Parts 1-7 of this series:

• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 7 - Private Property: Right from God, Friend of Republics
• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 6 - Enemies of Tyranny: Faith, Reason, and the First Ammendment
• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 5 - Self Worship: The God of Democracy
• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 4 - Marx and the Worship of Man
• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 3 - Compassionate Conservatism
• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 2 - Modern Libertarianism
• Missing the Mark With Religion, Part 1 - Modern Liberalism

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, a "foolish, wicked, and improper king" was brought to a trial of sorts for wanton disregard of the laws of England and the rights of his subjects in British America.

His sins were many. Chief among them was his unequal application of the law, and listed also among his offenses, "obstruction of justice." Rights and privileges, it seemed, applied only to the king, his Cabinet, his ambassadors, his Parliament, and selected classes of men in England – but not at all to the colonists. In the king’s mind, it was his divine prerogative to manipulate the law, to his advantage, any time and in any way he saw fit. This he did.

The colonists were less than delighted. The illegitimacy of the king’s position was clear, and the trend toward tyranny was ominous. They humbly challenged the British Crown, sending great statesmen across the wide deep to present reasoned and impassioned appeals before the King and his court, but remarkably, to no avail. They were repeatedly slighted and shunned, and the colonies sentenced and punished.

"A long train of abuses and usurpations" could not, however, be forever endured. Finally, the injuries upon the law and the people went too far. The spirit of liberty in the hearts of the colonists rose up in defense. Freedom’s leading spokesmen gathered in Philadelphia. And a decision was rendered – impeachment.

No, not the kind of impeachment we witnessed two years ago. Lacking that legal avenue, our Forefathers pursued impeachment "by other means" – the far less subtle approach of war. No crafty lawyers, trickster pollsters, party partisans, and socialist-minded ministers would rescue this king. And after much sacrifice, much property loss, much bloodshed, and many prayers, justice was finally served, liberty and equality won, a monarch dethroned!

Happily, the results of the conflict were not terrible but wonderful, and they were felt, not just in America, but throughout the world.

Thomas Paine had insisted that we were not fighting a war for American independence alone, but for "the rights of mankind." And providentially, it seemed, the legal tables of the centuries were turned. The false maxim that "the king is law" was rigorously challenged by the American religious maxim that "the law is king." Indeed, the world now knew that the common man was not so common after all, that the idea of kings was "ridiculous," and that equality before the law was a mandate from heaven.

Throughout the depth and breath of the land, early Americans recognized equality before God and the law as a religious principle. It was Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, who thundered the conviction that this equality was an "endowment" from our "Creator," something which no government had the right to ever revoke. This was so, taught the Rev. Abraham Williams (in a 1762 election sermon), because: "All men [are] naturally equal, [having] descended from a common parent (who is God)." Or as the apostle Peter weighed in: "God is no respecter of persons but hath made of one blood all nations under Heaven."

God declared, and the Founders believed, men were equal. This equality, they felt, was divided into two parts:

First, equal rights. The Ten Commandments laid out a plan for civil society that implied each man possessed unalienable rights.

A. "Thou shalt have no other God’s before me," translated politically into a prohibition against Kings, absolute power, above the law government officials, and or any attempt by the state to mandate worship of the state. It insured that government was by the consent of the governed who were, each of them, equally possessed of the same rights that any government official possessed. All powers held by public officials were only on temporary loan from the people. A failure to keep that trust, so delegated, would be, and should be cause to renege those powers.

B. Men and governments were likewise prohibited from preventing or interfering in any individual’s worship of God - the right to religious liberty.

C. Men and government were prohibited from shedding innocent blood - the right to life.

D. Men and governments were prohibited from stealing or coveting other men’s goods - the right to property.

Therefore, all mankind possessed an inalienable right to life, liberty and property. There were no exceptions. No one was above the law. All were subject to the law. All were equal.

