It
is very telling that evangelicals in the [u]nited States will strenuously
refuse to accept the presence of God in the holy relics of saints, the Holy
Mysteries, holy water, and so on, but they will readily accept the presence of
God in anything that has to do with American political life:
Evangelist
Franklin Graham said that prayer — and God’s answer to it — helped Donald Trump
and Mike Pence pull off “the
biggest political upset of our lifetime.”
Graham, president
of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, said he has
traveled across the United
States this year, holding prayer meetings at
each state capitol. “I could sense going across the country that God was
going to do something this year,” Graham told The Washington Post. “And
I believe that at this election, God showed up.”
On
Thursday, a day after Trump was elected to become the nation’s 45th
president, Graham said God had answered their prayers.
“Did God show up?” he
wrote on Facebook. “In watching the news after the election, the secular
media kept asking ‘How did this happen?’ ‘What went wrong?’ ‘How did we miss
this?’ Some are in shock. Political pundits are stunned. Many thought the
Trump/Pence ticket didn’t have a chance. None of them understand the
God-factor.”
. . .
Source:
Lindsey Bever, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/11/10/franklin-graham-the-media-didnt-understand-the-god-factor/,
opened 10 Nov. 2016
Since
this idea of America
being especially favored by God is so deeply ingrained in American
evangelicals, it needs to be explored more thoroughly. To do so, we will examine the text of an
address (‘The Continental Divide’) delivered by Pastor Tommy Nelson of Denton
Bible Church (in Texas) on 23 Oct. 2016.
It was aired at least twice by American Family Radio prior to election
day and has received more than 300,000 views on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwTAQpYhkug)
as of 14 Nov. 2016, so it may safely be taken as something most evangelicals
would agree with. All quotes from this
talk come from http://dentonbible.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Continental-Divide.pdf,
opened 14 and 15 Nov. 2016.
In
some of his opening remarks, he says,
We are historically
rare. We can be directly involved. We can “vote.” We have a say. We have what
virtually none have had throughout history. Until 1776, no one had a say in
their rule.
This
is an absurd statement. Voting has been
present in many places and in many ages of world history: the ancient Greeks and Romans, Russian
villages, Old English folkmoots, the election of an abbot by a monastery’s
monks, etc.
He
goes on:
But . . . From 1776 to
1848, in just 70 years, most monarchies were gone. America had started something! France will
follow. We were an idea whose time had come, as throughout the world men had
had a gutful of the irresponsible authority of kings. Of authority bestowed
through birth not merited through character.
It
is good to have an ideal of good character in rulers, but his declaration that
the revolutions that swept away the monarchies from Europe
are somehow a blessing is entirely wrong.
In the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed, in these
alone upwards of 2 million people suffered and died. And in the other revolutions that shook Europe up till 1848 many more thousands would do
likewise.
Is
the ‘right to vote’ really worth such a great loss of human life, not to
mention the destruction of cities, death of animals, and so on?
But
this is not the worst of it. Vladimir Moss in his An Essay in Universal History, Part 3 (http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/downloads/595_AN_ESSAY_IN_UNIVERSAL_HISTORY_PART_3.pdf,
2016, opened 12 Nov. 2016), pgs. 12-3 and 21, points out
The spirit of the Revolution was “inexplicable” to Tocqueville
precisely because it was not human, because it was a spirit from hell. It was
from hell, because it was against God. For the essential conflict between the
revolutionaries and the ancien regime was a conflict between two ideas of the
origin of authority: between the idea that it comes from above - ultimately,
from God, and the idea
that it comes from below - ultimately from what the Masons called
"Nature", but which more religious called Satan, the original
revolutionary.
King Louis XVI stated the Christian principle: "I have taken
the firm and sincere decision to remain loftily, publicly and generously
faithful to Him Who holds in His hand kings and kingdoms. I can only be great
through Him, because in Him alone is greatness, glory, majesty and power; and
because I am destined one day to be his living image on earth."9 This
firm, but humble statement of the doctrine, not so much of the Divine right of kings, as of
their Divine dependence on the King of kings, was opposed by the
satanic pride of the revolutionary faith. "The Revolution is neither an
act nor a fact," said De Mounier. "It is a political doctrine which
claims to found society on the will of man instead of founding it on the will
of God, which puts the sovereignty of human reason in the place of the Divine
law."
This anti-theistic character of the French Revolution was
confirmed by the great Anglo-Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke: "We
cannot, if we would, delude ourselves about the true state of this dreadful
contest. It
is a religious war. It includes in its object undoubtedly every other interest of
society as well as this; but this is the principal and leading feature. It is
through this destruction of religion that our enemies propose the
accomplishment of all their other views. The French Revolution, impious at once
and fanatical, had no other plan for domestick power and foreign empire. Look
at all the proceedings of the National Assembly from the first day of declaring
itself such in the year 1789, to this very hour, and you will find full half of
their business to be directly on this subject. In fact it is the spirit of the
whole. The religious system, called the Constitutional Church, was on the face
of the whole proceeding set up only as a mere temporary amusement to the
people, and so constantly stated in all their conversations, till the time
should come, when they might with safety cast off the very appearance of all
religion whatsoever, and persecute Christianity throughout Europe with fire and
sword. This religious war is not a controversy between sect and sect as
formerly, but a war against all sects and all religions."
