Fox and Friends enjoys playing the victim in their weekly The Fight For Faith segment, which shows sanctimonious Christians being persecuted by non-religious heathens, and the courageous battle that ensues. Elisabeth Hasselbeck interviews a North Carolina pastor who believes that all Americans should value his deity over their own country. He wants to divide the country and offend many people by flying a much younger Evangelical Christian flag over our nation's symbol of freedom, beloved by so many.
The red cross on a blue corner atop a white field (for purity) is the flag found in the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, which dictates all the extreme, Old Testament purity that these televangelist preachers seem to love, until the truth of their own sins is ultimately exposed. (see scandals like Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker et al.)
Pastor Rit Varriale claims that our Founding Fathers, who eschewed the idea of mixing religion and government, based our newly formed government on Christian Values. This couldn't be further from the truth, as the First Amendment said something emphatically different.
The First Amendment's Establishment Clause prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” This clause not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another. It also prohibits the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion.
Pastor Varriale is ignorant of the fact that the Pledge of Allegiance did not contain the phrase, Under God, until the 1950's, he doesn't know that many Americans are NOT Christians and he thinks that the Constitution expressly guarantees everyone must pray in publicly funded institutions. Hasselbeck asks why he feels the need to fly this flag above the American Flag. He says,
'We've seen for quite a while now a push back on traditional Christian values in our culture and you can go all the way back to the issue of prayer in school. When the government started telling us that we can't pray with our children at institutions that our tax dollars pay for, and when the church simply complied, that's an issue. I mean, we have senior adults, their lives are a witness, a testimony to the fact that what we're living in right now is not the way it's always been in America. They grew up with prayer, they grew up with Bible readings at the beginning of their school day, and it was Constitutional.'
Pastor Varriale doesn't know about the 1962 Supreme Court Decision Engel v. Vitale which clarified that the state cannot mandate prayer for everyone in a publicly funded school (for example).
But the Big Lie in the school-prayer debate is the false charge that the Supreme Court expelled God or eliminated praying from public schools. In reality, the Court has never banned prayers in schools — in Engel or in any other decision.
Instead, the Court ruled that, under the establishment clause of the First Amendment, “it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.”
This Christian Flag was actually created after our own flag, in 1897, so it's not something that predates the birth of our nation. This is typical Southern rebellion, hiding behind its so-called religiosity, to show that they are not actually patriotic Americans, but bitter, hatemongers who profit off a contrived conflict that doesn't really exist. Of course, the Fox 'News' folks eat this garbage right up, because it helps them to further divide the country, like they always do.
