Recovering American Liberty: Volume 1: Rediscovering the Principles of Just Government

By Robert Lowry MD and Dagne Florine PhD

Many Americans today realize that their own government is steadily becoming the greatest danger and threat to their rights, liberties, and future prosperity. In their attempt to right the errant ways of American government, millions of Americans have looked to the Constitution for answers, and yet “what is Constitutional” continues to elude those that we the people elect to political office.

In Recovering American Liberty, the authors note the importance of the Constitution, but present an argument that contemporary Americans have lost sight of the ethical principles that the Constitution was conceived and written in, and ratified only in the light of – those being the self-evident truth principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

Recovering American Liberty explores the Declaration of Independence and each of those self-evident truths. The authors reason that without Americans first becoming a people who once again embrace these principles in the Declaration, then all their efforts to Make America Great Again, will be for not. For, it is only because Americans once honored these principles in their personal lives, that America as a nation, became Great in the first place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480841703

Robert Lowry MD

Robert C. Lowry, MD, grew up working in a small family-owned metal fabrication shop in south central Los Angeles. After high school, he worked as a roughneck in Texas. He earned his medical degree from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He now lives in Boerne, Texas, with his wife and children, and has a small private practice. Dagne Florine, PhD, is a product of small-town America, where she learned the value of hard work during long, hot summers at the Green Giant canning factory. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Minnesota and her doctorate from the Mayo Clinic/University of Minnesota. After working in cancer research as a postdoctoral fellow and in the biotechnology field, she moved to Texas where she currently lives with her family.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Robert Lowry, MD.

Dagne Florine, PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or

by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the

author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture quotations designated (ESV) are taken from The Holy Bible, English

Standard Version. Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division

of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (HCSB) are taken from the Holman

Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003,

2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from

the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations designated (NASB) are taken from the New American

Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973,

1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations designated (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible: New

International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International

Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4168-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4169-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4170-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017902327

Publishing date: 01/02/2020

Archway Publishing rev. date: 08/27/2020

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

FROM SUBJECTS TO CITIZENS (A DIFFERENCE IN WORLDVIEWS)

CHAPTER 2

THE PRINCIPLES OF JUST GOVERNMENT DECLARED: THE SELF-EVIDENT

TRUTHS PROCLAIMED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

CHAPTER 3

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS

CHAPTER 4

TO BE SELF-EVIDENT

CHAPTER 5

THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED

CHAPTER 6

THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL

CHAPTER 7

"THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR

WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS"

CHAPTER 8

"THAT AMONG THESE RIGHTS ARE LIFE, LIBERTY

AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS"

CHAPTER 9

"THAT [IN ORDER] TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS,

GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN …"

CHAPTER 10

"DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE

CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED"

CHAPTER 11

"THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES

DESTRUCTIVE OF THESE ENDS [I.E., OF SECURING THE

CITIZENS’ NATURAL RIGHTS], IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE

PEOPLE TO ALTER OR TO ABOLISH IT."

CHAPTER 12

THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO INSTITUTE THE

GOVERNMENT OF THEIR CHOICE

CHAPTER 13

THE PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO FOUND THEIR GOVERNMENT

"ON SUCH PRINCIPLES…AS TO THEM [WHO ARE INSTITUTING IT

AND AGREEING TO BE GOVERNED BY IT] SHALL SEEM MOST

LIKELY TO EFFECT THEIR SAFETY AND HAPPINESS"

CHAPTER 14

THE PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE THEIR GOVERNMENT

"IN SUCH FORM, AS TO THEM [THOSE WHO ARE INSTITUTING

IT AND AGREEING TO BE GOVERNED BY IT] SHALL SEEM MOST

LIKELY TO EFFECT THEIR SAFETY AND HAPPINESS"

CHAPTER 15

AMERICAN ETHIC AND ETHNICITY

CHAPTER 16

UNDERSTANDING THAT NATURAL RIGHTS ARE

BOTH LIBERTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

CHAPTER 17

NATURAL VERSES CIVIL RIGHTS

CHAPTER 18

WHO IS THE SOVEREIGN?

CHAPTER 19

LAWFUL VERSUS LEGAL (AND UNLAWFUL VERSUS ILLEGAL)

CHAPTER 20

RECOGNIZING THE ETHICS AND PRINCIPLES UPON WHICH

AMERICAN FREEDOM AND LIBERTY RELY (REDISCOVERING

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE)

SUMMARY

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

ENDNOTES

PREFACE

I n 2008, President George Bush famously stated he abandoned free market principles, in order to save the free market. That was his justification for gifting an $800 billion too-big-to fail government rescue, called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), to the big banks and financial institutions. Only a few months later Barack Hussein Obama rose to power on the marketing wave of hope and change. It took him less than a year to slap the nation with an economic stimulus program of his own, and he followed that up with a classic leftist-fascist government take-over of the Healthcare and Auto industries. Again, it was just another whiplashing of an American electorate that had, over the past generation, gradually abandoned their respect for the principles upon which this country was founded.

For years, Americans had been slowing moving away from the ethical principles of their founding culture, and towards being party-loyalists, willing to vote for and defend whatever policies and people their party leaders pressed for. But Obama pressed a little too far. This time, some of the people woke-up to finally smell the swamp rat that DC had long ago become. Out of a realization their government had been hijacked, the Tea Party Movement was born, and not surprisingly the leadership of both major political parties attacked them.

Americans began turning to their Constitution to save them, but as they had for decades been ignoring the principles, and the warnings of their Founders, they failed to realize that their Constitution does not provide the protections they assumed it contained.

What was that warning?

A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy."¹

- Samuel Adams

As more Americans re-familiarized themselves with the Constitution, their frustration with those running the government, but seemingly not abiding by it, continued to grow. As Andrew Napolitano had warned in his 2006 book of the same title, all across America, "The Constitution [was indeed] in Exile."

Enter Mark Levin, author and radio talk show host, who in 2013 published a book titled, The Liberty Amendments. His book noted a then still little-known procedure actually included in the Constitution, called an Article V Convention, where proposals for changes to the Constitution could be made by the people through their status as the states, without having to wait for Congress and the DC swamp to act. In it, Mr. Levin spelled out in detail what some of those proposed changes ought to be while pointing out where he believes the federal government is not acting in proper alignment with the Constitution.

The Liberty Amendments sparked considerable discussion among members of local self-described conservative political groups. But though it was a book which ran through several proposed constitutional amendments, the actual underlying and overarching idea Mr. Levin put forth was that it was not the Constitution that needed amending, but rather it was we the people’s hearts and minds that needed amending. He argued that the American people needed to once again be a people who would properly interpret the Constitution so that it could actually work as was meant.

When I was asked by a local Tea Party group leader to come and give a review of The Liberty Amendments, as I presented the Mr. Levin’s ideas, and we moved into the question-answer period, it quickly became apparent that Mr. Levin was right, none there had but even a modicum of understanding or knowledge of the principles in which the Constitution was itself founded. But nor did Mr. Levin offer in that work, a clear statement of what those principles are. (Perhaps he thought his readers would know.)

I left that meeting and wrote out a short essay on the topic of why Americans can’t resolve the continually worsening corruption of their civil governments, at any level of government, and why Mr. Obama is merely a symptom of a greater cultural disease that had taken hold of the American people at large. The true pathology still needed to be pointed out to Americans - and treated - and resolved. A proper cure for ridding the nation of that disease of heart and mind needed to be formulated, prescribed, and offered in a manner that the average American could understand and see the truth of. From there, the essay began to take on a life of its own, while I struggled to learn the principles myself, the ideas of rights, liberties, and government powers began to take up all my extra time. These principles became the topic of discussions at the family dinner table most evenings. Eventually, the essay was complete, and it was suggested I let others take a look at it.

With that new goal in mind, I sought out the assistance of Dagne Florine, a fellow Tea Party patriot who was likewise questioning the transformation of American culture and looking for answers. Neither of us being professional writers, and both of us having day jobs, it took a few years to develop that initial essay into what is now present. In developing the ideas of that little essay into a work ready for the public eye, I have since discovered it is as Winston Churchill once said of writing books:

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.²

What are we respectfully submitting to our fellow American citizens in this work? We are presenting a number of ideas that prior to the present generation, most all Americans grew up to know, understand and generally respect, without having to read about these principles as adults. They knew them because they were brought-up in an American society that operated by them. America’s institutions operated by these principles, American children were taught them in their schools, and they were generally honored and respected by the adults across America, including the leaders of the institutions of the culture.

For the most part, Americans tried to live by this set of well-recognized and accepted ethical principles in their daily lives – outside of government. The result of we the people respecting those principles, was the development of a nation and culture which continued to work its way towards better reflecting those principles. When those principles were respected, we the people required little civil government involvement in their daily lives.

Today, however, this present generation clearly does not know these principles. The people leading America’s institutions do not example them (and generally act in opposition to them), and students are not taught them. In the process of these principles being wiped from the culture, so too has the perceived need of civil government grown. Accordingly, the size and authority of all levels of civil government in America has grown to where we the people now think it is the role and just purpose of government to save the people from themselves.

Not surprisingly, with that new attitude, so too have those seeking to rule over the people, been more than willing to step up to the plate and become the political rulers the people have been foolishly asking for. In so doing, so too has this new generation of political activists and their political leaders been able to use those same unjust powers of civil government against their political enemies (including: we the people), and cause the American government at all levels to become an even greater oppressor of the people today, than was the king’s government in the days of the Founding generation.

An entire generation of Americans has now arrived at high school and college with a near-blank slate for a worldview – ready to be indoctrinated into the official religion of American academia – Humanistic Democratic Socialism. One can switch the order of the words, or substitute in the terms secular, or progressive or atheism, etc., but it is all little else than different denominations of the same religious faith of Humanist-Materialism. Obama is a classic student of such false religious training, and America’s colleges are producing thousands more each year.

As for their understanding of the Constitution – the majority have no idea of what is actually in the Constitution. Should they come to be told a line or two out of the Constitution, they fail to realize that the Constitution is but of little use to the cause of justice if not understood in the light of the worldview and ethical principles it is itself anchored in and birthed out of. Having learned only secular-based morals-of-the-week, unanchored to any transcendent ethics, an entire generation has come into adulthood unequipped to even consider that the Constitution might be nothing more than a tool or instrument of force, that those in government can either use to work for what is just, or for what is unjust…depending upon how their worldview sees (interprets) the Constitution.

The Constitution – grand a document as it is – is not what led America to become the freest society man has ever developed. Only through the people’s individual and personal respect for the ethical principles upon which the Constitution is itself based, were individual liberty and self-reliance honored, a just government system developed and wide-spread economic prosperity attainable.

We the people have become a society that is ignorant of the ethical principles Samuel Adams was referencing in the above quote. And it should surprise no one that America has slowly become that society Adams warned it would become if those principles were to ever dissolve from the hearts of the people. Having now abandoned those principles, Americans cannot govern themselves, and with that, they have allowed to developed within their culture, an entire class of people to rule over them – the politicians, the academics, the bureaucrats, the community organizers – the experts – all being the new priests of the culture.

Americans now look to their government to make them feel safe rather than be free, to feel assured rather than know the truth, to accept whatever rules are promulgated rather than respect (or even think about) and act in accordance to what is truly just, and to accept whatever their party leaders claim rather than to individually seek the truth. The majority would rather be subjects to a government that takes care of them, than be free citizens of a society which operates a government that respects all as equal under the law. America has become the culture and government their forefathers fought and died to escape from and remain free of.

Though a growing number of Americans are waking up to the fact that America, as a culture, is falling apart, we the people (certainly as evidenced by their voting patterns - the majority of those who vote in the major cities anyway) have no earthly idea of why this is so, or that there might even be an underlying cultural disease as its source. Accordingly, when they see injustice, they grasp at straws and call for hope and change, but have a worldview incapable of showing them where they truly are or where they need to turn to find the truth, and not just continue to gather for themselves people who will give them the answers they want to hear. They have no idea where, or to Whom, to turn even to find these principles, let alone to actually learn them and live by them.

In 2008, President Bush stated he was going to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market. Obama took that vacancy of intellect and principles and pressed hard to instill into America a fundamental transform[ation].³ He attempted to rule America by a set of principles that are abhorrent to true justice, and deny the very truth of we the people’s natural rights. To those who embrace leftist ideals, there is no limit to just government powers - that is until those powers are turned about and aimed at themselves. For those on the right, there remains an idea (as if a legend) about limited government powers, but they fail to ever appreciate the true limited just purpose of government, and so fall for embracing policies that are abhorrent to justice as well.

Individual liberty was severely curtailed during the Bush-II years. Obama took those oppressions and doubled-down on them, bringing only more internal domestic strife and tensions, and economic stagnation. Obama policies instilled into many of the people’s hearts a sense of divisiveness, racism, economic class discord, and of economic entitlement – of being owed a portion of their neighbor’s labor and property. With his secular religious zeal, he single-handedly brought back into American culture, the ideology of judging people by their sex or skin color and not because of their individual character.

The ideas of gratefulness, and respecting one’s neighbors and the true God-given rights of all people was out the door with Obama’s hoped for hope and change and its realized ruinous transformation of American culture. When finally, enough Americans woke up out of the spell that Obama’s change was to embrace fascism and an ever-growing government that denied the people’s most basic rights, in 2016, the majority looked to Mr. Trump for a different change – a change looking to Make America Great Again.

The problem with the people’s new hope though, was that although a majority had wakened to reject the fascism of the Democrat Party, near just as many were still wanting to cling to the hope and change of relying on the civil government for their safety, for their jobs, for their cheese, for bail-outs, for their everything. An entire generation has now come to adulthood knowing nothing of their true liberties, and the proper limited nature of just government being at the core of the culture’s overall economic prosperity. Too many of we the people believe that economic prosperity and the easy life simply come through and by the government – a government they trust to feed them, but do not believe should force them to do anything to have that prosperity come about. In other words, the majority of we the people no longer know or hold in their own individual hearts the worldview and the ethical principles that will allow them to actually Make America Great Again.

Americans are not even asking the questions that will provide them with the truth - the answers that, if embraced, lead to the prosperity and domestic tranquility they pine for. They have been taught instead to press for equality of outcome and not equality of liberty; to call for legalism and in inequality of how the government rules over the people, instead of for equality under the law and in having their true rights secured by government; to demand the government keep them physically safe from all that nature can potentially throw at mankind, instead of securing the people’s individual liberties so that each can be best free to secure his own liberties, and through those liberties be most likely to have his or her rights and physical safety truly secured.

Americans are clearly exampling a worldview that no longer knows, let alone trusts in their own individual God-given rights and abilities, but relies on being told by their betters in government what to do, when to go outside, when to hide in fear, how to eat, who even to admire, and all by relying on a government is no longer understood to rightly be we the people. Americans have fallen for the marketing of a hope and change to an alternate worldview that is leading them into becoming a self-destructive people, while rejecting, and now nearly fully ignorant of the founding worldview that led their forebears to become the most free, prosperous and secure nation in human history.

What is that founding American worldview that led to America’s unique greatness?

What are the foundational principles of just government that exist within that worldview?

Where (or better from Whom) do these natural rights come from?

What is that prescription Americans need to regain control over their government once again and solve the social issues that continue to develop and plague the society despite decades of government expense to end them?

These are the questions that are not being asked, but it is the answer to these questions we are attempting to present. The answers come by asking not how to solve the symptoms of our cultural troubles, but to actually look for the underlying cause of the trouble and resolve those issues. The answers come by first realizing that the ethical principles that led America down the road to greatness in the past are axiomatic; they remain true today and if embraced again, can still lead America into greatness in the future. The answers come by first realizing that the ethical principles are the key, but that they are not principles we humans invent…they are what we discover them to be…they are what we discover the truth to be, regardless of what we may want the truth to be. The answer is in first seeking The Truth. And until Americans once again seek to learn of The Truth, and in that truth rediscover what these particular ethical principles are, we the people will continue to suffer the consequences of our alternative false beliefs and foolish efforts.

