by Robert E. Reccord
Focus on the Family
December 2, 2003


The liberals who went after Roy Moore would like to do the same thing to
anyone who stands up for God in the public square.

When Alabama's judicial ethics panel voted to oust State Supreme Court
Chief Justice Roy Moore, it provided the most vivid illustration yet of
the great irony playing itself out in our day.

Many in the United States legal system are engaged in an effort to destroy
the very foundation on which our nation's laws are based. The
Judeo-Christian system of morality has served as western civilization's
legal foundation for centuries, yet today many judges believe they can
destroy that foundation and still maintain a lawful society.

For decades, members of the U.S. Supreme Court not only tolerated our
biblical foundations, they openly embraced them. In an 1892 decision, the
court stated, "Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based
upon and embody the teachings of The Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible
that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our
civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. This is a
religious people. This is historically true . . . this is a Christian
nation." (Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States 1892)

President Coolidge acknowledged "The foundations of our society and our
government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be
difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be
practically universal in our country."

Coolidge understood that if the foundations are destroyed, our nation
won't just cease to be moral, it could very well cease being a nation at all.

There is nothing in our nation's founding documents — the Declaration of
Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights — that would lead
a reasonable person to conclude that a judge could not display the Ten
Commandments in his courthouse. So where did the courts get the idea?
Perhaps U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black can best be blamed. In order
to arrive at some of the damaging church and state decisions the court
made in the 1950s and 1960s, Black took us on a journey through Thomas
Jefferson's personal writings. In them, he found a letter Jefferson wrote
to the Danbury Baptist Association extolling the "wall of separation
between church and state."

Was Jefferson arguing that religious people should not influence
government? That would be difficult to believe, considering the fact that
two days after writing his famous letter to the Danbury Baptist
Association, Jefferson could be found sitting in the halls of Congress,
listening to a sermon from Baptist Pastor John Leland, one of many
religious services held in government buildings during Jefferson's
administration.

Despite efforts by the legal left to paint Judge Moore as an extremist, he
fails to fit the mold. I have had the privilege of spending time with
Judge Moore recently and found him to be both reasonable and well-spoken.
When he ran for chief justice in 2000, he did so on a platform built on
returning the legal system to its moral underpinnings. In fact, he was
known as the "Ten Commandments Judge" during that campaign. The people of
Alabama overwhelmingly chose to place Moore in office, and they still
support him today. That sentiment seems widespread. A recent Gallup poll
found 77 percent of Americans disagree with the court ordering Moore to
remove his monument.

Judge Moore is demonstrating the difference between holding a belief and
holding convictions. Beliefs run rampant today. But a conviction is the
willingness to act on a belief regardless of the consequence. Most
Americans say they believe in God, but Judge Moore risked his career by
sticking to his belief that God's laws supercede man's. Those kind of
convictions are hard to find today.

Ultimately, the decision against Moore will serve as one more warning shot
aimed at Americans of all faith backgrounds. The message: "Go ahead and
believe in God, but carry that belief into the public square and it will
cost you dearly."

Make no mistake, the case against Judge Roy Moore is not an effort to
protect Americans from state-sponsored religion; it is about moving people
of religious conviction further to the margins of public life. It moves us
closer to a day when only those willing to bow down before the altar of
religious neutrality will be deemed fit for public service.

Robert E. Reccord is president of the North American Mission Board, a
Southern Baptist agency based in Alpharetta, Ga.