Calf Worship In The United States:
The American Civil Religion

Patriotic devotion to the American civil religion is one of the most subtle, yet pernicious forms of idolatry practiced in the United States today. Pernicious because evangelical Christians themselves are some of its chief adherents.

Civil religion is the fusion of disparate belief systems under the “benevolent” power of the state on the assumption of a mutual obligation to natural law. In this view the state is not subject to God or Biblical law.

Rather religion exists to serve the need of the state for a unified populace. For George Washington and the American founders, religion functioned as a social adhesive and for that reason was to be encouraged – as long as it kept its place.

Ancient Political Idolatry

It was for just such a purpose that Jeroboam set up his golden calves in Israel. In doing so, he took advantage of the laziness of the people and their ignorance of history. Jeroboam feared that the 10 tribes would be reunited with Judah if they went up to offer sacrifices in Jerusalem.

“So the king consulted, and made two golden calves, and he said to them, ‘It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold your gods, O Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.’ And he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan” (I Kings 12: 28). Thus, true religion was perverted into a civil religion to serve the needs of the state in Israel.

Have you ever wondered how ancient peoples could be so foolish and juvenile as to worship an image carved from a piece of wood? In 1983 a book by Steven Schlossberg made the point that modern idols are more sophisticated than the images set up by the ancients (Idols For Destruction, Thomas Nelson Publishers). They are idols nonetheless.

Modern Political Idolatry

One such idol he identified as Historicism. Historicism takes various forms, but according to Schlossberg, “the idolatries of history exalt an age (past, present, or future), or a process or an institution, or a class, or a trend and make it normative” (p13)…He went on to say that ”Time will unfold all things, it says, in a way that is inevitably right no matter what happens….In this thinking the golden age lies in the past instead of the future” (p20).

Ecclesiastics 7:10 speaks to this tendency toward historicism and civil religion: “Do not say ‘Why is it that the former days were better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.”

Political Baalism

“The creation of the golden calves may have been an attempt to identify the Lord with Baal. Among the Phoenicians, Baal was sometimes called the "calf" whereas the supreme god El (God) was called the "bull". A bull cult was widespread in Canaan at the time of the Israelite invasion” (The Free Dictionary by Farlex).

The cult status of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 is a modern-day manifestation of this ancient, idolatrous civil religion because:

1) it substitutes the governing authority of God for that of "we the people," thus enthroning a false god at the heart of the nation,

2) it makes it illegal to require an officeholder to swear to govern by the Bible, thus opening the door wide for humanistic, "positive" law, and

3) it emphatically pronounces the Constitution itself to be the supreme law of the land, thus excluding any higher law in the Bible.

This is all in contrast to the earlier covenant documents of our 13 original colonies, which were broken by the action in 1787-88. It should be obvious that the curses that have come upon America are the result of this broken covenant, in accordance with Deuteronomy 28.

Whether we realize it or not, our Federal head(s) have placed us in a position of vulnerability before God. We may try to shrug it off with the excuse that that was 215+ years ago, but we know that God does not take covenants made with him lightly. For example, He held Saul accountable about 700 years after Joshua made the covenant with the Gibeonites.

It's all right there for people to read, but most Christians are too preoccupied, too lazy, or too negligent to do it. They'd rather take the word of a "Christian History Expert" who has an axe to grind. These kind of distortions are repeated constantly by the American Christian History experts and serve to perpetuate the idolatrous, American civil religion.

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