. . .
Burke agreed with the Catholic monarchist Joseph de Maistre in
calling the revolution “satanic”. And, as we have seen, he called the war that
broke out between revolutionary France
and Britain
in 1793 “a religious war”. For truly, the war between the revolution and its
opponents was
a
religious war, a war between two opposed ideas of who rules human society: God
or the people. Moreover, it was war against monarchy in all its forms: “No
Monarchy, limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be
safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established
in the Centre of Europe.”
Likewise,
with the later revolutions, he draws our attention to some noteworthy things
(pgs. 346-7):
L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “Revolutionary agitation between the years
1830 and 1848 was carried out mainly by the Carbonari and various ‘Young
Germanies’, ‘Young Italies’, etc. In the Masonic world before 1848 something
powerful, similar to 1789, was being planned, and preparations for the
revolution went ahead strongly in all countries. In 1847 a big Masonic
convention was convened in Strasbourg
from deputies elected at several small conventions convened earlier… At the
convention it was decided to ‘masonize’ the Swiss cantons and then produce a
revolutionary explosion at the same time throughout Europe.
As we know, movement did in fact follow, with a difference of several months,
in a whole series of countries: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Parma, Venice, etc. Reformist
‘banquets’ laying the beginning of the revolution in Paris were organized by the directors of the
Masonic lodges…”
What
is a Christian pastor doing praising these unChristian revolutions?
But
there is more to consider.
And in the place of
monarchies there arose constitutions. Official obligations and restraints set
forth in writing through theologically informed reason, an absolute law,
outside of man, by which he must be ruled, and to which rulers were
accountable. A constitution - the incarnation of just rule in paper and ink
−administered through
representative leaders
−placed there through an
informed majority
−who voted for those
they believed the wisest and best of men, whose job was to follow this law.
−Or as Mr. Lincoln said,
“A government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
−A leadership bestowed
through character not conception.
There
is much that could be said about all that, but we will only comment on a few
things.
First,
it is fine to desire rulers who respect the law, but trusting in ‘paper and
ink’ to make them rule justly is doomed to failure. It shows the Enlightenment optimism of the
constitution’s framers in the ability of man’s reason to solve man’s
problems:
And Revolutionary leaders had an immense confidence
in their ability to define exactly how personal actions caused the effects seen
in political conflict and public conditions.
This confidence was part and parcel of the Enlightenment’s belief that
human nature and human relationships were open books which the enlightened
could read as clearly as Sir Isaac Newton had read the secrets of physical
nature (Noll, Hatch, Marsden, The Search
for Christian America, Expanded Edition, Helmers & Howard, 1989, p. 84).
Reading
through The Federalist Papers one
will see those statements by the three authors justified many times over.
Second,
about Mr Lincoln’s formula ‘a government of the people, by the people, and for
the people’ is a rejection of God’s sovereignty over man. Where in that formula is there any room for
God at all? It mightily breaks the
‘chain of being’ (one of Wendell Berry’s favorite images), or the hierarchy,
that God has established in creation:
from God, to angels, to monks, to men in the world. One cannot praise both Mr Lincoln’s statement
and the ‘theologically informed reason’ that supposedly birthed the constitution. They are contradictions.
As
for ‘the people’ choosing leaders by elections, one may see the fallacy of this
dogma of democracies and republics in something Ron Paul said shortly after
Donald Trump’s election:
“We
look at the president, we look at what he said, we look at what he might do
when you look at his advisors,” Paul said.
“But
quite frankly there is an outside source which we refer to as the ‘deep state’
or the ‘shadow government’.” Paul warned.
“There
is a lot of influence by people which are actually more powerful than our
government itself, our president,” the congressman said.
“Yes,
Trump is his own guy, more so than most of those who have ever been in before.
We hope he can maintain an independence and go in the right direction. But I
fear the fact that there is so much that can be done secretly, out of control
of our apparent government and out of the view of so many citizens,” Paul
urged.
Source:
Steve Watson, http://www.prisonplanet.com/ron-paul-trump-needs-to-resist-neocons-and-shadow-government-elites.html,
12 Nov. 2016
Back
to Pastor Nelson:
The system has problems,
but I prefer it to monarchies because we don’t have bloodlettings.
Again,
he betrays a lack of historical knowledge.
