The idea of
freedom is not absent from the Holy Scriptures.
Their approach to it is unique, however.
It is not an absolute value; it is always hedged about with various
limitations. The Holy Apostle Peter’s
First Epistle to the Christians in Asia Minor provides a good example of
this. He writes,
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers
and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; Having
your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against
you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify
God in the day of visitation. Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for
the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as
unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise
of them that do well. For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may
put to silence the ignorance of foolish men: As free, and not using your
liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God (I Peter
3:11-16).
This is not
quite what we have ended up with in the United States. Christianity has always been present amongst
us, but so too have other influences, some of them outright pagan, as
Christopher Ferrara shows in his indispensable book Liberty: The God That
Failed:
After 1770, writes Albanese, “songs began
to appear which celebrated the Goddess [of Liberty]” and “preachers took up the
cause of the Goddess in their turn.” For
example, Jacob Duché, the Chaplain to the Continental Congress who delivered
its opening prayer, gave a sermon explaining how Liberty “true to her divine
source, is of heavenly abstraction” and that both Liberty and the “divine
virtue” which is her “illustrious parent” come to dwell “in the hearts of all intelligent
beings” where “they ought jointly to be worshipped.”
The sign and sacrament of this veritable
cult of the Goddess Liberty was the Liberty Tree in Boston . . . . As Oliver’s brother wrote, Liberty Tree had
been “consecrated as an idol for the mob to worship” and was the place for
imposing the discipline of the “Tree of Ordeal [on those] whom the Rioters
pitched upon as State delinquents.” In
addition to being both a totem and locus of the power of Liberty, Liberty Tree
was a place of worship where revolutionary liturgies were enacted. In Providence, Rhode Island a Liberty Tree
was dedicated during a ceremony in which the participants laid their hands on
the sacred object as a local minister invoked the worldwide unity of a kind of
mystical body of Liberty . . . .
The “sacred elm,” writes Albanese, became
“a kind of transcendent cosmo-historical tree around which the other Liberty
Trees and liberty signs of the colonies took root . . . Like the sacrament it
was, Liberty Tree was the reality which oriented the patriots, yet it pointed
beyond itself to another source of power”—the power invoked by Paine with his
talk of remaking the world and regenerating man in a disquieting analogy to the
working of divine grace (Tacoma, Wash., Angelico Press, 2012, pgs. 150-1).
A group of
Yankee Christians known as the National Reform Association saw clearly the
spiritual battle between Christianity and heathenism that has been waged since
the early days of the newly-independent States:
Even more explicitly prophetic was the
President of Wheaton College, Prof. Charles Blanchard, whose address to the
1874 convention [of the NRA—W.G.], entitled “The Conflict of Law,” predicted
that, failing adoption of the proposed Christian Amendment, no state law
favorable to Christianity “can stand a suit in the Supreme Court of the United
States. . . . This conflict of law is
inevitable and irrepressible. Our
laws will be heathenized or our Constitution Christianized, and Americans
must soon decide which they will have done.”
In like manner, Felix Brunot’s address warned that while “Our nation is
Christian . . . the Constitution is unchristian. . . . Can this anomaly continue? Impossible.
One by one your Christian laws . . . and all the Christian features of
State Constitutions, must come to the test of the Constitution of the United
States; and they must fall before it.”
. .
. Under the influence of the Godless Constitution as wielded by anti-Christian
forces, predicted Tayler Lewis, it would not be long before “our whole
political page becomes a pure, unbelieving, irreligious, Christless, Godless
blank” (Ibid., pgs. 533-4, 535).
It is clear
which side has won in this battle, as the States have been scrubbed of most
everything overtly Christian in public spaces.
Even federal Supreme Court cases that conservatives have cheered, like Dobbs
v Jackson, make no mention of Christianity at all (which makes the
victories doubtful over the long run).
Thus,
instead of the Christian idea of limited freedom directed toward virtuous ends
(and ultimately to union with God Himself), we have the Luciferian-Promethean
idea of unlimited freedom. Examples –
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2024/04/garlington-at-the-extremes-of-liberty/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!