Posted By Joseph Klein
President Obama proclaimed to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2012: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
In keeping with this sentiment, his administration decided to scrub all federal law enforcement training materials in order to eliminate the use of such words or phrases as jihadists or Islamic terrorists, since the use of such terms could be viewed by Muslims as evidence of Islamophobia.
By contrast, the Obama administration, including the military over which President Obama presides as commander-in-chief, is engaging in a pattern of behavior targeting traditional Christian believers and their groups as extremists and mocking their beliefs.
For example, according to an October 23, 2013 report by Fox News, “Soldiers attending a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood say they were told that evangelical Christians and members of the Tea Party were a threat to the nation and that any soldier donating to those groups would be subjected to punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Fort Hood, let’s not forget, was the site of the massacre committed by the radicalized Muslim soldier Nidal Hasan, shouting “God is great” in Arabic (Allahu Akhbar) as he proceeded with the slaughter of his unarmed fellow soldiers.
Yet, during the pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood, barely a word was said about Islamic extremism. As one soldier put it, “Our community is still healing from the act of terrorism brought on by Nidal Hasan – who really is a terrorist. This is a slap in the face. The military is supposed to defend freedom and to classify the vast majority of the military that claim to be Christian as terrorists is sick.”
Fox News’ Todd Starnes reported last April that, while briefing an Army Reserve unit in Pennsylvania, an instructor said that Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism were examples of religious extremism, equating followers with the KKK, al Qaeda and Hamas. The training materials also listed “Islamophobia” as a form of religious extremism.
In yet another example, Todd Starnes reported last January that “the U.S. military ordered soldiers to remove a cross and a steeple from atop a chapel and to board up cross-shaped windows at a remote American forward operating base in Afghanistan.” Whatever justification might be given for removing the very visible Christian cross symbol from atop the chapel, boarding up windows that happen to be cross-shaped is a step too far to rationalize on grounds that the design of windows in an American facility might offend Afghan Muslims whom our soldiers are risking their lives to defend.
Breitbart News has recounted still other examples of anti-Christian bias in the military under President Obama’s watch. These are not isolated examples. A Defense Department training document entitled “Extremism” was cited by Breitbart News to demonstrate the document’s reliance on an organization as an approved source of information – the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – that has an anti-Christian, anti-Tea Party bias. For example, SPLC has labeled such traditional Christian groups as the American Family Association and the Traditional Values Coalition as domestic hate groups.
This bias appears to reflect the Obama administration’s thinking at the highest levels. Indeed, as reported by Breitbart News, rather than embrace an amendment passed last June in the House Armed Services Committee protecting religious speech of service members in the military, the White House released a Statement of Administration Policy with a threat to veto the bill if it passes the full House and Senate. “In other words,” Breitbart News concluded, “Obama says he will veto any bill that forbids his appointees or officers from telling a soldier that he cannot mention Jesus during prayer or have a Bible on his desk, or that keeps those appointees from telling a chaplain (who is an ordained clergyman) what religious teachings he is allowed to give in worship services, or what spiritual counseling he can give to another soldier.”
The Obama administration bends over backwards to avoid hurting the sensibilities of Muslims, even referring to Hasan’s jihadist attack at Fort Hood as merely “workplace violence.” But traditional Christians are a subject of mockery and disrespect by this administration.
The White House acknowledged, for example, that it asked Georgetown University, a Catholic institution, to cover up prominent Christian symbols for President Obama’s economic speech there in 2010. Is it any wonder that the military followed the example of its commander-in-chief in going overboard to remove anything that looked like a Christian symbol in the chapel at the Afghan base?
President Obama sets the tone for his administration’s dismissive attitude towards traditional Christians. Indeed, he came into office with a snide view of traditional Christian believers.
During the presidential campaign for his first term, Obama condescendingly dismissed those persons of faith whom he said “cling” to their “religion.”
Moreover, as the Christian evangelist James Dobson reminded us back in 2008, Senator Obama had delivered a speech mocking the Bible a couple of years earlier.
“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Dobson said, adding that Obama is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”
Once Barack Obama became president, Dobson no doubt had a target on his back. In fact, the Obama Internal Revenue Service went after the radio ministry, Family Talk, run by Dobson. His ministry was given the run around in its application for a tax-exempt status, including having to deal with burdensome paperwork requirements and demands for disclosure of Dobson’s political views. Only after a threat to bring the IRS to court did the tax agency relent and approve the application.
Sadly, the Obama Administration is evidently waging a concerted campaign to cast traditional Christians as extremists, while ignoring the real extremist threat to our way of life posed by jihadists.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
The American Revolution: Was it an Act of Biblical Rebellion?
David Barton - 05/2009
Was the American Revolution an act of rebellion against God and the Bible? Many today claim that it was. For example, John McArthur (Pastor of Grace Community Church and host of the national radio program “Grace to You”) asserts:
Oklahoma church leader Albert Soto similarly claims:
Others hold the same position.3 In fact, Dr. Daryl Cornett of Mid-America Theological Seminary maintains that the American Revolution occurred because . . .
While such charges certainly reflect the personal views of these critics, they definitely do not accurately reflect the extended theological debates that occurred at the time of the American Revolution. In fact, contrary to Dr. Cornett’s claim that the Founding Fathers “turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation” of the American Revolution, the topic of civil disobedience and resistance to governing authorities had been a subject of serious theological inquiries for centuries before the Enlightenment. This was especially true during the Reformation, when the subject was directly addressed by theologians such as Frenchman John Calvin, 4 German Martin Luther, 5 Swiss Reformation leader Huldreich Zwingli, 6 and numerous others. 7
It was not strange that such Biblical discussions should have arisen in that period, for many tyrannical civil leaders who felt personally threatened by Biblical Reformation teachings attempted to suppress the spread of those teachings through bloody purges, brutal tortures, and barbaric persecutions – such as when French leaders conducted the famous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, resulting in 110,000 Reformation followers being killed, or when Henry VIII (1491-1547) similarly utilized public executions and burnings at the stake (a practice continued by Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth I, and subsequent monarchs). In fact, those civil leaders even deliberately enacted laws specifically prohibiting Reformation adherents from practicing their Scriptural beliefs.
Facing such civil opposition, Reformation leaders turned to the Bible and found much guidance on the subject of civil disobedience and resistance to tyrannical civil authority. In fact, numerous famous heroes of the Bible – including many of those listed in the “Faith Hall of Fame” in Hebrews 11 as well as in other passages – were accorded their special position of honor because they committed civil disobedience (e.g., Daniel, the Three Hebrew Children, the Hebrew midwives, Rahab, Moses, etc.; and the Apostles in Acts 4-5 also declared their willingness to be civilly disobedient against tyrannical commands of civil and religious rulers).
Some of the important theological works on the subject of civil disobedience and resistance published during that time included the 1556 Short Treatise of Politic Power and of the True Obedience which Subjects Owe to Kings and Other Civil Governors by Bishop John Poynet (1516-1566), and the 1579 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense Of Liberty Against Tyrants), published by French Reformation theologian Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623) and French Reformation leader Hubert Languet (1518-1581) in response to the horrific St. Bartholomew Day Massacre. Both works undertook an in-depth Biblical examination of how God’s people throughout the Scriptures had responded to civil rulers, including both good and bad rulers. Those theological discussions continued in England during the brutal reign of Henry VIII (1491-1547), the repressive abuses of James I (1566-1625), and the ruthless rule of the Tudor monarchs, including that of Bloody Mary (1516-1558).
In fact, James I, in addition to using brutal persecutions and murders to help combat the theological teachings and writings leveled against him, even ordered Church leaders (recall that James I was the official head of the English Church) to concoct two new “church” doctrines: (1) the Divine Right of Kings (that kings stand in the place of God, representing Him to the people), and (2) Complete Submission and Non-Resistance to Authority (that because kings have an allegedly Divine position, they are not to be resisted – ever, for any reason). Not surprisingly, Reformation followers openly opposed James’ “irrational and unscriptural doctrines,” 8 thus prompting him to level even harsher persecutions against them, including mutilation, hanging, and disemboweling.
In 1644, during in the reign of Bloody Mary, Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford penned the important theological work Lex Rex, demonstrating that the law is king rather than vice versa. For asserting that Biblical position, Rutherford was charged by British monarchy with high treason but died before he could be tried. Not surprisingly, Lex Rex was banned by the Crown and every person who had a copy was ordered to turn it in to a king’s official.
James II continued the persecution of believers, and not surprisingly, the theological debates also continued. For example, when clergyman Abednego Seller penned a defense of James’ reign, urging complete obedience to the Crown in his Passive Obedience Prov’d to be the Doctrine of the Church of England, from the Reformation to These Times (London, 1689), clergyman Samuel Johnson responded with An Answer to the History of Passive Obedience (London, 1689).
Significantly, the many theological writings penned during these brutal and tyrannical reigns provided the underpinning for the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which: (1) tyrannical monarchs were set aside; (2) England made its first attempts to separate State from Church and thus end religious tyranny and murders wrongly committed in the name of Christ; and (3) representative government was instituted under William of Orange (1650-1702).
When British autocratic tyranny began to increase toward America preceding the Revolution, those ancient theological debates were renewed. The Quakers and Anglicans adopted the position set forth by King James I (and subsequently embraced by Dr. Cornett, Rev. MacArthur, and others of today’s critics), but the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and most other denominations of that day adopted the theological viewpoint presented by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Rutherford, Poynet, Mornay, Languet, Johnson, and other theologians across the centuries. In fact, John Adams specifically recommended the theological works of Poynet (A Short Treatise of Politic Power, 1556) and Duplessis-Mornay and (A Defense Of Liberty Against Tyrants, 1579) to readers who wanted to understand the theological thinking in the American founding.9
On the basis of those numerous historic theological writings (which, significantly, had also been regularly preached from American pulpits for decades prior to the American Revolution 10 ), Americans embraced two specific theological positions that guided their thinking and conduct in the conflict with Great Britain.
The first was that most Christian denominations during the Founding Era held that while they were forbidden to overthrow the institution of government and live in anarchy, they were not required blindly to submit to every law and policy. Those in the Founding Era understood that the general institution of government was unequivocally ordained by God and was not to be overthrown, but that did not mean that God approved every specific government; God had ordained government in lieu of anarchy – He opposed anarchy, rebellion, lawlessness, and wickedness and wanted civil government in society. Therefore, a crucial determination in the colonists’ Biblical exegesis was whether opposition to authority was simply to resist the general institution of government (an institution ordained by God Himself), or whether it was instead to resist tyrannical leaders who had themselves rebelled against God. (The Scriptural model for this position was repeatedly validated when God Himself raised up leaders such as Gideon, Ehud, Jepthah, Samson, and Deborah to throw off tyrannical governments – leaders subsequently praised in Hebrews 11:32 for those acts of faith.) That the Founders held the view that the institution of government is not to be opposed by that tyranny is, is a position clearly evident in their writings.
For example, Founding Father James Otis explained that the only king who had a “Divine right” was God Himself; beyond that, God had ordained that power should rest with the people (c.f., Exodus 18:21, Deuteronomy 1:15-16, etc.):
Founding Father John Dickinson (a signer of the Constitution) also affirmed that spiritual view:
In fact, Samuel Adams (the “Father of the American Revolution” and a signer of the Declaration of Independence) specifically recommended a study of the Scriptures in order to understand the basis of America’s struggle against a tyrannical king, explaining that:
The Founders clearly believed that they were not in rebellion to God’s ordained institution of civil government; they were only resisting tyranny and not the institution itself. In fact, Rev. Jacob Duché (a supporter of the British) argued from the Bible in favor of the American position, explaining:
Despite the Americans embracing what they believed to be a fully-supported Biblical position, some British leaders nevertheless specifically accused the Americans of anarchy and rebellion – a charge to which John Quincy Adams forcefully responded:
Declaration signer Francis Hopkinson (also a church musician and choir leader) agreed:
Reflective of the Founding Father’s belief that they were not rebelling against God or resisting ordained government but only tyranny was the fact that the first national motto proposed for America in August 1776 was “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” 17 – a summation of the famous 1750 sermon 18 preached by the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mayhew (a principle figure in the Great Awakening).
