"It is impossible to miss the discrimination against ... believers"
Days after the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Newt Gingrich delivered a commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University. Read it here.
Editor's note: Below is the text of the commencement address former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered at Liberty University on May 19, 2007, four days after the death of Liberty's founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. In the speech, obtained from Gingrich's official Web site, Gingrich warns that a "growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot publicly profess the truths on which it was founded" and calls on Liberty graduates to "carry out Dr. Falwell's dream of creating a better America and a better world and remember always that while you live in the world, you are not of the world."
AP Photo/Roanoke Times, Stephanie Klein-Davis
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivers a commencement address at Liberty University, May 19, 2007, in Lynchburg, Va.
May 21, 2007 | Jerry Falwell, Jr., Jonathan Falwell, Dr. Godwin, Provost Rist, members of the Board, faculty, administrators, distinguished guests, and, most of all, the Graduating Class of 2007. As I look out upon you I am deeply grateful to Dr. Falwell for inviting me to come and bear witness to our need to rediscover God in America. It is in response to his call that I ask you to hear this witness.
We gather on a day like no other in the history of Liberty University. We gather to honor the Class of 2007. Congratulations, one and all! You have worked for years to arrive at this day, and you and your parents can take justifiable pride in all of your achievements. But as we celebrate, we are all mindful of the seat of honor that is empty this beautiful Spring morning.
Dr. Jerry Falwell, our dear friend, has been called home to be with the Lord.
...
When we consider Dr. Falwell's many achievements, we can confidently say, as was written two thousand years ago by Matthew: Well done, good and faithful servant, well done.
...
"My heart," Jerry once said, "was burning to serve Christ ... I knew nothing would ever be the same again."
He was never the same again -- and neither were we.
The image of a heart, enflamed with a desire to serve God, calls to mind the words of our Lord at the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, that it may give light to the whole house".
Jerry Falwell was a man of courage. A servant leader of God, he lived his faith without hesitation or fear. Not once did he consider lighting a lamp, and hiding it under a bushel. No: he placed his lamp upon a stand, where it gave light to the whole house.
One of Dr. Falwell's favorite scripture verses was from the second chapter of Habakkuk: "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry."
...
The vision of Dr. Falwell was more than he could accomplish in his lifetime. We know that he had much more planned for Liberty, but like him we can be confident in the scriptures' promise that though the vision is for His appointed time, it will surely come.
All his life, Dr. Jerry Falwell bore witness to the Truth, secure in the promise that the Truth will make us free.
A man of deep wisdom, he understood something quite profound, something that too many people today would rather not acknowledge. What he understood was the deep resonance between the demands of his faith and the demands of his nation. He saw that as the Bible requires Christians to bear witness to the Truth, so too does the Declaration of Independence require Americans to bear witness to certain self-evident truths.
To be sure, the Truth of the Bible is not identical with the truths of the Declaration. But the two orders of truth do overlap, and where they overlap, they powerfully reinforce each other. Indeed, the Declaration assumes many of the central teachings of the Bible.
When our Declaration of Independence asserts "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", it makes some key assumptions.
It assumes that God is sovereign over the universe.
It assumes that God created man.
And it assumes that man must obey an order of justice which God Himself has instituted.
That order of justice requires all men to honor each other's natural rights, because these rights are the unalienable endowment of the Almighty. When someone violates the rights of another they are not merely breaking the law. They are violating God's grant of protection. These are the truths of the Declaration of Independence, and they reflect the Truth of the Bible.
They are truths to which we must bear witness. They are the lamps which we must keep alight before our neighbors and before the world. These are the lamps which must be kept upon their stands.
We have relied upon these truths in our times of crisis; they have been the lights that guided us through our darkest hours.
In one of the America's most difficult periods, as the nation plunged headlong towards civil war, Abraham Lincoln recalled the basic assertion of the Declaration, that "nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows."
82 years later, while the flames of war spread across Europe and the Pacific, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote that "Our modern democratic way of life has its deepest roots in our great common religious tradition, which for ages past has taught to civilized mankind the dignity of the human being, his equality before God, and his responsibility in the making of a better and fairer world."
FDR, the greatest Democratic President of the 20th century, believed in good and evil and believed his generation faced a war between Christianity and paganism.