions). This bill is a clear attempt to reinvigorate them with new powers, even if workers don't agree.

* Cap and Trade (Energy and Commerce Committee: Chairman Henry Waxman, 1974; Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee: Chairman Edward Markey, 1976) The House pa.s.sed a huge energy tax increase on the American people in the guise of a cap-and-trade scheme. The bill would concentrate the authority to choose the recipients of carbon permits-and by extension, the power to determine which U.S. firms will be allowed to produce, innovate, and grow-into a centralized bureaucracy. This is clearly a step toward central economic planning.It's also worth noting that the Senate's failure to pa.s.s this bill has provoked threats from the Obama administration to have the Environmental Protection Agency regulate carbon as a pollutant, a move that would centralize economic power in bureaucracies even more than cap and trade would have done. Additionally, the Copenhagen Conference on global warming produced a commitment from partic.i.p.ants, including the United States, to initiate a vast transfer of wealth from developed nations to poor ones. It's socialism on a global scale.* Stimulus Bill (Appropriations Committee: Chairman Dave Obey, 1969) Congress circ.u.mvented the normal appropriations process and hastily pa.s.sed this convoluted legislation that mandated which agencies, firms, and individuals would (and, implicitly, would not) receive taxpayer dollars. Five-hundred thirty-five individuals exercised complete control over $787 billion in taxpayer funds. Another step toward centralized economic planning, the stimulus has only sent a fraction of the money to "shovel ready" infrastructure and other jobs projects. Far more has gone into state and federal bureaucracies, perhaps irreversibly growing the size and power of government at the federal, state, and local level.

* Healthcare Overhaul (Energy and Commerce Committee: Chairman Henry Waxman, 1974; Ways and Means Committee: Chairman Charles Rangel, 1970; Education and Labor Committee: Chairman George Miller, 1974; Senate Finance Committee: Chairman Max Baucus, 1978) The healthcare bill signed into law in March 2010 will turn healthcare into a de-facto nationalized utility by forcing all Americans to buy health insurance and micromanaging insurance companies from the Department of Health and Human Services. Fortunately, many of the most destructive elements of this bill do not take effect until 2014, so there is still time to repeal it and start over with market-based, patient-oriented health reform.

With this 1970s-era cohort in charge, it's unsurprising the major legislation pa.s.sed by this Congress has increased centralized economic planning. Another example is the government takeover of General Motors, engineered by a "car czar" who is not subject to congressional approval.

And then there's the Left's redistribution of taxpayer money for ma.s.sive housing subsidies through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing," said Democratic congressman Barney Frank in 2003. Of course, this gamble helped spark the housing crash, but that hasn't stopped the Left. In fact, in December 2009, the Obama administration lifted the $400 billion cap on Treasury funding to Fannie and Freddie, a big step toward nationalizing the home loan market.

For these archaic, left-wing Democrats, their return to power with the Democratic House and Senate majorities of 2007, along with the 2008 election of a new, left-wing president, is their last chance to achieve their dream of inst.i.tuting socialism in America.

The policies of the Left are clearly socialist. They would have government define and dominate every aspect of energy production in America. They would have government define and dominate healthcare-one-sixth of the U.S. economy. (The first healthcare overhaul bill to pa.s.s the House gave the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to unilaterally reduce benefits, increase premiums, and establish waiting lines for high risk patients.) They have taken over AIG, America's largest insurer. They took over General Motors and Chrysler. They dominate banking. They have a "pay czar" in the White House to dictate salaries at ostensibly private companies. These actions are consistent with a socialist vision of America where the government defines and dominates the private sector.

WHY THE SECULAR-SOCIALIST LEFT HAS TO LIE.

If you are a political candidate with unpopular secular-socialist beliefs, you simply cannot be candid about what you want to accomplish. Therefore, secular socialists learn very early they have to misinform and mislead in order to get elected.