Wings of Liberty • July 21, 2024

Is America a Christian Nation?

The political temperature in America, already hot, has increased to a boil following the assassination attempt on former President Trump. The stunning (and thankfully unsuccessful) attempt has served to galvanize the right, bringing a unity improbable a few short weeks ago.


It is not hard to understand why. Trump is not only beloved by many, but he has long been the target of the deep state. There is a strong sense among some, even those who were not ardent Trump supporters, that it is possible the attempt on his life was something more than a lone gunman on a slanted roof that was “accidentally” unsecured by Kim Cheatle’s (and Alejandro Mayorkas’s) Secret Service.


After all, Mayorkas’ failure to secure the southern border is intentional. Thinking people are now solemnly considering the implications of the failure to secure the rooftop at Butler, PA, a task which also falls under the purview of the Secretary of Homeland Security.1 As former Navy Seal and Blackwater founder, Erik Prince, stated, “the fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yards to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.”2


Of course, the deep state is conducting its own investigation,3 while running interference to impede congressional investigation.4


Christian Nationalism


Unsurprisingly, the assassination attempt appears to have vitalized certain religious elements within conservativism. But even before the attempt on Trump’s life, the assertion that “America is a Christian Nation” had been gaining force for some time.5


Most recently, at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference and five days before the attempted assassination, Senator Josh Hawley claimed (incorrectly) that America was founded in the tradition of Augustine as carried on by “stern Puritans”, and stated:


And I’m sure some will say now I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say that I am advocating for Christian Nationalism. And so I do.6


Senator Hawley’s assertions are false, and Americans of all political persuasions need to understand they are false.


Most of the Founding Fathers were not Puritans, nor could any sort of viable argument ever be made that they were. George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin: none of them were Puritans, nor were they followers of Augustine. Far from it.


Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 AD, died in 430 AD, and repeatedly advocated for torture and forced conversion.7 His tyrannical views on the subject formed the basis of both the Crusades carried out by the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition, including the torture and murder of supposed Protestant “heretics”.8


Augustine was opposed to liberty of conscience, not in favor of it. Augustine, if he were alive, would have been opposed to the Declaration of Independence, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.


In contrast, the Founding Fathers passionately believed in liberty of conscience and were fiercely opposed to state coercion on religious grounds. This was the foundation of America – a land for all, without king or Pope, where no religious zealot could use the power of the state to impose his creed on his fellow men.


Senator Hawley stated the following in the same speech:


Twenty thousand practicing Augustinians made their way to these shores to found a society here on his principles. History knows them as the Puritans. Inspired by the ‘City of God’ they founded “The City On a Hill”.


We are a nation forged from Augustine's Vision a nation defined by the Dignity of the Common Man. The twenty thousand Puritans that arrived on the shores of North America were most certainly “practicing Augustinians” when they arrived…9


Again, Senator Hawley’s comments are demonstrably false. America was not “forged on Augustine’s vision”, but was founded most decidedly in opposition to Augustine’s tyrannical ideas. The Founding Fathers speak for themselves.


James Madison stated the following regarding liberty of conscience and religious freedom:


That Religion or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of Conscience.10


It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.11


Conscience is the most sacred of all property.12


We are teaching the world the great truth that Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion Flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.13


In the fight to pass the Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty, Madison remonstrated with that generation’s version of “Christian Nationalists” who tried to insert the words "Jesus Christ" in a preamble. Madison stated, "The better proof of reverence for that holy name would be not to profane it by making it a topic of legislative discussion..."14


Benjamin Franklin stated, "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”


George Washington, in a letter to Touro Synagogue to assure the religious freedom of the Jews in the U.S., stated:


The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation...It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.


May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.15


Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote of inalienable rights for every person under the sun.


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…16


According to the Founding Fathers, it is for the purpose of securing and protecting “these rights” – the very rights that Augustine opposed – that government is instituted. Augustine’s endorsement of torture and persecution is not only un-Christian, it is un-American. In fact, that is the very point of America: it was the intention of the Founding Fathers to render the creation of a persecutorial Augustinian state forever unconstitutional.


