The best deceptions are those that look most truthful. The subtle replacement of a word here, the rearranging of a term there, and you have something that on the surface seems right, but is really just plain old chicanery! No “natural” group is more adept at this sort of dishonest communication than the American liberal.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…”

Thus begins the United States of America’s celebrated Bill of Rights. The founders of our nation thought freedom of religion so important that they made religious interference the very first restriction upon our fledgling government.

Government cannot prohibit the free exercise of an individual or group’s religious beliefs. What does this mean? It means that people are free to express their faith or lack of faith freely, in the public square or in their places of worship or the privacy of their own homes.

It has been pointed out by the observant and concerned that since President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo where he used the term “freedom of religion”, there has been a switch in language in the administration to the term “freedom of worship.” The shift began with the President’s address at the Fort Hood terrorist attack memorial.

Subsequently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has switched to freedom of worship as well. Freedom of religion or freedom of worship, does it matter? Is this just hair splitting? Well the two links I supplied above lead to articles that deal with the implications of the switch quite capably. I’m more interested in asking the question why?

The answer is simple: hatred.

“Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:” Ephesians 4:26

That simple scripture cannot be adhered to by the left, they can never allow the wrath of their supporters to be abated. It is from that wrath that the left’s power flows. Without grievance there is no liberal agenda. To forgive the past is to lose the future for the Democrats.

Has there ever been a movement as obsessed with hatred and at the same time so unforgiving as the American Left? Hatred is the left’s religion. It is their eternal paradox. It’s like the atheists who cannot disbelieve in God without hating God and all those who choose to believe in Him.

Nothing is more hateful to a liberal than the God of the Holy Bible. In America, when a liberal attacks religion, he really means Christianity. This tenet of leftist thinking is illustrated beautifully by Brad Pitt in a conversation with Bill Maher. Pitt establishes his belief system when he states that if he ran for political office his platform would be “No God, legalization and taxation of pot and pro gay marriage.

Pitt then establishes what he means by no religion by attacking Christianity directly much to the delight of Maher and his audience. This is not unlike the statement made by Aldous Huxley:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do…. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

Pitt, Maher and Huxley are pegged by their desire to do away with God exposing the fact that they are not so much interested in liberty as they are in living as libertines. It is essential to recognize that liberalism as it exists today in America is rebellion against the God of the Holy Bible.

The first thing the founders wanted was to keep the recognition of God from being prohibited -The first thing the progressive liberal wants is to do away with God all together or at the very least to marginalize God.

In the mind of a liberal, if you defend traditional marriage, it is because you hate homosexuals and lesbians. If you are for immigration reform, it is because you hate Latinos. If you oppose the Presidents agenda it is because you hate Black people…and so the storyline goes.

The left loves to promote diversity. While many hardcore leftists oppose religion (really just Christianity) the paradox returns when it comes to liberal enthusiasm for religious diversity. The promotion of religious diversity is the ultimate anti-religious strategy. By championing the idea of equal validity for all belief systems, you effectively nullify them all.

If all religions are equally valid, then when they contradict each other they become equally invalid. As I am want to say on occasion, we can all be wrong, but we can’t all be right.

This is why so many Bible-believing Christians find it so troubling for the President to say he is a Christian and then say that he believes there are many paths to God.

Much of what the Obama administration and liberalism in general want for America should be troubling to Christians—that is, if you believe the Holy Bible is in fact God’s Word. It is important to the liberal agenda to make the transition from freedom of religion to freedom of worship.

Worship can be confined—we see this at play right now in China with the house church movement and state sanctioned churches. But a Chinese Christian is not free to disseminate literature or to spread the Gospel freely in society.

This is where we are headed in America. We see crosses being removed from roadside memorials, and the President covering references to Christ when he speaks at religious universities. We see “Under God” under attack. We see children unable to express their gratitude to their God for seeing them through high school in valedictory speeches.

Students can’t read the Bible in school, you can’t share your faith with a co-worker. If you are a liberal working to convince your constituents that the Defense of Marriage Act is an act of hatred, you certainly can’t abide a pastor standing on a street corner teaching that marriage is a holy sacrament to be entered into between one man and one woman.

If a pastor has to fear losing his tax exempt status because he preaches that homosexuality is a sin or abortion is murder, that certainly seems to be the government prohibiting the free exercise of religion. When most people don’t read the constitution for themselves, it’s easy to change terms to fit an agenda.

The left has convinced many Christians that they should not be involved in public discourse. Liberals claiming to be Christians love to say they practice a Christianity akin to the sermon preached by the Lord on the mountainside. But they hate the Lord’s great commission given to the disciples on the side of another mountain.

“Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” Matthew 28:16-20

When you remove “…Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world”, it becomes possible for you to reinvent what the Sermon on the Mount truly meant. The left likes the idea of Christ, but they don’t believe Christ! You certainly can’t go around telling people that all power is given unto Him. What about Buddha? What about Allah?

Fomenting the perception of hatred has become the left’s worshipful act. When the only thing you can see is hatred manifested in some way or another, you have become devoted to seeing hatred. Whatever you are devoted to, that thing becomes your de facto god.

I have stated many times that I have not been able to figure out how to reconcile being a Christian and voting Democrat, given the platform the Democrats run on. I am open to hearing an explanation from those of you who can.

Digital Publius