Second, equality before the law. As already alluded to, this equality as children of God with equal rights, translated into equality before the law, as well. Again from the Biblical text the Founders read. "All men will be judged according to their works." Justice demanded this. The Great Father of us all, did not say just poor men, just those ill connected or just those ill educated were to be judged - but all men, rich or poor, president or citizen, priest or parishioner, male or female. As there were to be no exceptions in the final judgment, early Americans believed that it was wrong to give two, or three, or four different sentences for the same crime, based on class status, political position, or Insider connections. A man would be punished according to his crimes - plain and simple, and in political affairs, judged according to his fidelity to the Constitution, not according to his rank, his party, or political office.

Based on this principle, it should be noted, that equality before the law, as it pertained to the principles of Justice, demanded that the crimes of a government official were actually greater, since their effects were felt generally, and thus, the punishment, commensurate with the size of the crime, was proportionately more severe. Such crimes demanded the contempt of the people, not their pardon. After all, as the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared: "[The government was organized] for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man."

Therefore, it is both peculiar and disturbing, in our day, to hear of a rising blind sort of patriotism among us, to the point of religious and moral fervor, that cries "My Country, My President, My Party, Come Hell or High Water!" Call it that newest of faiths even, "civil society," a system of beliefs which contends that elected officials should only be criticized by our votes, not by our words, that rigid views on moral and political issues is a national sin - that bipartisanship, is a national virtue, that government officials who break the law, ought not to be prosecuted if they are rendering a valuable service, and that anyone who should cast an eye of suspicion upon the Federal Government and its officials ought to be scorned, identified, singled out, ostracized, and perhaps disenfranchised or arrested as trouble-makers and potential terrorists.

What is this religion, what is this morality other than the religion and morality of fools, malefactors, cowards, sloths and kingmen?

Taking the ancient council of the Apostle Paul - to reverence the law and to be subject to the political powers that be - they have gone to the polar extreme that it is morally correct to blindly reverence the ruler, even when the ruler, tramples on the law he is oath-bound to uphold. This position misses the Mark With Religion, encouraging passive citizenship on the one hand, and intolerance for the vigilant citizen, on the other. Nothing could serve the cause of tyranny and it’s evil Author better. Paul’s entreaty was an appeal to order, not blind subservience.

A balanced, better principle of faith an early American religious faith espoused, was held in common by many:

"We believe that all men are bound to sustain and uphold the respective governments in which they reside, while protected in their inherent and inalienable rights by the laws of such governments; and that sedition and rebellion are unbecoming every citizen thus protected, and should be punished accordingly." And yet if the rights were not, thus protected, a leader of that same faith advised that we, "Act as the inflexible Romans, and hurl the miserable sycophant from his exaltation."

President Teddy Roosevelt put it this way:

"We hold that our loyalty is due the American Republic, and to all our public servants exactly in proportion as they efficiently serve the Republic . . . Every man who parrots the cry of ‘stand by the President" without adding the proviso ‘so far as he serves the Republic’ takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the king could do no wrong."

In "The American Crisis," Thomas Paine, similarly noted: "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it." Concerning blind loyalists to the crown he added: "Surely there must be something strangely degenerating in the love of monarchy, that can so completely wear a man down to an ingrate, and make him proud to lick the dust that kings have trod upon. A few more years, should you survive them, will bestow on you the title of ‘an old man’: and in some hour of future reflection you may probably find the fitness of Wolsey’s despairing penitence - "had I served my God as faithfully as I have served my king, he would not thus have forsaken me in my old age."

There seems to be something hauntingly off the mark, something disturbingly irreligious, something terribly unmanly about the person who says My Country, My President, My Party, Come Hell or High Water! For those who wish to find the mark, rather than miss the mark with religion, blind loyalties and patriotic sentiment to men, parties, political office, and civil society - should we not replace such sentiments with eternal vigilance to religious principle, to fixed law, and our Heaven inspired Constitution? Religion, manhood, and a gratitude to the sacrifices of our forefathers requires it.

Copyright © 2001 by Steve Farrell.
All Rights Reserved.

About Steve Farrell.