It is strange to have Senator Hawley invoke Augustine and Puritans instead of the Founding Fathers. But Senator Hawley is correct about the Puritans insofar as it is true that the Puritans were just as tyrannical and intolerant as Augustine. The Puritans were so persecutorial, most of the Pilgrims settled south of Massachusetts to get away from them.


They were especially cruel in their persecution of the Quakers, whom they drastically outnumbered, and with whom they had certain theological disagreements.


Beginning in 1656, Puritan church-state laws forbade any sea captain to land Quakers in Massachusetts. “Any individual of that sect was to be committed at once to the House of Correction, to be severely whipped on his or her entrance, and kept constantly at work, and none were suffered to speak with them.”17


“It was decreed that any Quaker arriving in the Colony should have one of his ears cut off. For another offence, he should lose the other ear. Every Quaker woman should be severely whipped. For a third offence, the tongue was to be bored through with a hot iron.”18


Quakers were sentenced to death in several cases at Boston.19


A 1661 law ordered that “any wandering Quakers be apprehended, stripped naked from the middle upward, tied to cart’s-tayle and whipped thro the town.”20


As Providence designed, however, Roger Williams, the eventual founder of Rhode Island, was raised up to face the Puritans’ intolerance. America was forged on Roger Williams’ vision of a free land.


As a preacher standing for civil and religious liberty and against the intolerance of the church/state, Roger Williams’ preaching made a clash with Puritan Governor John Winthrop and the leadership in Massachusetts inevitable. Roger Williams insisted that “forced worship stinks in God's nostrils.” He held “God requireth not a uniformity of religion.” Williams held that, “[E]nforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. No man shall be required to worship or maintain a worship against his will.”i21


Williams was summoned to return to England to face the charge of sedition, but before his arrest word from the coiner of the phrase “City of God”—John Winthrop warned him to flee before capture. William Jackson Armstrong, an author and citizen of Ohio referenced Roger Williams in 1889 as follows:


The civil power has no jurisdiction over the human conscience. Conscience belongs to the individual, and is not the property of the body politic. All human laws which prescribe or prohibit religious doctrines are damnable and unjust. Magistrates are but the agents of the people; on them no spiritual power whatever can ever be conferred.


Down amid the shadows and fogs of his sea-girt land, there had fallen upon this man [Roger Williams] an inspiration that was to roll back the tide of human hate and fear that had devastated this world for forty centuries. Reflecting upon the suffering of his race from religious cruelty, there had broken into his brain the conception, simple and sublime, of the words of Jesus of Nazareth to the Herodians with the tribute money : "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."


From that declaration of Roger Williams, two hundred and forty years ago, was born the American Constitution. Presbyterian England in the first half of the seventeenth century was not big enough to hold this inspired man. His continued presence would have split the throne of the Tudors and Plantaganets. From English religious persecution Roger Williams fled to the Puritans of New England. These gentlemen, too, had fled from Europe to enjoy (as they said) the blessings of religious liberty. But they had only enough liberty for Puritans and not enough for Roger Williams. So this brave man fled once more from the New England Puritans to the wilderness, and, among the barbarians of the North American forests in the Province of Rhode Island, established the first government according religious tolerance ever founded on this earth.22


Historian, professor and religious liberty advocate Alonzo T. Jones succinctly points to the roots of Puritan intolerance:


But yet those ambitious prelates of the fourth century were not content with stopping all manner of work, and closing public places on Sunday. They had secured the power of the State so far, and they determined to carry it yet further and use the power of the State to compel everybody to worship according to the dictates of the church. And one of the greatest Fathers of the church, was father to this theory. That was the great church Father and Catholic saint, Augustine— and by the way, he is grandfather to National Reform, too, as we shall prove one of these days.