What are these principles? you might ask.

What is that Truth?

… That is exactly our point.

And that is where our journey of Recovering American Liberty starts…

…Rediscovering the Principles of Just Government

Robert C. Lowry

Boerne, Texas

P.S. Throughout this work there are references to Americans, conservatives and liberals. With regard to Americans, it is generally used in a sense of referring to the vast majority of Americans and not in how actually every single American, or any particular individual thinks or functions. With regard to conservatives and liberals, these terms have had many different meanings over the years with respect to what political policies and ethical principles they may be connoting, referring to or supporting. Likewise have the terms secular and humanism morphed over the past century or so from theistic ideologies to faiths that today reject theism. Today they continue to have many potential meanings or connotations that are far and away from their traditional meaning of years long gone. Accordingly, in this work, we have generally avoided using the terms unless to use them in their most pedestrian understanding of today. Thus, in this work, unless otherwise mentioned, these terms are used in their presently understood meaning by the general public (i.e.: a liberal = a socialist, leftist, or progressive; a conservative = anybody the socialists don’t like, and anyone who doesn’t want to be known as a liberal despite whatever political policies he or she may actually support – specifically, not a classical liberal).

INTRODUCTION

When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

—Psalm 11:3 (HCSB)

S upreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said in an interview on Al Hayat television, I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. ⁴ When I heard this I was flabbergasted! Here was a United States Supreme Court Justice publicly pronouncing to all the world that she doesn’t even believe in the legitimacy of the Constitution she swore to uphold and is supposed to measure the legitimacy of other American laws and actions of government agents and agencies by. It was not surprising President Bush would think nothing of it, and would likely even approve of her comments, but one would have thought there were enough truth-loving Americans in Congress still, that someone in the House or Senate would address the issue and move to have Justice Ginsberg impeached and removed for cause, from The Court. But of course, nothing was done…

…the American citizenry was too busy to take notice, too ignorant of their own liberties, and too unaware of the gravity of Ginsberg’s admissions to see it as a warning…a death knell of a society.

Justice Ginsberg went on in that same interview to recommend to her audience that they look to the South African Constitution as a worthwhile model – a constitution which denounces racism in one sentence and then legalizes and institutionalizes it in the next; a constitution which claims in one sentence that certain human right exists, but in the next sentence directly states otherwise and that the state (the government) can deny the existence of those rights if and whenever those in government so choose.⁵ It is a constitution that secures no individual rights whatsoever, denies the idea of all being created equal, and lacks any anchoring to any true basic transcendent inalienable rights.

For the next three days, not one person I had asked, who had heard the interview (which were few), thought it much of anything to be concerned about.

After much investigation of what Americans know of and think of their natural rights, I began to realize that the only reasonable conclusion for the cause of America’s growing cultural self-destruction is not that of an actual rejection of America’s founding principles at all, but rather it is that the vast majority of we the people of the present American generation have never even actually been taught them.

How can it be said the citizens have rejected them, if the citizens have never been taught of them in the first place?

I began to realize that all the political efforts to Make America Great Again would be for not, if the people have no idea what actually made America great in the first place. Good political intentions are not enough. As is said, the road to hell is paved by good intentions. Without a deep understanding of the principles (including the principles of people’s natural rights), any effort to Recover American Liberty will be a fruitless waste of energy and time. If one wants to live in liberty, one must first understand liberty and respect that liberty in all others.

A new great awakening – a rediscovery of the principles of civil society and just government, and of the only worldview in which those principles come to exist, is the needed prescription for any reasonable hope of Making America Great Again, and of moving her towards a more just and still greater future. Recovering American Liberty aims to help bring about that rediscovery.

Today, Americans face a daunting number of social dilemmas and difficulties that weave through every aspect of the culture and society. Arguably, all those difficulties have come as a direct result of years of Americans compromising their principles away, while first tolerating, and then embracing other materialistic moral principles that are anathema to the true liberties of the natural rights of we the people - of all people.

Having compromised so long, and now being ignorant of their own original cultural principles, Americans today lack a universally accepted sense of ethics, and many have no sense of ethics at all, relying instead on transient group-morals-de-jour, unanchored to any set of transcendent ethical principles to which all the citizens subscribe. This lack of we the people holding to a common transcendent ethos, but now embracing the idea of group morals being what defines the ethic for each sub-group of citizens, has been leading we the people into taking political positions and making electoral choices that lead to the legal (but not lawful) government oppression and violations of their own natural rights – rights they often still claim to have, but clearly do not understand the true nature of, or what it is they are actually claiming.

In this re-introduction of we the people to the ethical principles upon which American culture is founded, the first chapters point out the worldview of the Founders. They describe the political realities of the day and how their worldview came to develop and move in some ways away from that of their European cousins. These first chapters describe what led the Founders to realize they were justified in rising up and fighting to be independent of British rule. The next several chapters present each of the principles in the order in which they are presented in the Declaration of Independence. As the process moves forward, these principles are shown to be a part of the very essence of human nature itself, and how only when each is respected, understood and honored by the people individually, can a community of people have any realistic hope of establishing for themselves a just society…a Great Society.