It was not until the era of modern democracies and republics (which the u. S. helped
usher in), with their powerful, centralized governments, driven by demonic
ideologies like ‘the rights of the people’, that massive wartime casualties
became a reality. Under monarchs, even
so-called ‘absolute monarchs’, there were too many independent centers of power
and loyalty to allow such large armies to gather and slaughter one another
(Donald Livingston, ‘The Founding and the Enlightenment’, Vital Remnants, Gary Gregg II, ed., ISI Books, 1999, pgs. 266-7).
Furthermore,
the u. S.
government has been one of the most war-hungry in history, being involved in
some battle or another for 222 out of 239 years of her existence:
Pastor
Nelson:
With the exception of
our Civil War where half our country killed the other half over a breach of the
Constitution concerning inalienable rights.
The
breach of the constitution was the North not letting the South deal with the
slavery question in her own way, in her own time. There was no clause in that document which
demanded an immediate end to slavery in the States, only the shrill cries of
radical abolitionists. To say that the
constitution, implicitly or explicitly, allowed the North to act on its
ideological belief that slavery anywhere, at any time, is an evil that must be
eradicated, is to grant radicals of all stripes the ability to force their
beliefs on others through federal action, including those Pastor Nelson would
probably find objectionable, like LGBT and abortion activists. One must be careful when throwing around
words like ‘inalienable rights’. That is
a game that those outside the evangelical camp can play as well.
Pastor
Nelson:
And I am amazed at our
constitution’s invention in Philadelphia
in 1787. A group of 55 men replaced millennia of kings with a constitution in
just 112 days and it has lasted for 229 years. And it had never been done
before.
This
completely overlooks the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of
the u. S., which,
considering the outcome of the Philadelphia
‘experiment’, deserve a much-needed second look.
And
there is far too much pride here, so much so that it borders on idolatry:
15 The idols of the heathen are
silver and gold, the work of men's hands.
16 They have mouths, but
they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not;
17 They have ears, but they
hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.
18 They that make them are like unto
them: so is every one that trusteth in them.
Source:
Psalm 135, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+135,
opened 15 Nov. 2016, emphasis mine
Back
to Pastor Nelson:
But another problem,
just as dangerous, is that proper elected leaders demand an informed and wise
voting public.
A proper standard must
be present throughout the culture.
If not, an ignorant
population will get what they deserve. 51% can be as terrible as a tyrant when
they are misinformed.
So potentially,
“universal suffrage” is dangerous. That is why public mandatory education and
universal suffrage emerged at the same time in our country. The Horace Mann
Common School movement began just after the Constitution. Every young person –
future voters – had to be educated in basic reading and writing, in morals, citizenship
and yes, the Bible as only a morally responsible people could select proper
leaders. A people and a culture are reflected in their elected leaders.
Universal
adult suffrage was not what the framers envisaged for the American
republic. Many were heartily in favor of
property qualifications on voters. One
wonders if this is another ‘inalienable right’ that would have been worth
another Civil War-like ‘bloodletting’ in the Pastor’s mind had property
qualifications not been abolished by the States quite to his liking (which
would probably have happened with Southern slavery, peacefully and gradually,
if the North had been patient enough).
At
any rate, Horace Mann’s common schools are nothing to brag about. Neither he nor they are Christian:
. . . Homeschooling now qualifies as a
movement. It is certainly radical, in that it has taken a public stand, with
money on the line, against the public schools.
It
stands against the only American institution that can legitimately claim for
itself this unique position: it is the only established church in the nation.
It has a self-accredited, self-screened priesthood, as every church must. It
has a theology. Its theology is messianic: salvation through knowledge. But
this knowledge must be screened and shaped in order to bring forth its socially
healing power.
Massachusetts was the last state to abolish tax funding of
churches. That was in 1832. In 1837, the state created the nation’s first state
board of education. It was run by one of the crucial figures in American
history, the Unitarian lawyer Horace Mann. He believed that the public schools
should perform much the same function that the established Congregational
churches had performed for two centuries in Massachusetts. The schools would produce
what the churches had failed to produce, a new humanity. They would transform
sin-bound man by means of education.
This
outlook is what R. J. Rushdoony called the messianic character of American
education, which is the title of his 1963 book.
. . .
Source: Gary
North, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/10/gary-north/home-schools-and-the-tea-party/,
opened 15 Nov. 2016
We
appreciate Pastor Nelson’s attempt and that of evangelicals as a whole in the u. S. to defend
the tradition that has come down to them, but, as is hopefully clear, there are
serious defects in that tradition (it is in fact an anti-tradition, something
that destroys rather than strengthens true tradition, which Southerners can
attest to, who actually do have something of a pre-Modern tradition). Unless they want things to decay even further
than they have, they must look beyond the Rush Limbaugh view of history and
reassess just where they are in light of the whole of the history of the Church
and of the world.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the
Souð!
Anathema
to the Union!
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