The second Scriptural viewpoint overwhelmingly embraced by most Americans during the Revolutionary Era was that God would not honor an offensive war, but that He did permit civil self-defense (e.g., Nehemiah 4:13-14 & 20-21, Zechariah 9:8, 2 Samuel 10:12, etc.). The fact that the American Revolution was an act of self-defense and was not an offensive war undertaken by the Americans remained a point of frequent spiritual appeal for the Founding Fathers. After all, Great Britain had attacked America, not vice versa; the Americans had never fired the first shot – not in the Boston Massacre of 1770, the bombing of Boston and burning of Charlestown in 1774, or in the attacks on Williamsburg, Concord, or Lexington in 1775.
Illustrative of this belief was the famous command to the Lexington Minutemen, “Don’t fire unless fired upon!” Yet, having been fired upon without having broken any law, the Americans believed they had a Biblical right to self-defense. In fact, the Rev. Peter Powers, in a famous sermon he preached in front of the Vermont Legislature in 1778, 19 specifically noted that America had “taken up arms in its own defense” 20 – that she had no initiated the conflict but was only defending herself after being attacked.
The Framers’ writings repeatedly emphasized this point of spiritual appeal. For example, Founding Father Francis Hopkinson made this clear in his 1777 work “A Political Catechism”:
Founding Father James Wilson (a signer of both the Declaration and the Constitution, and an original Justice on the U. S. Supreme Court) affirmed:
According to the Founders’ Biblical understanding, the fact that they were engaged in a defensive action made all the difference – they believed that they could boldly approach God and sincerely seek His aid and blessing in such a situation. In fact, so cognizant were American leaders they that they would account to God for their actions – and so convinced were they that they would be held innocent before Him – that the flag of the Massachusetts Army proclaimed “An Appeal to God,” and the flag of the Massachusetts Navy likewise declared an “Appeal to Heaven.” 23
The Continental Congress also issued a manifesto reflecting a similar tone of submission to God:
Believing that they were thus operating under fundamental Biblical principles, Founding Father Samuel Adams therefore boldly warned British officials:
Significantly, the Americans had been militarily attacked for well over two years before they finally announced a separation; and for eleven years preceding that announcement (from 1765 to 1776), they had diligently pursued reconciliation and not conflict, offering documents such as their famous appeal of 1775 and the May 1776 “Olive Branch Petition,” each of which was submitted in a completely submissive and conciliatory tone. Reflective of this tone was the writing of Founding Father Stephen Hopkins (a signer of the Declaration and Governor of Rhode Island) in which he explained to the British:
The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon (also a signer of the Declaration) also affirmed:
Significantly, as Dr. Witherspoon had correctly noted, it was Great Britain who had terminated the entreaties; in fact, during the last two years of America’s appeals, her peaceful pleas were directly met by armed military force. King George III dispatched 25,000 British troops to invade his own Colonies, enter the homes of his own citizens to take their private possessions and goods, and imprison them without trials – all in violation of his own British Common Law, English Bill of Rights, and Magna Carta (centuries old documents that formed the basis of the covenant between British rulers and citizens). Only when those governmental covenants had been broken by their rulers and America had been directly attacked did the Americans respond in self-defense.
On the basis of these two theological understandings (that God Himself had ordained the institution of civil government, and that God had explicitly authorized civil self-defense) the Founding Fathers and the majority of American Christians in that day believed that they were conducting themselves in a manner that was not in rebellion to God or the Scriptures.
Consequently, Dr. Cornett’s claim, as well as those of John MacArthur and other critics, that the Founders “generally turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation, propped up by poor exegesis and application of the Bible” merely reflects the side that they have taken in the historic theological debate – the same as if they had been 1776 Quakers arguing against Presbyterians, or Anglicans against Congregationalists. However, just because these modern critics may disagree with the theology of Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, Mornay, Rutherford, and other theologians does not mean that from an historical viewpoint the Americans’ approach was “propped up by poor exegesis and application of the Bible,” or that the Founders “generally turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation.” It simply means that today’s critics are either uninformed about the actual historical and theological writings from the Reformation through the Revolution, or that they disagree with the theological positions held by the Founding Fathers, theologians, and ministers of that era, but it does not mean that there was no Biblical basis for the American Revolution.
In fact, the spiritual nature of America’s resistance was so clear even to the British that in the British Parliament:
Such spiritual declarations – confirming what was readily evident even to America’s opponents – certainly are not consistent with what critics inaccurately claim is the Unitarian, Deistic, and Secular Enlightenment rebellion basis of the American Revolution.
Endnotes
1. Dr. John MacArthur, see his declaration that “The truth is, the United States was born out of a violation of Romans 13:1-7,” from “The Christian and Government: The Christian’s Responsibility to Government – Part 1” (at: http://www.biblebb.com/files/mac/sg45-97.htm).(Return)
2. Albert Soto, "The American Revolution Rebellion" A True Church (Return)
3. For example, see Dr. Jack Arnold, “Dare You Resist Your Government? Romans 13: 2-4” (at: http://reformedperspectives.org/newfiles/jac_arnold/NT.Arnold.Rom.59.html#F1A), originally published in IIIM [Third Millennium] Magazine Online, April 16-April 22, 2001, Vol. 3, No. 16 (Dr. Arnold is Pastor at Covenant Presbyterian in Orlando, CA, and established “Equipping Pastors International” in 1997); and Dr. John Brug, "The Christian’s Dual Citizenship: Concerning the American Revolution" (at: http://www.wlsessays.net/files/BrugCitizenship.rtf) (Dr. Brug is Professor at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary); and Pastor Robert L. Deffinbaugh, “Was the American Revolution Biblically Supported?” (at: http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=6084) (Pastor Deffinbaugh is at Community Bible Chapel in Richardson, Texas); etc.(Return)
4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Henry Beveridge, translator (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845, the first English translation by Thomas Norton was published in London: 1561, the original Latin version was published in 1536), Book 4, Chapter 20: Of Civil Government (at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.vi.xxi.html).(Return)
5. Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent Should it be Obeyed? (1523), (at: http://www.uoregon.edu/~sshoemak/323/texts/luther~1.htm).(Return)
6. Americanized Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890), pp. 6456-6457, s.v. “Huldreich Zwingli.”(Return)
7. John Harty, The Catholic Encyclopedia. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), "Tyrannicide" (at: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15108a.htm); see also Rev. John C. Rager, "Catholic Sources and the Declaration of Independence," The Catholic Mind, Vol. XXVIII, No. 13, July 8, 1930 (at: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/politics/pg0003.html).(Return)
8. J. M. Mathews, The Bible and Civil Government, in a Course of Lectures (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1851), p. 231.(Return)
9. John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Philadelphia: William Young, 1797), Vol. III, pp. 210-211.(Return)
10.See, for example, numerous sermons cited in Alice M. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1958), pp. 22-23, 26, 27-28, 34-37, 65-68, 86-87, 89-95,101-104, as well as sermons by Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning the Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (Boston: 1750), pp. 37-41, Jonathan Ellis, The Justice of the Present War against the French in America, and the Principles that Should Influence us in the Undertaking Asserted: A Sermon Preached to the Soldiers, Sept 22, A.D. 1755. from I Sam. Xviii. 17 (Newport: J. Franklin, 1755), John A. Lidenius, The Lawfulness of Defensive War. A Sermon Preached before the Members of the Church; at Chiechester, in the County of Chester, and Province of Pennsylvania, upon their Association for Defense, February 14, 1756 (Philadelphia: James Chattin, 1756), etc. (Return)
11.James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved(Boston: J. Williams 1766), pp. 11, 13, 16-18, (Return)
12.John Dickinson, The Political Writings of John Dickinson (Wilmington: Bonsal and Niles, 1801), Vol. I, p. 111. (Return)
13. Samuel Adams, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, William V. Wells, editor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1865), Vol. I, p. 504. (Return)
14.Jacob Duche, The Duty of Standing Fast in our Spiritual and Temporal Liberties, A Sermon Preached in Christ Church, July 7, 1775. Before the First Battalion of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, Jr., 1775), pp. 13-14. (Return)
15.John Quincy Adams, An Address Delivered at the Request of the Committee of Arrangements for the Celebrating the Anniversary of Independence at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the Occasion of Reading The Declaration of Independence (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1821), p. 28. (Return)
16.Francis Hopkinson, The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, Esq. (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), Vol. I, pp. 115-116. (Return)
17.John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), Vol. I, p. 152, letter to Abigail Adams, August 14, 1776. (Return)
18.Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning the Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1968, originally printed in Boston: 1750), pp. 37-41. (Return)
19.The Rev. Peter Powers, Jesus Christ the true King and Head of Government; A Sermon Preached before the General Assembly of the State of Vermont, on the Day of Their First Election, March 12, 1778 at Windsor (Newbury-Port: Printed by John Michael, 1778). (Return)
20.The Rev. Peter Powers, Jesus Christ the true King and Head of Government…..March 12, 1778, p. 18. (Return)
21.Francis Hopkinson, The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, Esq. (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), Vol. I, pp. 111-115. (Return)
22.James Wilson, The Works of the Honorable James Wilson, Bird Wilson, editor (Philadelphia: Bronson and Chuncey, 1804), Vol. II, pp. 496-497. (Return)
23.Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts. 1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1984, originally published in Watertown, MA: 1776), Vol. 51, Part III, pp. 196-197, April 29, 1776. (Return)
24.Samuel Adams, Writings, Vol. IV, p. 86, “Manifesto of the Continental Congress” on October 30, 1778. (Return)
25.Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, Harry Alonzo Cushing, editor (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), Vol. IV, p. 38, to the Earl of Carlisle and Others on July 16, 1778. (Return)
26.Stephen Hopkins, The Grievances of the American Colonies Candidly Examined, (New York: Research Reprints Inc., 1970, first published London: J. Almon, 1766), pp. 45-48. (Return)
27.John Witherspoon, The Works of John Witherspoon (Edinburgh: J. Ogle, 1815), Vol. IX, p. 250, “The Druid,” Number III. (Return)
28.Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (Baltimore: William Ogden Niles, 1822), p. 198. (Return)
Was the American Revolution an act of rebellion against God and the Bible? Many today claim that it was. For example, John McArthur (Pastor of Grace Community Church and host of the national radio program “Grace to You”) asserts:
People have mistakenly linked democracy and political freedom to Christianity. That’s why many contemporary evangelicals believe the American Revolution was completely justified, both politically and scripturally. They follow the arguments of the Declaration of Independence, which declares that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are Divinely endowed rights. . . . But such a position is contrary to the clear teachings and commands of Romans 13:1-7. So the United States was actually born out of a violation of New Testament principles, and any blessings God has bestowed on America have come in spite of that disobedience by the Founding Fathers. 1
Oklahoma church leader Albert Soto similarly claims:
The Colonists’ act of rebellion flies in the face of [Romans 13:1,2]. Did they overlook this verse? No, these were not men ignorant of Scripture. In fact, they used Scripture to support their cause in the most devious of ways. The deception that prevailed during this period of history was immense. God and Scripture was the vehicle of mobilization that unified the cause, gave it credence, and allowed the Deist leaders at the top to move the masses toward rebellion. Scripture was the Forefathers’ most useful tool of propaganda. 2
Others hold the same position.3 In fact, Dr. Daryl Cornett of Mid-America Theological Seminary maintains that the American Revolution occurred because . . .
