[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 69 (Wednesday, May 6, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H5276]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            IN GOD WE TRUST

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Forbes) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FORBES. Mr. Speaker, on April 6 of this year the President of the 
United States traveled halfway around the globe, and in the nation of 
Turkey essentially proclaimed that the United States was not a Judeo-
Christian nation.
  Now, I don't challenge his right to do that, nor do I dispute the 
fact that is what he believes. But I wished that he had asked and 
answered two questions when he did that. The first question was whether 
or not we ever considered ourselves a Judeo-Christian nation; and the 
second one is if we did, what was that moment in time where we ceased 
to be so?
  If you ask the first question, you find that the very first act of 
the first Congress in the United States was to bring in a minister and 
have Congress led in prayer and afterwards read four chapters out of 
the Bible.
  A few years later when we unanimously declared our independence, we 
made certain that the rights in there were given to us by our creator.
  When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 that ended the 
Revolutionary War and birthed this Nation, the signers of that document 
made clear that it began with this phrase: ``In the name of the Most 
Holy and undivided Trinity.''
  When our Constitution was signed, the signers made sure that they 
punctuated the end of it by saying ``in the year of our Lord, 1787.''
  And 100 years later in the Supreme Court case of Holy Trinity Church 
v. The United States, the Supreme Court indicated, after recounting the 
long history of faith in this country, that we were even a Christian 
nation.
  President George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew 
Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow 
Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight 
Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan all disagreed with the 
President's comments and indicated how the Bible and Judeo-Christian 
principles were so important in this Nation. And Franklin Roosevelt 
even led this Nation in a 6-minute prayer before the invasion of 
perhaps the greatest battle in history, the Invasion of Normandy and 
asked for God's protection. After that war when Congress came together 
and said where are we going to put our trust, it wasn't in our weapon 
systems, or our economy or our great decisions here, but it was ``In 
God We Trust'' which is emboldened directly behind you.
  So if in fact we were a Nation that was birthed on those Judeo-
Christian principles, what was that moment in time when we ceased to so 
be? It wasn't when a small group of people succeeded in taking prayer 
out of our schools, or when they tried to cover up the word referencing 
God on the Washington Monument, or they tried to stop our veterans from 
having flag-folding ceremonies at their funerals on a voluntary basis 
because they mentioned God, or even when they tried in the new visitor 
center to change that national motto and to refuse to put ``In God We 
Trust'' in there. No, it wasn't any of those times because they can rip 
that word off of all of our buildings, and still, those Judeo-Christian 
principles are so interwoven in a tapestry of freedom and liberty that 
to begin to unravel one is to unravel the other.
  That's why we have filed the Spiritual Heritage resolution to help 
reaffirm that great history of faith that we have in this Nation and to 
say to those individuals who have yielded to the temptation of 
concluding that we are no longer a Judeo-Christian Nation to come back, 
to come back and look at those great principles that birthed this 
Nation and sustain us today because we believe if they do they will 
conclude, as President Eisenhower did and later Gerald Ford repeated, 
that without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an 
American way of life.
  Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic 
expression of Americanism. Thus, the Founding Fathers of America saw 
it, and thus with God's help it will continue to be.

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