Introduction
Well, a very Happy 4th of July to you and yours. I trust you are grilling something tasty, gathering with friends and family, and shooting off fireworks, hopefully at least a few that are a tad bit illegal. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interact with a clip I saw floating around of my friends Joel Webbon and Stephen Wolfe talking about the fact that a constitutional republic really only works for a people who know how to govern themselves. As Benjamin Franklin said, it’s a “Republic – if you can keep it.” The verdict is in, says Joel, and clearly, we haven’t kept it. And, when you don’t have a virtuous people governed by the Holy Spirit, you will get the iron fist of stronger government, rulers, and laws.
Descriptive or Prescriptive?
The question I have is whether the point here is descriptive or prescriptive. It’s certainly true that a morally enslaved people will become a politically enslaved people, sort of like that one bumper sticker: “Gravity: It’s the Law.” You cannot have political liberty apart from spiritual liberty, and sometimes, when your nation is sliding into enslavement, the only choice you have is between an Ahab and a Jehoram. And if Jehoram is a little less evil than his father, and would suppress Baal worship just a little bit, you might cast your vote for that guy because, hey, that’s a little better – maybe he buys you a little bit more time (cf. 2 Kgs. 3). And I suppose there comes a time when your constitutional republic is so corrupt that you defect to the pagan empire, like Jeremiah counseled at the end of the nation of Judah. There may also come a time when famine, war, or persecution drives you into an Egypt of necessity where the slave food happens to be pretty decent. And sometimes Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar converts, and there’s a measure of justice and liberty that comes with that.
But while we still have a little bit of room to breathe, what do we hope for? What do we pray for? What are we working for? Do we actually want the firm-hand of a monarch? Is that what we’re aiming for? Or are we just saying that if we’re not careful, our French Revolution could end up creating a Napoleon? I completely agree with the latter description, but I want to do everything I can to avoid it. And even here, a lot depends upon what we mean by “the firm hand of a monarch.” Do we mean the firm hand of true, biblical righteousness? Do we mean a George Washington striving to establish or re-establish the republic? Do we mean the firm hand of a Moses meekly striving with the slave-mentality of a nation to establish representative judges, due process, and true natural liberty? Or do we mean a “king like the other nations?”
Politics is always a matter of approximating true justice. And sometimes your choice might be between a Saul (who is more like the other nations than we might wish) and more of the tribal chaos of the judges (when there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes). And no doubt there were some in Israel arguing for the necessity of that king given the constant violence of Moses’ failed Israelite republic. And by the time we get to that chopped up concubine, I’d say they had certainly failed to keep that republic. But clearly, while God allowed Israel to anoint a king like the other nations (and the law certainly intimated a king), it was not the best choice in that moment because Israel was rejecting God as their king (1 Sam. 8:7). It could have looked like the best option at that moment. But it wasn’t.
The Patria in Patriotism
It’s certainly true that God may give us what we deserve, which is a globalist regime of Klaus Schwab’s wet dreams, all of us eating bugs in our climate-controlled incubators. And yes, our current constitution is largely a dead letter. But our constitution is dead like my grandfathers are dead. Don’t get me wrong, a written document is in many ways not like a human being, made in the image of God. It does not have a soul that will never die. It will not rise at the resurrection. But what I mean is that what those men wrote and signed and lived out and died for (however haltingly) happened on this soil, in this place, and I am the recipient of that virtue, those blessings, in a similar way to the fact that I am the recipient of the virtues and blessings of Richard Lee Stites and Orville Edmond Sumpter. In other words, there can be no patriotism without a fatherland. “Patria” means fatherland, the land of our fathers, and patriotism is loyalty and love of our fathers’ land.
One of the things I’ve most appreciated about Stephen Wolfe is his insistence on the particularities of a people, a nation. What binds us together is not primarily ideas but shared experiences, places, family, worship, language, convictions, and customs. While I think “ethnicity” is a challenging way to describe all of that (because we’ve been programmed by our current overlords to think of that as largely racial), I understand that complex synthesis of concrete realities to be what he is getting at with the word “ethnos” or “ethnicity.”
