Methinks the lad is a Scotsman.
Now this is more like it. A real grab for the
"hero" of the non-revolution. I grew up on a reservation where we
all owned our property but the land was leased. Life, liberty and
property?
REH
The Christian Statesman POBox 8741-WP
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15221
Biblical Freedom and the American War for Independence
by Timothy Terrell
Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, fifty-six men risked their lives and
their fortunes to sign a document asserting the independence of the American
colonists from Great Britain. This "Declaration of Independence" directed
the attention of the world to the tyranny of the British Crown and justified
the force of arms to reclaim self-rule.
Achieving freedom came at a heavy price for these signers. Nine of the
fifty-six died from wounds suffered while fighting British troops. Five were
captured by the British and were tortured to death. Twelve had their homes
ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the Continental Army, and two
others had their sons captured. The Virginian Carter Braxton, a wealthy
planter and trader, lost his ships to the British Navy. Forced to sell his
lands and home to pay his debts, he died in rags. Thomas McKean was required
to move his family constantly to keep them from the British. He served in
the Continental Congress without pay and lost all his possessions during the
war. Vandals or soldiers looted the homes of Clymer, Ellery, Gwinnett, Hall,
Heyward, Middleton, and Rutledge. Thomas Nelson saw his home destroyed in
the battle at Yorktown, and died bankrupt. John Hart was driven from his
dying wife's bedside. His thirteen children were forced to flee, and his
crops and gristmill were destroyed. For over a year he lived in forests and
caves, returning after the war to find his wife dead and his children gone.
Soon after, he died from exhaustion and a broken heart.
For what cause did these men fight? What led them to sacrifice their
fortunes, their homes, their families, and their lives? It is not lightly
that men would give up these things. The answer is: 1) a deep desire to live
in a free society with basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and 2) a
firm belief in constitutional self-rule. Both of these were rooted in the
biblical precepts of the Protestant Reformation.
Life, Liberty, and Property
The right to life is essential to a free society. Without this most
fundamental of human rights, still denied to millions of people the world
over, the state is no longer a protector but an oppressor. Obviously, early
Americans envisioned circumstances in which there could be a justified
taking of life, such as capital punishment, but no one was to "be deprived
of life...without due process of law."
Liberty is simply the freedom to act as one will to seek fortune or pleasure
or contentment. Government control over the activities, wealth, education,
dwelling, career, or any other part of human life is a constraint on
liberty. Early Americans saw that certain governmental functions were set
forth in Scripture, and thus not all state coercion would be a deprivation
of a biblically conceived liberty. Modern American society, however, has
expanded the role of government far beyond its biblical limits, such that
the liberty the framers envisioned for U.S. citizens has been lost.
Fundamental to a free society is the basic right of property. Though this
right is routinely trammeled today, to the framers it was inconceivable that
this right would not exist in a free nation. Wrote John Adams,
Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.... The moment,
the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the
laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to
protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If Thou Shalt Not Covet , and Thou
Shalt Not Steal, were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made
inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made
free.1
Without the right of private property, a society will not grow and prosper.
If the government will not stop my neighbor from taking what I have
produced, I will not bother to produce. Not only are incentives corrupted,
but the economy turns into chaos. Early in the 20th century, the Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that an economy without private
property and a free-market price system will fail for lack of information
about how to allocate resources. An economic system with few or nonexistent
private property rights will collapse just as the Soviet Union did a decade
ago.
The best safeguard of natural human rights is a decentralized civil
government limited by a biblical constitution.
Safeguarding Rights
Some of the framers did not consider it necessary to enumerate the rights of
the people, believing that to do so would be superfluous and even
counterproductive. What we now know as the Bill of Rights was strongly
opposed by Hamilton and Madison in the Federalist and in private
correspondence. For Englishmen, rights were not completely spelled out in
written law, but were embodied in the tradition of common law. The
Constitution itself was a minimalist document, incorporating within it "in
every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A Bill of Rights."2 In a
letter to Thomas Jefferson, Madison wrote,
[E]xperience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions
when its control is most needed. Repeated violations of the parchment
barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every state. In
Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it
has been opposed to a popular current.3
In the Federalist , Hamilton wrote,
I...affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which
they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed
Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various
exceptions to the powers which are not granted; and, on this very account,
would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why
declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why,
for instance should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be
restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I
will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulatory power; but
it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible
pretense for claiming that power.4
The best safeguard of natural human rights is a decentralized civil
government limited by a biblical constitution. Throwing off the control of a
tyrannical power is not in itself enough to guarantee a free society. This
is clearly seen in the case of the French Revolution. Having destroyed the
monarchy, the revolutionaries failed to set up a satisfactory government.
