Attorney General William Barr said Christian media is essential to the preservation of Christianity in the public square as the United States continues to experience a “steady erosion of religion and its benevolent influence.”
“We live at a time when religion – long an essential pillar of our society – is being driven from the public square,” Barr told those gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters Christian Media Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, last week. “Thank God we have the National Religious Broadcasters to counter that effort.”
“Your members courageously affirm that entertainment and moral education are not mutually exclusive,” he continued. “You have boldly shown that media can serve higher ends: the safeguarding of faith as well as the cultivation of the classical virtues of the mind and heart that maintain our republican experiment in self-governance. As such, NRB’s members offer an alternative and essential platform for believers and nonbelievers alike.”
The reason politics is “omnipresent” today, Barr said, is partly because progressives are moving away from the liberal democracy envisioned by the founding fathers.
“That has played a major role in our politics becoming less like a disagreement within a family, and more like a blood feud between two different clans,” he explained. “They want able-bodied citizens to become more dependent.”
“The tacit goal of this project is to convert all of us into 25-year-olds living in the government’s basement, focusing our energies on obtaining the larger allowance, rather than getting a job and moving out and taking responsibility for ourselves.”
The attorney general stressed that historically, the U.S. has relied on religion, a decentralization of power and the freedom of the press to help prevent a slide toward tyranny.
Barr quoted founding father John Adams, who wrote, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
“How does religion protect against majoritarian tyranny? In the first place, it allows us to limit the role of government by cultivating internal moral values in the people that are powerful enough to restrain individual rapacity without resort to the state’s coercive power,” Barr contended.
“Experience teaches that to be strong enough to control willful human beings, moral values must be based on authority independent of man’s will. In other words, they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being. Men are far likelier to obey rules that come from God than to abide by the abstract outcome of an ad hoc utilitarian calculus.”
SOURCE: Christian Post, Leah MarieAnn Klett
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