The Single Biggest Problem Facing America Today Part 3

We have been saying in these articles that if we don’t know what America is, what kind of country we were founded to be, we will gradually change into something else.  Most of us won’t even know it, but America will be gone, just as if we had been taken over by a foreign country. 

If I had to describe what America is in one sentence, it would be this: God has given unalienable rights to human beings. 

But what does this all mean? 

The first thing this means is that we are not a secular country.  I think different people would define what a secular country is differently, but the current version that our country has bought into is that it is unconstitutional for our country to favor one religion over another, or even to favor theism over atheism.  Our government must be neutral to all religions, meaning that each one has the same value as another, or essentially no value at all in how our country is run.  If you can’t invoke one, then you can’t invoke another.

Supposedly this is based on the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

What people are forgetting is that at that time in Europe, they had and still have today state churches.  The Queen of England is head of the Church of England.  A king or queen could personally not have any belief in God at all, and yet they would still be head of a Church by virtue of their position.  Our Founders did not want the government running the Church or the Church running the government. 

What people are forgetting is that a religion is a worldview.  Everybody has a worldview; nations have worldviews.  For all of world history, nations all had a religious worldview.  If not explicitly, then implicitly.  Now in the last century, with the rise of communism, we have countries whose worldview explicitly does not include a god.  There are people in our country who say that we were founded as a secular nation, and thus we are and should be one today.

The problem with that is that our nation was built on the belief that God did something that affects every human being.  Without that, we don’t have our country.

This secularism in our country today stems from several decisions of that court called supreme that removed prayer and Bible reading from our nation’s public schools. 

Except that prayer and Bible reading in public schools have been the practice even before our nation officially became a nation.  If this was indeed unconstitutional, then the Founders would have seen that this ended in their generation.  It would not have taken almost 200 years for the practice to be deemed forbidden by our Constitution.  They knew what they meant by the First Amendment better than we do and whether it had prohibited prayer and Bible reading in the public schools.  Why would the First Congress establish the office of chaplain in Congress and open their daily business with prayer if prayer was forbidden in the government and the public square?  

But the bigger question is: how can we teach our children and the millions of immigrants who come here every year the principles of our nation without mentioning God?

If we don’t recognize the role of God in the founding of our nation, then the very idea of unalienable rights will change.

Unalienable rights are rights that precede and supersede government.  Government did not give them, and government cannot take them away.

But if we don’t recognize these rights as having come from God, then they must have come from the government or the consensus of the people.  The government is now the highest authority.

Our Founders debated whether to include an enumerating of these unalienable rights in the Constitution, because they were afraid that people would come to think that these rights came from man and not God, hence they would be subject to change or restrictions.  They finally settled on including some of these rights as the first Ten Amendments to our Constitution.

But it needs to be asked what God we are talking about.  How would the Founders know that God gave these unalienable rights to human beings? 

The Declaration of Independence says that the Founders deemed these rights to be self-evident.  Some have concluded by this that the Founders were deists, that these rights were merely natural law.  The problem with that is that a deist god wouldn’t give rights to human beings, let alone inform them that it had. 

And I can’t imagine a nation would go to war with the world’s superpower over the musings of its philosophers. 

Generally, we speak of God as a belief.  The Founders spoke of God as a fact.  And without God, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America

the other side of diversity

We have long been told that diversity is our strength, yet a lot of us sensed that there was something wrong here.

Diversity is a strength if we are all united in the same goals, the same dreams, the same visions. 

But we are not.

And when we are not, we divide into a myriad of racial, ethnic, and sociological groups, all competing for pieces of a pie that is limited by how much money our governments can print, borrow, and spend.

We are far from the days of John F. Kennedy, when he said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Today America is not about people being free to pursue their dreams but people waiting for and relying on the government to come in and give them a hand to pursue their dreams.  Or if not, at least enough help so they can live comfortable lives.  So each group looks for a set-aside, a program, a law, an interpretation of a law, a court ruling, an investment. 

And the government is not only required to work on behalf of its citizens but millions of citizens of other countries who live here as well. 

The American dream is no longer your freedom to pursue what you want but our promise to do as much for you as possible.

And these means that diversity represents competitors, not competitors that force us to work harder, run faster, and jump higher, to become the best we can be, but to work harder to get government assistance.  

And we are finding that there isn’t enough money in the world to meet every need and to solve every problem.

We no longer believe in the American Dream.  We had always believed that the Dream was possible given the basic freedoms our Constitution provides.  Now we believe those freedoms are not enough; everybody needs help from the government.  We need more rights, more money, and the government compelling other citizens to assist us in our endeavors.