Robespierre's anti-Christian Reign of Terror was the unfortunate result.
the so-called American Revolution was a contest over jurisdiction
The Secession of 1776
The French Revolution was truly a revolution. In that it differed from the
American War for Independence, which was actually not a revolution, at least
as commonly conceived. A revolution implies the overthrow of authority--a
sudden radical change in political organization. This was not what the
Americans set out to do. The framers saw the war with Great Britain as a
last resort following many humble entreaties for justice before the throne.
Americans were not seeking a new and different way of life, or a new and
different government. They desired only to keep the kind of representative
government that had prevailed in the Colonies for a century and a half. If
any revolution occurred, it was a British revolution.
It is not well recognized today that the so-called American Revolution was a
contest over jurisdiction. After the Glorious Revolution in England
(1689-1690), Parliament enjoyed increased royal power in England, power it
assumed applied to the colonies as well. However, the colonies were directly
under the King by virtue of their royal charters, not under Parliament.
Virtually every document carrying a colonial protest to King George bore
some appeal to these original charters. Parliament had no more jurisdiction
over America than Massachusetts has over South Carolina. The colonies had
their own elected legislatures that predated the Glorious Revolution, and
had no intention of following the orders of a usurping foreign assembly. In
1775, in his Novanglus, John Adams attempted to settle the jurisdictional
question once and for all. By what law, he asked rhetorically, did the
English Parliament obtain sovereignty over America?
By the law of God, in the Old and New Testament, it has none; by the law of
nature and nations, it has none; by the common law of England, it has none,
for the common law and the authority of Parliament founded on it never
extended beyond the four seas; by statute law it has none, for no statute
was made before the settlement of the colonies for this purpose; and the
Declaratory Act, made in 1766, was made without our consent.
If King George had stepped in to protect the colonies from Parliament's
encroachments, there would have been no war in 1776. Instead of honoring the
colonial charters, however, King George sided with Parliament to tax,
harass, and abuse the American colonies, until in 1776 the colonists could
declare that "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history
of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."
Why then does the Declaration of Independence not make this jurisdictional
issue a focal point? It must be understood that the Declaration was a
foreign policy instrument before it was any reflection of the colonists'
philosophical position.5 The Declaration was intended to convince the French
king, Louis XVI, to enter the war on the side of the colonists. Harping on
what might seem to be philosophical radicalism would not have the desired
effect, so Jefferson and the other authors instead engaged in a
point-by-point expos� of King George's illegal activities.
The American War for Independence, then, was an effort at regaining what had
been until the mid-1700s a free society enjoying a substantial amount of
self-rule. It is more accurately described as a secession, a withdrawing
from the British Empire, conducted under duress. The King had broken
Britain's contracts--the charters--with the colonies, and the colonists
demanded a political divorce. War resulted, but it was a war for
independence, not a war of revolution. After its successful conclusion, the
delegates to the Constitutional Convention attempted to frame a federal
government that would perform its limited duties while respecting the
authority of the individual states.
Free government is founded on jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy
and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we
are obliged to trust with power.
"Cousin America Has Run off with a Presbyterian Parson!"
Key to the framers' understanding of the need for self-rule and strictly
limited federal government was their religious background. American society
was theologically homogeneous, most of the nation having come from the
Protestant regions of Europe. Though some Americans deviated from orthodox
Christianity, the religion of the colonies was, in confession and practice,
commonly Reformed and Calvinistic. Christianity was the center of the
colonials' lives, a unifying element that served as the foundation for not
only worship, but political opinion and law. Attempting to understand the
American founding without considering the faith of the citizenry would be
like trying to understand the movements of the planets without considering
the sun. Russell Kirk, not one to be suspected of Calvinist sympathies,
wrote,
In colonial America, everyone with the rudiments of schooling knew one book
thoroughly: The Bible. And the Old Testament mattered as much as the New,
for the American colonies were founded in a time of renewed Hebrew
scholarship, and the Calvinistic character of Christian faith in early
America emphasized the legacy of Israel....
