Our Godless Constitution and The Sunday Law

[phkrause]

For the years in the 1990s that I edited Liberty, I got quite an education regarding America and American history. And one thing I learned, early on, was just how secular, even godless, the United States Constitution is.

https://adventistreview.org/cliffs-edge/2109-27/

[RonCorson]

It is often hard to take Cliff seriously, He ends by saying:

"This implicit recognition of Sunday as sacred, in something as secular as the United States Constitution, shows ironically enough why it was a great idea to keep the government and religion as far apart as possible. And that’s because the one time in the document that it even implicitly seeks to apply religious doctrine to the nation—it gets it wrong."

Really they got it wrong? Where is the explanation of why it was wrong? OK, it would be a silly article to explain why it was wrong to say that society as a whole took the day off on Sunday and thus really not necessary to hurry back with a decision on Sunday when the government was closed. Yeah when you look at it in context to history there is noting wrong about the statement in the amendment. Though one would think that if you had an article in the Adventist Review the writer could explain why something is wrong rather than just make a gratuitous assertion. 

Cliff correctly mentions the declaration of Independence is not the constitution. It is however the frame that presents the constitution. As Abraham Lincoln famous quote reveals.

"Abraham Lincoln entered the presidency with a deeply developed view of the Constitution’s meaning and significance. Alluding to Proverbs 25, he called it the “picture of silver” inside of which was the “apple of gold,” the Declaration of Independence. “I never had a feeling politically,” Lincoln declared, “that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” especially the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” in their God-given natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, from his earliest days in politics, Lincoln maintained that equality of natural rights “is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest.” Americans are not bound together “by blood,” he declared; rather, it “is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” It was the Declaration, not the Constitution, which formed the moral and political basis of the Union. The Declaration made Americans into “We the People” who then gave the Constitution its authority by their consent." https://ashbrook.org/viewpoint/onprin-feb2009-sikkenga/

It can be summed up as" 

The two key founding documents in American history are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The first explains why we exist as a nation. Not only does the Declaration mention God four times, most importantly, it says that our rights come from the Creator.

The Constitution explains how we exist as a nation—how we are to function. The Constitution is predicated on the Declaration...https://providenceforum.org/blog/god-and-the-constitution/