by Bill Nugent
Article #251
When does America stop being America? When does a government stop being a government and start being nothing more than a band of thieves, murderers and tyrants? Our forefathers decided in 1776 that the British government over the colonies had so devolved into tyranny, that rebellion against it was not sin.
In 1776 the Bible belt was New England. Today the Bible belt is the rural South but back then the New England Puritans, who were Calvinists, were the heart of the American church. New England led the rebellion. Massachusetts rebelled in early 1775 and drove the British out of Boston by March of 1776. The British retreated to Nova Scotia and then invaded Tory filled New York in the summer of ’76. Most of the top American generals were New Englanders except Washington, the Virginia Episcopalian. Washington was very devout and theologically conservative.
I’ve just read the Declaration of Independence. In it are twenty six formal causes of war against Britain that are listed and described. The first six describe how the British king overturned laws and dissolved legislatures and otherwise prevented people from writing their own laws. The capricious overturning of laws by the 18th century British king certainly has a parallel in the actions of the present day Federal judiciary.
The other causes of the war for American independence, though onerous, did not involve anything remotely like the overturning of anti-abortion laws. None of causes of war listed in the 1776 document involved the kind of mass murder that the modern day abortion industry commits. Abortion is mass murder of the unborn and toleration of it has been forced upon us by our government since 1973.
I tried to imagine what would have happened if a Roe vs Wade, legalization of abortion decision was handed down by the British king or parliament on January 22nd 1773 instead of 1973. What would the colonists have done? I think the Declaration of Independence would have been issued on January 23rd 1773 and 100 percent of America would have been united behind it. The British viceroys and their armies would have been expelled from America forthwith!
What if legalization of gay marriage were imposed on any of the colonies by a British king in the 1770s? That too would have made the causes of war listed in the Declaration of Independence seem trivial.
Every day nearly four thousand lives of preborn children are snuffed out in abortion clinics and hospitals in the US. The Supreme court, by its bizarre postmodern reading of the constitution, has regarded the “right” to abortion to be a fundamental freedom since 1973. The Supreme Court also struck down all of the state’s remaining anti-sodomy laws by Lawrence vs Texas in 2003.
We all know the ‘frog in a pot’ illustration. If you drop a frog in boiling water he immediately jumps out. If, however, you put a frog in warm water and gradually heat it up to boiling temperature, the frog will stay in the water and won’t jump out and will boil to death.
The ‘frog in a pot’ is what has happened to America. America has gradually changed from a free and God affirming nation to an unfree nation that trembles before its nascently tyrannical government. In America today we have the illusion of freedom. You’re free to buy pornography and you’re free to abort your child. You don’t have the freedom to write laws through your representatives in Congress because the judicial branch strikes down laws through judicial review, according to its Orwellian political biases. Every law has to be crafted to adhere to the judges political preconceptions.
Since abortion kills more than a million each year, I think it’s no exaggeration to say that abortion alone outweighs the combined total of all other domestic issues in the US. Abortion is the American holocaust. Women of racial and ethnic minorities are aborted at a far higher rate than white women in the US. I used to live in New Rochelle NY, near Planned Parenthood’s gleaming facility located between the barrio and the projects.
Even the social democracies of Europe, which we regard as so secular and liberal, restrict abortion to a much greater degree than American law. American abortion law is so extremely liberal because the Supreme Court has read the right of abortion into our constitution, our fundamental law.
The problem is not just with the Supreme Court. The legislatures, both state and federal, have enacted unjust and ungodly laws that adopt the gay agenda, legalize gay marriage, legalize gambling and ban Christian expression from the public square. Similarly, corporate board members and the media elite have promoted ungodliness in countless ways.
Yet we conservative Christian people are the biggest flag wavers and we send our sons and daughters into the armed forces to be trained to kill in defense of this postmodern, unfree, semi-totalitarian, semi-socialist country. We dance to the secular leaders’ tune even when they play lousy music.
Concerning America’s war policy, I believe it’s certainly appropriate for the US to wage war against the Muslim extremists that attacked us on 9/11. However, the conquest of the entire nation of Afghanistan and the bloody attempt to remake that nation into a democracy is far beyond the scope of self defense.
The US has expended the lives of many of its young people and killed many Afghans to oust the Taliban and replace them with a Muslim regime that is only slightly less extreme and corrupt. I regard this as both unjust and unwise from the standpoint of Christian principles of just war. The US should have done a surgical invasion and concentrated only on getting Bin Laden and the other Al Qaida leaders.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were meant to spread democracy to the Muslim world. The real cause of the democratic awakening in the Middle East is the communication revolution brought about by Al Jazeera and the Internet. The formerly isolated peoples of the Mideast now have a window to the West and they see how free people live. The attempt to impose democracy by invasion and regime change can actually cause a resentful pushback and hinder democratic progress in Muslim lands.
Not to dwell too long on US war policy, but the recent war in Iraq was absurd from a self-defense standpoint and our pyrrhic victory there is likely to be undone by radical Iraqi Shiite forces that are allied with Iran. More than half of Iraqi Christians have fled Iraq since the war began. Amazingly there have been few public protests against this war, not even from the left. Where’s a liberal when you need one!? I believe that Christians should not volunteer to join the armed forces of the US because the US government can’t be trusted to wage a just war.
We in the church are like ambassadors. We are sent into the world as witnesses to do the business of Jesus our King. We are sent to the US but the US is not our country. Our country is a heavenly one. When we point to our country we should be pointing heavenward.
What we in the US call “liberal” politics is simply postmodern politics. It is lawlessness. The preborn children can be murdered because human life isn’t sacred. Nothing to them is sacred. There are no morals, only preferences. Ironically, they have no hesitation to impose their politically correct standards on the rest of us through laws and through the coercive power of the state.
This article is not a call for rebellion against the US government. Civil disobedience against outrageous government behavior may, in time, be appropriate. For now I simply suggest that we step back from our knee-jerk patriotism and take a look at the big picture. I’m a conservative both theologically and politically. I vote and I’m politically involved and I believe every Christian should be involved in governing this nation.
The US constitution puts “We the people” in charge. The American people, especially Christians, are the kings of America under King Jesus. In my DTF Special Issue #13, titled, “We are Kings and Priests: What Does it Mean to be a King?”, I show that the Bible teaches that born again believers are kings as well as priests. The Bible doctrine of the kingship of the believer was the original basis of American democracy as taught by Thomas Hooker and other Puritans in the 1600s. (DTF SI 13 is available on my website under “DTF Special Issues.”)
I’m not a pacifist. I believe there are conditions for a just war in accordance with Christian principles. I love the US and I pray for it. I haven’t given up on America, neither should any Christian.
I just want to point out that at some point unconditional patriotism becomes spiritual adultery and idolatry. Let’s get our loyalties in proper order. Our holy city, our new Jerusalem is in heaven.“They desire a better country, that is a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:16 NAS). “I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2 NAS).
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