Most of this week’s “WallBuilders Live” radio program has consisted of excerpts from the new DVD series “Constitution Alive! A Citizen’s Guide to the Constitution” featuring Rick Green and David Barton. On yesterday’s program, Barton explained that that the Constitution’s requirement that members of Congress and the president take an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” was the Founding Fathers’ way of infusing religion into the document since an oath is a “direct appeal to God” to hold lawmakers accountable for their actions and “there is no such thing as a secular oath.”
Any oath that is not made to God, Barton said, must instead rely on “the goodness of man and there’s not a whole lot in me that says the goodness of man is great. Just look back across the Twentieth Century and the one hundred and fifty million lives that were lost because Stalin wasn’t good and Hitler wasn’t good and Tojo wasn’t good and Pol Pot wasn’t good.”
The Founders knew this, Barton said, and so they “tied religion to the Constitution to give it strength” through these oath requirements, asserting that any attempt to implement the Constitution without religion is like trying to breathe on the moon.
“You and I, if we go to the moon and breathe there, we’ll die,” Barton said, “because that’s not our atmosphere. And if you take a secular atmosphere to the Constitution, it will die because that’s not its atmosphere. It was birthed and created in a religious atmosphere and if you take that air out of the room, it will suffocate. It will die because it’s not made that way”:
