As we look back to the founding of the United States of America, we are struck by a sense of humility and gravity. On one hand, the fact that Americans live and enjoy the freedoms we do today absent an external authority through a vassal suzerain relationship is both remarkable and humbling. To imagine what it must have been like settling and aiming for civility across this land is magnanimous.
On the other hand, the taming of the wilds of America came at a great cost for not only the land, but its people both within and without. Manifest Destiny was an inexorable vision that tenaciously advanced the American Experiment across this diverse and myriad continent. The outworking of which was heavy.
The countryside—stained with blood, sweat, and tears of both the just and the unjust alike—nevertheless displays its grandeur for all to see and experience. The Statue of Liberty stands daily and proclaims, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…”[1] The very mythological air of America brings countless many to her shores.
This air, however, was not purchased with money or gold. Instead, it was wrought in the furnace of struggle. The Revolutionary War tested not only the aptitude of a fledgling nation, but its character. A Declaration followed by a Constitution carved principles deep into the granite of immovable mountains and established an ideal that we still admire to this day. Nevertheless, approximately 245 years after the ink dried on this ideal, we can look back now certainly with a sense of awe at the acumen and forward-thinking nature of our Founding Fathers, but also with an awareness that a struggle persists. A contest not of human making, but spiritual in nature.
To be sure, and as in the case with the making of any nation, the history is often written by the victors. Only in the case of America the victors were born out of a struggle and fashioned through enduring efforts of those seeking a better life—a life consistent with a Creator God. How would the two exist? A nation—not a theocracy, nor a monarchy—centered on a separation of powers. A triad of governmental branches. A remarkable test of the people’s grit and desire to rebel yet enjoy protection. A people needing something more than an ideal man. A God-man.
Still, an indelible resolve is what marked the character of this early nation—reflecting its people’s ambition to stand, to advance, and to struggle.
Thus, any taxation without representation would always have been unbearable to a free-minded people. They stood, they struggled, and they advanced toward a new concept of freedom. The cost was incalculable. To be on the side of the Patriot was to rebel against all common sense of the day. But Thomas Paine—taking to his pen—stated in one sentence found in his treatise, Common Sense, more than he could have imagined. Paine fatefully articulated, “But the most powerful of all arguments, is, that nothing but independence, i.e. a continental form of government, can keep the peace of the continent and preserve it inviolate from civil wars.”[2] In other words, to let, “Arms, as the last resource, decide the contest…”[3] was the only way forward for these American revolutionaries. There was no choice. They must resist, even if it cost them their businesses, their homes, their fathers, and even their sons. And resist they did. To arms they went, and victory established the American Experiment.
However, what Thomas Paine, writing in 1776, did not know is that 87 years later this self-same Country would face the “inviolate” Civil War that implosively forced men to take arms once again; only this time with rifles, grape shot, and bayonets murderously pointed at each other. The grisly horror of approximately three quarters of a million American lives were lost in this new struggle for freedom.
A freedom not fought to remove the powers of an overreaching monarch, but on the tension between who has the right to enforce an understanding of humanity as Imago Dei or chattel.
In the end, men would leave farms, fields, and labor once again and become soldiers. They would travel through this grand country with their five senses experiencing things never known. They would lie dug in trenches and advance through swamps and wildernesses for their cause. It was an Emancipation Proclamation that brought the tsunami wave of Civil War to its final beachhead. Freedom reigned once again, and the cries of revolutionaries sounded across America’s shores.
Reconstruction, one World War, and the invention of the Television ushered in a new day. A revolution not based on advancing freedom initiated by a Creator God, but now on an ideal man an Übermensch, would prevail. This new man was created in the imaginations of a few but was disseminated through the new revolution—the Digital Revolution. Caricatures would shape thought and millions would go to their grave unknown and unsung.
Neil Postman captured this new revolution in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as he wrote, “It [telegraphy] destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse.”[4] Thus, the Digital Revolution’s influence on our American Experiment moved us into a second World War, a global initiative to eliminate threats to our shores, and intelligence operations that remain classified to this day.
We sit now in a new day. It is a day of no-fault divorce. It is a day not protecting the unborn. It is a day when a man can reject and subsequently exchange his biological anatomy if he so chooses. It is a day of churches embracing and celebrating the marital union and copulation of homosexuality. It is a day of denominationalism. It is a day of social media tribalism. It is a day of distraction. It is a day of intrigue.
The results of this new day?
Confusion. Men do not know how to be biblical men. Women do not know how to be biblical women. The revolution is now within.
An answer to this problem?
Discipleship. A focused, intentional, church-based discipleship ministry geared at developing biblical leaders who understand the times and know what to do. A new program of living. A new program of dying.
God’s Alternative Program.
This article is part of a larger compilation that will hopefully end in a book. Click HERE to read more.
[1] Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” The Statue of Liberty, accessed September 30, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/colossus.htm.
[2] Thomas Paine, Rights of Man and Common Sense, Fifth Printing edition (New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 1994), 276.
[3] Paine, 265.
[4] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 20th anniversary edition. (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2006), 65.
— September 30, 2021