Augustine taught that,— "It is indeed better that men should be brought to serve God by instruction than by fear of punishment or by pain. But because the former means are better, the latter must not therefore be neglected . . . Many must often be brought back to their Lord, like wicked servants, by the rod of temporal suffering, before they attain to the highest grade of religious development."23


Notes the theologian and historian August Neander, “It was by Augustine, then, that a theory was proposed and founded, which . . . contained the germ of that whole system of spiritual despotism, of intolerance and persecution, which ended in the tribunals of the Inquisition.”24


The Woke Left as Intolerant as the Puritans


It is doubtless true that the woke Left is as intolerant as the Puritans. It has used its increased power in education, media and government to impose its intolerable ideology on society. Large and hairy men who think they are women dominate women’s sporting events. Children are taken from parents by force and given cross sex hormones and have their genitals cut off. Sodom owns the month of June by government edict.


Millions of babies are aborted every year in cold blood. Governments collude with social media companies to make war on free speech. Organized groups loot and burn in large cities with impunity. The border is open and millions of illegal immigrants have entered the country, and the Left thinks they all ought to be allowed to vote.25


Is it any surprise that the cry arises: “America is a Christian Nation! We must go back to God!”


The state of society is dire. We are witnesses to the moral, social, and economic decay of not only America, but of all the western world in real time. Rome fell from corruption, decadence and profligacy, and the West falters similarly.


But the solution to America’s problems does not lie in so-called Christian Nationalism, a union of church and state, or government legislation to compel some tortured and hypocritical pantomime of the Christian religion. Shall we replace the forced confession of preferred pronouns with forced compliance or confession of some religious tenet?

Make no mistake – what many dislike most about the Left is its tyrannical use of government to cram its hideous ideology down our collective throats. A neutral state ought not to be controlled by religious or ideological partisanship. The state is tasked with the governance of a vast multitude, with vastly different spiritual and religious views. There ought to be no rainbow flags flying at the White House any more than there ought to be flags with a cross or a crescent moon flying at the White House.


The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of God, or Jesus Christ. The first clause of the First Amendment forbids Congress from passing any laws tending to the “establishment of religion”. There is no state religion in the U.S.


In 1796, in the last year that George Washington was President, the Treaty of Tripoli was signed to protect American merchant ships from piracy by the Barbary States. Article 11 states as follows:


As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.26


The Treaty was unanimously ratified in 1797 by the Senate, and copies were provided to every senator. Then President of the United States, John Adams, endorsed it as follows:


Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed, and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof.


There are increasing calls for a church-state union. Friends, we already have one. That’s what government by left wing idealogues in the Church of the Woke is. How do you like it?


It is no more a solution to America’s problems to have religious tyrants legislating their religion than it is to have left wing zealots legislating their ideology. Tyrants are tyrants. Tyranny is tyranny.


Unity in the political right is desirable if it is in favor of the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. A new intolerant Puritanism is as anti-American as the ideological oppression of the Left.



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1 https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/why-well-never-know-what-really-happened-in-butler-pa/


2 https://www.zerohedge.com/political/massive-secret-service-failure-led-nearly-successful-assassination-donald-trump


3 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/secret-service-check-box-senate-briefing-leaves-questions-infuriating


4 https://www.foxnews.com/us/congress-denied-access-crucial-trump-protection-plan-screams-cover-your-mode-expert


5 https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3540071-boebert-says-she-is-tired-of-separation-between-church-and-state-the-church-is-supposed-to-direct-the-government/


6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNbGxdDZ2I – see minute 4:20.


7 Augustine's Letters #185 Ch.6: "It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word."


Augustine's Letters #185 Ch.6: "Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction? Although even men who have not been compelled, but only led astray, are received by their loving mother with more affection if they are recalled to her bosom through the enforcement of terrible but salutary laws, and are the objects of far more deep congratulation than those whom she had never lost. Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show symptoms of resistance; especially since, if they multiply with growing abundance among the fugitive slaves and robbers, he has the more right in that the mark of the master is recognized on them."


