Faith in God and Fidelity to the Constitution versus the Rule of Men. Ghostly echoes of history from 1774-1775 to 2014-2015, Part Three.

“I am a Clergyman it is true, but I am a member of the Society as well as the poorest Layman, and my Liberty is as dear to me as any man, shall I then sit still and enjoy myself at Home when the best Blood of the Continent is spilling?...so far am I from thinking that I act wrong, I am convinced it is my duty to do so and duty I owe to God and my country.” -- Peter Muhlenberg, Pastor, Colonel of Virginia militia, 1775 and later Major General, Continental Army.

As I noted in Part One of this series, "Unum Necessarium," there are decided differences between the situation the Founders faced in the years 1774-1775 and that which we face as 2014 gives way to 2015. As I noted in Part Two, "The long game & the struggle for liberty," there are also striking similarities.

Early in Part Two, I made this observation:

In (the French and Indian War), the colonists got an up-close look at the British Empire, at the follies and corruptions of an arbitrary government and an arrogant military that had prior to that event been distant and seemed not so important to the New World. Colonists who had been reared in the moral revival of the Great Awakening, who had learned to appreciate the British Constitution as practiced after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, colonists who had imbibed the lessons of the English Civil War and the philosophy of John Locke, were shocked at the contrasts between what they had been raised to appreciate as ostensibly freemen of Britain and the harsh reality.

This background cannot be overemphasized. As Gordon S. Wood wrote in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787:

The general principles of politics that the colonists sought to discover and apply were not merely abstractions that had to be created anew out of nature and reason. They were in fact already embodied in the historic English constitution which was esteemed by the enlightened of the world precisely because of its "agreeableness to the laws of nature." The colonists stood to the very end of their debate with England and even after on these natural and scientific principles of the English constitution. And ultimately such a stand was what made their Revolution seem so unusual, for they revolted not against the English constitution but on behalf of it.

Of course they came to understand that the English Constitution had deep flaws -- just as we today understand only too well the flaws in the document with which the Founders replaced it -- but they proceeded from a fidelity that they viewed as older, more true to who they were as freeborn Englishmen than the corrupt tyranny that the English monarchy under George III was saddling them with. In this view, THEY were the true, the faithful, Englishmen, not the hated ministers and corrupt mercantilists who profited off THEIR sweat and blood.

In this, we are today a precise mirror of the Founders -- we view ourselves as the only true, freeborn Americans who show deeply-held fidelity to OUR Constitution. In our view, as I said in Olympia WA last month, the elites who are currently in charge of our country are indeed "domestic enemies of the Constitution," just as the Founders believed that their English "betters" were enemies of their own constitution and the liberty that it was supposed to secure.

This is why the enemies of liberty and property speak of this country as a "democracy" whereas we swear allegiance to the Constitution and the Republic. They understand that the Founders were as averse to unrestrained democracy as they were to monarchical tyranny. They seek to win the argument by corrupting the terms. In this they have been, unfortunately, remarkably successful. At the same time these same enemies of liberty and the Founders' Republic accuse us of being "paranoid gun nuts" for suspecting their motives, even when they boldly call for the abolition of the Second Amendment and the confiscation of civilian firearms of military utility (the so-called "assault rifles" -- another cynical use of deliberately-corrupted language to win the argument). Just because we aren't being shunted off into re-education camps for firearm owners right now, they argue, means we don't have a point. "How can you not trust the system?" they ask. Perhaps because like the Founders we too have read history.

For in this also we are just like the Founding generation. Again from Gordon S. Wood:

As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had noted in the House of Commons that the colonists' intensive study of law and politics had made them acutely inquisitive and sensitive about their liberties. Where the people of other countries had invoked principles only after they had endured "an actual grievance," the Americans, said Burke, were anticipating their grievances and resorting to principles even before they actually suffered. "They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." The crucial question in the colonists' minds, wrote John Dickinson in 1768, was "not, what evil has actually attended particular measures--but, what evil, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them." Because "nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel, . . . therefore nations in general have lost their liberty." But not the Americans, as the Abbe Raynal observed. They were an "enlightened people" who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before them, aimed to think before they felt.

Yet now, with the success of various state's Intolerable Acts" in the wake of Sandy Hook, the citizens of those states ARE feeling. They don't NEED to think, to be "paranoid" in their enemies' parlance. They don't need to think beyond how best to resist. For if they are "paranoid" they still have real enemies -- and those enemies are on the march. The monster has finally let the mask slip and he really resents that they have noticed. Yet, Bloomberg and his band of liberty-thieving, property-plundering billionaires ought not be surprised with the reactions that I-594 and the rest of these unconstitutional diktats have sparked. Not if they have read their history as we have. As John Locke wrote in 1689:

Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence.