John Calvin's Hebrew scholarship, and his expounding of the doctrine of sin
and human depravity, impressed the Old Testament aspect of Christianity more
strongly upon America than upon European states or other lands where
Christians were in the majority.6
Calvinism as a doctrine was of course not universally held by early
Americans, yet even Arminians and Roman Catholics could not help but absorb
some Calvinist social thought. The French Huguenot (i.e., Calvinist) work
Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, 1579),
which was widely read in the colonies before the War for Independence,
defended the right of the colonists to take up arms and secede from Great
Britain. The ruler himself is subject to the law, Calvinist pastors taught
from their pulpits, any one who resists a law-breaking ruler is not a rebel
but a protector of the law. The influence that the colonial churches,
especially Presbyterian churches, exerted before and during the war was more
than circumstantial; it was decisive. Boettner wrote,
So intense, universal and aggressive were the Presbyterians in their zeal
for liberty that the war was spoken of in England as "The Presbyterian
Rebellion." An ardent colonial supporter of King George III wrote home: "I
fix all the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon the
Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principal instruments in all
these flaming measures. They always do and ever will act against the
government from that restless and turbulent anti-monarchical spirit which
has always distinguished them everywhere." When the news of "these
extraordinary proceedings" reached England, Prime Minister Horace Walpole
said in Parliament, "Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian
parson."7
It was Calvinism's biblical view of human nature that prompted the Framers
to block human ambition with the checks and balances of the Constitution.
While recognizing the potential for good, the writers of the Constitution
believed that there existed, in the words of Madison, "a degree of depravity
in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust."8
Hamilton noted that "men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,"9 and
consequently should be restrained when holding public office. Thomas
Jefferson pointed out that:
Free government is founded on jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy
and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we
are obliged to trust with power. In questions of power, let no more be heard
of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the
constitution.10
Conclusion
Why, then, did the early Americans fight? Why did they set up a new
constitutional republic? Their sacrifices were attempts to achieve freedom
for themselves, their families, and their descendants, so that on this
continent the rights of life, liberty, and property--biblically
understood--would be secure. In stark contrast to the atheistic French
Revolution, the American founding occurred in a Calvinistic setting that
contributed to a firm belief in constitutionally limited government. If we
lose this understanding of our history, if we forget the importance of
biblically limited earthly authority, we risk losing the freedoms our
forefathers secured for us.
Timothy D. Terrell is an assistant professor of economics at Wofford
College, a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church in Simpsonville, SC,
and director of the Center for Biblical Law and Economics (CBLE is online at
the Patrick Henry Institute website: www.christcollege.org/html/phi/). Dr.
Terrell can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
Endnotes
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15221
Biblical Freedom and the American War for Independence
by Timothy Terrell
Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, fifty-six men risked their lives and
their fortunes to sign a document asserting the independence of the American
colonists from Great Britain. This "Declaration of Independence" directed
the attention of the world to the tyranny of the British Crown and justified
the force of arms to reclaim self-rule.
Achieving freedom came at a heavy price for these signers. Nine of the
fifty-six died from wounds suffered while fighting British troops. Five were
captured by the British and were tortured to death. Twelve had their homes
ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the Continental Army, and two
others had their sons captured. The Virginian Carter Braxton, a wealthy
planter and trader, lost his ships to the British Navy. Forced to sell his
lands and home to pay his debts, he died in rags. Thomas McKean was required
to move his family constantly to keep them from the British. He served in
the Continental Congress without pay and lost all his possessions during the
war. Vandals or soldiers looted the homes of Clymer, Ellery, Gwinnett, Hall,
Heyward, Middleton, and Rutledge. Thomas Nelson saw his home destroyed in
the battle at Yorktown, and died bankrupt. John Hart was driven from his
dying wife's bedside. His thirteen children were forced to flee, and his
crops and gristmill were destroyed. For over a year he lived in forests and
caves, returning after the war to find his wife dead and his children gone.
Soon after, he died from exhaustion and a broken heart.
