Voting about Faith, America’s Survival (Issue #473)

This week I attended a funeral.  A three-year old special needs child had passed away.  The sun broke through the overcast day, when the gates of Heaven opened up to receive her—at least that’s how it seemed to all the believers gathered there at the graveside singing hymns, mourning, and bearing witness to how precious a little life can be.

People of faith believe that identity is always intact.  God keeps us safe with Him, where we are always looking and acting our best in the image He created us in.  People of faith believe their purpose extends beyond the temporal material world and into Eternity.  Everything in this physical life therefore is couched in the context of a relatively brief mortal existence on earth, and the Life and Time indestructible elsewhere. People of faith tend to live according to discretion and morals, by virtue of a continuous reference to the Life that is to come.  This reference smoothes out some emotional rough edges, allays disappointment, enables forgiveness to occur, and displaces class envy.  The crash or the burn-out, or so-called “postal” bouts of anger and revenge, are more often characteristic of someone without faith or someone who enters into a crisis of faith.

In politics faith has implications too.  Government is seen as a portion, or mere functional piece, of that relatively brief mortal existence here on earth.  Caesar is to be respected certainly, but a person’s natural rights—even a little person’s—are more important.  Government is subordinated to one’s spiritual journey.  Government is subordinated to certain values, which constitute the duty of a faithful and faith-filled people to their God.  People of faith are always, potentially, revolutionary.  The Declaration of Independence is their civil creed.

The First Amendment to the Constitution had once established a useful firewall, even as the advance of secularism continued over two centuries to affect the democratic society at large.  States even towards the end of the Twentieth Century remained sovereign with respect to most matters of religion, in the context of our federated Republic.  Within the states themselves moreover, a high regard for matters of the spirit and of religion, provided for a libertarian approach that gave space and freedom for entire communities of faith to deviate from the majority norms in their pursuit of happiness.  People also knew how to mind their business then.  Property more or less ensured privacy, because it wasn’t lightly taken away, or heavily taxed, or invaded by the government.  The advance of secularism, coupled with a corrosive leveling form of democracy, eventually dismantled the federalist construct of our government and has all but killed the Constitution.  It was only a matter of time before every remaining pocket of religious freedom and faith-based “deviant” institution would be under attack.

Today any semblance of resistance to the secular norm is quashed at every level of government and society.  A consolidated national democratic and secular majority-will, skewed, corrupted and expressed by a conformist and no-longer-federal government, invades every family and household in the country.  People of faith are about to be extinguished—or rather, the faith of the people, which is the real aim of attack.  Ironically, faith can inform and cause people to respond in two very different ways whenever their Caesar presumes upon the prerogatives of their God and His people.  It is, of course possible, to take solace and comfort from the fact that life is short and there are sure rewards and perfect justice in Heaven.  The other way is to live heroically, knowing that whatever the cost or ultimate sacrifice, it is well worth the teaching and the example of the Lord, in order to bring His Prayer to fruition: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).  It is certainly worth the fight if done in defense, and for the future of freedom and the future of America’s posterity.  It is worth voting too when the ballots are not bullets, and when a peaceful way forward presents itself in order to bring about political revolution.

There is indeed a time for every season, but much involves the choice that free men and women make as it were, in time.  People without faith will vote for their stomachs every time.  They will give in to fear and to fearful political exhortations of envy, because they never see beyond the grave.  They empower government to take from others what they think they need, and acknowledge no higher authority than their own selfish greed and that of greed’s henchman, the bureaucrat with a badge and snub-nosed gun.  After all, they have nothing else to reconcile, nothing more to redeem, nothing to justify outside the narrow confines of incidental breath and an accidental heartbeat.  The truth is that it was never unconstitutional according to the Founders’ Original Intent to have prayer in schools, public or otherwise—it is entirely unconstitutional, however, to have the Federal Government telling sovereign states what they can and cannot do and defining what is or isn’t allowed in their schools.

The underlying problem has never been about prayer or monuments.  It isn’t about how or whether to teach objectivity, critical thinking, logic or the scientific method.  It sure isn’t about studying Chinese in kindergarten, and whether to double up on increasingly ungraded math and science homework!  The crisis in schools is massive, and the failure to educate readily apparent.  The solution, as with so much else, involves transmission and receipt of our cultural inheritance and of history again.  It involves preparing kids and young people for the workplace and for society, concentrating on skills but also on discipline and character.  Education will fix itself, when the Republic is restored and the American people, including all people of faith are free again.  The biggest problem we face today isn’t phonics or bilingualism.  It isn’t the amount of money thrown at something, or the quality of teachers in low-income neighborhoods.  It has everything to do with the Federal Government and its massive overreach in terms of raw power.  It has to do with entire branches of the Federal Government, which no longer serve the best interests of the American people!  The solution has to do with knocking the Federal Government back down to a proper constitutional size and scope.  GOOD CHRISTIAN: IF YOU VALUE ANYTHING AT ALL IN THIS LIFE, YOU MUST VOTE!