Deistic and Unitarian tendencies in regards to religion. . . . were of such strength that even orthodox Christians were swept up into rebellion against their governing authorities. . . . Those Christians who supported physical resistance against the tyranny of Britain generally turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation, propped up by poor exegesis and application of the Bible.
While such charges certainly reflect the personal views of these critics, they definitely do not accurately reflect the extended theological debates that occurred at the time of the American Revolution. In fact, contrary to Dr. Cornett’s claim that the Founding Fathers “turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation” of the American Revolution, the topic of civil disobedience and resistance to governing authorities had been a subject of serious theological inquiries for centuries before the Enlightenment. This was especially true during the Reformation, when the subject was directly addressed by theologians such as Frenchman John Calvin, 4 German Martin Luther, 5 Swiss Reformation leader Huldreich Zwingli, 6 and numerous others. 7
It was not strange that such Biblical discussions should have arisen in that period, for many tyrannical civil leaders who felt personally threatened by Biblical Reformation teachings attempted to suppress the spread of those teachings through bloody purges, brutal tortures, and barbaric persecutions – such as when French leaders conducted the famous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, resulting in 110,000 Reformation followers being killed, or when Henry VIII (1491-1547) similarly utilized public executions and burnings at the stake (a practice continued by Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth I, and subsequent monarchs). In fact, those civil leaders even deliberately enacted laws specifically prohibiting Reformation adherents from practicing their Scriptural beliefs.
Facing such civil opposition, Reformation leaders turned to the Bible and found much guidance on the subject of civil disobedience and resistance to tyrannical civil authority. In fact, numerous famous heroes of the Bible – including many of those listed in the “Faith Hall of Fame” in Hebrews 11 as well as in other passages – were accorded their special position of honor because they committed civil disobedience (e.g., Daniel, the Three Hebrew Children, the Hebrew midwives, Rahab, Moses, etc.; and the Apostles in Acts 4-5 also declared their willingness to be civilly disobedient against tyrannical commands of civil and religious rulers).
Some of the important theological works on the subject of civil disobedience and resistance published during that time included the 1556 Short Treatise of Politic Power and of the True Obedience which Subjects Owe to Kings and Other Civil Governors by Bishop John Poynet (1516-1566), and the 1579 Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense Of Liberty Against Tyrants), published by French Reformation theologian Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623) and French Reformation leader Hubert Languet (1518-1581) in response to the horrific St. Bartholomew Day Massacre. Both works undertook an in-depth Biblical examination of how God’s people throughout the Scriptures had responded to civil rulers, including both good and bad rulers. Those theological discussions continued in England during the brutal reign of Henry VIII (1491-1547), the repressive abuses of James I (1566-1625), and the ruthless rule of the Tudor monarchs, including that of Bloody Mary (1516-1558).
In fact, James I, in addition to using brutal persecutions and murders to help combat the theological teachings and writings leveled against him, even ordered Church leaders (recall that James I was the official head of the English Church) to concoct two new “church” doctrines: (1) the Divine Right of Kings (that kings stand in the place of God, representing Him to the people), and (2) Complete Submission and Non-Resistance to Authority (that because kings have an allegedly Divine position, they are not to be resisted – ever, for any reason). Not surprisingly, Reformation followers openly opposed James’ “irrational and unscriptural doctrines,” 8 thus prompting him to level even harsher persecutions against them, including mutilation, hanging, and disemboweling.
In 1644, during in the reign of Bloody Mary, Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford penned the important theological work Lex Rex, demonstrating that the law is king rather than vice versa. For asserting that Biblical position, Rutherford was charged by British monarchy with high treason but died before he could be tried. Not surprisingly, Lex Rex was banned by the Crown and every person who had a copy was ordered to turn it in to a king’s official.
James II continued the persecution of believers, and not surprisingly, the theological debates also continued. For example, when clergyman Abednego Seller penned a defense of James’ reign, urging complete obedience to the Crown in his Passive Obedience Prov’d to be the Doctrine of the Church of England, from the Reformation to These Times (London, 1689), clergyman Samuel Johnson responded with An Answer to the History of Passive Obedience (London, 1689).
Significantly, the many theological writings penned during these brutal and tyrannical reigns provided the underpinning for the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which: (1) tyrannical monarchs were set aside; (2) England made its first attempts to separate State from Church and thus end religious tyranny and murders wrongly committed in the name of Christ; and (3) representative government was instituted under William of Orange (1650-1702).
When British autocratic tyranny began to increase toward America preceding the Revolution, those ancient theological debates were renewed. The Quakers and Anglicans adopted the position set forth by King James I (and subsequently embraced by Dr. Cornett, Rev. MacArthur, and others of today’s critics), but the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and most other denominations of that day adopted the theological viewpoint presented by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Rutherford, Poynet, Mornay, Languet, Johnson, and other theologians across the centuries. In fact, John Adams specifically recommended the theological works of Poynet (A Short Treatise of Politic Power, 1556) and Duplessis-Mornay and (A Defense Of Liberty Against Tyrants, 1579) to readers who wanted to understand the theological thinking in the American founding.9
On the basis of those numerous historic theological writings (which, significantly, had also been regularly preached from American pulpits for decades prior to the American Revolution 10 ), Americans embraced two specific theological positions that guided their thinking and conduct in the conflict with Great Britain.
The first was that most Christian denominations during the Founding Era held that while they were forbidden to overthrow the institution of government and live in anarchy, they were not required blindly to submit to every law and policy. Those in the Founding Era understood that the general institution of government was unequivocally ordained by God and was not to be overthrown, but that did not mean that God approved every specific government; God had ordained government in lieu of anarchy – He opposed anarchy, rebellion, lawlessness, and wickedness and wanted civil government in society. Therefore, a crucial determination in the colonists’ Biblical exegesis was whether opposition to authority was simply to resist the general institution of government (an institution ordained by God Himself), or whether it was instead to resist tyrannical leaders who had themselves rebelled against God. (The Scriptural model for this position was repeatedly validated when God Himself raised up leaders such as Gideon, Ehud, Jepthah, Samson, and Deborah to throw off tyrannical governments – leaders subsequently praised in Hebrews 11:32 for those acts of faith.) That the Founders held the view that the institution of government is not to be opposed by that tyranny is, is a position clearly evident in their writings.
For example, Founding Father James Otis explained that the only king who had a “Divine right” was God Himself; beyond that, God had ordained that power should rest with the people (c.f., Exodus 18:21, Deuteronomy 1:15-16, etc.):
Has it [government] any solid foundation? – any chief cornerstone. . . ? I think it has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God. . . . Government. . . . is by no means an arbitrary thing depending merely on compact or human will for its existence. . . . There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of nature and the grant of God Almighty, Who has given to all men a natural right to be free; and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so if they please….If both those powers are retained in the hands of the many (where nature seems to have placed them originally), the government is a simple democracry, or a government of all over all. . . . [God is] the only monarch in the universe Who has a clear and indisputable right to absolute power because He is the only one Who is omniscient as well as omnipotent. 11
Founding Father John Dickinson (a signer of the Constitution) also affirmed that spiritual view:
Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness. . . . We claim them from a higher source – from the King of kings and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us, exist with us, and cannot be taken from us by any human power without taking our lives. 12
In fact, Samuel Adams (the “Father of the American Revolution” and a signer of the Declaration of Independence) specifically recommended a study of the Scriptures in order to understand the basis of America’s struggle against a tyrannical king, explaining that:
The Rights of the Colonists as Christians. . . . may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament. 13
The Founders clearly believed that they were not in rebellion to God’s ordained institution of civil government; they were only resisting tyranny and not the institution itself. In fact, Rev. Jacob Duché (a supporter of the British) argued from the Bible in favor of the American position, explaining:
Inasmuch as all rulers are in fact the servants of the public and appointed for no other purpose than to be “a terror to evil-doers and a praise to them that do well” [c.f., Rom. 13:3], whenever this Divine order is inverted – whenever these rulers abuse their sacred trust by unrighteous attempts to injure, oppress, and enslave those very persons from whom alone, under God, their power is derived – does not humanity, does not reason, does not Scripture, call upon the man, the citizen, the Christian of such a community to “stand fast in that liberty wherewith Christ….hath made them free!” [Galatians 5:1] The Apostle enjoins us to “submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” but surely a submission to the unrighteous ordinances of unrighteous men, cannot be “for the Lord’s sake,” for “He loveth righteousness and His countenance beholds the things that are just.” 14
Despite the Americans embracing what they believed to be a fully-supported Biblical position, some British leaders nevertheless specifically accused the Americans of anarchy and rebellion – a charge to which John Quincy Adams forcefully responded:
[T]here was no anarchy. . . . [T]he people of the North American union and of its constituent states were associated bodies of civilized men and Christians in a state of nature but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God (which they all) and by the laws of the Gospel (which they nearly all) acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. 15 (emphasis added)
Declaration signer Francis Hopkinson (also a church musician and choir leader) agreed:
Q. It has often been said, that America is in a state of rebellion. Tell me, therefore, what is Rebellion? A. It is when a great number of people, headed by one or more factious leaders, aim at deposing their lawful prince without any just cause of complaint in order to place another on his throne. Q. Is this the case of the Americans? A. Far otherwise. 16
Reflective of the Founding Father’s belief that they were not rebelling against God or resisting ordained government but only tyranny was the fact that the first national motto proposed for America in August 1776 was “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” 17 – a summation of the famous 1750 sermon 18 preached by the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Mayhew (a principle figure in the Great Awakening).
The second Scriptural viewpoint overwhelmingly embraced by most Americans during the Revolutionary Era was that God would not honor an offensive war, but that He did permit civil self-defense (e.g., Nehemiah 4:13-14 & 20-21, Zechariah 9:8, 2 Samuel 10:12, etc.). The fact that the American Revolution was an act of self-defense and was not an offensive war undertaken by the Americans remained a point of frequent spiritual appeal for the Founding Fathers. After all, Great Britain had attacked America, not vice versa; the Americans had never fired the first shot – not in the Boston Massacre of 1770, the bombing of Boston and burning of Charlestown in 1774, or in the attacks on Williamsburg, Concord, or Lexington in 1775.
Illustrative of this belief was the famous command to the Lexington Minutemen, “Don’t fire unless fired upon!” Yet, having been fired upon without having broken any law, the Americans believed they had a Biblical right to self-defense. In fact, the Rev. Peter Powers, in a famous sermon he preached in front of the Vermont Legislature in 1778, 19 specifically noted that America had “taken up arms in its own defense” 20 – that she had no initiated the conflict but was only defending herself after being attacked.
The Framers’ writings repeatedly emphasized this point of spiritual appeal. For example, Founding Father Francis Hopkinson made this clear in his 1777 work “A Political Catechism”:
Q. What is war?
A. The curse of mankind; the mother of famine and pestilence; the source of complicated miseries; and the undistinguishing destroyer of the human species.
Q. How is war divided?
A. Into offensive and defensive.
Q. What is the general object of an offensive war? . . .
A. [F]or the most part, it is undertaken to gratify the ambition of a prince, who wishes to subject to his arbitrary will a people whom God created free, and to gain an uncontrolled dominion over their rights and property. . . .
Q. What is defensive war?
A. It is to take up arms in opposition to the invasions of usurped power and bravely suffer present hardships and encounter present dangers, to secure the rights of humanity and the blessings of freedom to generations yet unborn.
