On his Monday night show, CNN’s Chris Cuomo told the American people that to heal our nation, we don’t need God.
“If you believe in one another and if you do the right thing for yourself and your community, things will get better in this country,” Cuomo stated. “You don’t need help from above, it’s within us.”
Whether he realized it or not, Cuomo’s statement was clear secular humanism, which is the idea that human beings don’t need God but rather can improve and better the world by themselves. The ideology places prime importance on the goodness and improvement of human beings, rather than fidelity to and hope in a Creator.
At least one obvious question from Cuomo arises. Namely, what does he mean when he said, “do the right thing?”
If there is no God, who gets to decide what is right?
If God isn’t in the picture, neither is an objective and immutable standard of right and wrong. What’s moral and immoral would simply be determined by one’s subjective opinion, with no one to really say what is right.
And if that’s the case, then why would Cuomo urge us to do what’s right?
Additionally, our founding fathers and first presidents would have also disagreed strongly with Cuomo’s humanistic remark.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” President George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address on September 19, 1796. “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”
President Abraham Lincoln concurred.
In his Day of National Thanksgiving Proclamation issued on July 15, 1863 during the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln wrote, “It is meet and right to recognize and confess the presence of the Almighty Father, and the power of His hand, equally in these triumphs and in these sorrows.”
Lincoln also asked the American people to intercede to Almighty God to end the war. “I invite the people of the United States… to invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit to subdue the anger which has produced and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion, to change the hearts of the insurgents… and to lead the whole nation, through the paths of repentance and submission to the Divine will, back to the enjoyment of union and fraternal peace,” Lincoln wrote.
As Independence Day nears, let’s take Lincoln’s advice.
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Photo from Ron Adar / Shutterstock.com
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