Trump Prayer speech
Since George Washington first added “So help me God” to his inaugural oath, every President since has likewise asked for assistance at his inauguration.
President Trump brought a particular message to the National Prayer Breakfast that hopefully will bring about a renewal in our faith in democracy and freedom.
His words contained a common thread-values.; a word that today has come to be associated with racism, xenophobia misogyny and Islamophobia rather than the underlying moral absolutes that are embedded in our founding documents.
These values to which President Trump referred come to us from the Hebrew Bible brought to America by the Puritans who believed in the sanctity of all life; that all people are born with equal intrinsic value; that we have free-will and that we must learn to care for the stranger. These values were revolutionary at the time and remain so today in so many places around the world, This Judeo/Christian ethic was and remains an extraordinary ethic; one that requires vigilance for it is easy to get caught up in fundamentalism and give up free will.
There are many who conflate religion with ethics. There are billions of people who believe in God-and gods. There are probably billions who don’t believe in God. I teach that God is a symbol for our values. When we, in the west, refer to God given-we are referring to the values and morals in the Hebrew Bible, values that came to the world 3500 years ago by the Jews and shared around the world by Christianity. These are immutable values, absolute values that Immanel Kant reinforced through his teaching of the categorical imperative, a secular understanding of the Judeo/Christian ethic.
President Trump is not the first to refer to these values.
The Declaration of Independence holds as “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these areLife, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson said the God who gave us life gave us liberty. Jefferson asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”
John Adams, a member of the Declaration of Independence committee and second president of the United States (1797–1801), understood the deep connection between ethical monotheism and freedom.
I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty, sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be a great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God…put in the terms of St Thomas Aquinas: An unjust las is a human law that is not rooted in natural law.”
Barack Obama, in his “Call to Renewal” keynote address on June 28, 2006, in Washington D.C., said:
“Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religion to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Barack Obama said this during his Inaugural Speech 2013:
“What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
“For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”
And President Trump said:
“And America will thrive as long as we continue to have faith in each other and faith in God. That faith in God has inspired men and women to sacrifice for the needy, to deploy to wars overseas and to lock arms at home to ensure equal rights for every man, woman and child in our land. It is that faith that sent the pilgrims across oceans, the pioneers across the plains and the young people all across America to chase their dreams.”
It is time for all of us to go back to that ethic and reclaim our western values.”
