| President Ronald Reagan [1911-2004], the 40th president of the United States [1981-1989], in a speech to members of the British Parliament asked, “What kind of people do we think we are? … Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.”1,2 Many consider Reagan’s June 8, 1982 Palace of Westminster speech as one of the greatest ever. It explains why Reagan’s public speaking earned him the nickname ‘The Great Communicator’. Not only did Reagan inspire freedom, but his Biblically based convictions also helped end the Cold War and change the world. Reagan’s ‘Freedom Is Fragile’ inaugural address on January 5, 1967, was another great one. We paraphrase: “It’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; we don’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation for them to do the same, or one day, we will spend our sunset years telling our children and children’s children what it was once like in the United States, where men were free.” Victor Davis Hanson [born 1953], one of America’s best-known historians, mirrors the same notion of freedom: “We don’t realize how tenuous legacy is and how it has to be transmitted from generation to generation. The nature of man doesn’t change, and that’s reassuring since we know the necessary conditions to save him from himself. The legacy of the West is a guidance system through the natural perils of human nature and behavior.” Hanson’s observations that man’s nature doesn’t change and that the necessary conditions to save him from himself are known must seem mystifying to a Biblically illiterate nation in contemporary America. Yet, in 17th-18th-century America, every elementary schoolchild would have known what they mean. For 150 years in early America, The New England Primer laid the theological foundation for the nation, propelling America’s meteoric rise into becoming the most advantaged nation in history. Each alphabet letter in the Primer was associated with a Biblical character or a scriptural lesson, with a corresponding doctrinal truth anchored in the mind with a rhyme. ‘A’ was for Adam and there was a woodcut of Adam and Eve: “In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all.” ‘C’ was for Christ, with the rhyme “Christ crucify’d for sinners dy’d.” In God’s economy, America’s Gross Domestic Product or military prowess counts for nothing, because it is righteousness that exalts a nation, as Proverbs 14:34 specifies. Righteousness, i.e. conformity of life to God’s laws, is an absolute necessity for something like freedom to even exist, let alone maintain. The Founders, of course, understood this. They recorded in the Declaration of Independence that man came into this world “endowed with unalienable rights.” That is, possessing “rights prior to, and independent of, his belonging to a political community, nation, or state.”3 Endowed by whom? you may ask. By the Christian God, or more precisely, the Judeo-Christian God who created man in his own image, and the Christian God who became man and endured suffering in the human condition.4 In God’s everlasting order, He will never have it forgotten that the Cross is the basis of all blessings. The Founders established Biblical truth in culture as the bedrock of the fledgling nation, while also emulating Plato’s [428-348 BC] questions regarding the sustainment of freedom: 1) Who teaches the children, and 2) What do we teach them? In the 2024 election, Donald Trump announced his commitment, if elected, to closing the Department of Education, removing its public education monopoly, firing government education bureaucrats, and returning education to the States. We called it a “rocket booster launching America into the next century.” Victor Davis Hanson recently inventoried the pitfalls of human secularism, including former President Obama’s eight-year revolution, and Obama’s “four-year, more radical, third term using the waxen effigy of Joe Biden.” He said: “This revolution that we’ve experienced, everything was up for sale, everything was negotiable, we invented a third gender and rammed it down people’s throats. We tore down statues and said 1776 was no longer the foundational date [of America, but it was now] 1619. “We looked at girls’ sports, and we destroyed it. We said that transgendered biological males that were now transgendered [could compete with] females: they won over 600 medals, [which] they took away from hardworking female athletes. “[Trump’s effort is simply a] return to normalcy and common sense. It only looks revolutionary to revolutionaries but not to the rest of the people. It is a counter-revolution to restore normalcy and bring the country from the far-left fringes back home again.” It takes a wholly worthwhile 6 minutes to listen to Hanson’s full inventory here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZX6TxQeJ8A |
| Hanson points to Maximilian Robespierre [1758-1794] and his brother Augustin Robespierre [1763-1794] as leading figures in the French Revolution that lasted from 1789 to 1799. In 1792 the brothers changed the 7 days of the week to a 10-day décade system, eliminating Sunday as a day of rest in order to de-Christianize French society. In addition to abolishing the 7-day week, French revolutionaries destroyed legions of statues, monuments, and paintings. This was all part of the destruction and effort to erase symbols of the monarchy, aristocracy, and religion. As Hanson puts it: “They went after the churches. Does this sound familiar?” Henry Kissinger said it was not clear to him whether “the country that dislikes its past has any future.”5 This demystifies quite a few current manias, such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project; the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [DEI] obsession [the federal government’s shameless setup to conceal discrimination, exclusion, and inequality]; homosexual and gender dysphoria; race division; and public school indoctrination of children to hate America and hate each other. Marcello Pera [born 1943], the former President of the Italian Senate and author of books on science and philosophy, noted in 2008 that liberal secularism – taken up and evangelized by Obama and Biden – is no less dangerous than Nazism or Communism; it’s just more insidious. “It does not wear the brutal face of violence, but the alluring smile of culture. With its words, liberal secularism preaches freedom, tolerance, and democracy, but with its deeds it attacks precisely that Christian religion that prevents freedom from deteriorating into libertinism, tolerance into indifference, democracy into anarchy.”6 With that said, we’ll pray for President Donald Trump and his heroic effort to root out the anti-god philosophy and ideology entrenched in government bureaucracy and the Deep State over the last 50 or 60 years. Gideons and Rahabs have begun to stand. David Lane American Renewal Project 1. www.historyplace.com/speeches/reagan-parliament.htm 2. www.hoover.org/research/march-freedom-reagan-bush 3-4. Marcelo Pera, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies; 2011. 5. www.wsj.com/opinion/meet-europes-paul-revere-british-essayist-douglas-murray-ea230db4 6. Marcelo Pera, ibid. |
