Over the years I’ve been forced to reach the conclusion that America’s constitutional self-government is failing because many American voters who profess to be disciples of Christ refuse to think or act like it when they fulfill their responsibility as members of the sovereign body of the people. I was first forcibly impressed with this years ago, in regard to self-professed Christians in the black community. The Bible states unequivocally that the taking of innocent life is among the six or seven things God hates, and which to Him are abominations. (Proverbs 6:16). But in exchange for what they (wrongly in most cases) regard as the worldly benefits of the misnamed “welfare state” the vast majority of Black voters consistently support candidates who are staunch proponents of so called “abortion rights,” including of course Barack Obama.
It deeply saddens me that they will have to stand before God burdened by this abuse of the sovereign power by His Providence entrusted to them. Because of their long experience with abominable injustice in America, they surely risk a harsher judgment than King Saul, when he sought the innocent life of his servant David; and King David when he maliciously arranged the death of his servant Uriah. How can a people privileged to have spent time on the cross with Jesus seek willfully to profit from the perpetration of the very evils that required His sacrifice? And, at that, against their own offspring, during the very era when God was working to deliver black Americans from the inheritance of injustice that was for so long their lot, from birth.
I thank God for delivering me from that snare of self-betrayal and perdition; and for the blessing He allows me, even now, of bearing sacrificial witness against it, in my vocation as a Christian citizen. But in the course of that witness, I encountered yet another cause for sorrow as I learned from repeated experience that the treacherous exchange that garners worldly profit at the price of the relationship with God that is true life, has become the whole foundation of the practice of citizenship for many of those who profess to be adopted children of God through Jesus Christ.
Many of those who acted on behalf of the people of the United States when they declared themselves an independent nation, did so with the conscious understanding that they acted in fulfillment of their obligation to God in respect of political right. They said as much in the Declaration of Independence. In the context of State governments already instituted to implement the understanding of true self-government revealed in Christ, they went on to establish a government for their new nation as a whole, that would be consistent with respect for the exercise of God-endowed rights they had already vindicated, even despite the terrific vicissitudes of war.
Both the frank realism of their faith and their experience of that struggle for right left them fully aware of the adversity their assertion of God-endowed liberty would face. Indeed, the Constitution they devised was predicated on the understanding that God’s justice, and the rights arising from it, would always be embattled, warring with those aspects of human nature (e.g., unbridled, passionate avarice and ambition) that continually challenge and transgress the boundaries by which, in the intention of the Creator, God, humanity is engendered, preserved and happily fulfilled.
The Constitution of the United States was devised to accommodate that realistic expectation by providing a framework that gives people of goodwill, committed to the exercise of right, the means to retain a decisive advantage over those who seek the triumph of will without regard to goodness. Such are the people who amass and abuse power by every means. The accretion of power is their sole preoccupation. For its sake they expel God and right from every precinct of human existence, including above all, the precincts of political rule. But without people of goodwill, how will right measures be extended, or wrong ones resisted and ultimately defied?
Until the latter part of the 20th century, despite several damaging assaults against it, the Constitution’s favoritism (its tilt toward people of goodwill) worked as intended. That it did so was, as Tocqueville famously observed, due in large part to the Christian understanding of virtue that prevailed in our national political life, however it was “honored in the breach” in other aspects of the nation’s everyday existence.
To be sure Americans, being an eminently practical people, were consciously committed to the belief that practice makes perfect. That belief gives the advantage to successful practitioners. But America’s Christian ethos tempered that worship of success with a strong dose of respect for the logic of rational thought, which demands the existence of a pre-existing standard, in light of which one’s sense of what constitutes success takes account of the requirements of humanity.
After the founding of the United States that standard was, for a long time, emblazoned with the all-seeing eye of God. From God’s perspective all men are equal simply because, beside the power of creation, the highs and lows of human achievement dwindle to insignificance. Nothing remains but the rectitude by which the Creator, God, prescribes respect for the worth of humanity as a whole. This perspective reminds people, otherwise preoccupied with amassing wealth and power, that in the final analysis, nothing of their worth as individuals will survive unless it is somehow marked out by some contribution to the store of human worth, as seen from God’s perspective.
Thus wealth and power alone might bespeak a successful individual, but they did not mark that individual as an outstanding citizen. Rather, as with George Washington, that individual achievement had to be translated into a form that proved one’s contribution to the common good, understood above all as the decent happiness of the people as a whole. It is measured in terms that include the success of that self-government which exemplifies the common good of the people, established as such by the authority derived from God’s authorship of the whole of everything.
The present corrupt tendency of our public affairs suggests that we have come to the time when the common good has been discarded as the public standard for individual achievement. We are reaping the bad fruits of the abandonment of the Christian ethos, the ethos that made it possible for the people of the United States to make their experience of self-government successful. The standard of God-endowed right has been replaced by the standard of power without regard to right. There is no longer any test of public good that must be passed before individual achievement is translated into political stature. There is no test of good citizenship to verify the political relevance of success in other respects.
This deficiency opens the door to the worst kind of abusive tyranny. And the present so-called two-party system has devolved into an instrument entirely designed and devoted to impose that tyranny. That’s why it simply doesn’t matter what individual candidates say or promise to do about this or that issue of the day. The elitist faction’s sham political process is a bad tree. And as Christ forewarned, a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. If they were honest with themselves, people in both the sham so-called “major parties” would admit that this corresponds to their repeatedly disappointed expectations as voters.
But it ought to be especially evident to sincere conservatives in the GOP. Willful blindness prevents some from seeing it, but God forbid that it should prevent people of goodwill from pointing it out. My effort to do so, and indicate the remedy America’s Founders’ envisaged, will continue in my forthcoming WND column this week.