For what cause did these men fight? What led them to sacrifice their
fortunes, their homes, their families, and their lives? It is not lightly
that men would give up these things. The answer is: 1) a deep desire to live
in a free society with basic rights of life, liberty, and property, and 2) a
firm belief in constitutional self-rule. Both of these were rooted in the
biblical precepts of the Protestant Reformation.
Life, Liberty, and Property
The right to life is essential to a free society. Without this most
fundamental of human rights, still denied to millions of people the world
over, the state is no longer a protector but an oppressor. Obviously, early
Americans envisioned circumstances in which there could be a justified
taking of life, such as capital punishment, but no one was to "be deprived
of life...without due process of law."
Liberty is simply the freedom to act as one will to seek fortune or pleasure
or contentment. Government control over the activities, wealth, education,
dwelling, career, or any other part of human life is a constraint on
liberty. Early Americans saw that certain governmental functions were set
forth in Scripture, and thus not all state coercion would be a deprivation
of a biblically conceived liberty. Modern American society, however, has
expanded the role of government far beyond its biblical limits, such that
the liberty the framers envisioned for U.S. citizens has been lost.
Fundamental to a free society is the basic right of property. Though this
right is routinely trammeled today, to the framers it was inconceivable that
this right would not exist in a free nation. Wrote John Adams,
Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.... The moment,
the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the
laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to
protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If Thou Shalt Not Covet , and Thou
Shalt Not Steal, were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made
inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made
free.1
Without the right of private property, a society will not grow and prosper.
If the government will not stop my neighbor from taking what I have
produced, I will not bother to produce. Not only are incentives corrupted,
but the economy turns into chaos. Early in the 20th century, the Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out that an economy without private
property and a free-market price system will fail for lack of information
about how to allocate resources. An economic system with few or nonexistent
private property rights will collapse just as the Soviet Union did a decade
ago.
The best safeguard of natural human rights is a decentralized civil
government limited by a biblical constitution.
Safeguarding Rights
Some of the framers did not consider it necessary to enumerate the rights of
the people, believing that to do so would be superfluous and even
counterproductive. What we now know as the Bill of Rights was strongly
opposed by Hamilton and Madison in the Federalist and in private
correspondence. For Englishmen, rights were not completely spelled out in
written law, but were embodied in the tradition of common law. The
Constitution itself was a minimalist document, incorporating within it "in
every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A Bill of Rights."2 In a
letter to Thomas Jefferson, Madison wrote,
[E]xperience proves the inefficacy of a bill of rights on those occasions
when its control is most needed. Repeated violations of the parchment
barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every state. In
Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it
has been opposed to a popular current.3
In the Federalist , Hamilton wrote,
I...affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which
they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed
Constitution but would even be dangerous. They would contain various
exceptions to the powers which are not granted; and, on this very account,
would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why
declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why,
for instance should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be
restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I
will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulatory power; but
it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible
pretense for claiming that power.4
The best safeguard of natural human rights is a decentralized civil
government limited by a biblical constitution. Throwing off the control of a
tyrannical power is not in itself enough to guarantee a free society. This
is clearly seen in the case of the French Revolution. Having destroyed the
monarchy, the revolutionaries failed to set up a satisfactory government.
Robespierre's anti-Christian Reign of Terror was the unfortunate result.
the so-called American Revolution was a contest over jurisdiction
The Secession of 1776
The French Revolution was truly a revolution. In that it differed from the
American War for Independence, which was actually not a revolution, at least
as commonly conceived. A revolution implies the overthrow of authority--a
sudden radical change in political organization. This was not what the
Americans set out to do. The framers saw the war with Great Britain as a
last resort following many humble entreaties for justice before the throne.
Americans were not seeking a new and different way of life, or a new and
different government. They desired only to keep the kind of representative
government that had prevailed in the Colonies for a century and a half. If
any revolution occurred, it was a British revolution.
It is not well recognized today that the so-called American Revolution was a
contest over jurisdiction. After the Glorious Revolution in England
(1689-1690), Parliament enjoyed increased royal power in England, power it
assumed applied to the colonies as well. However, the colonies were directly
under the King by virtue of their royal charters, not under Parliament.