Q. Is even defensive war justifiable in a religious view?
A. The foundation of war is laid in the wickedness of mankind . . . . God has given man wit to contrive, power to execute, and freedom of will to direct his conduct. It cannot be but that some, from a depravity of will, will abuse these privileges and exert these powers to the injury of others; and the oppressed would have no safety nor redress but by exerting the same powers in their defense and it is our duty to set a proper value upon and defend to the utmost our just rights and the blessings of life, otherwise a few miscreants [unprincipled individuals] would tyrannize over the rest of mankind, and make the passive multitude the slaves of their power. Thus it is that defensive is not only justifiable but an indispensable duty.
Q. Is it upon these principles that the people of America are resisting the arms of Great Britain, and opposing force with force?
A. Strictly so. . . . And may Heaven prosper their virtuous undertaking! 21
Founding Father James Wilson (a signer of both the Declaration and the Constitution, and an original Justice on the U. S. Supreme Court) affirmed:
The defense of one’s self . . . is not, nor can it be, abrogated by any regulation of municipal law. This principle of defense is not confined merely to the person; it extends to the liberty and the property of a man. It is not confined merely to his own person; it extends to the persons of all those to whom he bears a peculiar relation – of his wife, of his parent, of his child. . . . As a man is justified in defending, so he is justified in retaking his property. . . . Man does not exist for the sake of government, but government is instituted for the sake of man. 22
According to the Founders’ Biblical understanding, the fact that they were engaged in a defensive action made all the difference – they believed that they could boldly approach God and sincerely seek His aid and blessing in such a situation. In fact, so cognizant were American leaders they that they would account to God for their actions – and so convinced were they that they would be held innocent before Him – that the flag of the Massachusetts Army proclaimed “An Appeal to God,” and the flag of the Massachusetts Navy likewise declared an “Appeal to Heaven.” 23
The Continental Congress also issued a manifesto reflecting a similar tone of submission to God:
We, therefore, the Congress of the United States of America, do solemnly declare and proclaim that. . . . [w]e appeal to the God Who searcheth the hearts of men for the rectitude of our intentions; and in His holy presence declare that, as we are not moved by any light or hasty suggestions of anger or revenge, so through every possible change of fortune we will adhere to this our determination. 24
Believing that they were thus operating under fundamental Biblical principles, Founding Father Samuel Adams therefore boldly warned British officials:
There is One above us Who will take exemplary vengeance for every insult upon His majesty. You know that the cause of America is just. You know that she contends for that freedom to which all men are entitled – that she contends against oppression, rapine, and more than savage barbarity. The blood of the innocent is upon your hands, and all the waters of the ocean will not wash it away. We again make our solemn appeal to the God of heaven to decide between you and us. And we pray that, in the doubtful scale of battle, we may be successful as we have justice on our side, and that the merciful Savior of the world may forgive our oppressors. 25
Significantly, the Americans had been militarily attacked for well over two years before they finally announced a separation; and for eleven years preceding that announcement (from 1765 to 1776), they had diligently pursued reconciliation and not conflict, offering documents such as their famous appeal of 1775 and the May 1776 “Olive Branch Petition,” each of which was submitted in a completely submissive and conciliatory tone. Reflective of this tone was the writing of Founding Father Stephen Hopkins (a signer of the Declaration and Governor of Rhode Island) in which he explained to the British:
We finally beg leave to assert that the first planters of these colonies were pious Christians – were faithful [British] subjects who, with a fortitude and perseverance little known and less considered, settled these wild countries by God’s goodness and their own amazing labors [and] thereby added a most valuable dependence to the crown of Great-Britain; were ever dutifully subservient to her interests; so taught their children that not one has been disaffected to this day but all have honestly obeyed every royal command and cheerfully submitted to every constitutional law; . . . have carefully avoided every offensive measure . . . have never been troublesome or expensive to the mother country; have kept due order and supported a regular government; have maintained peace and practiced Christianity; and in all conditions and in every relation have demeaned themselves as loyal, as dutiful, and as faithful subjects ought; and that no kingdom or state hath, or ever had, colonies more quiet, more obedient, or more profitable than these have ever been. 26
The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon (also a signer of the Declaration) also affirmed:
On the part of America, there was not the most distant thought of subverting the government or of hurting the interest of the people of Great Britain, but of defending their own privileges from unjust encroachment; there was not the least desire of withdrawing their allegiance from the common sovereign [King George III] till it became absolutely necessary – and indeed, it was his own choice. 27
Significantly, as Dr. Witherspoon had correctly noted, it was Great Britain who had terminated the entreaties; in fact, during the last two years of America’s appeals, her peaceful pleas were directly met by armed military force. King George III dispatched 25,000 British troops to invade his own Colonies, enter the homes of his own citizens to take their private possessions and goods, and imprison them without trials – all in violation of his own British Common Law, English Bill of Rights, and Magna Carta (centuries old documents that formed the basis of the covenant between British rulers and citizens). Only when those governmental covenants had been broken by their rulers and America had been directly attacked did the Americans respond in self-defense.
On the basis of these two theological understandings (that God Himself had ordained the institution of civil government, and that God had explicitly authorized civil self-defense) the Founding Fathers and the majority of American Christians in that day believed that they were conducting themselves in a manner that was not in rebellion to God or the Scriptures.
Consequently, Dr. Cornett’s claim, as well as those of John MacArthur and other critics, that the Founders “generally turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation, propped up by poor exegesis and application of the Bible” merely reflects the side that they have taken in the historic theological debate – the same as if they had been 1776 Quakers arguing against Presbyterians, or Anglicans against Congregationalists. However, just because these modern critics may disagree with the theology of Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, Mornay, Rutherford, and other theologians does not mean that from an historical viewpoint the Americans’ approach was “propped up by poor exegesis and application of the Bible,” or that the Founders “generally turned to Enlightenment rhetoric for validation.” It simply means that today’s critics are either uninformed about the actual historical and theological writings from the Reformation through the Revolution, or that they disagree with the theological positions held by the Founding Fathers, theologians, and ministers of that era, but it does not mean that there was no Biblical basis for the American Revolution.
In fact, the spiritual nature of America’s resistance was so clear even to the British that in the British Parliament:
Sir Richard Sutton read a copy of a letter relative to the government of America from a [Crown-appointed] governor in America to the Board of Trade [in Great Britain] showing that. . . . If you ask an American, “Who is his master?” He will tell you he has none – nor any governor but Jesus Christ. 28
Such spiritual declarations – confirming what was readily evident even to America’s opponents – certainly are not consistent with what critics inaccurately claim is the Unitarian, Deistic, and Secular Enlightenment rebellion basis of the American Revolution.
Endnotes
1. Dr. John MacArthur, see his declaration that “The truth is, the United States was born out of a violation of Romans 13:1-7,” from “The Christian and Government: The Christian’s Responsibility to Government – Part 1” (at: http://www.biblebb.com/files/mac/sg45-97.htm).(Return)
2. Albert Soto, "The American Revolution Rebellion" A True Church (Return)
3. For example, see Dr. Jack Arnold, “Dare You Resist Your Government? Romans 13: 2-4” (at: http://reformedperspectives.org/newfiles/jac_arnold/NT.Arnold.Rom.59.html#F1A), originally published in IIIM [Third Millennium] Magazine Online, April 16-April 22, 2001, Vol. 3, No. 16 (Dr. Arnold is Pastor at Covenant Presbyterian in Orlando, CA, and established “Equipping Pastors International” in 1997); and Dr. John Brug, "The Christian’s Dual Citizenship: Concerning the American Revolution" (at: http://www.wlsessays.net/files/BrugCitizenship.rtf) (Dr. Brug is Professor at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary); and Pastor Robert L. Deffinbaugh, “Was the American Revolution Biblically Supported?” (at: http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=6084) (Pastor Deffinbaugh is at Community Bible Chapel in Richardson, Texas); etc.(Return)
4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Henry Beveridge, translator (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845, the first English translation by Thomas Norton was published in London: 1561, the original Latin version was published in 1536), Book 4, Chapter 20: Of Civil Government (at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.vi.xxi.html).(Return)
5. Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent Should it be Obeyed? (1523), (at: http://www.uoregon.edu/~sshoemak/323/texts/luther~1.htm).(Return)
6. Americanized Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890), pp. 6456-6457, s.v. “Huldreich Zwingli.”(Return)
7. John Harty, The Catholic Encyclopedia. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), "Tyrannicide" (at: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15108a.htm); see also Rev. John C. Rager, "Catholic Sources and the Declaration of Independence," The Catholic Mind, Vol. XXVIII, No. 13, July 8, 1930 (at: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/politics/pg0003.html).(Return)
8. J. M. Mathews, The Bible and Civil Government, in a Course of Lectures (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1851), p. 231.(Return)
9. John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Philadelphia: William Young, 1797), Vol. III, pp. 210-211.(Return)
10.See, for example, numerous sermons cited in Alice M. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1958), pp. 22-23, 26, 27-28, 34-37, 65-68, 86-87, 89-95,101-104, as well as sermons by Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning the Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (Boston: 1750), pp. 37-41, Jonathan Ellis, The Justice of the Present War against the French in America, and the Principles that Should Influence us in the Undertaking Asserted: A Sermon Preached to the Soldiers, Sept 22, A.D. 1755. from I Sam. Xviii. 17 (Newport: J. Franklin, 1755), John A. Lidenius, The Lawfulness of Defensive War. A Sermon Preached before the Members of the Church; at Chiechester, in the County of Chester, and Province of Pennsylvania, upon their Association for Defense, February 14, 1756 (Philadelphia: James Chattin, 1756), etc. (Return)
11.James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved(Boston: J. Williams 1766), pp. 11, 13, 16-18, (Return)
12.John Dickinson, The Political Writings of John Dickinson (Wilmington: Bonsal and Niles, 1801), Vol. I, p. 111. (Return)
13. Samuel Adams, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, William V. Wells, editor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1865), Vol. I, p. 504. (Return)
14.Jacob Duche, The Duty of Standing Fast in our Spiritual and Temporal Liberties, A Sermon Preached in Christ Church, July 7, 1775. Before the First Battalion of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, Jr., 1775), pp. 13-14. (Return)
15.John Quincy Adams, An Address Delivered at the Request of the Committee of Arrangements for the Celebrating the Anniversary of Independence at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the Occasion of Reading The Declaration of Independence (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1821), p. 28. (Return)
16.Francis Hopkinson, The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, Esq. (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), Vol. I, pp. 115-116. (Return)
17.John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), Vol. I, p. 152, letter to Abigail Adams, August 14, 1776. (Return)
18.Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning the Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1968, originally printed in Boston: 1750), pp. 37-41. (Return)
19.The Rev. Peter Powers, Jesus Christ the true King and Head of Government; A Sermon Preached before the General Assembly of the State of Vermont, on the Day of Their First Election, March 12, 1778 at Windsor (Newbury-Port: Printed by John Michael, 1778). (Return)
20.The Rev. Peter Powers, Jesus Christ the true King and Head of Government…..March 12, 1778, p. 18. (Return)
21.Francis Hopkinson, The Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings of Francis Hopkinson, Esq. (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), Vol. I, pp. 111-115. (Return)
22.James Wilson, The Works of the Honorable James Wilson, Bird Wilson, editor (Philadelphia: Bronson and Chuncey, 1804), Vol. II, pp. 496-497. (Return)
23.Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts. 1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1984, originally published in Watertown, MA: 1776), Vol. 51, Part III, pp. 196-197, April 29, 1776. (Return)
24.Samuel Adams, Writings, Vol. IV, p. 86, “Manifesto of the Continental Congress” on October 30, 1778. (Return)
25.Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, Harry Alonzo Cushing, editor (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), Vol. IV, p. 38, to the Earl of Carlisle and Others on July 16, 1778. (Return)
26.Stephen Hopkins, The Grievances of the American Colonies Candidly Examined, (New York: Research Reprints Inc., 1970, first published London: J. Almon, 1766), pp. 45-48. (Return)
27.John Witherspoon, The Works of John Witherspoon (Edinburgh: J. Ogle, 1815), Vol. IX, p. 250, “The Druid,” Number III. (Return)
28.Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (Baltimore: William Ogden Niles, 1822), p. 198. (Return)
Stand To for 28 October, 2013
Push Back with Prayer
0700 at BJ’s Restaurant
Hamilton, Montana
1. Opening - Round the Table
Individual Prayers
2. Morning Psalm: 139
3. Breakfast Reading: Isaiah 57:14-21
4. Breakfast is served
5. Breakfast Discussion Topic: Romans 13 argument in Pastor Packets
6. Closing - Round the Table
Individual Prayers
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Helping Millennials Help Themselves: How Christians Should Respond to High Youth Unemployment
By Tyler O'Neil
October 23, 2013|3:07 pm
Almost 6 million young people are "disconnected," neither working nor in school, according to a new study by The Opportunity Network coalition. The coalition shared its efforts to address this problem, and a Christian economist argued that followers of Jesus Christ should work to create opportunities for young people to find work.