8 https://victorspen.wordpress.com/2015/03/30/the-horror-of-the-inquisition/; https://churchandstate.org.uk/2016/04/the-dark-side-of-christian-history-the-inquisition-and-slavery/


9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNbGxdDZ2I


10 James Madison, Amendments to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 1776


11 James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, circa June 20, 1785


12 James Madison, essay on Property, March 29, 1792


13 James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822


14 https://vftonline.org/EndTheWall/VFT-UL/candst/detach.htm


15 George Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, Aug. 18, 1790 in: The Writings of George Washington, p. 766-67.


16 https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript


17 https://historicipswich.net/2022/11/29/persecution-of-quakers-by-the-puritans/


18 Ibid.


19 https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/15/Mary-Dyer; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Barrett-Dyer


20 https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/15/Mary-Dyer; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Barrett-Dyer


21 https://www.inspirationalstories.com/quotes/roger-williams-enforced-uniformity-confounds-civil-and-religious-liberty/


22 William Jackson Armstrong “Romanism and Civil Liberty” https://documents.adventistarchives.org/ 7

Tracts/SL/SL18891015-20.pdf


23 Schaf, Church History, Vol. II, section 27.


24 Neander, Id., p. 217. "


25 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13621419/democrats-republicans-vote-illegal-aliens-voter-id-trump.html


26 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp



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FAUCI and THE VATICAN:   THE STORY THE MEDIA REFUSES TO COVER