Virtually every document carrying a colonial protest to King George bore
some appeal to these original charters. Parliament had no more jurisdiction
over America than Massachusetts has over South Carolina. The colonies had
their own elected legislatures that predated the Glorious Revolution, and
had no intention of following the orders of a usurping foreign assembly. In
1775, in his Novanglus, John Adams attempted to settle the jurisdictional
question once and for all. By what law, he asked rhetorically, did the
English Parliament obtain sovereignty over America?
By the law of God, in the Old and New Testament, it has none; by the law of
nature and nations, it has none; by the common law of England, it has none,
for the common law and the authority of Parliament founded on it never
extended beyond the four seas; by statute law it has none, for no statute
was made before the settlement of the colonies for this purpose; and the
Declaratory Act, made in 1766, was made without our consent.
If King George had stepped in to protect the colonies from Parliament's
encroachments, there would have been no war in 1776. Instead of honoring the
colonial charters, however, King George sided with Parliament to tax,
harass, and abuse the American colonies, until in 1776 the colonists could
declare that "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history
of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."
Why then does the Declaration of Independence not make this jurisdictional
issue a focal point? It must be understood that the Declaration was a
foreign policy instrument before it was any reflection of the colonists'
philosophical position.5 The Declaration was intended to convince the French
king, Louis XVI, to enter the war on the side of the colonists. Harping on
what might seem to be philosophical radicalism would not have the desired
effect, so Jefferson and the other authors instead engaged in a
point-by-point expos� of King George's illegal activities.
The American War for Independence, then, was an effort at regaining what had
been until the mid-1700s a free society enjoying a substantial amount of
self-rule. It is more accurately described as a secession, a withdrawing
from the British Empire, conducted under duress. The King had broken
Britain's contracts--the charters--with the colonies, and the colonists
demanded a political divorce. War resulted, but it was a war for
independence, not a war of revolution. After its successful conclusion, the
delegates to the Constitutional Convention attempted to frame a federal
government that would perform its limited duties while respecting the
authority of the individual states.
Free government is founded on jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy
and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we
are obliged to trust with power.
"Cousin America Has Run off with a Presbyterian Parson!"
Key to the framers' understanding of the need for self-rule and strictly
limited federal government was their religious background. American society
was theologically homogeneous, most of the nation having come from the
Protestant regions of Europe. Though some Americans deviated from orthodox
Christianity, the religion of the colonies was, in confession and practice,
commonly Reformed and Calvinistic. Christianity was the center of the
colonials' lives, a unifying element that served as the foundation for not
only worship, but political opinion and law. Attempting to understand the
American founding without considering the faith of the citizenry would be
like trying to understand the movements of the planets without considering
the sun. Russell Kirk, not one to be suspected of Calvinist sympathies,
wrote,
In colonial America, everyone with the rudiments of schooling knew one book
thoroughly: The Bible. And the Old Testament mattered as much as the New,
for the American colonies were founded in a time of renewed Hebrew
scholarship, and the Calvinistic character of Christian faith in early
America emphasized the legacy of Israel....
John Calvin's Hebrew scholarship, and his expounding of the doctrine of sin
and human depravity, impressed the Old Testament aspect of Christianity more
strongly upon America than upon European states or other lands where
Christians were in the majority.6
Calvinism as a doctrine was of course not universally held by early
Americans, yet even Arminians and Roman Catholics could not help but absorb
some Calvinist social thought. The French Huguenot (i.e., Calvinist) work
Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, 1579),
which was widely read in the colonies before the War for Independence,
defended the right of the colonists to take up arms and secede from Great
Britain. The ruler himself is subject to the law, Calvinist pastors taught
from their pulpits, any one who resists a law-breaking ruler is not a rebel
but a protector of the law. The influence that the colonial churches,
especially Presbyterian churches, exerted before and during the war was more
than circumstantial; it was decisive. Boettner wrote,
So intense, universal and aggressive were the Presbyterians in their zeal
for liberty that the war was spoken of in England as "The Presbyterian
Rebellion." An ardent colonial supporter of King George III wrote home: "I
fix all the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon the
Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principal instruments in all
these flaming measures. They always do and ever will act against the
government from that restless and turbulent anti-monarchical spirit which
has always distinguished them everywhere." When the news of "these
extraordinary proceedings" reached England, Prime Minister Horace Walpole
said in Parliament, "Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian
parson."7
It was Calvinism's biblical view of human nature that prompted the Framers
to block human ambition with the checks and balances of the Constitution.
