The First Amendment to the Constitution makes two statements regarding religion: the government may not establish a religion or prevent the free exercise thereof.  When that was ratified, most Americans were Christians, and a small percentage were Jews.  They designed a government with strengths that depended on people with Bible-based morality.  Because the right to petition the government for redress of grievances follows immediately after the right to free exercise of religion, it's reasonable to believe that the Founders believed that a moral people was part of our governing ethos.

This does not mean that only religious people have a place in American government.  When Jefferson said there is a "wall of separation" between government and religion, he was speaking about government staying out of religion, not about the faithful staying out of government.  In their writings, the Founders made it clear that the morality of the people was to transfer to governance.  While many religious traditions have moral foundations, it was Christianity with which the founders were most familiar, and it was Christian morality upon which the new government depended.

The progressives of today have "progressed" well beyond any perceived need for a religious basis for morality.  The left now defines morality by individual personal preference and statist needs.  This creates a difficult problem, given that our system of government is built around a known and fixed moral foundation.  The concept of a "living and breathing" Constitution that varies based on ever-changing social ideas is utterly alien to how the Founders envisioned our constitutional system.

The left's hatred of religion is particularly focused on Christianity.  The belief in a perfectly righteous God who defines a fixed morality is antithetical to the modern left's secular religion centered on self-worship.  The two systems are incompatible.

The left knows they are incompatible and are therefore working to a government that will serve their ever-changing individual moral principles.  The Constitution will still exist in theory, but its connection to Christian morality will be broken.  Not only that, but, as the travails of Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker demonstrate, they aggressively want to make Christian morality unconstitutional and possibly illegal.

The list of incompatibilities between these two belief systems is almost endless.  There are many foundational beliefs that have been turned upside-down by the self-worship morality of the modern left:

1. A man and a woman joining together in a covenant under God has been replaced by the hook-up society of unserious random relationships.

2. "Life begins at conception by God's providence" has been replaced by "life begins only when a woman says it has begun."

3. "He created male and female" has been replaced by people creating their own genders.

4. "All men are created equal" has been replaced by unequal treatment based on the style of the day (currently, anti-white).

5. "Flawed men have access to God's grace" has been replaced by people perfected by heavy-handed human indoctrination and coercion.

6. "All wisdom comes from God" has been replaced by "now God knows nothing, and human wisdom is the only wisdom there is."

7. "God says not to steal" has been replaced by "stealing is fine when the thieves are upset about a perceived wrong."

8. The blind justice of God has been replaced by a justice that varies based on who is on trial and who is prosecuting.

9. "God insists on using fair weights in trade" has been replaced by the notion that woke businesses should put their thumbs on the scale for favored groups.

10. God's creation has been replaced by an accident of evolution.

Again, the above is not meant to argue that America must run on Christian principles or that only Christians can participate in government.  It simply shows that the constitutional order that existed in 1791 is being bent to the breaking point by a new morality entirely unrelated to Judeo-Christian principles.

There have always been societies that incorporate humanity's flaws and desires into their design.  Some succeeded better than others, but all eventually failed, whether quietly or with great human misery.  Those that survived longest did so thanks to tyrannical control from above, with the tyrants setting the moral standards.

We were given an opportunity to break that process.  Our founders framed our government based on the people's moral principles according to Christian tradition.  When we abandoned the moral principles of Christianity, the experiment in self-government began its slide into failure.  We are now on the precipice of the tyranny needed to govern immoral people.

It is the utmost irony that a successful self-government requires a surrender to the principles of an all-powerful God, but the total loss of defined morality will require an all-powerful human government to maintain control.

Image: In God We Trust on coin by Kevin Dooley.