In the course of describing these principles, there will be presented what may seem to some to be strawman arguments made for one idea or another, but rest assured these are all legitimate arguments we (the authors) have been confronted with over the past several years, by various and very real people. The point for not naming the actual individual(s) who posited the argument is to have the reader consider the validity and truth of the idea or principle being proposed, and not be prejudiced by who may have said it and supports it. These ideas should live or die on their own merit, not by who claimed them to be right or wrong, just or unjust.

Once the principles are presented, the remaining chapters focus on how all these principles act as the basis for the culture itself so as to present the case of how civil government in America would operate if it were to do so by a people who honor these principles. The attempt in these latter chapters is to show how knowing these ethical principles, and holding the worldview in which they come to be realized and understood, is a requirement upon each and every citizen if we the people are to have any reasonable expectation of the culture’s institutions actually respecting and securing those rights Americans claim to have been endowed.

The various individual principles will continually be brought back into the conversation as the chapter topics move to add another block to the foundation of ideas each of these principles exist as in the American cultural heritage. In this repetitive manner of presentation, each of these important ideas is allowed to be seen in how each works in relation to the next, and how the broader sense of liberty exists in the truly unique American culture and ethnicity.

The thesis is this: Unless each and every American is going to hold these principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence as axioms and truly sacrosanct in his own heart first…i.e. to be able to say once again that we hold these truths to be self-evident, it is completely senseless to believe that American society will operate in such a manner that only comes from a people who do. And it is quite clear today, that not only do a vast percentage of Americans not honor these principles, they do not even know them. If Americans wish to Make America Great Again, they will have to first realize what it was that made America great in the first place…

CHAPTER 1

FROM SUBJECTS TO CITIZENS

(A DIFFERENCE IN WORLDVIEWS)

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge;

it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

— John Locke

T he Americans living in 1776 did not just go to bed one day as willing subjects to a human king thousands of miles away, and awake the next morning holding a new worldview that told them they had equal rights to that of any king. For centuries, the idea of a divine right of kings had been a mainstay of western culture and political thought. In one form or another ‘inequality’ of the rights of persons was the basis for the legal systems throughout most the world and of human history in general. With the Christian Reformation of the 1500’s that idea began to breakdown and the idea of all people possessing equal rights to their own lives and actions began to make headway in European society. Incorporating the ideas of equality and of individual liberty into the legal systems of the kingdoms of Europe was not a smooth transition.

Resistance, by those in power, to this growing acceptance of universal liberty (and against tradition), led to great social strife. It was in great part the cause of the British Civil War, the movement of so many Europeans to the New World, and much of the general cultural unrest in the west - even to this day. By 1776, the idea of equal rights was still more so an academic idea and far and away from being made the legal basis of any nation’s civil government. Most people still considered themselves subjects to the monarchs and rulers who controlled the kingdoms of the world. The change in the general American worldview away from being subjects and towards being truly sovereign citizens of their own communities took years to develop and required that the people first come to realize the truth of their own natural rights. They had to first discover and embrace the idea of individual (and equal) liberty on their own.

This idea of individual liberty was not an invention of the Founding Fathers or the people of their generation even, but was an idea that existed in the foundations of their religious faith that had its own roots extending centuries back into history. Before the Americans could even consider it possible to seek their political independence from Britain, they had to first come to understand and embrace the true nature of their natural rights, and also eject from their worldview the long-held dogma that inequality of persons was God’s ordained order of the world – an idea that almost every culture in the world today may officially publicly claim to reject, but that by their actions and laws, actually continue to embrace.

Despite the fact that a few of the Reformation philosophers in the 1500’s had begun pointing out that the Judeo-Christian faith actually presents and teaches the ideas of equality and liberty in general, the official church leaders throughout Europe generally continued to promote and press into the culture the idea of an official God-ordained inequality of persons. The American revolution of 1776, therefore, was as much a universal continuation of the Reformation and its cultural pressure upon the hierarchy of the church and the civil leaders, as it was a particular fight for American liberty. It was a revolution in western civil politics claiming its roots in not only early Greek and Roman concepts of government, but of the early historical Judeo-Christian worldview as well.

Samuel Adams once declared, The American Revolution did not start on the battlefields of Lexington and Concord.⁶ Indeed, the physical war may have officially started in those fields, but Adams realized the ideological revolution started decades earlier in the hearts and minds of the colonists in America. As Samuel Adams had so keenly noted, before the Americans even considered taking up arms to fight for their natural rights and the liberties thereof, they had to first come to learn of their natural rights. Once having learned of their natural rights, they had to develop a love for those rights and too, a respect that those rights exist equally in each and every person. They needed to develop a worldview in which existed a desire to live by them so much so that they would be willing to risk dying for them, even if in so doing, it would only mean helping secure those rights for others. Certainly, only a people who believe in the existence of their own immortal souls and of a life beyond the physical world of this present earthly existence, could possibly think in such a manner as to be willing to risk their physical lives in such a way for posterity. Perhaps Patrick Henry relayed the sentiment of this American form of Judeo-Christian worldview best, when in 1775, he exclaimed at the end of a speech to his fellow Virginians considering the question of going to war against Britain:

…Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!⁷

The Founders who signed the Declaration of Independence did not invent the idea that all should be equal under the law. Many of those libertarian ideas that the colonists were embracing in 1776, were brought to public light by the Christian Enlightenment philosophers a century or so prior - long before the start of the American Revolutionary War. That wave of libertarian political writings hatched out of the Reformation also helped usher in the Great Awakening of the mid-1700’s in the colonies. Increasingly more and more colonists were beginning to accept in their own minds the view that the traditions of an official government with its official church and the king-subject relationship were not in line with their faith and understanding of truth. More and more they were beginning to see that this way of civil organization was oppressive to the liberties God gave each of them as natural human rights. They were awakening to the fact that the idea of a human king reigning over the people sat counter to the truth of their Christian faith. By 1776, common people in America (and in many of the Protestant churches in Europe) had developed a tradition of actually reading their Bibles themselves and were not simply relying on what their too often otherwise politically motivated church leaders told them it said.

The libertarian ideas from the Reformation in the Christian Church spread into how westerners looked at civil government in general, but in America, the social, legal and physical situation was such that these libertarian ideas could more easily be expressed in public life and brought into the official civil public interactions of the people, than in the communities back in Europe. In America, the presumed righteousness of the king’s position in civil government was not only being called into question, but his authority in real terms was waning as the self-directed political power of the colonial communities was growing, and the various European states were in a time of almost constant conflict such that the elites of the European societies simply could not also attend so closely to the political matters in the colonies.

As the Americans politically moved to have their communities run more in line with these new ethical principles they had discovered and were embracing, the king and Parliament continued to deny colonists’ calls for political and social reform. Indeed, they responded by pressing ever-harder to force the Americans to submit to the crown’s claimed privileges and authority over the people (ex: the Intolerable Acts). The inevitable outcome was that more and more Americans began seeking freedom from that ever-tightening political grip and oppression being pushed upon them from London. When the British then took military action against the Americans in Boston in 1775, this only served to push more Americans to embrace the idea of standing up and fighting to become free of their subjection to the king and Parliament. The Americans would be subjects to a human king no longer, but be equal citizens by the equal rights given them by God, and in that ideology, aim to set their communities under the authority of their own God-given rights, and operating in accordance to the ethical principles of their reformed Judeo-Christian worldview.

With armed revolution already underway in the colonies in 1775, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January of 1776, put the question directly to the people of the reasonableness and logic of the traditional monarchial systems of civil government. Arguably, had that question been posed to a people who had no sense of their own natural equal rights and holding instead a worldview that did not question the validity of the existence of a king-subject ideology, that book might have simply sat at the printer’s shelves and never been read but by a few curious minds. But the Americans were primed to hear this question and think hard on it. The release of Common Sense into the public could not have been timed better for fanning the growing fervor and sense of liberty in the people against the feudal ways of the British government – but only because their mindset had been primed to acknowledge that idea by first learning of their true liberty in their Bibles and being the products of a Reformation running through the Church for the previous 200 years.

Those two works (the Bible and Common Sense) were perhaps the most well-read writings of the day across western society – not just the colonies. As noted in a letter Paine wrote to Henry Laurens in 1779, (former President of Congress), Common Sense had over 150,000 copies published by the middle of 1776.⁸ This may not seem like a significant number today, but to appreciate its popularity one must consider that in 1776, the estimated population of the entire United States was 2.5 million.⁹ To have 150,000 copies of a work published at that time would be similar to the market penetration the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings works have met with today.

If the Americans were going to have any hope of living in a society that respected these natural equal rights and establish a government that treated its citizens as equal under the law, they could not just take these newer ideas into their worldview without also ejecting from their worldview (and expelling from their social orderings) any portion of their former worldview philosophy that had them believing they were rightfully subjects to a human king, and unequal under the laws of the civil government. In other words, before the Americans had any hope of developing and living by this new worldview of equal natural rights and liberty, they were going to have to not just embrace the new, but they would need to eject from the official orderings of their society, all that was inconsistent and contrary to that truth they now were beginning to see as self-evident. Ridding their own worldviews and the overall society of all those inconsistencies between the political systems of the past and the liberties they were now claiming, proved however, to be more of a challenge than even a single revolution could manage. Nevertheless, as the summer of 1776 came to pass, the Americans were now fully-committed to that first step – and those in Great Britain who did not see the same ideology, were just as ready to deny the Americans that liberty.

The Americans won their independence and threw-off being subjects of the British monarchs, only because they were willing to fight for their God-given liberty.

Ever since the Americans declared and won their political independence, there have been many nations and peoples who have tried to incorporate the idea of equality and liberty into their own official social contracts and constitutions, but none have managed to actually replicate or improve on the American form - with respect to the level of personal liberty Americans once achieved. This is so because, although many other people have clearly been drawn to the idea of equality and the sound of liberty, when it comes down to it, the ethical basis in the various worldviews through which their own cultures exist, always sit in contradiction to, and in contrast with, the ethical basis by which the American ideas of liberty and equality came to be known. In some worldviews for example (especially those of secular humanism and socialism), the terms of equality and liberty hold completely different meanings than what these terms meant in the Christian-based worldview held by those of the founding generation. And as more Americans are drifting philosophically away from America’s founding worldview (and towards secular humanism and socialism), so too are the leftist government officials they vote for running their governments in manners that lead to constantly more restrictions upon their true liberties…and not even equally so!