While recognizing the potential for good, the writers of the Constitution
believed that there existed, in the words of Madison, "a degree of depravity
in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust."8
Hamilton noted that "men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,"9 and
consequently should be restrained when holding public office. Thomas
Jefferson pointed out that:
Free government is founded on jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy
and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we
are obliged to trust with power. In questions of power, let no more be heard
of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the
constitution.10
Conclusion
Why, then, did the early Americans fight? Why did they set up a new
constitutional republic? Their sacrifices were attempts to achieve freedom
for themselves, their families, and their descendants, so that on this
continent the rights of life, liberty, and property--biblically
understood--would be secure. In stark contrast to the atheistic French
Revolution, the American founding occurred in a Calvinistic setting that
contributed to a firm belief in constitutionally limited government. If we
lose this understanding of our history, if we forget the importance of
biblically limited earthly authority, we risk losing the freedoms our
forefathers secured for us.
Timothy D. Terrell is an assistant professor of economics at Wofford
College, a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church in Simpsonville, SC,
and director of the Center for Biblical Law and Economics (CBLE is online at
the Patrick Henry Institute website: www.christcollege.org/html/phi/). Dr.
Terrell can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
Endnotes
REH comments.
How far does "property" go and how is it
determined? Did the Colonists truly not ask and discuss this
question? Also what about the Calvinist doctrine of the
elect? In his language "Landowner" is very close to "Godliness"
or the Elect. At one point some of the founding fathers wanted
only the landowners to vote. Does this bear any
resemblance to Switzerland which as I understand is a genuine Calvinist republic
or is this man just a plain old Presbyterian Scotsman claiming the "American
Secession" for his own. It was the Baptist Roger Williams who
saved their bottoms on that one. Williams was the one who insisted on
the Separation of Church and State generations before.
But this man is not a historian but an economist. He still should
have come and joined the list but he was too insecure. Tomorrow you
will read his article on the efficacy of being fired and I think that makes it
alright that he be held to the same standard he espouses.
Neither does he acknowledge that his "Biblical"
Constitution "did in" the women, the blacks and denied Indian's relevance
because they weren't something else? The specifics may have
been pure Old Testament male chauvinism but the ideals were equalitarian and
that is not particularly European and certainly not Biblical. But it
is Iroquois.
Ben Franklin was taken with the Iroquois and their
government as well as their social contracts. There was certainly
more freedom amongst their Sachems then in the Colonies at any time.
That is the reason Colonial children kept running away to join the
Indians. There is an American Opera about a popular
Minister/politician whose female relative refused to come home to his "heaven"
on earth after she married an Indian and found their ways more free and to her
liking as a woman.
There are other ways to look at the parallels here and
there are quite a number of parallels that relate more to the Iroquois and their
effect on Rousseau, Blake and Locke than this man is willing to
acknowledge. Single-minded he is. One other
point. The "Hebrew" scholars didn't like Hebrews much.
Could it have been because all of that scholarship was like so much of the
Indian scholarship up almost to the present? Pure fantasy and
projection.
"How inconvenient those Jews. They lived
too long and refused to accept our view of things. How dare they have a
counter opinion about 'our' shared history!"
Almost Talibanic?
Finally, I don't see how any society could justify
allowing their heroes, who had given so much, to die in squalor after signing
the document that gave them their freedom. But it is a portent of
the Veteran's wars against the American People's representatives for their
inability to stick to a contract once the war was won. I've
seen the grandeur of Mount Vernon and the crumbling walls of the capital from
Washington's deal with Congress for the stone. No treaty or
contract was sacred with this bunch as long as the people are powerless to
resist. What a barbaric bunch he describes.
This is a religion to be proud of? Like the bible itself, the
ideals are impressive but the result is something else.
Time for a little "trusel time."
A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" is one that has been
widely acknowledged for its intellectual content (explicitly or implicitly), but
without a corresponding amount of attention being given to its utility or even
to its potential negative value for society. The negative value may come from
commission or omission. It may deal with the content of a discipline, with the
way a discipline is perceived, with knowledge that cuts across disciplines, and
even with "integrative studies". John Warfield, Some Magnificent
Academic Trusels. GMU press.
I hope that I didn't eat too much. I love Trusels.
REH
