Source: https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/when-state-sovereignty-defies-divine-sovereignty
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 06:32:23+00:00

Document:
I studied law and passed the California Bar Exam, said to be the toughest bar exam in the world. I understand how to read laws, and I know how to write laws. I have a passionate interest in the legal system.
For the first hundred years after the Constitution was ratified, America was a Christian nation. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this obvious fact in several decisions. America was also a capitalist nation, acknowledging the work of an “invisible hand” in a free market.
However, during thesecond hundred years after the Constitution was ratified, America became an atheistic and socialist or fascist nation. In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court declared all state laws prohibiting atheists from taking an oath of office to be “unconstitutional.” Decades before that, the Court had ruled that a Christian—whose allegiance to God is greater than his allegiance to the government—cannot take an oath of office.
My allegiance to God is greater than my allegiance to the state. So after I passed the California Bar Exam, I asked the California State Bar if they intended to abide by the modern Supreme Court cases (instead of original intent), and of course, they did.
All the details of my case, why I am not an attorney today, and why Christians are not allowed to take the oath to “support the Constitution” are spelled out below in more detail than your average constitutional law professor would want to know.
I’m not a lawyer, but it’s not for lack of trying. I went to USC pre-law; after law school I passed the California Bar Exam. I was completely qualified to become a lawyer.
But then I ran into the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This was the Court that recently said the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are “unconstitutional.” This was only the latest in a long series of decisions that are hostile to religion. In 1998, I came before the Ninth Circuit Court with a brief written by three well-known professors of constitutional law and a former California State Supreme Court Justice. The court blocked my attempt to become an attorney by refusing to reverse the decision of a federal district court that declared that a 1945 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court barred me from practicing law. I believe America ought to be a nation “under God.” But we can’t have attorneys actually believing that, now can we?
When it struck down “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ninth Circuit Court claimed it was only following Supreme Court precedents.
The Ninth Circuit could have said “under God” in the Flag Salute was constitutional, because thirty years ago it declared that “In God We Trust” and “So help me, God” were constitutional—on the grounds that they were merely “patriotic” slogans and really had nothing to do with God or religion (Aronow v. U.S., 432 F.2d 242, 1970).
Instead, the Court (maturing over the last thirty years in its hostility to religion) declared that the words “under God” really do have reference to theology, and are therefore unconstitutional. I believe all attorneys and politicians have a divine obligation to conduct their public affairs according to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and that our nation is obligated to be a nation “under God.” Because of this, the legal system refused to allow me to become a member of the Bar.
I know a good man from Afghanistan. Thirty years ago he was imprisoned by the Communists. He was well known in Afghanistan, something of a hero. He’s a hero in my eyes. He now lives in the United States. I’ve had dinner at his home. He is a great American, and his family loves this country.
You are now being interviewed as a potential juror on my case. You know me to be a fine person, and you know my Muslim friend was no enemy of America. You think I’ve been charged with violating a very, very bad law. Not just an “unconstitutional” law, but an unethical law. An immoral law. You have a conscience, and your conscience will not allow you to do anything that would send me to prison or to the firing squad for failure to kill a good person. You know in your heart that as a juror you will not vote “guilty” regardless of the law or the facts in my case. Once in the jury room, you will also attempt to persuade the other jurors to vote “not guilty,” to send a message to the government that this is a very bad law. You hope that juries across America will nullify this bad law.
If you tell the judge that you intend to vote your conscience regardless of the law or the facts, you will not be allowed to serve on the jury. “You’re excused,” the court will tell you, and send you home.
And, “you’re excused” is what the California State Bar told me, along with every court all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Because in America today, anyone who places God (or his own conscience) above the decrees of the government cannot be an attorney (unless he keeps his mouth shut about his having a conscience). Anyone who would publicly announce with the Apostles, “We must obey God rather than man,” cannot become a lawyer, a draftsman for the county, a certified elevator inspector—even a naturalized American citizen, according to numerous court cases.
Let’s walk through the fundamental problem for the sake of clarity.
That court was correct; the judge was fair. The more research I did, the more hopeless it appeared. This case may be obscure, but it is not an anomaly. It represents the tip of an iceberg of Supreme Court decisions that have quietly converted America from a nation “under God” to a government that thinks it IS god.
If my case sounds like the makings of a nutty conspiracy theory, I respect your good sense and patriotism. But the case law5 is against you, as it was against me.
To appreciate that case and the tectonic shift in values it represents, it is necessary to review the cases it cites, and trace those cases back to cases at the time the Constitution was ratified, and even further back.
In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that America was “a Christian nation.” The case was Holy Trinity Church vs. United States, and it involved a New York church that wanted to hire a pastor from England. Federal immigration authorities tried to stop the church under a statute prohibiting the importation of cheap manual labor. The U.S. Supreme Court said it was wrong to apply this statute to churches and pastors because “this is a Christian nation.” The Court described the Christian roots of America in the last half of its opinion.
Things have changed dramatically since 1892.
