The vital Source of liberty and law - Part 1
The American founders told us, and the enemies of freedom know it as well.
Summary: Karl Marx said, “My objective in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” His ideological descendants have continued to attempt this campaign of destruction. When we compromise with them by using a secular foundation for liberty, we unwittingly join in the demolition of the true foundation of liberty… and thus doom our efforts. This two-part essay explores this dynamic, and gives a path forward.
David French, an alleged conservative who forgot what society should be conserving, made some waves a few years ago. He argued that in a society that protects liberty, we must allow Drag Queen Story Hour in order to also preserve religious liberties. All’s fair in the land of liberty apparently; turn about is fair play; if you want to have the freedom to go to church and teach your children to obey God, then you must also grant sexual deviants and their allies the freedom to ideologically groom children at school and intentionally deconstruct childhood innocence.
Because that is, as he put it, “The Price of Liberty.”
But this reasoning is fatally flawed.
(By the way, how did that bargain work out? Were you free in 2020 to attend your church, or did your government shut it down as “non-essential” while allowing preferred radical revolutionaries to run riot?)
One cannot preserve liberty without making the Author of liberty and law the foundation of one’s society. Ungrounded liberty-for-the-sake-of-liberty will collapse into slavery to vice, and the tyranny of evil. This is an ironclad law of human nature.
Allow me to spend some time explaining why this must be so.
The Source of our purpose in life, how we define moral excellence, our understanding of truth and goodness and beauty, our shared sense of sanity, our conception of human nature, our agreement on what things laws should protect or punish…. All these things in the pre-1776 American colonies were rooted in an avowedly biblical, Christian, often-Protestant understanding of God, the world, human nature, and flourishing society. Even the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was understood to mean the Aristotolean pursuit of Eudaimonia - a morally virtuous and thus blessed or “happy” life.1 While there were varied opinions about how best to do this, virtually everyone agreed that the classical virtues and morals of the Bible were a crucial part of it.
This was the basis of America.
The Marxist ideologues behind the various moral inversions of our society are intentionally and knowingly seeking to destroy these Western/Christian foundations, so as to create a collectivist state - a state in which the classical American model of liberty and equal treatment under the law is eliminated in favor of vengeful redistribution of outcomes and continuous revolution.
An in-depth explanation of the Marxist model of the world and of fomenting revolution (and all its derivations, which I shall simply call “Marxism” here) is a subject for another post, coming soon. But suffice it to say that these Leftist revolutionaries understood that Christianity and traditional family values were among the most important pillars upholding America.
They saw clearly that these pillars were preventing their desired aims. That is why they have intentionally sought to destroy these areas for nearly 100 years. It is the tip of the spear for their political revolution.
“WE DON’T NEED THE BIBLE TO BE GOOD, OR TO BE FREE”
Marxist-led movements through the early to mid-20th century successfully removed the Bible from the public sphere2 and infected mainline church denominations with ideological compromise. But the momentum of Biblical virtue and Christian “common sense” was able to sustain liberty and moral sanity for a while in America, even with public policy failing to recognize the biblical Author of liberty as the one in whom we trusted and obeyed. It seemed like the secular experiment was working.
But this can only work for a generation or two.
(Continue reading below)
Imagine cutting a branch off a fruit tree while fruit is on the branch. You cut it off from its source of life (the tree and its roots) and just stick it in the ground.
For a short while, the fruit and leaves can maintain their fragrance and beauty. But the source of life is gone. It will eventually become dry and rotten – and the more moisture you introduce, the quicker the fruit will rot.
Our society and government are subject to the same forces.
Previously, our culture was saturated in a thoroughly western, classical Christian framework. From this foundation, we raised generations of people who had a shared understanding of what it meant to be good, what should be applauded and punished, how liberty and law should intersect, how to think critically but not cynically, to want to improve things but not invert the moral order to cause chaos just to shake things up. They were guided by a transcendent and objective standard of truth and love, justice and mercy. It wasn’t perfect, but it was connected to perfection, and pursued an ideal of God’s perfection within a gracious liberty to follow one’s own conscience within societal limits founded on classical, Biblical virtue and morality. Catholics, Jews, Deists, and agnostics (a minority in American colonies) were free to pursue eudaimonia within this social and legal environment.
They recognized that God – the source of these things – provided the grounding and nourishment for morality and liberty to flourishing in society. That’s the roots and tree (God, western classical Christianity, the Bible), and its fruit and leaves (morality and liberty).
But then we removed God from the equation in our public policy. We stopped using a Biblical paradigm in shaping public policy. We “secularized” the public sphere and said religion should be private (kept inside one’s church or kept in one’s heart) or at least neutered, and perversely excluded it from political discussions. We then had the absurdity to call this secularization an American value.
We cut the branch off. Who needs a tree and roots, when the branch does all the fruit-growing?
And then we placed the branch in a system that was disconnected from the Source. We thought pledging allegiance to the flag, and being patriotic, and supporting small government and social progress and compassion and liberty would be enough. Just be kind. Follow common sense morals. Show love. “You do you.” Liberty and free markets. The Bill of Rights. Pictures of a bald eagle, screeching in the sky.
“Freedom.”
It seemed to work fine for a little while, because families were still passing on the deeper values. For a while, we agreed for the most part on what “progress” and “love” and “goodness” and “pursuit of happiness” meant, what we should promote and what to restrict. But over time, cut off from the Source… Things have withered.
As time goes on, public policy has been tossed about with every wave of propaganda, and our cultural morality becomes shipwrecked because it has no compass and no anchor.
The more you try to spray down the fruit with water (“more liberty!”) the faster it will rot. Liberty isn’t the cure.