"The idea of everyone having a chance and opportunity very much aligns with the teaching of Christ," Russell Krumnow, managing director of Opportunity Nation, told The Christian Post on Tuesday.
He explained that 16 percent of Americans, ages 16 to 24, neither have a job nor are pursuing a degree. "Obviously that's a problem for them, but it's also a problem for the country," Krumnow said.
Many of the disconnected are high school dropouts," he explained. "Some sort of education beyond high school is really important in the current economy."
Krumnow noted that Opportunity Nation connects "businesses and employers, the educational system and faith-based institutions" in order to promote economic mobility – the ability for people to achieve success no matter their background.
"We particularly recognize that any significant social change or movement in our nation's history has been led by people of faith," Krumnow added. He listed World Vision and Faith for Change as Christian charities with which his organization partners.
While he lamented the state of young people, Krumnow also pointed to positive results from his organization's study, the "Opportunity Index."
Across the nation, the high school graduation rate is trending up, and now stands at 78 percent. Following the "Great Recession," the unemployment rate continues to shrink, and 44 states saw a decrease in the rate of violent crimes.
Some trends, however, proved less promising. Krumnow also explained that mean household income – the average amount of money a family makes – has not been rising, but has "dipped slightly." As a result, while more people are working, more people are also living "at or near poverty levels."
Jay Richards, distinguished fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, told CP in a Tuesday statement, "The high youth unemployment follows from the economy's moribund growth and high unemployment generally." He argued that free market policies, like lowering or abolishing the minimum wage, would help solve the problem.
"Every impediment to employment, every regulation that makes it harder to hire and fire employees, every law that raises the minimum wage – that adds to the costs of each new employee – hits the young hardest," said Richards, author of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem.
He contends that the young, least skilled and least experienced, need entry-level jobs to enter the marketplace. "These are the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, and they need to be able to grab the bottom rung."
Richards also denounced the welfare programs behind "the vast administrative state" as actually harmful to the poor.
"Too many Christians believe the piety myth, and so think that their good intentions are what really matter," he explained. "But if we really want to help people, we need to anticipate the effects of the actions and policies we support," to love God with our minds, as well as our hearts.
He continued, "Our hyper-regulatory policies, even when well meaning, don't prevent the rich from staying rich. But they do prevent many of 'the least of these' from taking the first step to economic success and security."
Sunday, October 20, 2013
LEFTISM AND THE POST-RELIGIOUS CHURCHES
By: Dr. John J. RAY (M.A.;Ph.D.)
The Mainstream Protestant Churches
From Robespierre to Stalin, Leftists for many years opposed all religion. They saw it as a rival to their own claims on power. In recent decades, however, this seems all to have become reversed. For instance, it used to be said in Britain that the Church of England was "The Tory Party at prayer". These days it is certainly not. It is more like the Liberal party at prayer. Throughout the developed world, the churches now are often the source of clearly Left-wing messages.
This seems to be very much associated with the fact that there seems to have developed in the "Western" world in recent decades the curious phenomenon of the post-religious church. This is most marked in the case of the Church of England and its related Anglican churches worldwide.
There was once a time hundreds of years ago when followers of the Church of England were passionate believers in its blend of Protestant doctrines and episcopal organization. And assent to the 39 "Articles of Religion" is to this day supposed to be the mark of the Anglican. These articles say things such as: "Holy scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." (Article 6). And: "They are to be had accursed that presume to say , That every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law and the light of Nature." (Article 18). No universal salvation or doctrinal flexibility there! And no vagueness about what is authoritative!
How much this uncompromising language contrasts with the wishy-washy social gospel that is usually to be heard in Anglican churches today. When the Anglican flock go to church these days what they hear from their clergy tends to be a wishy-washy mish-mash of every trendy "liberal" belief under the sun. God and the Bible are lucky to get a mention. The former Archbishop of Canterbury (Carey) is so "Green" that not even Greenpeace could have found fault with him and the present Archbishop (Williams) clearly has no respect whatever for Bible teachings about homosexuality. It is not even certain that a majority of the Anglican episcopate believe in God in any meaningful sense. Some of them clearly do not.
So in modern times nothing seems to be forbidden in the Anglican churches and nothing seems to be required for membership other than a modicum of politeness and a patience with rambling sermons. And it is not so much belief that is required as good taste! How has this come about?
It would appear to be because we no longer live in a culture of belief. Where once the churches were a part of everyday life for most people they are no longer so and religious skepticism is widespread. Why? Probably because science has made such inroads into explaining the once-inexplicable and because the conduct of so many supposed Christians has been so unchristian for so long that huge numbers of people have lost faith in organized religion and its traditional teachings. About the only religious belief that still wins widespread assent in the modern Western world is belief in God. But this is now accompanied by widespread skepticism about whether the churches know any more about God than anybody else. Certainly, the idea that one particular church has the truth while others do not is now widely seen as ridiculous.
In this climate, the more established churches have tended to lose their bearings. Long acceptance made them soft, and loss of that acceptance panicked them and demoralized their clergy. Rather than having the fortitude to continue proclaiming the Gospel of Christ, they scrabbled around looking for any means of regaining popular favour. Their long acceptance had meant that both their clergy and their laity had lost their religious edge and that they had become the refuge for those who were not very religiously committed anyway. So their struggle to retain some popularity had few restraints and steadily led them down a long downhill path to a point where they had virtually no fixed beliefs of any kind.
Perhaps the defining moment in this process was the publication in 1963 of the book "Honest to God" by Church of England bishop John Robinson. This book revealed to all how far the faith of many theologically sophisticated Anglicans had decayed and it was widely read. It denied the idea of God as any sort of a separate identity and said that God was simply "The ground of our being" -- whatever that might mean. From that point on, the phenomenon of the essentially Atheist Anglican became increasingly widespread. In the struggle to retain their acceptance in the modern world, many Anglicans were willing to abandon even God.
So their churches became little more than hollow shells or religious vacuums. When their traditional religious formulas and beliefs became widely questioned, they abandoned any advocacy of them and had nothing substantial to replace them. They now offer a facility for worship and fellowship but have no authority in matters of morals, doctrine or anything else. They have become social facilities rather than religious institutions. Rather than deliver salvation, all that many churches now aspire to is to make their congregations feel good. And old stone Cathedrals, magnificent vestments, mesmeric chants, angelic choirs, soaring hymns, fragrant incense and powerful pipe organs assist greatly with that. No-one has ever denied that the Anglican churches in particular can do a good show when they try.
But this mere show and lack of any moral, ethical or doctrinal anchors leaves the door open wide for what is popularly believed and promoted in the secular world to be adopted in the churches as well. The thinking seems to be that if you want to keep the collection plates full, you must tell people what they want to hear. So if Leftist, Greenie, Feminist or "Gay-lib" beliefs are vocally expressed in the community at large, such beliefs will be expressed with similar energy from the pulpit.
The acclaimed Marxist theorist Gramsci foresaw many years ago a "long march through the institutions" for Leftism -- and the post-religious churches have offered no resistance to that march at all. Their clergy now preach salvation through the nostrums of Leftism and Environmentalism rather than through the worship of Christ. The vacuum left in the churches by the loss of faith in their own traditional teachings is filled by whatever beliefs are fashionable in the secular world.
Leftist influence in the Roman Catholic church
Under the strong leadership of a theologically conservative Pope, the situation is not quite as grim in the Roman Catholic church but influences from the surrounding culture are still, of course, strong. One of the Catholic Church's historic methods of bringing people under its influence has in fact been its great willingness to compromise with the surrounding culture and adopt pagan elements as its own. Christmas, for instance, was devised to coincide with the pagan Winter Solstice celebrations and Easter to this day bears the name of an ancient pagan Goddess (Astarte or Ashtaroth). And it is influences from the outside world of today that lie behind such untraditional and unscriptural ideas as the advocacy of female and openly homosexual priests.
The very "Red" nature of much contemporary Latin-American Catholicism is, however, not really in the same category. It is not a wholly modern phenomenon. In fact, ever since Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical "De Rerum Novarum" of 1891 (Yes. 1891, not 1991) the church has given qualified approval to socialist ideas.
Famous though it is, many people will not know what De Rerum Novarum says. It rejects Marxism but justifies intervention by the State on behalf of the workers and proposes that the best solution for working-class poverty would be some sort of combined action of the Church, the State, the employer and the employed. Such a "corporatist" solution was of course put faithfully into practice by various good Catholic sons -- such as Benito Mussolini and General Franco.
And the basic idea did not die with the Fascists. It is now known among Leftists as the "Third Way" and is the official policy of Britain's Labour Party, led by Tony Blair. Tony Blair is an Anglican so he is more moderate and democratic than Mussolini or Franco but he too rejects the old Marxist nostrums of abolishing private property and having government run industry while at the same time still using the power of the State to redistribute wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not.
So it was only the atheism of Communism that made Communists the enemies of the Church. The socialist but theistic Nazis and Fascists were soon accommodated. So while Catholics and most of their clergy do at least appear to remain religious, theirs is a religion that has always accommodated to a large degree whatever nonsense that is believed in the world around them -- so therefore many Catholic clergy now accommodate or embrace the Leftist ideas that are so prominent in the contemporary world of the media and academe.
So the main motivation behind Catholic socialism would seem to be the wish of the church to curry favour with the often poor members of its congregations but some attempt to treat Christ's counsel about the surest path to the afterlife (e.g. "Go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven" -- Matthew 19:21) as if it were also advice about how to run the affairs of the secular world is also of course involved -- materially assisted by the fact that theologians seldom seem to be very literate in economics.
So in many countries this does sometimes result in people hearing from Catholic pulpits condemnations of the "greed" of capitalism. Yet is it not greed to demand something that you did not earn? Is it not greed to use the coercive power of the government to take from others? Is it not greed to use the coercive power of unions to receive an unfair wage, often at the expense of other less-unionized workers? Is it not greed to demand that church members pay you a certain percentage of their wages? So the second-rate theology that fails even to ask such questions results in many Catholics worldwide hearing from their priests a message that is in some ways not very distinct from the message of Marxist revolutionaries.
This abrogation of their traditional role of giving the faithful a distinctive message does however seem to have been highly detrimental to both the Catholic and the historic Protestant churches, causing a steady leaking away of their congregations.