This case was overruled in 1931 (U.S. v. Macintosh).6 A pastor from Canada wanted to become an American citizen. The Holy Trinity case should have been applied here. Like the Apostles, this pastor was one of those “radical” “subversive” Christians who “must obey God rather than man.” The Supreme Court, in a truly hideous opinion, declared that allegiance to God took second place to allegiance to the state. The Court said the oath to “support the Constitution” (which the Canadian pastor was willing to take) required “unqualified allegiance to the nation and submission and obedience to the laws of the land” even if these laws directly contradicted the law of God.
This case represents the complete overthrow of everything America once stood for.
There’s more: By its very nature, an oath (such as the oath to “support the Constitution”) is religious: a solemn statement made to (and in the presence of) God. At least it used to be religious. Atheists who opposed hearing “so help me God” in public succeeded in having the oath legally redefined into an act of “ceremonial deism.” But back in 1844, the U.S. Supreme Court, in holding that the government must teach the Bible in government-operated schools, had declared that “deism” was a form of “infidelity.” The modern secular oath is therefore now a declaration that one is not faithful to God.
As I said above, a Christian (and by implication, anyone with a conscience) is prohibited by law from taking the oath to “support the Constitution.” Discovering this, I also concluded that no Christian (or anyone with a conscience) should want to take this oath.
I was not permitted to take such an oath. This is why I am not an attorney. The state insists that the person taking the oath concede that the authority of the state trumps the authority of God, and that his allegiance to the state is absolutely unqualified. The state must be conceded, for all intense and purposes, to be God.
Some people—even some attorneys—told me to “just go ahead and take the oath” and “get it over with.” But it would be a “false statement of fact or law” for me to say that I was permitted to take the required oath, as the judge in federal court rightly observed, citing the 1945 Summers case (325 U.S. 561). It struck me as ironic that my very first act as an attorney would be to violate the duties of an attorney by falsely declaring that I was permitted by courts to take the oath. This I was unwilling to do, as no Christian can affirm under oath that Caesar is Lord.
Many Ten Commandments monuments have been held “constitutional” precisely because they were held to be irrelevant. But Judge Moore contended the monument represented something very relevant: the authoritative Word of a living God who was sovereign over federal courts. Moore contended all courts and every branch of government at every level had a duty to acknowledge the sovereignty of the God of the Bible. The new god of the religion of secular humanism would not permit this. It demands the “unqualified allegiance” laid down in the 1931 Macintosh12 case—and has never actually ceased from doing so.
Shutting down the press, confiscating arms, quartering troops, searching without warrant, double jeopardy, denial of bail, denial of jury, cruel and unusual punishments, taxes on tea, taxation without representation: imagine that all of these abuses in the Bill of Rights and the many grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence been completely redressed by the British Crown and restitution made. The American Revolution might have been averted. But then imagine that the very next day, the King announced the colonial magistrates and pastors had to “marry” homosexuals. It would have been described as “blasphemy.” It would have been seen as an insane assertion of deity on the part of the king. The Revolution would have commenced with triple the intensity.
Anyone who was surprised by the recent Supreme Court decision overriding the democratic process in numerous states and imposing homosexual “marriage” on the states hasn’t been paying attention. Americans today are idolaters. They tolerate blasphemy. Americans 200 years ago would have more fiercely opposed the claim to redefine marriage than all the “taxation without representation” one could imagine.
rearrangement of society to build the utopia it has charted for us.
Until we address the long-standing dislocated sovereignty at the root of today’s crises, our solutions to the problem will be superficial … and will fail. “The wicked frame mischief using law” (Psalm 94:20), but those deadly frames were erected in 1931 and 1945, not in 2015.
1. Los Angeles Daily Journal 107:82 (April 29, 1994) p. 20. See also 1994 Cal. LEXIS 2431 (Cal. Apr. 27, 1994) and Craig vs. State Bar of California 115 S.Ct. 421 (1994). Note that, technically, the merits of this case have never been reviewed. Courts have only refused to take the case. Note also that one of the attorneys on my brief before the 9th Circuit is now the Dean of the Law School at UC Irvine. I don’t say that because he was particularly fond of my position, but rather to demonstrate that the case was never “frivolous,” as some hasty analysts have erroneously concluded. Even the Daily Journal article conceded that the Court gave my case a great deal of thought.
4. In re Summers 325 U.S. 561; 65 S.Ct. 1307 (1945).
5. For reference, “case law” means previous court decisions, which function as law, just like the statutes of the legislature do.
6. U.S. v. Macintosh, 283 U.S. 605, 51 S.Ct. 570, 75 L.Ed. 1302 (1931).
8. This phrase is taken from the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, Inc. v. Wadmond, 401 U.S. 154 at 166, 91 S.Ct. 720 at 728, 27 L.Ed.2d 749 (1971). I offered to use “gender-inclusive language” if the State Bar insisted.
9. This phrase meets some of the requirements stated by the Court in U.S. v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644, 49 S.Ct. 448, 73 L.Ed. 889 (1929).
Present: Imbrie at A2d 354, 355, 371, ALR2d 244, 245, 362; Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513 at 515-16, 78 S.Ct. 1332 at 1336 (1958).
Kevin Craig was once a regular contributor to the Chalcedon Report (prior to 1982). His articles have also been published by Dr. Gary North’s Institute for Christian Economics. He spent the better part of a decade with the Catholic Worker movement and is the founder of Vine & Fig Tree.

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