Your choice seems pretty simple. Do you wish to live as a free citizen or a serf in the new world order?
The Election Series – 2022
President Reagan gave the nation a vision of what America has always been. The “shining city on a hill” was his deft and skillful turn of phrase that touched the American character and its history, helping him craft the most successful presidency in post-war America. He connected with the nation subliminally, calling it to see beyond the moment, or even a specific policy, to its destiny.
Before him, President Kennedy, back to President Lincoln and further still to the Puritan Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, in 1630, used some variation of the phrase. Of course, it originated with the Master himself in the Sermon on the Mount found in the Gospel of Matthew (5:14-16).
They didn’t use the “shining city” variations for the same purpose. Yet, the phrase has endured throughout the American experiment because it touches the narrative woven into our founding. There is greatness in our singular promise despite our weaknesses and failings – the noble charter of human liberty and freedom. There is hope that our Republic is more an enduring covenant that inspires continual improvement – than it is men’s words that repeatedly betray us.
In just two generations, these common themes and threads in the American story have been deliberately erased from politics and the culture – and increasingly, our religious heritage. The radical left’s century-long “march through the institutions” now commands the narrative – consented to by many on the conservative right who mistakenly thought you could buy peace with niceness or silence. Now, when we have elections, the question of how we live together – of what kind of country we want to live in – is reduced to tidy bits of policy as though policy could right the ship of state or give compass-bearing to our future. It’s fool’s gold.
It’s not that public policy isn’t important. It is. The rub is that when we have no common narrative – no familiar story or social touchstones that we share – our policy differences become the defining story by default. Without the wisdom of what has been or can be, our worst instincts overpower our common life. The worst traits become an attraction instead of a revulsion. Rejecting the God of our Fathers, we languish in Eliot’s “wasteland” of disillusionment or become Shakespeare’s idiot, “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
Among the many things the American Civil War should teach us is that when we have so little that connects us – or when we understand our fellow citizens so little that we see them as enemies – hate or vengeance fills the space between us. The brooding Lincoln seemed a captive to that in the last year of the Civil War and its prosecution.
However, if our modern political apparatus deliberately ignores the question of how we should live together – replaced with 30-second bromides and emotionalized prattle – the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, thought a great deal about it.
They did so framed by the 5,000 years of human history told in the language of conquest and war, where individual freedom was an apocryphal fancy. That history is the few’s unquestioned power – and the compulsory utility of the many organized to serve those few.
America’s inheritance from the Founders – still unique in all of history – is what many pundits, professors, and politicians now sneeringly call that “piece of parchment written by old white men.” Is it?
Many of us would argue that it is the American story. The Founding Documents are a vision that rejected absolute power and inverted the concept of human freedom. They reasoned that individuals have a divine purpose and a God-given right to freedom. Neither a government, through its might, nor a parliament by mob rule, should be able to eliminate even one of those rights.
In this new Republic, the people would elect their representatives to fulfill the promise of life, liberty, property, and happiness – lived out as God, family, and country.
It’s clear in their writings and deliberations that the Founders understood that the narrative of the new nation – if she was to rearrange the ancient paradigm of kings, tyrants, and totalitarians – must be deep-rooted in the soil of liberty, nourished by Grace.
And it’s no coincidence that the radical left considers these very ideas an anathema, as Dracula does daylight. The battle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to separate the God of Order from history, dismantle the family (especially fatherhood), and do away with the nation-state is not accidental. At the very core of the Marxist doctrine is enslaving the human spirit to the god of this world, perversely presented as “real” freedom for the “masses.”
Last month, the Italians elected a new Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose use of “God, family, and country” as a unifying phrase for her new government was immediately set upon by the radical left as the ideology of “fascism.” [Evidently, no one knows what fascism means anymore.]
While the fascist smear is ludicrous, the new Prime Minister is in good company with her use of language. The Founding Fathers fashioned their vision for liberty and Constitutional government from the Greeks and the great enlightenment thinkers, all against the backdrop of the Biblical covenants and the writings of one of history’s most influential thinkers, the theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who wrote:
“Man becomes a debtor to other men in various ways, according to their various excellence and the various benefits received from them . . . the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.”
We live off the fruits of those who have gone before us – indebted for every benefit. It is not simply the bits and pieces we’ve received from those before us freely and without cost. It’s everything. Gratitude and its attendant duty to God, family, and country were once conspicuous. That the concept is now somehow contemptible or “fascist” demonstrates the Western world’s spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy.
In the US, we are reaping what comes from rejecting what we have freely received. We are being herded into the new world order of rule by elites and so-called experts. The goal is to disengage the nation from restrictive Constitutional governance and to compel the general population into compliance through lawfare, social credits, and access to professional and academic opportunities. The Wuhan catastrophe has already proven this methodology in real time.
In addition, freedom of speech and religious expression is under direct attack by so-called “fact-checking” boards, hate laws, and misinformation boards with hidden agendas and partisan ties. It promises only to get worse very quickly.
A profoundly corrupt government, tech oligarchs, and plain thugs have used the vacuum of public servility to put the nation in great danger. The prophesied insanity brought on by the rejection of reason and living outside the Moral Order is settling like autumn’s frost. Perhaps this irrationality is nowhere better illustrated than the new dogma that chromosomes don’t determine one’s gender. Personal feelings do, rejecting science and observable reality. Even little children are props in this spreading evil and its madness.
In the upcoming elections, your choice seems pretty simple. Do you wish to live as a free citizen or a serf in the new world order?
Voting against the regime in power for the opposition party will not reverse the ongoing dismantling of America in its tracks. At best, it will only slow its advance. America must return to her roots and be that shining city on a hill. That’s her destiny. God, family, and country isn’t a political slogan – it’s the ageless prescription of how we live together. And the task is left to we the people if it’s to get done.
[Photo Credit: folkartfromtheharbor.com]
