“Will we enlist to restore freedom?”, asks Peter Marshall
Rev. Peter Marshall’s life is dedicated to helping to restore America to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching, and writing on America’s Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival. His website has many articles and resources to support this mission. We and our children profited greatly from the series of American history books he has co-authored. I encourage all Christians to buy or borrow these books to share with your children and to educate yourselves.
Recently, Rev. Marshall published this in his weekly commentary, “Do We Americans Still Hold ‘These Truths’?”; he asks American Christians to remember the principles upon which our national experiment has been founded.
But wait, what does he mean by “experiment”?
America is an experiment, you know. It can fail. When Ben Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention after the Fathers had created the Constitution, one of Philadelphia’s leading ladies accosted him on the sidewalk.
“Dr. Franklin, what manner of government have you given us?”
His response: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
Rev. Marshall also warns that we have turned away from our professed accountability to God. This is a new and a dangerous experiment.
But, this experiment in self-government was always under the judgment of God. We Americans have traditionally believed that God is the sovereign Lord over our civilization, and thus we have understood that in everything we do, including our government, we are answerable to Him.
Yet one listens in vain to any mention of this by President Obama.
Rev. Marshall closes his essay with a strong call for Christians to be faithful in fighting to restore our nation:
[W]e cannot look to the traditional mainstream churches to even be involved in the grass-roots movement it will take to bring America back to its First Principles, much less take leadership. No, it will have to come from the hearts of Christian people across the land.
But this is not new to us Americans. It has happened before. In 1775, the Minutemen of Massachusetts joined the riflemen of Virginia and the farmers of Pennsylvania and patriots from all the other colonies to wage the revolution that won our freedom. And in 1861, the farm boys, store clerks, industrial laborers, college students and others volunteered by the hundreds of thousands to fight for Old Glory and all she stood for, when the Confederates inaugurated the Civil War. So now, from the snow-capped Rockies to the pine forests of Maine, from the sun-baked plains of Texas to the lakes of Minnesota, the trumpet call of freedom can be heard summoning the American people to a new revolution — a rebirth of freedom.
Can you hear it? And will you enlist?
Here is the complete essay, reproduced with the generous permission of Rev. Marshall:
Posted on 06/17/2010
Do We Americans Still Hold “These Truths”?
“. . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:56)
When the Founding Fathers gave to the world the Declaration of Independence they announced that the fledgling nation had been founded on certain “self-evident truths.” The uniqueness of the American experiment lies in the fact that, unlike other nations on the earth, our civilization is not built on the old foundations of blood, ethnicity, soil, language, or religion. Rather, America is founded on a vision, a shared commitment to certain truths and principles. These truths and principles were not invented by the Founding Fathers, for their introduction to American soil goes back to the arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England. Our founding principles pre-date the Founding Fathers. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration he said that he was “not trying to say things which had never been said before, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.”
Sad to say, in our time these principles are anything but “common sense.” Indeed, one wonders whether they are commonly held at all. And certainly, for the elites of academia and most of the political leadership in Washington, DC they no longer make any “sense,” and haven’t for some time. Witness the incredible savaging handed out years ago to Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas by Teddy Kennedy and others on the Senate Judiciary Committee because he dared to assert his belief in natural law, which was commonly accepted as truth at the time of the Founding Fathers. No, if anything, the foundational truths of the American experiment are even more at risk now.
America is an experiment, you know. It can fail. When Ben Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention after the Fathers had created the Constitution, one of Philadelphia’s leading ladies accosted him on the sidewalk.
“Dr. Franklin, what manner of government have you given us?”
His response: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
The problem is that we are losing it — it’s slipping away from us, because we have lost our grip on the “self-evident truths.” How important is that? Woodrow Wilson, our President during World War I, once said: “A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do.” The great irony of Wilson’s quote is that Woodrow Wilson was one of the first Presidents who rejected the Founding Father’s commitment to self-government in favor of a large and controlling Federal bureaucracy. And it was Woodrow Wilson who instituted the Federal income tax, and whose philosophy of socialist government helped to start us down the road to extinction.
We shall look at some of “these truths” on which we were founded in just a moment. But first, let me remind my readers that the Declaration of Independence is, in reality, never finished. America is an ongoing experiment to develop and implement the principles which it announces. And as such we either move forward in the practice of our ideals, or we start to slip back. We are never standing still.
It is not so in Europe. There, the governments have been secular ever since the French Revolution, which threw over the ancien régime, where the monarchy had been expected to rule with at least one eye fixed on God. The French Revolution was viciously anti-Christ (priests and nuns were slaughtered by the thousands) and openly atheistic. From then on the door was opened to European government becoming officially secularist.
