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5 Pt. Salt 
Great video. I first heard David Barton speak about twenty years ago and he was fantastic, so I like him and appreciate what he does. However, I strongy disagree with his view that not voting for Mitt Romney is a sin.
http://www.examiner.com/article/prominent-christians-say-not-voting-for-romney-is-a-sin
Going to the link above, I found this remarkable statement:
“Church and state were separated by the founding fathers precisely to prevent the substantial power of churches to dictate how their congregations would vote. When prominent leaders tell their followers that voting for Obama — or not voting at all — is a sin, they are invoking no less than the threat of divine retribution and even hell. They are threatening voters. They are coercing voters. These are among the most flagrant and intolerable violations of liberty we can imagine in a country founded on the idea that religion must never become a driving force in the legislative process.”
Nevermind that “separation of church and state” is one the most, if not THE most misunderstood notions of American secularlists. I just have to laugh at the last sentence in the paragraph above as perhaps the best example of HGW I have ever seen! (Hyperbole Gone Wild).
Read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. The Constitution is a godless document. We were never a Christian nation.
Stan, would you remove the book of Esther from the Bible? It has no mention of God in it. Is the book of Esther a “godless document?” Perhaps if we limit ourselves to Esther, we can conclude that Israel was not a Jewish nation.
That’s not a good analogy. If we were a Christian nation our Constitution would reflect it. Patrick Henry and numerous others fought to have a moral code imbedded in it but they lost. The Founders believed that free trade and commerce would impose their own brand of morality on us but also realized that our Constitution would only work for good religious people. Fatal error in light of Scripture and we’ve been worshipping Mammon ever since.
William the Silent, or Henri de Navarre, the founder and “president” of the Dutch Republic, is, I believe, a great study on this issue from the reformed perspective. He led in the preservation of a protestant republic under the exrtreme threat of annihilation by a coalition of the mightiest nations on earth at the time. Yet, his policy was not to allow the protestant pastors of the day to hold cabinet positions. I did this study a long time ago and can’t recall all the details at the moment, but I do recommend the effort to any one who wants to observe the beginning and outcome of what was perhaps the most significant historical event concerning the survival of the reformed faith. Phillip the Second, William the Silent’s nemisis, was set upon extinguishing all traces of the “new religion” and its adherents. If he had we would likely be discussing very different issues today. If any one can find it, the HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS by John Lothrop Motley (1900) gives the details from an obvious Christian perspective. I don’t know why these events are not better studied by modern orthodox christians.
If any one noticed ( it would be great if they did), I woke up the next morning and remembered that I made an error of fact in my post. William de Nassau, not Henri de Navarre, was the other name carried by William the Silent. Henri was the de Medecci offspring who converted to Catholicisim to become king of France, starting the line of the Louis. William of Orange, Silent, Nassau, succeded in unifying almost all of the factions in Holland and Zeeland (including the Catholics) against the armies of Spain under the command of Alexander Farnesse and held them off untill his death by assasination. Why would this be significant to us? My thought is that our founding fathers were knowledgable of the events and issues that led to their predicament and choices. They were not vacuous characters that many today think they were. These men were unflinchingly aware and perhaps horrified at what a nightmare life in Europe had been for so many for so long a time. In my view, the Constitution and other documents they formed, that almost all modern factions claim to want to adhere to, change or reinterpret, were their imperfect efforts to avoid the misery of tyranny and chaos, the hell on earth of total depravity unchecked. I wonder if anyone knows what what they thought hunted them. It was not the fear of not allowing the many to be the frivolous idiots of modern times.
Read the Federalist Papers. It’s pretty clear what they thought.