Church and State     The crisis ahead...

from Bennett, Christian Science Monitor

There is a battle for liberty in every generation. 

There are times and seasons when the human struggle to advance and maintain liberty and dignity comes to the front, as it did with the drafting of the Magna Carta, the founding of America, and the American civil rights movement.

In times of great material prosperity and its usual concomitant decadence, this battle is usually not widely articulated and thus is lost to the greater populace.  The Roman Republic devolved into the profligate empire where thirst for pleasure replaced love of the principles of civil and religious freedom.

Where true concepts of civil, personal and religious liberty are not appreciated and protected. they will certainly be eroded.

Welcome to the 21st Century in America.  Without question, this nation is facing the greatest threats to its First Amendment freedoms since its founding. Americans have boasted about and nobly maintained the greatest grant of citizen freedoms in the history of the world.  While there are certainly low points in America's record of advancing freedom, including slavery and mistreatment of its native population, there is still no close second in history's annals for Champion Protector of Individual Rights.

The Bill of Rights with its grand promises of freedom of religious exercise, free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association and assembly, and the assurance it gives individuals of their right to shake a finger at their own government is without parallel on the unrolling scroll of human enterprise. 

What is it then that threatens this grand heritage?  The following articles from Liberty Point Institute are offered as warnings of the fragile state of some of these protections we have taken for granted.  Their underappreciation is certainly evident in that they are being flushed away with hardly a public notice, drowning in a flood of video and beverage ad infinitum, lost in a Super Bowl of mammon.

12/02