By Wings of Liberty • August 14, 2026
It is apparent that there are obvious media biases which result in coverage blackholes with both the left-wing media and the right-wing media. The leftist media avoids stories that are politically problematic for the left, and the right-wing media avoids stories which are unfavorable to the political right. Unless you are a complete partisan-loyalist-come-what-may (and these abound, to be sure) you know both sides of the media have their agendas. And they push those agendas with the issues they cover, how they cover them, or whether an issue gets covered at all. Control of information = control of people. If you needed any further evidence that the western media is bought and sold, major broadcast networks ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with cable news outlets CNN and MSNBC, largely ignored the stunning release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary entries leading up to his testimony, or rather non-testimony, at the Senate on July 29, 2026. [1] The Fauci diary files, which can be read here , expose a number of lies Fauci told the public versus what he recorded in private, [2] including conflicting stories about the origins of the virus and its actual versus claimed risk of fatality to the public. Following the hearing on July 29, during which Fauci refused to answer questions and pled the Fifth Amendment 111 times, most major news outlets either gave cursory coverage to the testimony, or actively defended Fauci’s conduct. Similarly, most major news outlets failed to report the bombshell revelation that Bill Gates held Q level security clearance through the Department of Energy (equivalent to top secret clearance issued by the Defence Department) during COVID, or questions Fauci refused to answer from Senator Rick Scott related to Fauci’s involvement with Bill Gates, [3] or Gates’ funding of virus research. Bill Gates’ top level security “typically applies to positions involving nuclear weapons design, national laboratories, critical energy infrastructure and classified scientific research”. [4] Fauci is stonewalling Congress and the American public and the world at large has yet to learn exactly what Fauci and Bill Gates were up to regarding gain of function research and the subsequent MRNA “vaccine” which was imposed and coerced so forcefully onto the public. Was this just about money? Make a virus, sell a “cure”? Or was it also about something even darker – like depopulation? The Covid shots were not only ineffective in preventing infection or transmission of Covid-19, they killed and maimed a lot of people. In 2010, Gates said that “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower [population] by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” [5] Despite an almost superhuman media campaign to recast this statement as benign, there just seems to be no amount of media weaseling that will make it go away. And since “reproductive health services” is often just the sleaze ball way of saying “abortion”, reasonable people have reasonably concluded that a good translation of what Gates said in the 2010 TED Talk is just what it sounds like: that if the elites abort more babies and inject people with more dangerous pharma cocktails, the population of planet earth will decrease by 10-15%. Which is a goal the Club of Rome and other elite orgs have been talking about for decades. [6] But back to Fauci: facts are facts. Fauci knew the virus was intentionally genetically modified: he had funded that research through the NIAID. Fauci publicly pushed the narrative during the pandemic that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was natural, and evolved from a wet market, which was false. It looks just like a man covering his tracks. Analysis of the virus revealed a novel furin cleavage site found at the S1/S2 boundary of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is absent in closely related natural coronaviruses like SARS-CoV. This specific additional sequence creates the mechanism whereby SARS-CoV-2 can infect human airways by facilitating viral entry by pre-cleaving the spike protein and significantly increasing infectivity, tropism, and syncytia formation. Fauci was aware that this very mutation was the purpose of NIAID funding and gain of function efforts, all while attempting to convince the public that the virus was natural. If you haven’t watched the full July 29, 2026 Fauci Senate hearing, you should. The link is here. And, as you may already know, in the intervening time between then and now, another shoe from the millipede has dropped. It has come to light that Fauci knew early on that the Covid vaccine could cause baby miscarriages in pregnant women, but he publicly informed the world that pregnant women should take it, and that it was safe. [7] If it looks like a depopulation agenda, and it walks like a depopulation agenda… But