A fully observant Catholic is a great rarity these days and conservative movements within the Catholic church (such as charismatic movements, pilgrimages to sites of alleged miracles or the Tridentine movement led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebre) commonly get an enthusiastic response. These phenomena suggest that the great majority of the ordinary Catholic laity would be much more receptive to a traditional faith-based message than the political message that they so often get these days.
The Survival of Real Protestantism
And the mainstream Protestant churches are steadily losing their congregations to more Bible-oriented churches. Where the priest in an Anglican church might be preaching to six old ladies in flowered hats on a Sunday, the more evangelical church down the road will have hundreds of people of all ages in it. There is no doubt that the churches have to adapt to the modern world but the evangelical Protestants show that you can do that without replacing the Christian gospel by a Leftist gospel. So, once again, Leftism is destructive. By invading the mainstream churches, it has made them increasingly irrelevant.
When it comes to adapting to the modern world, it may be of some relevance to note here that there is one diocese in the worldwide Anglican communion that is outstanding for its enthusiasm for strict Bible teachings and historic Anglicanism. That is the diocese of Sydney in Australia. And the Sydney Anglican seminary and churches are so full of adherents (old and young, male and female) that the Sydney diocese alone accounts for one third of all of Australia's Anglicans. Some ordained priests from the Sydney Anglican diocese have even been known to go out into other Australian Anglican dioceses and set up new churches there -- much embarrassing the local bishop by the large size of the congregations that they attract! The Sydney diocese shows what the Anglican church might have been.
The following report from the UK Daily Telegraph of October 14th, 2002 would suggest that also in England itself it is the traditional rather than the "modernist" Anglicans who attract the large congregations.
Christianity that is firmly and unwaveringly based in the New Testament still obviously has great popular appeal and failure to deliver a truly New Testament message is rapidly relegating the historic Protestant churches to minority status within Christendom. And what adherents they do still have tend to be more the members of a social club than committed Christians
The problems of the Roman Catholic Church in adapting to the modern world are of course different but, if strict Protestant fundamentalists can have married priests and acceptance of contraception, the theological and disciplinary difficulties in reconciling such practices with the historic Christian message cannot be too great. Certainly, there is demonstrably no need to adopt Leftist amorality in order to succeed as a church in the modern world.
An important result of their replacing traditional Christian faith by Leftist amorality is that the mainstream churches now seem to feel that they have no authority to offer moral guidance of any kind. For instance, rather than oppose or condemn the undoubtedly evil Saddam Hussein (who himself has said that from his point of view Hitler was too weak), they mostly avoided their traditional role of giving moral guidance entirely and were much more likely to ask their congregations simply to "pray for peace"! If such responses were to become common in the population at large, this would surely be a serious erosion of the values that underly Western civilization and perhaps even of the values that underly any civilization. So perhaps we should hope that the decay into irrelevancy of the mainstream churches will continue apace.
Jesus: Leftist or Rightist?
This Leftist invasion of the senescent mainstream churches does tend to raise the question of what Christ's Gospel really was. Are the current teachings of such churches Christian or not? The churches concerned would of course normally claim that they are. Answering this question fully, however, requires a trip into theology rather than into the sociological questions and observations that the present article addresses. All that is required for acceptance of the theses of the present article is a recognition that "traditional" Christian teachings have been substantially replaced by Leftist moral relativism and fervour for equality. How closely the traditional teachings of any given church mirror the teachings of Christ is another debate entirely.
Nonetheless, discussing religion whilst ignoring theology is surely a most incomplete enterprise so it would surely be remiss not to make at least a brief excursion into the theological questions involved.
We could approach this front-on by asking whether Jesus was part of what we would now call the Left or the Right. And since this is, of course, very much an old chestnut, let us look at it briefly:
As Leftists are traditionally anti-religious the argument has usually gone by default to the conservatives. Leftists have usually not wanted anything to do with any religious figure so conservatives could claim Jesus as one of their own with little opposition. And that claim is not without reason: Jesus did after all say, "For ye have the poor always with you" (Matthew 26:11) and he did make a point of dining with rich businessmen (Luke 19:1-8) and he did praise entreprenurship and profit (Matthew 25:14-30). And he did rebuke his disciples for proposing to sell their luxury goods and distribute the proceeds to the poor (Matthew 26:10). He denied being a revolutionary (Matthew 5:17) and preached obedience to the law (Matthew 5: 19; Mark 12:17). He preached compromise (Matthew 5:25) and opposed divorce (Matthew 5:32). And Jesus did of course inherit the Jewish view that mankind is in a "fallen" and imperfect state and preached that only faith in him could correct it (Luke 19:10; John 8:7, 32).
On the other hand he did say that it was as hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24) and he did tell a seeker after holiness to first sell all his wordly goods (Matthew 19:21). He did advise "giving freely" and advised against accumulating both money and worldly goods (Matthew, 10: 9,10; 6:19 and 6:31-34). He preached equality among the faithful (Matthew 20:25-28). And he was very much a pacifist (Matthew 5:39). All these latter references, however, clearly have more to do with spiritual guidance than with advice about how to run the affairs of the world.
The essential point in all this, however, is surely that Jesus was even in his own time an avowedly religious leader rather than a political one and, as such, he does not fit neatly into any modern political category and was in fact uninterested in how the affairs of the world should be ordered. His constant focus was on the Kingdom of Heaven and its entry requirements rather than on any earthly kingdom. So traditional Christian teachings about how the world should be ordered have had to evolve with only a little guidance from the master himself. On balance, however, Jesus does show a realism when he discusses the state of the world that is encouraging to conservative views of it.
Nonetheless, the fact that, in his spiritual guidance to his followers, Jesus opposed condemnation of others and retaliation for evil, that he also opposed selfishness and materialism and preached love and compassion could be seen as consonant with what Leftists advocate (but do not practice). And undoubtedly it is. That is why Leftists advocate it. It suits Leftists to pretend to believe that Christ's spiritual teachings can be taken as a template for organizing the affairs of the world and that only evil men or evil classes of men stand in the way of bringing about a socialist Utopia or any other desired state. That the world will always fall far short of the high ideals that Christ set they ignore. In this sense, Leftism is akin to the old Pelagian heresy, as Christ himself was emphatic that, although perfection is to be sought (Matthew 5:48), it is only to be obtained through faith in him (John 3:18). As Jesus summarized it to Pilate, "My Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36).
It seems obvious, however, that if you treat your fellow man kindly as part of your highroad to Christ's Kingdom of Heaven you will also want to support political policies that are kindly towards your fellow man. But note here that what Christ said was to give your OWN possessions to the poor -- not to give OTHER PEOPLE'S possessions to the poor. So Catholic "Liberation theology" and its Protestant equivalents -- which preach the latter course -- is simply bad theology. And the Holy Father (who is in general no great friend of capitalism) has proclaimed that too, of course.
To revert to the sociology of the matter, however, the teachings of Jesus have become deeply ingrained in our culture so that they form at least a large part of the ideals that most of us aspire to even if we often fall far short of living up to those ideals. And Leftists simply use that. If the change- and power-seeking Leftist wants to sound persuasive, the easiest way to do so is to place his appeal squarely within the existing ideals of the society. If we still lived in the pagan world of our ancestors as described (say) in "Beowulf", he might instead justify his cries for change in terms of what would lead us towards greater glory and fame. But in neither case could we safely conclude that what he says represents his real aims and values. And we can most certainly not conclude that those who preach compassion etc will therefore also practice it when they have the power to do so.
Conclusion
So it is far from true that it is Christianity which is Leftist. What is true is that the Churches which have LOST their traditional Christian values have become Leftist.
An important result of their replacing traditional Christian faith by Leftist amorality is that the mainstream churches now seem to feel that they have no authority to offer moral guidance of any kind. For instance, rather than oppose or condemn the undoubtedly evil Saddam Hussein (who himself says that from his point of view Hitler was too weak), they are more likely to ask their congregations to "pray for peace"! If such responses were to become common in the population at large, this would surely be a serious erosion of the values that underly Western civilization and perhaps even of the values that underly any civilization. So perhaps we should hope that the decay into irrelevancy of the mainstream churches will continue apace.
The Mainstream Protestant Churches
From Robespierre to Stalin, Leftists for many years opposed all religion. They saw it as a rival to their own claims on power. In recent decades, however, this seems all to have become reversed. For instance, it used to be said in Britain that the Church of England was "The Tory Party at prayer". These days it is certainly not. It is more like the Liberal party at prayer. Throughout the developed world, the churches now are often the source of clearly Left-wing messages.
This seems to be very much associated with the fact that there seems to have developed in the "Western" world in recent decades the curious phenomenon of the post-religious church. This is most marked in the case of the Church of England and its related Anglican churches worldwide.
There was once a time hundreds of years ago when followers of the Church of England were passionate believers in its blend of Protestant doctrines and episcopal organization. And assent to the 39 "Articles of Religion" is to this day supposed to be the mark of the Anglican. These articles say things such as: "Holy scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." (Article 6). And: "They are to be had accursed that presume to say , That every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law and the light of Nature." (Article 18). No universal salvation or doctrinal flexibility there! And no vagueness about what is authoritative!
How much this uncompromising language contrasts with the wishy-washy social gospel that is usually to be heard in Anglican churches today. When the Anglican flock go to church these days what they hear from their clergy tends to be a wishy-washy mish-mash of every trendy "liberal" belief under the sun. God and the Bible are lucky to get a mention. The former Archbishop of Canterbury (Carey) is so "Green" that not even Greenpeace could have found fault with him and the present Archbishop (Williams) clearly has no respect whatever for Bible teachings about homosexuality. It is not even certain that a majority of the Anglican episcopate believe in God in any meaningful sense. Some of them clearly do not.
So in modern times nothing seems to be forbidden in the Anglican churches and nothing seems to be required for membership other than a modicum of politeness and a patience with rambling sermons. And it is not so much belief that is required as good taste! How has this come about?
It would appear to be because we no longer live in a culture of belief. Where once the churches were a part of everyday life for most people they are no longer so and religious skepticism is widespread. Why? Probably because science has made such inroads into explaining the once-inexplicable and because the conduct of so many supposed Christians has been so unchristian for so long that huge numbers of people have lost faith in organized religion and its traditional teachings. About the only religious belief that still wins widespread assent in the modern Western world is belief in God. But this is now accompanied by widespread skepticism about whether the churches know any more about God than anybody else. Certainly, the idea that one particular church has the truth while others do not is now widely seen as ridiculous.
In this climate, the more established churches have tended to lose their bearings. Long acceptance made them soft, and loss of that acceptance panicked them and demoralized their clergy. Rather than having the fortitude to continue proclaiming the Gospel of Christ, they scrabbled around looking for any means of regaining popular favour. Their long acceptance had meant that both their clergy and their laity had lost their religious edge and that they had become the refuge for those who were not very religiously committed anyway. So their struggle to retain some popularity had few restraints and steadily led them down a long downhill path to a point where they had virtually no fixed beliefs of any kind.
Perhaps the defining moment in this process was the publication in 1963 of the book "Honest to God" by Church of England bishop John Robinson. This book revealed to all how far the faith of many theologically sophisticated Anglicans had decayed and it was widely read. It denied the idea of God as any sort of a separate identity and said that God was simply "The ground of our being" -- whatever that might mean. From that point on, the phenomenon of the essentially Atheist Anglican became increasingly widespread. In the struggle to retain their acceptance in the modern world, many Anglicans were willing to abandon even God.
So their churches became little more than hollow shells or religious vacuums. When their traditional religious formulas and beliefs became widely questioned, they abandoned any advocacy of them and had nothing substantial to replace them. They now offer a facility for worship and fellowship but have no authority in matters of morals, doctrine or anything else. They have become social facilities rather than religious institutions. Rather than deliver salvation, all that many churches now aspire to is to make their congregations feel good. And old stone Cathedrals, magnificent vestments, mesmeric chants, angelic choirs, soaring hymns, fragrant incense and powerful pipe organs assist greatly with that. No-one has ever denied that the Anglican churches in particular can do a good show when they try.
