President-elect Donald Trump has nominated U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to be the U.S. attorney general in his administration. He will be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, responsible for upholding the nation’s laws. Secular people and liberals are concerned about Session’s commitment to the separation of church and state. They think religion is likely to start to curtail the secular agenda, which they foisted on the United States, especially over the Obama administration. God’s people should be concerned about that too for a different reason.
Sen. Sessions lacks respect for the constitutional principle of church-state separation, which he has called an “extra-constitutional doctrine” and “a recent thing that is unhistorical and unconstitutional.” He apparently has a similar view of the wall of separation as did Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist who once said, the “wall of separation between church and State is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
Sessions also criticized Justice Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings and said that her concepts are “postmodern, relativistic, secular mindset and I believe it’s directly contrary to the founding of our republic.” In other words, Sessions is an advocate of a religious test for public office. Justice Sotomayor is a Roman Catholic. While she may have a secular mindset, the issue at hand is what Sessions wants for the republic?
On another occasion Sen. Sessions said, “We are at a period of secularization in America that I think is very dangerous, it erodes the very concept of truth, the very concept of right and wrong, and there are people out there who enjoy attacking people who follow biblical directives.”
While this is certainly true, what does Sessions want the United States to look like? Will he swing to the other extreme and start pushing to eliminate the church-state separation by which the United States became great in the first place? It is not likely that he will bring balance back into the nation’s laws.
Separation of church and state is at the foundation of all religious freedom. Donald Trump has said that he is going to work to remove the “Johnson amendment” to the IRS code, and thereby undo the “wall of separation” and give more power to the churches. Anyone who thought that Donald Trump might moderate his determination to strengthen the political engagement of the churches now that he’s headed to the White House needs to think again. The Sessions nomination suggests that we are likely to see a shift away from secularization to the opposite extreme in which modern evangelical and Catholic principles instruct U.S. policy.
Sessions is also an advocate of surveillance and a foe of encryption. These issues involve constitutional freedoms that have been seriously eroded in the last two U.S. administrations (Republican and Democrat). Sessions has also voted for voucher plans that would funnel taxpayer money to private religious schools, again an important indicator of what is to come.
If you think that Donald Trump’s administration will protect religious freedom for minority religions, think again. It is all going the other way. With no respect for the separation of church and state, where will that take the United States prophetically?
“The dignitaries of church and state will unite to bribe, persuade, or compel all classes to honor the Sunday. The lack of divine authority will be supplied by oppressive enactments. Political corruption is destroying love of justice and regard for truth; and even in free America, rulers and legislators, in order to secure public favor, will yield to the popular demand for a law enforcing Sunday observance. Liberty of conscience, which has cost so great a sacrifice, will no longer be respected.” The Great Controversy, page 592.