there is another story which the western media, left or right, refuses to cover regarding Tony Fauci, and that is his link to the Vatican. Sometimes what is not said is just as informative, if not more so, than what is said. And that is why it is so notable that both left and right wing media avoid investigation and coverage of the Vatican’s involvement in the narratives of both Anthony Fauci, as well as another public perp named Jeffrey Epstein. [8] If you watch Fox News, you will see that it is almost as averse to criticism of the Vatican or investigation into Fauci’s connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, vax mandates, as left-wing media outlets like CNN. It’s the same with Epstein and the Vatican. Radio silence from legacy media, be they left or be they right. Yes, its true that Fox News has turned on Fauci – but it doesn’t really have a choice at this point because the story has become too big. It’s either cover Fauci, or lose all credibility with that segment of the conservative base which smells all the dead rats under Fauci’s floorboards. So, Fox News covered Fauci’s diary and his narcissistic obsession with fame. It covered allegations Fauci misled Congress on the origins of the virus. It covered Fauci’s gross exaggeration of the fatality rate of Covid-19 in public, while privately documenting that it is actually far less dangerous. Fox News covered all of that. But Fox News is awfully quiet re Fauci and the Vatican. And there definitely is a connection between Fauci and the Vatican that any investigative journalist worth their salt should want to dig at. It’s not just that Fauci is Catholic, and the Vatican is the civil power of the church-state union of the Catholic Church. It’s not just that Fauci is being sheltered and aided in the midst of congressional scrutiny and public exposure by the Jesuits at Georgetown University, [9] which of course he is, or that the Jesuits are the militant arm of the Papacy, which of course they are. It’s not just that Joe Biden (Catholic) gave Tony Fauci (also Catholic) an unconditional pardon for all of his crimes during the pandemic no matter how heinous, or that the popes of old used to grant such plenary indulgences for all sins to the crusaders who furthered their wars. Isn’t that how it works in the confessional, behind the scenes? “Forgive me father, for I have sinned.” “What have you done, my son?” “Do you have the internet? I killed millions of people with a genetically altered virus and then told the whole world they needed to take a poison shot to save them from the virus.” “Yes, its all forgiven, my son. Ego te absolvo. Go do 33 ‘hail Mary’s’ and keep your head down at Georgetown for awhile.” The reality is that the Vatican and Fauci were teammates during Covid. The Vatican pushed lockdowns and Covid shots globally arguably as hard as Tony Fauci, and brought all its moral and spiritual influence to bear on the reluctant to overcome their misgivings. The Pope told every Catholic in the world that they have a “moral obligation” to take the Covid shot. [10] He told them it was “morally licit” even though derived from cell lines from aborted foetuses. [11] The Vatican even minted a coin celebrating the imposition of the Covid shot on the human family. [12] In doing so it publicly celebrated oppression, force, deception, coercion, and corruption. It celebrated everything that is anti-Christian, and anti-liberty of conscience. And early in the rollout of the Covid shots, the Vatican held a symposium to chart a course for world governments to overcome vaccine hesitancy in the face of public reports that the shots were killing people. The event was hosted by Pope Francis, and included the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna. Opening remarks were delivered by none other than Anthony Fauci. What did Tony Fauci say at this conference hosted by the Pope? Well, among other things, Fauci informed the crowd that moral authority needed to be brought to bear to overcome the doubters. The right voice was needed to overcome the hesitant, and those who did not want an experimental gene editing franken-shot under threat of punishment via the loss of civil liberties. Fauci said the key to overcoming current vaccine hesitancy is pairing the right medical message with the right messenger. “You have someone who’s a deeply religious person who will listen to their clergy.” [13]  Oh yes. There are plenty of dead rats in the Tony Fauci’s former office. One by one Congress will ensure that some of them are found and publicly ventilated. Fauci may take a public fall, and some media outlets will be compelled to cover some of his disgrace. But no mainstream media dares to touch the involvement of the Vatican with Fauci. And you should ask yourself what that means. And when you have thought about the implications you may know a little more about who really runs this world.