But this mere show and lack of any moral, ethical or doctrinal anchors leaves the door open wide for what is popularly believed and promoted in the secular world to be adopted in the churches as well. The thinking seems to be that if you want to keep the collection plates full, you must tell people what they want to hear. So if Leftist, Greenie, Feminist or "Gay-lib" beliefs are vocally expressed in the community at large, such beliefs will be expressed with similar energy from the pulpit.
The acclaimed Marxist theorist Gramsci foresaw many years ago a "long march through the institutions" for Leftism -- and the post-religious churches have offered no resistance to that march at all. Their clergy now preach salvation through the nostrums of Leftism and Environmentalism rather than through the worship of Christ. The vacuum left in the churches by the loss of faith in their own traditional teachings is filled by whatever beliefs are fashionable in the secular world.
Leftist influence in the Roman Catholic church
Under the strong leadership of a theologically conservative Pope, the situation is not quite as grim in the Roman Catholic church but influences from the surrounding culture are still, of course, strong. One of the Catholic Church's historic methods of bringing people under its influence has in fact been its great willingness to compromise with the surrounding culture and adopt pagan elements as its own. Christmas, for instance, was devised to coincide with the pagan Winter Solstice celebrations and Easter to this day bears the name of an ancient pagan Goddess (Astarte or Ashtaroth). And it is influences from the outside world of today that lie behind such untraditional and unscriptural ideas as the advocacy of female and openly homosexual priests.
The very "Red" nature of much contemporary Latin-American Catholicism is, however, not really in the same category. It is not a wholly modern phenomenon. In fact, ever since Pope Leo XIII wrote his encyclical "De Rerum Novarum" of 1891 (Yes. 1891, not 1991) the church has given qualified approval to socialist ideas.
Famous though it is, many people will not know what De Rerum Novarum says. It rejects Marxism but justifies intervention by the State on behalf of the workers and proposes that the best solution for working-class poverty would be some sort of combined action of the Church, the State, the employer and the employed. Such a "corporatist" solution was of course put faithfully into practice by various good Catholic sons -- such as Benito Mussolini and General Franco.
And the basic idea did not die with the Fascists. It is now known among Leftists as the "Third Way" and is the official policy of Britain's Labour Party, led by Tony Blair. Tony Blair is an Anglican so he is more moderate and democratic than Mussolini or Franco but he too rejects the old Marxist nostrums of abolishing private property and having government run industry while at the same time still using the power of the State to redistribute wealth from those who have earned it to those who have not.
So it was only the atheism of Communism that made Communists the enemies of the Church. The socialist but theistic Nazis and Fascists were soon accommodated. So while Catholics and most of their clergy do at least appear to remain religious, theirs is a religion that has always accommodated to a large degree whatever nonsense that is believed in the world around them -- so therefore many Catholic clergy now accommodate or embrace the Leftist ideas that are so prominent in the contemporary world of the media and academe.
So the main motivation behind Catholic socialism would seem to be the wish of the church to curry favour with the often poor members of its congregations but some attempt to treat Christ's counsel about the surest path to the afterlife (e.g. "Go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven" -- Matthew 19:21) as if it were also advice about how to run the affairs of the secular world is also of course involved -- materially assisted by the fact that theologians seldom seem to be very literate in economics.
So in many countries this does sometimes result in people hearing from Catholic pulpits condemnations of the "greed" of capitalism. Yet is it not greed to demand something that you did not earn? Is it not greed to use the coercive power of the government to take from others? Is it not greed to use the coercive power of unions to receive an unfair wage, often at the expense of other less-unionized workers? Is it not greed to demand that church members pay you a certain percentage of their wages? So the second-rate theology that fails even to ask such questions results in many Catholics worldwide hearing from their priests a message that is in some ways not very distinct from the message of Marxist revolutionaries.
This abrogation of their traditional role of giving the faithful a distinctive message does however seem to have been highly detrimental to both the Catholic and the historic Protestant churches, causing a steady leaking away of their congregations.
A fully observant Catholic is a great rarity these days and conservative movements within the Catholic church (such as charismatic movements, pilgrimages to sites of alleged miracles or the Tridentine movement led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebre) commonly get an enthusiastic response. These phenomena suggest that the great majority of the ordinary Catholic laity would be much more receptive to a traditional faith-based message than the political message that they so often get these days.
The Survival of Real Protestantism
And the mainstream Protestant churches are steadily losing their congregations to more Bible-oriented churches. Where the priest in an Anglican church might be preaching to six old ladies in flowered hats on a Sunday, the more evangelical church down the road will have hundreds of people of all ages in it. There is no doubt that the churches have to adapt to the modern world but the evangelical Protestants show that you can do that without replacing the Christian gospel by a Leftist gospel. So, once again, Leftism is destructive. By invading the mainstream churches, it has made them increasingly irrelevant.
When it comes to adapting to the modern world, it may be of some relevance to note here that there is one diocese in the worldwide Anglican communion that is outstanding for its enthusiasm for strict Bible teachings and historic Anglicanism. That is the diocese of Sydney in Australia. And the Sydney Anglican seminary and churches are so full of adherents (old and young, male and female) that the Sydney diocese alone accounts for one third of all of Australia's Anglicans. Some ordained priests from the Sydney Anglican diocese have even been known to go out into other Australian Anglican dioceses and set up new churches there -- much embarrassing the local bishop by the large size of the congregations that they attract! The Sydney diocese shows what the Anglican church might have been.
The following report from the UK Daily Telegraph of October 14th, 2002 would suggest that also in England itself it is the traditional rather than the "modernist" Anglicans who attract the large congregations.
The clergy at one of Britain's richest parishes are to refuse their Church salaries in protest at the next Archbishop of Canterbury's liberal views on homosexuality..
In a revolt that could spread across the country, the Rev William Taylor, the evangelical rector of St Helen's Bishopsgate in the City of London, said yesterday that Dr Rowan William's views were immoral and divisive. The decision by Mr Taylor and three fellow clergy to be paid by their congregation rather than the Church Commissioners is the first example of the "direct action" against Dr Williams threatened by conservative evangelicals. It will further raise tensions between traditionalists and liberals before this week's annual conference of Reform, the conservative evangelical network, which has called on Dr Williams to recant his views or resign. In his sermon to a congregation of about 450, Mr Taylor took a resolutely hardline stance on homosexual acts, which he condemned as morally and spiritually wrong
Christianity that is firmly and unwaveringly based in the New Testament still obviously has great popular appeal and failure to deliver a truly New Testament message is rapidly relegating the historic Protestant churches to minority status within Christendom. And what adherents they do still have tend to be more the members of a social club than committed Christians
The problems of the Roman Catholic Church in adapting to the modern world are of course different but, if strict Protestant fundamentalists can have married priests and acceptance of contraception, the theological and disciplinary difficulties in reconciling such practices with the historic Christian message cannot be too great. Certainly, there is demonstrably no need to adopt Leftist amorality in order to succeed as a church in the modern world.
An important result of their replacing traditional Christian faith by Leftist amorality is that the mainstream churches now seem to feel that they have no authority to offer moral guidance of any kind. For instance, rather than oppose or condemn the undoubtedly evil Saddam Hussein (who himself has said that from his point of view Hitler was too weak), they mostly avoided their traditional role of giving moral guidance entirely and were much more likely to ask their congregations simply to "pray for peace"! If such responses were to become common in the population at large, this would surely be a serious erosion of the values that underly Western civilization and perhaps even of the values that underly any civilization. So perhaps we should hope that the decay into irrelevancy of the mainstream churches will continue apace.
Jesus: Leftist or Rightist?
This Leftist invasion of the senescent mainstream churches does tend to raise the question of what Christ's Gospel really was. Are the current teachings of such churches Christian or not? The churches concerned would of course normally claim that they are. Answering this question fully, however, requires a trip into theology rather than into the sociological questions and observations that the present article addresses. All that is required for acceptance of the theses of the present article is a recognition that "traditional" Christian teachings have been substantially replaced by Leftist moral relativism and fervour for equality. How closely the traditional teachings of any given church mirror the teachings of Christ is another debate entirely.
Nonetheless, discussing religion whilst ignoring theology is surely a most incomplete enterprise so it would surely be remiss not to make at least a brief excursion into the theological questions involved.
We could approach this front-on by asking whether Jesus was part of what we would now call the Left or the Right. And since this is, of course, very much an old chestnut, let us look at it briefly:
As Leftists are traditionally anti-religious the argument has usually gone by default to the conservatives. Leftists have usually not wanted anything to do with any religious figure so conservatives could claim Jesus as one of their own with little opposition. And that claim is not without reason: Jesus did after all say, "For ye have the poor always with you" (Matthew 26:11) and he did make a point of dining with rich businessmen (Luke 19:1-8) and he did praise entreprenurship and profit (Matthew 25:14-30). And he did rebuke his disciples for proposing to sell their luxury goods and distribute the proceeds to the poor (Matthew 26:10). He denied being a revolutionary (Matthew 5:17) and preached obedience to the law (Matthew 5: 19; Mark 12:17). He preached compromise (Matthew 5:25) and opposed divorce (Matthew 5:32). And Jesus did of course inherit the Jewish view that mankind is in a "fallen" and imperfect state and preached that only faith in him could correct it (Luke 19:10; John 8:7, 32).
On the other hand he did say that it was as hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as it was for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24) and he did tell a seeker after holiness to first sell all his wordly goods (Matthew 19:21). He did advise "giving freely" and advised against accumulating both money and worldly goods (Matthew, 10: 9,10; 6:19 and 6:31-34). He preached equality among the faithful (Matthew 20:25-28). And he was very much a pacifist (Matthew 5:39). All these latter references, however, clearly have more to do with spiritual guidance than with advice about how to run the affairs of the world.
The essential point in all this, however, is surely that Jesus was even in his own time an avowedly religious leader rather than a political one and, as such, he does not fit neatly into any modern political category and was in fact uninterested in how the affairs of the world should be ordered. His constant focus was on the Kingdom of Heaven and its entry requirements rather than on any earthly kingdom. So traditional Christian teachings about how the world should be ordered have had to evolve with only a little guidance from the master himself. On balance, however, Jesus does show a realism when he discusses the state of the world that is encouraging to conservative views of it.
Nonetheless, the fact that, in his spiritual guidance to his followers, Jesus opposed condemnation of others and retaliation for evil, that he also opposed selfishness and materialism and preached love and compassion could be seen as consonant with what Leftists advocate (but do not practice). And undoubtedly it is. That is why Leftists advocate it. It suits Leftists to pretend to believe that Christ's spiritual teachings can be taken as a template for organizing the affairs of the world and that only evil men or evil classes of men stand in the way of bringing about a socialist Utopia or any other desired state. That the world will always fall far short of the high ideals that Christ set they ignore. In this sense, Leftism is akin to the old Pelagian heresy, as Christ himself was emphatic that, although perfection is to be sought (Matthew 5:48), it is only to be obtained through faith in him (John 3:18). As Jesus summarized it to Pilate, "My Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36).
It seems obvious, however, that if you treat your fellow man kindly as part of your highroad to Christ's Kingdom of Heaven you will also want to support political policies that are kindly towards your fellow man. But note here that what Christ said was to give your OWN possessions to the poor -- not to give OTHER PEOPLE'S possessions to the poor. So Catholic "Liberation theology" and its Protestant equivalents -- which preach the latter course -- is simply bad theology. And the Holy Father (who is in general no great friend of capitalism) has proclaimed that too, of course.