In America, we have always believed that we are a nation under God. In modern times, this has been reflected in the 1954 addition of that phrase to the Pledge of Allegiance. This original and long-held belief is one of the major “truths” that distinguishes us from Europe. We were founded as a Christian missionary enterprise (the original settlers were forthright in their desire to evangelize the natives for Christ), and given a unique mission among the nations. That mission was for us to so practice the Biblical principles of self-government that we could create a society with liberty and justice for all, which become Puritan Governor John Winthrop’s shining “city on a hill,” and an example to the world.
But, this experiment in self-government was always under the judgment of God. We Americans have traditionally believed that God is the sovereign Lord over our civilization, and thus we have understood that in everything we do, including our government, we are answerable to Him.
Yet one listens in vain to any mention of this by President Obama. In no speech or press conference or any other public statement by this President have I seen any mention of our American debt to the God of the Bible for our existence. Rather, his attitude seems to be that he is embarrassed by our typical American acknowledgments of God by public officials. Worse, there is in the Obama Administration an arrogance that rejects the humble admission that the government is under God’s judgment. It was evident from the beginning of his election campaign. Recall the endlessly repeated mantra “We are (he might as well have said “I am” because that’s what he meant) the ones you’ve been waiting for.” The crass arrogance of that statement is quite beyond belief, but it is an accurate reflection of who Obama and his cronies think they are — leaders who really know better than we do what is best for us. That attitude flatly rejects the founding principle of knowing that we are a people and a government under God.
The second principle I bring to your attention is that we Americans have always believed that the only legitimate government is that which governs by the consent of the governed. The arrogance of those who think they know better than we do how to govern our lives means that today’s secularist and socialist elites are always pushing ahead to implement their agenda whether the people like it or not. This violates government by the consent of the governed — a principle rooted in Hebrew government by Moses in the Sinai wilderness, as recorded in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 24, when the people gave their word to be governed by the laws of God. Our historic rejection of the absolutism of European monarchies, the rejection of the even worse tyranny of the Jacobin revolutionaries, and our defeat of their heir apparents — the 20th century dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Tojo — is due to our firm American grip on the principle that the only legitimate source of government power is the will of the people.
Until now.
When the Democratic majority in Congress rams through a health plan that is so manifestly against the will of the people is not one of our most sacred “truths” being violated?
Government is to be distinctly separate from the people — it is to represent us, and to serve us as our representatives. We are not its servants. It is our servant. It does not have the right to tell us that we have to buy health insurance, or that we have to buy anything else, for that matter. Society presupposes government, it exists before government, and government exists only to safeguard the rights of the people. For those rights are God-given, and government is answerable to God’s judgment for its conduct toward those rights.
Which brings me to the last founding principle that I want to bring up today (there are others, but space constraints forbid mention): the necessity of virtuous self-government. Ben Franklin said “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” We cannot, and will not long remain free if we do not recover the art and practice of self-government — governing ourselves as individuals according to the will of God. William Penn warned us that “either men will be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.” And James Madison, our fourth President, stated: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”
The Founding Fathers spoke of “ordered liberty,” that is, a freedom that is ordered by the moral laws of God. Famed Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray put it succinctly 50 years ago: “Men who would be free politically must discipline themselves. Political freedom is endangered in its foundations as soon as the universal moral values, upon whose shared possession the self-discipline of a free society depends, are no longer vigorous enough to restrain the passions and shatter the selfish inertia of men.”
It will take a mammoth effort to recover sufficient virtue in the hearts of the American people in order to produce the self-government that alone will preserve our liberties. Will it happen?
I don’t know. But I do know this: we cannot expect the traditional main-line churches in America to take the lead in a restoration movement. When they rejected the authority of the Word of God the anointing of God’s Spirit left them. A case in point is last year’s sad spectacle of Notre Dame University inviting President Obama to speak. Obama is an open and avowed supporter of the slaughter of our unborn children; he has never cast a pro-life vote in his entire political career; and he is therefore in complete rejection of everything that the mother of all Catholic universities in America is supposed to stand for. For this man be honored by Notre Dame tells us that we cannot look to the traditional mainstream churches to even be involved in the grass-roots movement it will take to bring America back to its First Principles, much less take leadership.
No, it will have to come from the hearts of Christian people across the land.
But this is not new to us Americans. It has happened before. In 1775, the Minutemen of Massachusetts joined the riflemen of Virginia and the farmers of Pennsylvania and patriots from all the other colonies to wage the revolution that won our freedom. And in 1861, the farm boys, store clerks, industrial laborers, college students and others volunteered by the hundreds of thousands to fight for Old Glory and all she stood for, when the Confederates inaugurated the Civil War. So now, from the snow-capped Rockies to the pine forests of Maine, from the sun-baked plains of Texas to the lakes of Minnesota, the trumpet call of freedom can be heard summoning the American people to a new revolution — a rebirth of freedom.
Can you hear it?
And will you enlist?
Copyright, 2010, Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.
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“. . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:56)
