In a culture (indeed, a world) that is slowly but surely rambling towards being completely secularized, the flexibility of our governments is gradually slipping into greater leniency. Implied powers prescribe disaster in far too many cases, and this is even more true when applied to the First Amendment. How can we uphold the expression of this amendment without yielding our standards to secular fingers?
The First Amendment to the Constitution states that citizens who bend with the laws of our government are to receive the freedoms of religion, speech, press, the right to peaceable assembly and the redress of grievances. Unfortunately, lawmakers who have perhaps too good a way with words are daily twisting these expressed and implied powers, amending right and left, planning to give us rights tomorrow that we do not have today. In a culture becoming so entirely saturated in this carnal freedom, the rights which are being abused to the point of morphing the government itself into a non-Biblical establishment existing only to fill the pockets of people who fancy themselves just, we have to be careful. Of all the amendments, the first one is perhaps the one most preyed upon because of its apparent flexibility and dramatically wide scope. How are we to stand against the waves of secularism crashing against these rulings?
Before we can possibly know how to protect ourselves against being pulled under by those who wish to twist the First Amendment according to their temporary wants, we must understand what exactly is being said within the text itself. Ratified on December 15, 1791, this impressive statement sought to heal the bulk of potential injustices a single man could suffer by giving him overwhelming rights. To quote directly from the Constitution, we read that the First Amendment exists to insure that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” As John Locke displays in his extensive written philosophies on the “natural rights of man”, the government with all its laws and amendments should be up and running to secure the rights of man, not to abridge or violate them. The First Amendment helps to assert a big part of these natural rights and how the government should respond to those who come with complaints of having been somehow deprived.
Because we are human and basically sinful, the idea pops into our heads that we may abuse the First Amendment and manipulate it to fit our individual needs. Suddenly the rights to freedom become the “right” to practice obscure religions that contradict the biblical foundation of the Constitution itself. The right to freedom of speech abruptly means that we can insult our fellow man; freedom of the press means that ink is capable of taking on malignant life, and peaceable assembly becomes riots in the streets of shadowed freedom. In order to secure the rights of redressed grievances, we feel that we have to take useless court requests to a legality that will (possibly) fulfill our lust for revenge. The First Amendment is easily taken out of context, and so is our behavior.
The Constitution gives us principles that align themselves with the principles found in the Bible, the natural rights God Himself wishes to be secured for His children. Our individual consciences, although given guidelines, are unprincipled and we are free to translate the First Amendment in accordance with what we believe to be true and good. We can use the First Amendment to provide natural rights and fair play for our brothers, or we can abuse it and move with the secular flow of humanity; thus is the savage beauty of being a free people.