Equality in the mind of the American colonist

Equality for the Founders, was an idea that meant primarily, how one’s heart and soul existed in relationship with his fellow man under the authority of God. This ideology saw God’s Laws (as understood in the Christian faith) as primary, and human laws needing to be in alignment with those laws of God. Equality meant that everyone was equally under those laws of God. Equality in the humanist worldview is a claim of an equality of shared material wealth – even if that means an inequality of the law over the people so as to unequally force that equality of material property into being. That this generally (or actually always) results in only an equality of the misery and toil (for those who live under the still privileged leaders of such socialist civil governments – for example: North Korea, China, Cuba, Iran, …and the latest example: Venezuela) continues to this day to be a glaring fact that is completely ignored by those who hold those alternate worldviews.

The one significant but ignored-to-this-day reason why no other nation of people has been able to match what the American founding generation was able to do in their claim of equal rights and liberty, and their posterity to further advance over the next two hundred years, is that no other nation of people has held to the same worldview as the Americans (once held) when they were a free people. The difference is in the ethics the people of any society holds in their own worldview, in contrast to that of the Americans up until around the 1960’s – the time when the American worldview began to shift away from the principles and towards secular ideas of the law. Indeed, it is this difference in worldview beliefs that brings about and sits as the driving force of so much social consternation in the American society today, and why the general citizenry has been unable to regain the respect of their rights and liberties from their government and its now well-ensconced political class.

In every generation since the American Revolution, some individuals around the world have certainly held that same founding American style worldview, but no other nation of people has actually ever broadly embraced it or brought it to bear in their own culture and society. The people of some cultures hold similar worldview positions to that founding American ideal, of course, but none of them actually coincide that closely with the ethical principles the American’s originally claimed, so as to have ever allowed their people to fully experienced that same sense of individual liberty Americans once knew. And though Americans still presently have those ethical principles as the official basis of the equality and natural rights of their own society, those principles are essentially all but completely unknown by Americans today and ignored in their law-making activities and their law-enforcement efforts…and yet the American people wonder why their own society is falling apart from within…they don’t know the philosophical and ethical basis of the very rights they claim to have, and want the government to respect, protect and operate in accordance to.

A common theme in the constitutions of other nations that have come into being since the founding of the United States is a claim of so-called human rights. The problem with these other constitutions, however, is that the words are where the similarity stops, for they fail in their laws and legal systems to appreciate the most paramount point of these rights – where the idea of those equal human rights come from. The founding Americans claimed and acknowledged that these rights come from the Creator – not the government; not man. By this ideology, the Americans did not invent these rights and wish or vote them into existence. For all the rest of the world, those grand constitutions and claims of human rights they make, all state that the people’s natural rights come from the power and election of the people granting them to each other through the government, and not via some transcendent authority above man. Subsequently, these other nations establish governments in accordance to a humanity-as-god worldview and end up with governments that, no matter what their constitutions may claim of the people’s rights and authority, always rule over the people, and claim a right to ignore, rescind and declare the citizens’ rights null and void at any time the leaders believe it necessary to protect not individual liberty, but the state itself. In other words, the individual persons of such societies are not actually appreciated any true natural rights at all, but merely man-declared (and eventually always undeclared) civil rights!

Unfortunately, many Americans today also believe such a human-invented basis of rights to be accurate and true – that the people not only establish by vote of the majority, what their own human rights shall be in that society, but they invent what those rights are, and ordain themselves with them. However, if the people’s natural rights come into existence by human declaration (and not some transcendent author), then so too can those supposedly natural rights be just as easily voted to no longer exist by the people of those societies. Or worse yet (and is more often the case) that power is left in the hands of the few who manage to figure out how to position themselves to rule over such a people who deny altogether the transcendent nature of true natural human rights.

In societies where the people are believed to have the power to invent their rights into existence, so too by that same worldview, do they believe they have the right to deny those rights just as easily and quickly as they voted to grant themselves those rights in the first place. Indeed, in many of the constitutions of other nations of today (two such examples will be presented in a later chapter) there are claims made of exactly that – that the people’s supposed human rights shall be ignored in certain situations or whenever the government decides that it would be inconvenient for those running the government to have to respect those rights. Those constitutions are a farce when it comes to respecting the true nature of natural individual rights (as the Americans once claimed), but those systems are what the people of those nations chose to believe in and live under.

In the founding American worldview (though it may seem most all Americans today no longer hold to that same worldview, or even think about it), the people’s natural rights do not come from any person or document or even the people, but from God. Only because they come from God (and not man), do natural rights exist in such a manner that they are not of the nature so as to be voted out of existence by man – for they are not under man’s authority, but God’s. Only by these natural rights being transcendent, are these rights of such nature that they cannot be justly voted away even by a majority of the electorate, or all of Congress. This transcendent nature of people’s natural human rights is the key to true liberty, and is what once made America different from all the rest of the nations of the world – and great. But should we the people no longer hold to that worldview in which this true God-endowed nature of natural individual rights is respected, then we the people will not press for government forms that hold them sacrosanct either.

