Controversy continues to brew over a Sam Adams beer commercial. 

Released on Independence Day, the advertisement quotes from the Declaration of Independence but omits the crucial words, “by their Creator.”

In the ad, an actor says, "All men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Endowed by whom? With the reference to God censored out, the wording does not even make sense.  Thomas Jefferson, who originally penned the Declaration, knew that rights cannot be "inalienable" unless they come from a transcendent source.

If rights come from the state, then they are not inalienable -- because what the state gives, the state can take away.

As Jordan Ballor says on the Acton Institute blog, "In such a radical separation of faith from public life, Sam Adams the beer company has done something that Sam Adams himself would never have stood for."

Of course, the reason Adams would not have stood for it is that the founders did not think of "faith" the way modern societies do, as merely personal experience and private feelings. They lived in an age that viewed Christianity as a philosophy or system of thought that spoke to every area of reality.  That's why, for them, references to God belonged rightfully in public, political documents like the Declaration of Independence.

Today the fact/value separation that I describe in Total Truth is being imposed with a vengeance -- even to the point of falsifying the founding documents of the American republic.

To read "Secularizing Sam Adams" by Jordan Ballor, go here.

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