Our founders were almost universally grounded in a Biblical worldview, and what they gave us in the Constitution, was an incredible gift. But the “If you can keep it” comment Franklin made was grounded in an understanding the it was a gift in trust. And that when one is a party to a trust, it comes with certain requirements. You must be faithful and true to the terms of the trust.
Our founders understood well that power corrupts, and crafted a design for our government that would free us from rulers with unlimited power, understanding that they would ultimately either become tyrants themselves, or be murdered and replaced by ones who were.
That’s a worldview that’s deeply shaped by the understanding that all men are corruptible, so they made sure to design in checks and balances to keep any of them from acquiring too much power. The video presented here is a fascinating discussion of those issues. So let’s learn a bit of history you almost certainly didn’t learn in school.
First, what’s a worldview? You could do a search for it, but my working understanding of it is that it is a kind of lens through which one views all of life and reality. If your worldview says that all people are basically good, you assume the best of people, and cut them plenty of slack for unsavory or unkind things they seem to say or do. If your worldview is that nothing that cannot be proven by science is real, then you dismiss things like religion out of hand.
But when Socrates said that ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’, he was making an uncommonly wise observation. Sadly, many people live their entire lives without critically examining their own worldview to see whether it’s giving them a distorted view of reality.
Christianity alone among the world’s religions can stand up to such an examination. That’s not to say that it explains everything - only that as a foundational belief system - a worldview - it stands without peer in all of history.
We “see through a glass darkly…” as Paul the Apostle put it in 1 Corinthians 13:12. Later, after our earthly bodies have gone the way of all flesh, we will yet live, and meet our Maker face to face. We can’t prove that’s what will happen, but the evidence for it is overwhelming. All it takes is curiosity.
Why not actually reed for yourself what the Bible actually says? See if your worldview can hold up as well as the Christian one. Indeed, the unknown number of people who started reading the Bible in order to prove it wrong fall into two categories, IMHO - those who couldn’t the proof they were looking for, and simply unwilling to pursue it any further, and those who became Christians. Almost nobody reads it and remains unaffected.
With that as a background, I want to introduce Bill Federer, here being interviewed by the guys at the City of God YouTube channel.
Here are a few highlights:
The founding fathers were almost universally convinced that the Bible and the Christian faith were essential to creating and preserving a just society.
All of the colonies but one had a requirement that in order to hold state office, one had to be protestant, or at least be a Christian. Rhode Island decided not to have that requirement because it could easily be disingenuously agreed to even by a faker.
98% of Americans were Christian of one stripe or another.
Since that was the makeup of America, the men sent to the Constitutional Convention were too, so they went with a mindset that they simply didn’t want a king, who could rule them through mandates and executive orders.
The Constitution took the power of a king, and separated in into three branches.
The key principle was that our rights come from our Creator. Most other nations insist that rights come from the government, so they have the power to take them away. Our Constitution named three essential rights it held that come from our Creator - the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (We should note well that they had a less self-centered understanding of the word happiness than we do. To them, it had to include a sense of being fully engaged in not just self-serving or hedonistic pursuits, but in pursuits which served one’s fellow members of society. They believed that true happiness required stewardship over all that was put under his influence, and that he leave it better in the end.)
And since our rights come from God and not the king, even the king is required to honor them. So no government has the power to take away those rights given by God.
Without God, government transitions from your servant to your master. It goes from protecting you to controlling you.
Throughout history up to 1776, the most common form of government was rule by a king. And the power of a king was usually absolute.
But in the leadup to 1776, great oppressions were done to the governed, including the massacre of the French Huguenot leaders in 1572. The goal had been the complete extermination of the Huguenot leaders in retaliation for various harms and offenses, all of which had been perpetuating the wars of religion between Roman Catholics and protestants. That massacre led some of my own ancestors to flee to the new world.
Another outcome was that people were examining the scriptures, and John Calvin, among other luminaries of the Reformation, wanted a covenant form of government. He eventually wrote that if rulers wanted people to be subject to them rather than to God, that we should not comply.
Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, insisted that he was not breaking laws that were just. He said that he was always required by his Creator to obey the law of God, but that any law devised by man that required him to obey it in contravention to God’s law was unjust. In short, just law squares with the moral law of God.
So we have been given this Constitutional form of government, designed by men whose worldviews were shaped by the theology of Calvinists, Presbyterians and others who held to the Reformation and the theology derived therefrom. It’s design separated the powers kings normally had into three - the legislative, the executive and the judicial. This separation of powers was designed to provide checks and balances, in order to limit the power of the government. The intent was to allow government to govern without permitting them to take away or alienate the rights given by God.
What they gave us was a Constitutional Republic, in which the Constitution was the highest law in the land, and the people, collectively, were the only human authority over it. And it all lined up with their understanding of God’s Word, the Bible.
Be sure and go to 22:11 on the video an watch Bill describe the brownie lesson he learned when he was still a kid. It’s the idea on which our government was grounded, and it’s brilliant.
But there’s one thing we’ve fumbled in recent years. In order to be effective, We the People need to understand that we ARE in charge, and to assume the responsibility to TAKE charge. Now we’re in a hole. On paper we’re the big boss, but
For the most part we don’t know it,
We’ve been dumbed down by a system that doesn’t want us to know it,
We don’t think our involvement will make a difference, and
We’d much rather pursue our new self-centered definition of happiness. You know, the one that tells us we need to take care of number one. Let somebody else do it. I’m not interested in politics.
But what about doing your job as party to a trust?
Our Constitutional Republic is a trust, in the sense that we who are the parties to the trust have an obligation to be true to its terms. And the terms of our trust require us to educate ourselves on the issues, go to meetings where important issues are debated and decided upon, and develop a consensus on them in order to make our wishes known to our representatives.1
Communism has infiltrated government at nearly every level, by using the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. His concept was that you couldn’t conquer America by using tanks and bombs, you had to rot it from inside.
And so they have. Our servants in government are rotten to the core. We the people are for the most part God-fearing citizens who just want justice and the rule of law restored and the criminals prosecuted. But the corruption is rampant at the highest levels of society, and is on the verge of taking the USA down forever.
Can we succeed in restoring our Republic? Maybe. Maybe not. But we have to try.
If you conclude that your part in it is just to watch and pray, that’s something - a really big something! Others have other roles and want to be more active.
The platform and plan I’m running on is Tactical Civics™. It might not work. But it CAN work if WE do. And if WE don’t nothing will work.
Join me, won’t you?
That’s NOT politics. It’s citizenship, law enforcement, and actually taking charge of the thing we’re supposed to be in charge of.