Uniting a divided country

 A Tribune reader was bold enough to suggest the answer to America’s divisiveness.  (Eisenhower’s ‘Middle Way,’ September 19)

I submit that Eisenhower’s answer was suitable to Eisenhower’s time far more than ours.

If half of America was traveling northeast, so to speak, and the other half was traveling northwest, you could probably convince a lot of them that traveling north would give them much of what they both wanted, enough to live at peace with the other half.

Today’s political climate is more like half of America wants to travel east and the other half wants to travel west.  Any advance in one direction takes away from the goals of the other half. 

The reader suggests his middle way positions as the way to unite our country, but frankly those are some of the very issues that currently divide us.

I do think that most Americans have not clearly defined their political philosophies as those at both ends have, so I do believe there is hope for us.

I submit that the root problem is that we have been lax in teaching to our children and the millions of people who have moved to our country in recent generations the true foundations of our nation.

A few examples: Those of us who are older are quite familiar with stories of our ancestors who came here with nothing, started their own businesses, and achieved the American dream.  We were the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Now we view the government’s role as taking care of people, so there is no need for bravery any more.  It’s the government’s responsibility to eliminate poverty, and they can’t spend enough money to do that.

We used to teach our kids in our public schools to love their neighbors as ourselves, to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, and the Ten Commandments.  But that was deemed too religious for us, so now we just teach them to tolerate each other, which can mean no more than to ignore each other.  We have lost the ties that bind us together.

These are not differences that have an easy middle road.

I agree with the reader that there is hope for our nation, but we lack an Eisenhower who has the position that we might listen to him and the wisdom to show us the way.

The Single Biggest Problem Facing America Today Part 2

We said in part 1 that the single biggest problem facing America today is knowing what America is, what the defining principles are that make it what it is.  If we don’t know what they are, we will soon become a different country.  And we won’t even know it.  But that America which we used to call the greatest country in the history of the world will be no more.

We said that the United States is founded on 5 ideas, actually propositions, as given in the Declaration of Independence.

The first proposition is that all men are created equal.

Some people today, educated people even, assert that the Declaration is sexist, because it says that all MEN are created equal.  What about women?

Throughout the history of the English language, the word ‘man’ has always had two meanings: man as distinct from woman, and man as distinct from animals.  Everybody spoke of mankind, and nobody thought it only spoke of men.  But recently, people started complaining that this use of the word is sexist, because they felt women were intentionally excluded, or unintentionally because they were so demeaned in men’s eyes.  I don’t think anybody who thinks this will accept any explanation I can offer to the contrary, so I won’t even make any more.

The Declaration talks about being CREATED equal.  That means, in the sight of the law and God, we are all on an even plane.  There is nothing inherently different between us such that one has more intrinsic worth or position than another.  One man cannot rule over another without their consent. 

We forget that at the time the Declaration was written, nations were ruled by kings.  Kings weren’t elected.  This rule was passed down through families, except for the occasional military coup.  But it was accepted that some people had a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.

But, no, the Founders said, we are all created equal.

We will no longer have rulers but representatives.

But, people will say, didn’t we have slavery?  Isn’t that one people ruling over another? 

Indeed it is.

Prior to the American Revolution, slavery was legal in all the colonies.  But that wasn’t the decision of the American people.  They were colonies, under British rule.  When the colonies became independent states, some states soon became free, and some remained slave states.  It took a Civil War and several Constitutional amendments to finally get rid of it.

But the Declaration of Independence declared the ideal which the nation as a whole finally lived up to.   But if the Declaration of Independence didn’t define our nation in this way, we might never have ended it.  It was colonists living under kingly rule who rebelled against that rule who clearly described the true condition of men.  I mean, humans.

But we haven’t been teaching this to our children and all our new immigrants, because this equality is from God, and some people have been led to believe that it is unconstitutional to talk about God in the public square, our public schools, and the government in general.

But without a grounding in our founding principles, the understanding of them changes.

We can’t say that people are created equal, so what’s left is equal, the idea that everybody is equal, and if things don’t look equal, it is the responsibility of the government to make them equal.

So if any particular group of people, and race is now the most commonly used definer, has, say, less than the average rate of homeownership, then that group is deemed not equal, and it is now the role of government to find a way to increase homeownership in that demographic group to equal that of others (meaning: whites).

The idea of equality morphed again, so that now the common word is equity.  The difference is that equity focuses on the need for government to take stronger action to make sure that ‘less equal’ groups become more equal to, well, white people.