To revert to the sociology of the matter, however, the teachings of Jesus have become deeply ingrained in our culture so that they form at least a large part of the ideals that most of us aspire to even if we often fall far short of living up to those ideals. And Leftists simply use that. If the change- and power-seeking Leftist wants to sound persuasive, the easiest way to do so is to place his appeal squarely within the existing ideals of the society. If we still lived in the pagan world of our ancestors as described (say) in "Beowulf", he might instead justify his cries for change in terms of what would lead us towards greater glory and fame. But in neither case could we safely conclude that what he says represents his real aims and values. And we can most certainly not conclude that those who preach compassion etc will therefore also practice it when they have the power to do so.
Conclusion
So it is far from true that it is Christianity which is Leftist. What is true is that the Churches which have LOST their traditional Christian values have become Leftist.
An important result of their replacing traditional Christian faith by Leftist amorality is that the mainstream churches now seem to feel that they have no authority to offer moral guidance of any kind. For instance, rather than oppose or condemn the undoubtedly evil Saddam Hussein (who himself says that from his point of view Hitler was too weak), they are more likely to ask their congregations to "pray for peace"! If such responses were to become common in the population at large, this would surely be a serious erosion of the values that underly Western civilization and perhaps even of the values that underly any civilization. So perhaps we should hope that the decay into irrelevancy of the mainstream churches will continue apace.
Stand To for 21 October, 2013
Push Back with Prayer
0700 at BJ’s Restaurant
Hamilton, Montana
1. Opening - Round the Table
Individual Prayers
2. Morning Psalm: 71
3. Breakfast Reading: Matthew 10:1-23
4. Breakfast is served
5. Breakfast Discussion Topic: Pastor Packet
6. Closing - Round the Table
Individual Prayers
RELIGION AND SOCIALISM / LEFTISM
The history of America's religious left, with its utopian and collectivist
ideals, can be traced back to the Pilgrims, who came to the New World and
attempted to build a “new man” who would create heaven on earth. Plymouth
colony's investors, fearing that the colonists' private greed might consume
profits, played into this tendency by imposing an edict requiring the Pilgrims
to abolish private property and to pool all of their resources. Under this
arrangement, from 1620-23 the Pilgrims at Plymouth lived a desperate existence.
In his book Of Plymouth Plantation, the longtime Plymouth governor
William Bradford emphasized that communism was the principal cause of the
colony's early deprivations:
When Bradford, at that point, changed course and allocated tracts of land to Plymouth's families for their own private use, he found that this move quickly and dramatically changed the colony's fortunes, “ma[king] all hands very industrious.” Concluded Bradford: “The experience … may well evince the vanity and conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make the happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.”
Notwithstanding the lessons of the Pilgrims’s early days, additional waves of religious socialists migrated to North America in the centuries to come, likewise attempting to found their utopias on such cherished principles as communal living, shared possessions, and the abolition of all distinctions between rich and poor. Most of these early Christian socialist societies were monastic rather than evangelistic; their primary concern was with their own salvation rather than with the conversion or salvation of all humanity. They had no desire to create mass movements.
The influence of the American utopian socialists of the early nineteenth-century was blunted by the emergence of the U.S. as a global colossus in the twentieth century, a development supported by organized religion until the social upheavals and reevaluations of the 1960s reawakened that dormant tradition.
The growing influence of leftism and socialism in the contemporary church has taken place in lockstep with the “god is dead” movement of the mid-20th century. As the scholar John J. Ray puts it, “This seems to be very much associated with the fact that there seems to have developed in the Western world in recent decades the curious phenomenon of the post-religious church,” typified by flexible doctrines of universal salvation coupled with a vagueness about what tenets of faith must be considered seminal or authoritative.
A watershed moment in this trend was the publication in 1963 of Honest to God by Church of England bishop John Robinson. Denying the notion that God actually existed as any sort of entity independent of the human imagination, this book identified the Deity simply, and amorphously, as “the ground of our being.” “From that point on,” writes Ray, “the phenomenon of the essentially Atheist Anglican became increasingly widespread.”
Today it is commonplace for Christian churches to offer a facility for worship and fellowship while making few, if any, claims to authority in matters of morality or theological doctrine. But if these cgurches tread lightly in their demands for personal morality, they are bold in offering political advice. Thus they promote, from the pulpit, various blends of doctrinaire leftism – in such forms as environmentalism, feminism, gay liberation, class identity, social justice, and redistribution of wealth. Moreover, church leaders commonly encourage their flock to engage in activism that promotes these leftist ideals.
In pursuit of redistributive social justice, the religious left has transformed Christ's call for private charity into a divine mandate authorizing government officials to take affluent people's resources and give them, in turn, to other people who are deemed more needy. Consequently, the constituents of the religious left have long tended to embrace Marxist and socialist ideals, most notably liberation theology.
Among the most prominent of the organizations that comprise the religious left is the New York City-based National Council of Churches (NCC), which has remained faithful to the legacy of its predecessor, the Communist front-group known as the Federal Council of Churches, which the NCC absorbed in 1950. In the Fifties and Sixties, under cover of charity, the NCC provided financial succor to the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and Poland, funneling money to both through its relief agency, the Church World Service. In the Seventies, the Council gave financial support to Soviet-sponsored incursions into Africa, aiding the terrorist rampages of Communist guerrillas in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, and Angola. And in the Eighties, the NCC made common cause with the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Yet another of the NCC’s faith-based initiatives, promoted passionately to this day, is its support for Communist Cuba.
Pax Christi USA (PCUSA) is also a leader of the religious left in America. Dedicated to creating “a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating, and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence,” PCUSA seeks to “transform” those “structures” of American society – most notably capitalism – that allegedly spawn racism, militarism, economic injustice, and international strife. PCUSA demonstrated its socialist leanings when it endorsed the Earth Charter, a document (written in 2000) that blames capitalism for many of the world's environmental, social, and economic woes.
The Christian evangelical group Sojourners has long denounced American “imperialism” while extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World. In the 1980s, for instance, the Sojourners community actively embraced liberation theology – rallying to the cause of Communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of bringing about revolutionary restructuring of society. Particularly attractive to the ministry’s religious activists was the Sandinista regime that had taken control of Nicaragua in a 1979 revolution.
Witness For Peace, a Christian antiwar group founded by Sojourners, contends, in a spirit consistent with that of its parent group, that regional free trade harms workers because it eliminates “collective ownership.”
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is yet another major constituent of the religious left. As early as the 1930s, this organization refused to publicly criticize the Soviet Union but openly asserted that the foremost threat to world stability was the United States. In the 1970s, John McAuliffe, who then headed AFSC's Indochina program, initially characterized the news of Cambodian massacres under the Communist rule of Pol Pot as an American “misinformation campaign,” and he lauded the new Cambodian regime as “the example of an alternative model of development and social organization.” AFSC also distributed a printed defense of the Khmer Rouge well after the genocide in Cambodia had been exposed. When McAuliffe and AFSC finally recognized the barbarities of Pol Pot's regime, they placed the blame squarely on the United States.
“For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense.”
When Bradford, at that point, changed course and allocated tracts of land to Plymouth's families for their own private use, he found that this move quickly and dramatically changed the colony's fortunes, “ma[king] all hands very industrious.” Concluded Bradford: “The experience … may well evince the vanity and conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make the happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.”
Notwithstanding the lessons of the Pilgrims’s early days, additional waves of religious socialists migrated to North America in the centuries to come, likewise attempting to found their utopias on such cherished principles as communal living, shared possessions, and the abolition of all distinctions between rich and poor. Most of these early Christian socialist societies were monastic rather than evangelistic; their primary concern was with their own salvation rather than with the conversion or salvation of all humanity. They had no desire to create mass movements.
The influence of the American utopian socialists of the early nineteenth-century was blunted by the emergence of the U.S. as a global colossus in the twentieth century, a development supported by organized religion until the social upheavals and reevaluations of the 1960s reawakened that dormant tradition.
The growing influence of leftism and socialism in the contemporary church has taken place in lockstep with the “god is dead” movement of the mid-20th century. As the scholar John J. Ray puts it, “This seems to be very much associated with the fact that there seems to have developed in the Western world in recent decades the curious phenomenon of the post-religious church,” typified by flexible doctrines of universal salvation coupled with a vagueness about what tenets of faith must be considered seminal or authoritative.
A watershed moment in this trend was the publication in 1963 of Honest to God by Church of England bishop John Robinson. Denying the notion that God actually existed as any sort of entity independent of the human imagination, this book identified the Deity simply, and amorphously, as “the ground of our being.” “From that point on,” writes Ray, “the phenomenon of the essentially Atheist Anglican became increasingly widespread.”
Today it is commonplace for Christian churches to offer a facility for worship and fellowship while making few, if any, claims to authority in matters of morality or theological doctrine. But if these cgurches tread lightly in their demands for personal morality, they are bold in offering political advice. Thus they promote, from the pulpit, various blends of doctrinaire leftism – in such forms as environmentalism, feminism, gay liberation, class identity, social justice, and redistribution of wealth. Moreover, church leaders commonly encourage their flock to engage in activism that promotes these leftist ideals.
In pursuit of redistributive social justice, the religious left has transformed Christ's call for private charity into a divine mandate authorizing government officials to take affluent people's resources and give them, in turn, to other people who are deemed more needy. Consequently, the constituents of the religious left have long tended to embrace Marxist and socialist ideals, most notably liberation theology.
Among the most prominent of the organizations that comprise the religious left is the New York City-based National Council of Churches (NCC), which has remained faithful to the legacy of its predecessor, the Communist front-group known as the Federal Council of Churches, which the NCC absorbed in 1950. In the Fifties and Sixties, under cover of charity, the NCC provided financial succor to the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and Poland, funneling money to both through its relief agency, the Church World Service. In the Seventies, the Council gave financial support to Soviet-sponsored incursions into Africa, aiding the terrorist rampages of Communist guerrillas in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, and Angola. And in the Eighties, the NCC made common cause with the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Yet another of the NCC’s faith-based initiatives, promoted passionately to this day, is its support for Communist Cuba.
Pax Christi USA (PCUSA) is also a leader of the religious left in America. Dedicated to creating “a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating, and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence,” PCUSA seeks to “transform” those “structures” of American society – most notably capitalism – that allegedly spawn racism, militarism, economic injustice, and international strife. PCUSA demonstrated its socialist leanings when it endorsed the Earth Charter, a document (written in 2000) that blames capitalism for many of the world's environmental, social, and economic woes.
The Christian evangelical group Sojourners has long denounced American “imperialism” while extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World. In the 1980s, for instance, the Sojourners community actively embraced liberation theology – rallying to the cause of Communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of bringing about revolutionary restructuring of society. Particularly attractive to the ministry’s religious activists was the Sandinista regime that had taken control of Nicaragua in a 1979 revolution.
Witness For Peace, a Christian antiwar group founded by Sojourners, contends, in a spirit consistent with that of its parent group, that regional free trade harms workers because it eliminates “collective ownership.”
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is yet another major constituent of the religious left. As early as the 1930s, this organization refused to publicly criticize the Soviet Union but openly asserted that the foremost threat to world stability was the United States. In the 1970s, John McAuliffe, who then headed AFSC's Indochina program, initially characterized the news of Cambodian massacres under the Communist rule of Pol Pot as an American “misinformation campaign,” and he lauded the new Cambodian regime as “the example of an alternative model of development and social organization.” AFSC also distributed a printed defense of the Khmer Rouge well after the genocide in Cambodia had been exposed. When McAuliffe and AFSC finally recognized the barbarities of Pol Pot's regime, they placed the blame squarely on the United States.
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