My cmnt: As a Christian informed by the Biblical values enshrined in the confessions of the Reformation I fully understand the significance and uniqueness of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

My cmnt: The American Trinity, as follows in this video by Dennis Prager, is a brief and insightful summary into the foundation and greatness of the American Experiment. No, not the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, but rather the creation of a nation uniquely founded on an idea not a particular race or ethnicity. So here it is from Dennis.

Race and ethnicity have defined every nation on earth. Except one: the United States of America. It is defined by values.

So, to understand America, you have to understand American values. 

They are:

1. “E Pluribus Unum”

2. “Liberty”

3. “In God We Trust.”

I call this “The American Trinity.” I made up the name, but I didn’t make up the values. They are on every American coin.

The first, E Pluribus Unum, is Latin, meaning, “Out of many, one.” When first adopted as an American motto shortly after the American founding in 1776, it referred to the thirteen American colonies becoming one nation. Over time, however, most Americans understood the motto to mean one people from many backgrounds. To quote The E Pluribus Unum Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Over the years, E Pluribus Unum has also served as a reminder of America’s bold attempt to make one unified nation of people from many different backgrounds and beliefs.”

In other words, America doesn’t care about your national or ethnic origins.

This explains why people who immigrate to America assimilate faster and more fully than immigrants to any other country.

Most of those who have immigrated to Europe, from, for example, Turkey – as millions have – are not considered fully German by fellow Germans or fully Swedish by fellow Swedes or fully Spanish by fellow Spaniards. This is even true of the children and grandchildren of those immigrants.

And, just as important, few of those immigrants – or their children or grandchildren – will ever feel fully German, Swedish, or Spanish. But a Turk who immigrates to the United States will be regarded as fully American – as American as any other American – the moment he or she becomes a citizen. And they – and certainly their children – will feel fully American.

Of course, America has not always lived up to this “e pluribus unum” ideal. But the ideal was always there. And it was applied to virtually every immigrant to America.

The second component of the American Trinity is liberty.

Now, you might ask, “Didn’t the French Revolution also enshrine liberty as a central national value? Wasn’t its motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”?

The answer is yes. America is hardly the only country to enshrine liberty; it is the only country to enshrine “Liberty,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and “In God We Trust.”

What’s the difference?

The difference is this: The moment you affirm equality, as the French Revolution did, you will lose liberty.

It is a basic American value that all human beings are born equal, and all must be equal before the law. But ending up equal – that’s a French and European value. And if you want people to end up equal, you must deprive them of liberty. Which is exactly what happened right after the French Revolution and in every other society that made equality its national goal.

America gives people the liberty to end up wherever their abilities, work ethic, and luck take them – meaning unequal. Therefore, professional athletes will make more money than teachers or doctors. That may be unfortunate, but that is what liberty allows. If you want equality, you will tell people how much they can earn – and that means the end of liberty.

And third, In God We Trust.

Unlike almost every other country, America never had a state religion. But it was founded on the principle that God – specifically, the God of the Bible – is the source of moral values. As the Declaration of Independence put it, all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In other words, rights come from God, not from men. If rights are given by men, men can take them away.

The American Trinity is the reason America became the world’s freest and most prosperous country. But many Americans want to, in the words of former President Barack Obama, “fundamentally transform” it. They wish to replace American values with European values – equality of result and an ever-expanding state, which greatly reduce individual freedom; the celebration of ethnic and racial identity, which is the opposite of E Pluribus Unum; and the removal of God as the source of morality and rights.

Which set of values Americans adopt will determine whether America remains free, prosperous, and the force for good in the world that it has been. With the exception of the Civil War, this is the greatest internal battle in American history.

I’m Dennis Prager.

What are Judeo-Christian values?

Have you ever heard the term, “Judeo-Christian values?” 

I suspect you have.

Can you name any of those values?

I suspect you can’t.

But you should because Judeo-Christian values are the moral foundation of Western civilization.

As the great British prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it:

“The truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only…because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace…for which we all long.”

Mrs. Thatcher was a believing Christian. I am a believing Jew. While we have different theologies, we have the same core values. And as far as society is concerned, moral values are far more important than theologies.

That is why traditionally religious Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews are aligned on almost every important moral issue.

Here, then, are ten of those values.

Number 1: There is one God. That God is the God introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible, or as Christians came to refer to it, the Old Testament.

Number 2: The Hebrew Bible introduced the most revolutionary moral idea in history: that there are objective moral truths just as there are objective mathematical and scientific truths. Without God, there is no moral truth; only moral opinions.

Number 3: Because there are moral truths, good and evil are the same for all people.

Number 4: God—not man, not government, not popular opinion, not a democratic vote—is the source of our rights. The American Declaration of Independence declares that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Number 5: The human being is “created in the image of God.” Therefore, Every human life is precious and therefore race is of no significance because God has no race.

Number 6: The world is based on divine order, and order is made by distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are God and man, God and nature, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil.

Number 7: Man is not basically good. Christians speak of “original sin” in referring to man’s nature; Jews cite what God said in Genesis: “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Both beliefs are diametrically opposed to the naive modern belief that man is basically good. And they lead to the same conclusion: we need God-based rules to keep us from our natural inclinations.

Number 8: Therefore, our natural inclinations are a very poor moral guide. As religious Jews and Christians put it, don’t follow your heart. A lot of terrible things have been done—and are being done now—by people thinking their hearts are better guides than Judeo-Christian values.

Number 9: Human beings have free will—and are therefore responsible for how they behave. In the secular world, free will does not exist because all human behavior is the result of biology and environment. And if there is no free will, people are not responsible for what they do—good or bad. 

Number 10: The Ten Commandments. They are the core of Judeo-Christian values. In fact, if everyone lived just by the Ten Commandments, we wouldn’t need armies or even police.

There is another important aspect to the term “Judeo-Christian.” The two religions need each other. Without the Old Testament, there is no New Testament. Virtually every Christian moral principle derives from the Hebrew Bible—not only the ten Judeo-Christian values I just enumerated, but such basic moral principles as “Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18), “Love the Lord your God …” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and “Love the stranger” (Deuteronomy 10:19). 

At the same time, Jews need Christians. It was overwhelmingly Christians who carried knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to the world. 

“Judeo-Christian” refers to one other fact: No religions in the world share a common revelation the way Judaism and Christianity do. That common revelation is the Hebrew Bible. The only two religions that share that Bible, or any sacred work, are Judaism and Christianity.

The ultimate embodiment of Judeo-Christian values has been the United States of America. America’s Founders were Christians—some culturally, some theologically—who were rooted in the Old Testament. So much so that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin designed a seal for the United States that depicted God leading Israel out of Egypt, just as they believed God was leading America out of Europe.

Only if we keep these values will we keep America, and for that matter, Western Civilization.

I’m Dennis Prager.