Religious Liberty Comments Needed

By Wings of Liberty • July 7, 2026
TO: THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Via EMAIL: RLC@usdoj.gov RE: RECOMMENDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY COMMISSION Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback to the recommendations of the Religious Liberty Committee submitted to President Donald J. Trump on June 26, 2026. While we are mindful of the Committee’s labors which resulted in the 12 recommendations released June 26, certain of which we agree with, we write to voice our concerns and objections to the Committee’s first and ninth recommendations, 1 and its obviously insufficient consideration of the warnings of the Founding Fathers of the dangers of a union of church and state, or the many lessons of history regarding same. The Committee recommended that the Department of Justice “issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.” 2 At the formal release of the Committee’s recommendations on the same day, Committee Chair Dan Patrick publicly stated that, “The separation of church and state is not in the constitution, ” and that the phrase “ has no constitutional basis .” 3 As citizens and students of history, and as Christians, we are alarmed, lest the flawed and unconstitutional view of the Chair of the Committee of the so-called “ proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and the separation of church and state”, prove influential or worse, instructive, to the Department of Justice. If the Committee’s opinion of the so-called “proper understanding” of the Establishment Clause is the same as that of its Chair, it is apparent that its understanding is not proper, but rather improper. Founding Father, “Father of the Constitution”, and fourth President of the United States, James Madison, contradicted Chair Dan Patrick’s claim that the separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. Madison stated that, “ Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States , the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history." According to James Madison, the separation of church and state is in the Constitution. As to whether James Madison, who is the principle author of the Establishment Clause, or Dan Patrick, is the greater authority on this subject, we think it not difficult for reasonably minded people to ascertain. Certainly, the Founding Fathers were all aware of the persecution of the Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and others in some of the colonies. They had seen first hand the ear croppings, whippings, imprisonment and hangings in Massachusetts and other colonies. In Europe, the persecution of the martyrs is well documented. Today we take the Bible for granted, but forget that William Tyndale was executed for translating the Bible into the English language not by atheists, but by religious bigots. It was a union of church and state which suppressed speech and the freedom of the press in England. It was a union of church and state which prohibited the work of translation of the Bible which changed the world. It was a union of church and state which necessitated his flight to Europe. It was a union of church and state which killed him. We respectfully ask that the Department of Justice, in considering the issue of public guidance of the separation of church and state, consider the history of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, and early Founding Father, who was repeatedly jailed for his religious faith in England. Pennsylvania Colony became a haven, not from atheist persecutors, but religious persecutors who did not believe in the separation of church and state. The same is true of Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island, who was ordered arrested for declaring that the civil magistrate cannot enforce the first table of the Decalogue. We ask that the Committee take into account the brutal public whipping of President Abraham Lincoln’s five-time great grandfather, Obadiah Holmes, in Massachusetts colony, for the “crime” of religious dissent. Obadiah Holmes was not whipped by atheists. He was whipped by Puritan bigots who did not believe in the separation of church and state. We respectfully request that the Department of Justice consider this history in the issuance of public guidance on the subject. We are concerned that the Committee neglected to take into account the impact of the separation of church and state on the other rights codified in the First Amendment. Free speech and freedom of the press, for example, owe their flourishing in the modern world in large part to the separation of church and state in America. Prior to the protections in the First Amendment, the Roman Catholic Church for centuries maintained a list of banned books called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The books were subject to confiscation, and the possession of them resulted in the punishment of the owner. Unfortunately, the Committee makes no mention of the censorship in this context of Galileo and Kepler, Kant and Locke, John Milton and Maimonedes, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, David Hume and Edward Gibbon, and many others, all at the behest of the Roman Papacy, which is itself a union of church and state. Free speech in the western world is the legacy of those who risked the wrath of a unified church and state, often at the cost of their lives. We would also ask that the Department of Justice consider the repeated modern calls from the papal power today for the censorship of the internet, and the suppression of free speech, contrary to the First Amendment. 4 We have no doubt that the censorship of Galileo, Kepler, Milton and others was prosecuted under the justification of the censorship of misinformation, also. The Roman Church was not alone in this persecution, either. We would ask the Department of Justice in its formulation of public guidance on the separation of church and state to remember the religious persecutions carried out at the behest of John Calvin in Geneva against religious dissenters such as Michael Servetus, who paid with his life for his writings and teachings. Servetus was executed by a union of church and state. We are concerned at the public statements of those who would create such a system in America. 5 Therefore we respectfully ask what proper guidance can the Department of Justice hope to give to the public on the “proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and the separation of church and state” if it is directed in its object by a Committee and a Committee Chair, who has neglected to more fully analyze the reasons for the separation of church and state, or the reasons why the United States codified the disestablishment of church and state in the First Amendment in the first instance? Reference to the wall of separation between church and state is not only mentioned by President Thomas Jefferson in the letter to the Danbury Baptists, which of course it is. 6 What is often left out of the narrative is that Jefferson said that he personally believed that the principle of the separation of church and state is codified in the Constitution. Therein, Jefferson wrote: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, ¬t opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. 