"Which God hath provided for all men." God. And there, too, today, is a reflection of one of the central causes of the Revolution and another parallel between then and now. Kevin Phillips writes in 1775: A Good Year for Revolution --

Edmund Burke, the late-eighteenth-century British statesman with a great gift for illuminating the American condition, pointed out to an inattentive Parliament in early 1775 the central part that religion played: a "fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth." Much of this, Burke said, flowed from their heavy settlement by Protestant refugees and dissenters. "Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired . . . The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is more adverse to all implicit submission of mind or opinion. (Worship in) our Northern colonies is a refinement on the principal of resistance."

Pastor John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (pictured and quoted above) was a perfect example of this dynamic.

It was Sunday morning early in the year 1776. In the church where Pastor Muhlenberg preached, it was a regular service for his congregation but a quite different affair for Muhlenberg himself. Muhlenberg’s text for the day was Ecclesiastics 3 where it explains, “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted….”

Coming to the end of his sermon, Peter Muhlenberg turned to his congregation and said, “In the language of the holy writ, there was a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away.” As those assembled looked on, Pastor Muhlenberg declared, “There is a time to fight, and that time has now come!” Muhlenberg then proceeded to remove his robes revealing, to the shock of his congregation, a military uniform.

Marching to the back of the church he declared, “Who among you is with me?” On that day 300 men from his church stood up and joined Peter Muhlenberg. They eventually became the 8th Virginia (Regiment) fighting for liberty.

The British bitterly denounced pastors such as Muhlenberg as the "Black Robed Regiment."

In truth, the American colonists of the day were largely a deeply religious people. Oh they had their dissenters, their deists, agnostics and atheists in the ranks of the revolutionary forces, much as we do in today's liberty movement. But the bulk of the Founders were Christians of various denominations, including Catholics (although there plenty of practicing Jews in the ranks of liberty -- one of the principal Sons of Liberty in the South was denounced by his colonial governor as a "dirty Jew").

And as I go around the country today, visiting the various places where armed civil disobedience is being practiced, I find most of those practitioners doing so on bended knee. It is a non-denominational and non-sectarian foxhole religion of the general Judeo-Christian sort, but it is undeniable. This was most evident at the Bundy Ranch, where Jerry Delemus ran the security operation and was a deeply religious man who provided testaments to his volunteer troops and always, it seemed to me, sought God's guidance in prayer.

There is, I think, less worry about sectarian and denominational issues these days (as opposed to the Revolution where the Protestant/Anglican divide was often pretty sharp) because the domestic enemies of the Constitution themselves seem to attack all Judeo-Christian religion (they make exception for those brands who incorporate state worship into their doxologies). They also tend to worship their leaders as demigods, with a divine right to rule the rest of us -- not with the Founders' rule of law, but with the rule of men (called "democracy"), which is to say the law of the jungle. There is, therefore, a much greater sense of us versus them, good versus evil. And, of course, they demonize us in turn in their world view. They attack us for our faith as much (or more) than anything, thereby unintentionally slandering the atheists and pagans among us. Remember this one from their current demigod?:

"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

If I may paraphrase the ancient Roman maxim about wine, "In pecuniae veritas." Or, "In money there is truth." To expand on the bare phrase, when you're speaking to donors at a fundraiser consisting of godless Hollywood heathens, you tell them what they want to hear, especially if it tracks with your own beliefs and there's money on the line. Presumably Obama wasn't "clinging to religion" himself all those years he allegedly sat in the Reverend Wright's pews. Of course being from Hollywood, all of the donor audience certainly understood the practicalities of a good, fictional script.

A French cartoon portraying King George the Third as a devil.

In any case, for those of us who are Christians, the behavior of these empowered domestic enemies of the Constitution tracks with our own suspicion that this is indeed a battle between good and evil, a spiritual war, with the other side plentifully stocked with very real demons. This is parallel to the Founders' own suspicions about King George the Third. (See this marvelous satire from 1782: A Dialogue Between The Devil, And George III, Tyrant of Britain, by Anonymous

So, having described faith in God and fidelity to the Constitution, as well as a determination to think and act before feeling the whip of tyranny, that makes three parallels between 1774-75 and 2014-15 instead of the previously promised two. In Part Four I will have others.