Equity requires the government to help people it considers disadvantaged in some way, so that they do better in life, however the government determines its criteria. 

This is achieved in either of two ways:

One, the government funnels money either directly or indirectly to these selected people or groups.  The other is to compel its citizens to favor these people or groups in certain ways over other people or groups.

The question for us now is whether this view of equality and equity is compatible with what America is.  Is this consistent with the founding principle of all men, I mean people, are created equal.

And the answer is no.

How can I be so sure?

Economics.

Our country has been in existence for almost 250 years.  It was the early 60s when the court called supreme ruled that we cannot favor one religion over another, including apparently even just believing in God as well.  It was the mid-60s when government began assuming the responsibility to take care of everybody.  Before then, it was called charity, and it was all voluntary.

Since then, government spending has grown exponentially, and we have learned that there isn’t enough money in the world to do everything we now want government to do. 

For all of our nation’s history prior to that time, our government was able to live within its means, and government debt was considered irresponsible and immoral. 

But now, the list of peoples who need to be made more equal and all the ways that equality needs to be achieved have driven our nation into such debt that it has long given up the idea of paying that debt off.  And that is un-American.

So, no, it is not the role of government to meet every need, solve every problem, look over and check up on all its people (non-citizens as well as citizens) to see that they are all living the American dream.   

Part 3 – what are rights?

 

 

The Biggest Single Problem Facing America Today Part 1

I am sure that we can all write out own lists of problems in our country, and many of us could even rank them in order of importance.  I suspect that what I call our biggest problem won’t even make most lists. 

Why?

It’s not the kind of problem that would make the nightly news.  You can’t put it on a cell phone video or explain it in a soundbite.  You need to look at all of our problems and then step back and survey the whole picture of what is happening in our country

The biggest single problem facing our country today is answering the question: what is America?

Historically, countries formed from descendants of common ancestors.  We have seen a lot of migration in the last some decades, but when Africans move to Italy, we don’t call them Italians.  We still call them Africans. 

But people move to the United States from all over the world, and they become citizens, and we call them Americans.

That’s because America was built on an idea or set of ideas, such that ethnic roots are irrelevant.  But more and more people in America can’t tell you what those ideas are.  We don’t teach them in our schools anymore, and we certainly don’t teach them to the millions of people who move to our country every year.

So if we don’t know what our founding principles are, we will create or imagine other ones, and our country will change into something it is not and was never intended to be.  And we won’t even know it.  And the things that made us what we are will cease to exist.  It will be like we were taken over by a foreign power, a coup, but nobody will even know.  It will happen slowly, over generations, each new generation growing up with a new normal, until one day it is gone.  And most people won’t even know it.

These ideas are five in number, and they are given in the Declaration of Independence. 

The first idea, or maybe I should say proposition.  An idea sounds vague and not necessarily grounded in reality.  The first proposition is that all people are created equal. 

In what sense are any two people equal?  We are all unique and are different from everyone else in innumerable ways: looks, intelligence, aptitudes, abilities, personalities, etc.  But note that it says created equal.  It is not talking about physical characteristics.

In the context of our country’s founding, it is the statement that nobody has the divine or natural right to rule over other people.  We forget today that at the time nations were ruled by kings.  Kings weren’t elected or chosen by the people.  It was a position they were born into. 

Our Founders said, no, we are all created equal.  We don’t have rulers. 

Yes, but you will say, they had slavery.  Isn’t that one people ruling over another?  Indeed it is, and we ended up fighting a very costly civil war to end that.  People don’t always live up to their ideals, but the first step is establishing them.  We will talk more about this in part 2. 

Secondly, the same God who created us equal also endowed us with unalienable rights.  These rights are how we define liberty and freedom, by our ability to exercise these rights.

These rights come from God and precede and supersede government.  Government didn’t give them, and government can’t take them away. 

When the Founders created our country’s new Constitution, they debated whether these rights should be enumerated in it.  They were concerned 1) that people would come to think that these rights came from the government at some point in the future and not from God, and 2) that these were all the rights that people were endowed with. 

Eventually they decided to add them to the Constitution, but by way of amendments.  The first ten amendments to our Constitution are called the Bill of Rights.  These rights were things you could do without the government’s permission or regulation.

Thirdly, these rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Fourthly, they said that government exists to secure those rights.  Remember this point.  The role of government is a key issue today.

And, lastly, when the government does not secure our rights, it is the right of the people to either change the government or replace it.

But what does all this mean, especially today in a politically divided country?

We will look at this in the remaining articles.