7 James Madison wrote, It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it. 8 Lastly, we object to the recommendation of the Committee that the Johnson Amendment be removed. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are mindful of Our Lord’s words that we “render to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God the things that are God’s.” 9 Jesus Christ established the principle of the separation of church and state, and taught that what belongs to God cannot be rendered to Caesar. The application of this teaching is that religionists, ambitious for civil power, and politicians ambitious for their endorsement, are to be kept separate in the American system of politics, as the Constitution requires. The union of church and state results in the corruption of both, a result which neither should desire, and neither can afford. Madison stated that “The number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State." 10 And he was right. If the Johnson Amendment is removed, religionists who want civil power will publicly stump and promise their votes and congregational dollars in exchange for political favors, and the politicians will be doubtless all too eager to reciprocate in the form of legislation which the religionists desire provided they will aid their attempts to gain office. In his anonymous treatise published in the Boston Gazette, John Adams, later the second President of the United States, wrote that canon law was a tyrannical form of government, as was feudal law, but that the worst of all forms of governments was a union of the two. 11 And it was Madison who stated that, “In the Papal System, Government and Religion are in a manner consolidated, & that is found to be the worst of Governments.” We respectfully request therefore that the Department Justice not adopt recommendations 1 and 9 of the Committee, and that it does adopt recommendation 1 of the Committee that it convene a public hearing, with written and oral submissions from the public, to more comprehensively study the question of the separation of church and state in history, and in American history in particular, a study which we would enthusiastically support. We remain yours truly, [THE UNDERSIGNED] ------------------------------------------------------- 1 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/president-trumps-religious-liberty-commission-delivers-historic-report-draft 2 Ibid, [Emphasis added]. 3 https://www.chron.com/politics/article/dan-patrick-church-state-constitution-viral-22323383.php 4 https://reclaimthenet.org/pope-francis-calls-on-social-media-platforms-to-censor-more-misinformation ; 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAUkMwlWYB8 ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMBiPIfx-UA 6 https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html 7 https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html - Jefferson here is clearly referring to Congress. That Congress is prohibited by the Constitution from making a union of church and state. 8 James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments 9 Matthew 22:21 10 James Madison, Letter to Robert Walsh, March 2, 1819. 11 John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765. https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/PJA01dg2 Since the Promulgation of Christianity the two greatest systems of Tyranny that have Sprung from this source, are the Cannon and the feudal Law. The Desire of Dominion, however noble and useful on the whole, is however, when unawed and unrestrained by Hopes and Fears, an encroaching, grasping, restless and ungovernable Principle. And among all the Variety of iniquitous systems that have been contrived by the great, for the Gratification of it, in themselves was never So successful, as in the Invention and Establishment of the Cannon and the Feudal Law. In the former, the most refined, sublime, extensive and astonishing Constitution of Policy that was ever conceived by the human Mind, we find was framed by the Romish Clergy, for the Aggrandisement of their own order. All the Epithets, that I have given to the Romish Policy, will be owned to be just, when it is considered, that they found it practicable to persuade Mankind, that God almighty had intrusted them with the Keys of Heaven, whose Gate they might open and Close at Pleasure—With a Power of Dispensation over all the Rules and Obligations of Morality—With an Authority to Licence all sorts both of Sins and Crimes.—With a Power of deposing Princes, and absolving subjects from their Allegiance.—With a Power of procuring or witholding the Rain of Heaven and the Beams of the Sun—With the Management of Earthquakes, Pestilence and Famine—Nay with the misterious, awful Incomprehensible Power of Creating out of Bread and Wine the Flesh and Blood of the great Creator of the Universe. And all these opinions, they were enabled to propagate and rivet in the Minds of the People, by reducing the Minds of the Common People them to a State of Sordid Ignorance and staring Timidity, and by infusing into them a religious Horror of Letters and Knowledge of every Kind. Thus was human Nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, deplorable Servitude, to him and his Subordinate Tyrants, who it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God and that was worshiped. In the latter We find another System, Similar in many Respects to the former: which, altho it was originally formed, perhaps for the necessary Defense of a barbarous People, against the Inroads and Invasions of her neighboring nations; Yet for the Same Purposes of Tyranny, Cruelty and Lust, which had dictated the Cannon Law, it was soon adopted by allmost all the Princes of Europe and wrought into the Constitution of their Govt. It was originally a Code of Laws 110for a vast Army in a Perpetual Encampment. The General was invested with the Sovereign Propriety of all the Lands within their Territory—of Him the first Rank of his great officers, held the Lands, immediately, and the other subordinate Ranks, held of them, and all held by a Variety of Duties and services, tending to bind the Chains the faster on every order of Mankind. In this Manner the Common People were held together in Clans and Herds in a State of Servile Dependance on their Lords, bound by the tenure of their lands to follow them to their Wars whenever they commanded, and in a state of total Ignorance of every Thing divine and humane, excepting the Use of Arms and the Culture of the Lands. But another Event, still more calamitous to human Liberty, was a wicked Confederacy between the two Systems of Tyrany above described. It seems to have been even stipulated between them that the temporal Grandees, should contribute every Thing in their Power to maintain the Ascendancy of the Priesthood, and the Spiritual Grandees in their turn, shold employ that ascendancy over the Consciences of the People, in impressing on their Minds a blind, implicit obedience to civil Magistracy. [emphasis added]

Liberty and Healthcare in Canada

By QV.tv • July 2, 2026