Americans Killed God?
by Richard Rolwing
Issue 114 - August 20, 2008

When they quoted, "The Americans have killed God and they want the Muslims to bury him," both the Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama Bin Laden were quoting Qtub, Al Queda's main mentor.

To both of them America was just like other modern democracies, formally godless. That made them Satanic. Actually all human governments are Satanic, Qtub taught. To legislate is a Divine prerogative. To obey a law is to submit. Submission is worship. Submission to men is idolatry. Satan loves that. Islam has its Koran. It needs no human governments. Sola Scriptura. Man cannot cooperate with God, even under God. Only God can make a law requiring submission.

But Qtub did not understand America. All of its state constitution preambles acknowledge God. He ignored the Declaration of Independence which began with God the Creator, ended with God, and built its entire case on God, whom it acknowledged as the Supreme Legislator, the Supreme Judge, and the Supreme Governor, of the world, two of which expressions were prayerful.

In the Declaration's view, men can cooperate with God, share or participate in His authority (and power) to legislate, execute, and judge. Submission is viewed as a duty owed to God as well as man simultaneously as long as men act under God. The Declaration never contested King George's authority over the rest of the British Empire. It was his authority over America he had forfeited. Non-submission had become a duty and not just a right. God no longer backed up the King's might with right.

Whatever his short studies in the U.S., Qtub had every reason to ignore the Declaration. Few are its American students and fewer still any college courses. The Niagara of books on the Founding era over the last 50 years almost completely ignore it. The vast majority of legal scholars, historians, political scientists, and political philosophers dismiss it completely as originally and enduringly irrelevant. Even Scalia called it fluff.

Dershowitz says the Declaration's rights are useful fictions just like its God was for Moses, Jesus, the Vatican, and Deists. The National Institute for the Study of the Declaration of Independence has published ten volumes defending it against both past and present critics, and establishing its significance for the Constitution.

Most American critics, however, never directly confront its natural theology. They mostly like to say that it is obvious that if anything is self-evident it need not be said, so that, with its feet cut off, the Declaration just floats away into the mist, dismissed. They never notice they themselves do what they say the Declaration should never have done, spell out something obvious. Of course, its natural law philosophy only recalls alchemy or witchcraft. Only a foolish attorney brings it up in Court.

Neither the Second Continental Congress nor the 13 new states tried to impose the Declaration's philosophy on citizens, although they did require acceptance of its act of separation. It was this new nation's birth certificate. Without it the Constitution would have been contrary to British law, the the law of nations, and the natural law. Scholars have claimed it was forgotten for 50 years, but they simply ignore the Supreme Court's frequent recourse to it and ample reliance upon it during that time.

Uncle Sam began based upon a religious philosophy of natural law, natural rights, natural religion, and natural theology. He neither embraced nor repudiated any historical religion or faith. Only a monotheistic religion is compatible with his philosophy, but regardless of one's theoretical convictions, obedience to his Constitution and laws suffice for good American citizenship.

While Uncle Sam never contested that the authority to rule comes from God and shares in His Divine Right, he insisted that who rules, and by what rules, comes from the consent of the governed. The Declaration never replaced Divine right, God, with man, a human majority, though even the Declaration's few defenders say otherwise. The Declaration never declared independence from God.

By reason of the Declaration of Independence, America is a God-based regime, though not dependent formally upon any historical faith. The American experiment is a moral project as every nation is, but it is also religious and monotheistic. It is a philosophical project, reason-based, not faith-based.

Why is America not a theocracy? It is convinced that God leaves it to the people governed to mediate His authority to rulers, to 1) designate who will share in the Divine authority to rule, the right to command submission, and to 2) determine the form of that rule, and to make the rules --under God, cooperating with God thereby. Those who designate and determine their human government worship God in doing so and also by their obedience to those human rules.

Neither Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, or Calvin have a problem with that, incidentally. Qtub had no clue, like Dershowitz.

Richard J. Rolwing is the author of a series of works entitled "Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam? Notes on the State of the Declaration of Independence