Webster (the author of the dictionary that bears his name) warned us of that very thing:
So now we get people arguing over whether men dressed as sexually provocative women swishing their hips in glitter tights should be able to bring little children into strip bars and teach them how fun and liberating it is to be Queer and invert morality, and how lame and oppressive their parents are for not letting them explore their sexuality together. (The pictures of these events are so disturbing or sometimes R-rated that I will decline posting them).
But upon what basis do you say that they are wrong to do so and should be stopped by the power of the government? The good of the protection of childhood innocence? They disagree, they respond in Marxist-ese that childhood innocence is a Western construction and is not liberating, that you’re just trying to inculcate these children into your backward oppressive ways. And you should let them do drag together, because liberty. Because it would be hateful to tell them No. Because just speaking your backwards morality is violence and you must be silenced. Love is love. Don’t be a bigot. They unleash all their tiresome patter on you to deactivate you and trap you in pointless arguments - to prevent you from effectively opposing their goals to destroy the foundations of society.
A published academic paper promoting drag performance as a pedagogy for young children put their true goals this way:
“Drag may be especially well-positioned as a form of cultural production that, to paraphrase the writer and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, serves to “make revolution irresistible”… We’re leaving a trail of glitter that will never come out of the carpet.”
They use that perversion of liberty, unhinged from any unchanging moral compass, to invert the social morality so as to destabilize society and create revolution into a collectivist totalitarian society that enforces the normalization of perversion and persecutes even the verbalization of biblical/biological dissent. As Karl Marx put it, his ideological followers should engage in “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”
Apply this to economics, sex, gender, fitness, race, and dozens of other targets of Marxist-derived “critical theory.”
Cut the anchor, wreck the ship, take the children, make the revolution inevitable.
In a society of laws, who gets to decide what actions will be promoted and what will be outlawed or shut down - and upon what moral basis will these decisions be based?
Thankfully we have a written Constitution and Bill of Rights which provides some kind of reference point. But a written law is useless without Godly people - people who believe in virtue, truth, and justice - to employ it. William Penn knew this well and wrote it into the Charter of the Liberties and Frame of Government of Pennsylvania in 1682:
“Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn…. a loose and depraved people love laws and an administration like themselves.”
North Korea and China have written constitutions which guarantee religious liberty, but these written documents are useless since they have a godless totalitarian government that simply ignores their own constitution.
(Are you seeing the selective enforcement of the law here in America?)
WOLVES IN MORAL GARMENTS
“They promise them liberty, when they themselves are the slaves of depravity.”
2 Peter 2:19
Although all this should be painfully obvious, it’s hard for most people to admit it. Denial is more comfortable.
The radicals laboring to subvert your country and your children don’t come right out and admit their philosophy and goals to the masses like they do in their own circles of academia. To you, they say that they just care about people and want a better life. The gaslighting is extreme: “We definitely aren’t doing that, and it’s good that we are, and there won’t be room for bigots like you when we’re done.”
As the “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky wrote to his followers, “Do what you can with what you have, and clothe it in moral garments… goals must be phrased in terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” ‘Of the common welfare,’ ‘Pursuit of happiness’…”
Of course they lie to the general public about the end-goals of their radical agenda.
All of their patter about kindness and acceptance is just the “moral garments” to conceal an ideological paradigm founded on rebellion and indeed revenge against even the idea of God and his created order. Karl Marx put his hatred of God into verse:
“So a god has snatched from me my all
…nothing but revenge is left to me!
On myself revenge I’ll proudly wreak,
On that being, that enthroned Lord,
Make my strength a patchwork of what’s weak,
Leave my better self without reward!”
“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet
full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant
…Then I will wander godlike and victorious
Through the ruins of the world.
And, giving my words an active force,
I will feel equal to the Creator.“
Clearly this message won’t resonate with the masses, and so it needs the “moral garments” to fool people into participation or at least deactivate them from effecgive opposition.
HOW TO CUT THROUGH THE GASLIGHTING
Don’t listen to what people say they intend. Instead, watch what they do, what they promote, and what the results are. What do they make excuses for? Whom do they shut down? What do they fight for? What do they refuse to condemn?
Trust the evidence of your eyes. React accordingly.
Accept the gift of clarity: It is happening.
And it isn’t a conspiracy per se. It’s just ideological birds of a feather, flocking together.
NeoMarxist activists have been churned out of our universities for decades in every large city in America. They don’t “grow out of it” when they hit “the real world”; they are true believers and they are working to impose their ideology on the culture they have been taught to despise. They want to invert traditional morality, they want to indoctrinate children into being psychologically incapable of functioning in their parent’s society and thus agitating for revolution, they want to subvert the system and destroy classical morality (for its own ends, and as a pathway to destroying classical liberty and law). They dream of continual revolution and a Marxist Utopia emerging from the ashes of the society they lit on fire. They are smug in their rebellion against every aspect of God's order. They want to engage in “relentless criticism of all that exists.” They are seeking to get their influence deeper into the gears of society. Recognizing what they are really doing and rejecting their lying patter is the first step: Awareness.
And then you and I must act accordingly against them, while maintaining our own emotional positivity and trust in God’s eventual victory.
Those three elements are essential: Awareness, Action, and Joy. Take any one of them out and you can’t wage an effective long-term resistance - you’ll either be too ignorant, too passive, or too depressed. (Notably, depression is often the result of anger suppressed and turned inwards).
In Part Two I go deeper into the nature of the battle we are in, and I recommend general action steps. I’ll publish that in a next couple of days.
Until then, fight the good fight.
Footnotes:
“Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.” (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia)
“Health, learning, and virtue will insure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem, and public honor. Beyond these, we want nothing but physical necessities, and they are easily obtained.” - Jefferson, letter to a friend
For instance, see the history and ideology of the plaintiff who sued to remove Bible reading from schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madalyn_Murray_O%27Hair