But this means that the constitution is part of our ethnos. Representative, constitutional government is part of our ethnicity, our American way of life. And if that is the case, we really have to be careful to distinguish between “the firm hand of strong rulers” as the descriptive judgment of God on a wayward people – almost always in the form of some kind of empire (Nebuchadnezzar, Napoleon) on the one hand, and the “firm hand of strong rulers” as a prescriptive means of salvaging and rebuilding and repenting as a nation, as represented by the likes of Moses, David, Nehemiah and Ezra, George Washington, Davy Crocket, and Wyatt Erp. There really is a world of difference between contemplating a “Protestant Franco” and the ensuing Spanish Civil War and celebrating the Declaration of Independence and the War for Independence. The ethos and (dare I say) ethnicity (in Wolfe’s sense of the word) of the two paths is monumental. I suppose many believe that the “Protestant” adjective can do enough heavy lifting to salvage the image, but that is to slip into the very “universalism” that Wolfe has so helpfully criticized.
Our nation was built largely on a Scotch and Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, rooted in the history of Alfred the Great, the Magna Charta, Scottish independence, the English Civil War, and a great deal more of the same sort of rugged representationalism, limited government, and constitutional checks and balances, resulting in the famous derision of King George, referring to our War for Independence as the “presbyterian revolt,” largely due to the high number of Scottish presbyterians in the American colonies and the long standing tensions between the Scots and the English.
It’s no accident that “presbuteros” means “elder” or “old man.” Presbyterianism is church polity organized around the representative rule of elders: older, wiser men, our fathers in the faith. Again, it’s no accident that the “black-robed regiment” was disdained by the British during the War for Independence. They knew that it was the presbyterian pastors and elders leading the charge for independence, and that for deeply Scottish and Anglo-Saxon Protestant reasons. It has been said that what you win them with is what you win them to. And so the same is true for us politically. The American republic is in shambles, like many of our families and churches. We have become a fatherless people, bastards all. And so we act like it: angry, impulsive, bitter, and wildly insecure, especially on social media. The temptation in a moment like this is to call for strong leaders who will defend us, but that can very easily mean gang leaders, thugs, and personality cults with varying degrees of beneficence. But the need of the moment is fathers. The need of the moment is biblical patriarchy. Faithful fathers are bound by covenants, by oaths of loyalty, to their marriages, children, parents, churches, and nations. Those covenants bind us together in shared experiences, places, people, customs, and obligations. Biblical covenants are the framework of family, church, and state, with their overlapping duties and responsibilities.
Conclusion
A constitutional republic is for a religious, self-governing people, and it is not fit for any other kind of people. Witness America’s various attempts at sharing “democracy” with other nations that do not share those cultural values. But now we are witnessing the same insanity with our open borders policies. America is on a path to the same kind of failed states we have already witnessed, only in reverse, with the foreign cultures streaming in, without any human means or hope of assimilating them.
I do not know if we are Cicero witnessing the crumbling of the American Republic, and some Trumpian Caesar will cross some Rubicon and what appears to be an emerging American Empire will take its place for a few hundred years more, perhaps even with a King Saul of sorts who might seem relatively better than warring tribalism. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And I don’t mean that as some kind of pietistic Jesus-juke. I mean that like Joshua did at the end of his life, with the Mosaic Republic teetering on the edge of the era of the judges.
There is no absolute moral necessity for a constitutional republic over a constitutional monarchy. But love of our particular fathers, love of our fatherland, means a love of our constitutional republic because despite all the rot and filth and weaponization, it is the land where our fathers died. And it is a way of life – an ordered liberty under Christ – for which they lived and died.
As the old patriotic hymn goes:
“Our father’s God to, Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King!”
The cry of the early patriots was “No King but Christ.” And I intend to hold that ground. No King but Christ, not even a Protestant one, if it can be helped. Many factors would play into how one can and should hold the ground of a burned-out constitutional republic, but it strikes me that Davy Crockett holding the Alamo works, whether literally or figuratively.
God could certainly raise up a Constantine, which would be better than we deserve, and three hundred years into a thoroughly pagan empire that was probably the most many Christians could hope for. But if the choice is between a Constantinian regime and a slowly crumbling empire that leaves room for a new medieval Christendom of decentralization and a growth, it is not at all clear to me that we ought to hope for Constantine. I’d rather rebuild our republic in the ruins. I’d rather deal with roving bands of Huns than whatever Diocletian the European Union dredges up.
Happy 4th, y’all.
Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash
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