If, therefore, President Trump seeks to lead Americans into Make[ing] America Great Again, he (just like the rest of we the people) will need to understand and honor these ethical principles in which the American basis of liberty and natural rights come to be discovered and known in the first place. All the attempts to do it through any other route, or by any other worldview, are efforts that will only lead to more cultural problems, and further away from true liberty. Thus, government efforts to make all Americans economically more equal, but that ignore the true natural rights through which true equality (under the law) leads to the best most potentially fruitful economic opportunities for all, may make America economically strong again, but they will not (for they cannot) make her Great again, and will only act to continue to destroy her from within and eventually lead to all being equal - that is equally psychologically miserable and equally economically poor. Only being a people who are virtuous in the light of the founding principles, will Make America [truly] Great Again.

The American version of natural rights is unique in world history with respect to actually bringing these values into the operations of the civil government of an entire nation of people. The ancient republics did not operate by this worldview, which holds the ideology of a transcendent and equal set of natural rights existing in all people. In ancient Greece, early Rome, and a few other short-lived republics from history, for example, though some of the people were considered equal as citizens, the fact remains that only a small percentage of the people in those societies were treated as equals to those governing the societies. Few had any true say in the affairs of government, and fewer still had any truly respected equal rights. Even in the democracies of the ancient Greek city-states the reality was that perhaps only 10-20 percent of the people were even actually of the citizen class. The majority living under those governments and laws had no say and no respected right of self-government or direct participation in the civil government at all—except to be subject to the decisions of the ruling class.¹⁰ In fact, in ancient Greece and Rome, even the status of citizen was stratified into various levels of citizenship, with various levels of respected rights.¹¹

By this all-being-equal-under-God’s ordinances American understanding of human rights, so too was the idea of citizenship different among Americans verses their European cousins. In their uniquely American worldview of their natural rights, Americans were also able to see the truth of the other principles of just government, and in that light they gradually and persistently pressed against even their own traditions that were not in line with those principles. That which ran counter to the liberties and equalities they claimed all humans have been given, continually caused for stress in the society and that stress gradually worked its way into making for change towards the truth. As such, over the first several decades after her founding, American society was able to gradually continue to move further and further away from official legal social stratification of her European beginnings, and ever-towards a true sense of equality of persons and of natural rights not just in her own citizens, but in all people. Thus, as Adams remarked, the philosophical revolution did not begin with the Revolutionary War, nor was it fully instilled at the end of the war, but the the revolution (the continued transition in the hearts and minds of we the people) gradually continued to be pressed into civil affairs and operations of the overall society over time.

(The Americans first had to realize they were on a cultural road that was based and operated in a manner that was not in line with the truth of their natural God-given liberties. That was the first revolution Adams mentioned took place in America. Once that first revolution took place (in their hearts and minds), the Americans had to then fight a physical war so as to gain the power to actuate and affect their new worldview of natural rights into their culture and its government. This meant that once the physical war was over, there was still work to be done. Winning the physical war would not be what made everything in American society just. They were just now culturally turned in the right direction. The Americans [and their posterity] would now still have to press their own hearts, and their communal ship of state, constantly towards those truth principles they could now see on the horizon and were now culturally aimed towards. To deride the Founders now, for not correcting all that was amiss in their day, is to completely fail to respect the gigantic cultural shift in human freedom and liberty they brought about for all mankind. It would be tantamount to claiming the Wright brothers works and efforts to be ignorant and foolish for not being able to make the Space Shuttle)

In 1783, when the American Revolutionary War officially ended, there came now the task of inserting those grand claims into the actual workings of the American civil government, and the overarching social order. However, there were a few ideas in the traditional European worldview that, though in error, still had yet to be universally recognized in all the states as false. Several of those old traditional ideas needed to be done away with in order to bring the new American society fully in line with the worldview and principles they claimed. Though it took time to achieve, that recognition could only have come by the fact of the first principles being recognized, honored, fought for, and the physical war actually executed and won by a generation that was willing to risk their lives to gain the chance of taking human history and pushing it a huge step forward towards liberty…a liberty many of them would never get the chance to actually witness.

Only by this newly rediscovered set of ethical principles was America (now as an independent people) able to recognize her own false beliefs and traditions and gradually rid herself of many (not all – even still) of the trappings of the former worldview ways of not just western European culture, but of trappings of humanity and human governments throughout all human history and of most the entire world still today. As subsequent generations of Americans held to these principles and the idea of God-given equal natural individual rights, so too were they able to abolish slavery, open up the voting booths to women, and gradually move ever-forward towards true equality under the law irrespective of sex, race or other physical characteristics.

Additionally, and what is quite important in understanding the weight of the true unique blessing their willing sacrifice has meant to people the world over, is that only because the colonists were willing to fight and die for what they believed in, did the once colonists and subjects of the king become free citizens of the free and independent American states. Had they merely thought and talked about the ethic, or elected to politically compromise with those of an alternate belief, and then, by that compromise, not been willing to organize and fight (and be truly willing to die) for attaining that goal, nothing would have changed for them other than increased frustration with the system they would have remained under. By the depth of their faith and willingness to act and risk losing everything of physical value including their physical lives, they were able to gain something of much greater value than all their worldly possessions—namely, the freedom and respect of their natural rights – liberty. Only through their willingness to risk their physical property and lives for the sake of their spiritually-based ethical beliefs (yes, their spiritual religious-based beliefs) were they able to gain the opportunity and ability to live enjoying both.

The Ethic and Worldview of the American Colonists in 1776; the Ethic Presented in the Declaration of Independence

The earliest American colonists held to a set of ethical principles very similar to that of the general populace of the European societies from which they had fled in the 1600s. Theirs was not a significant break in form from the overall worldview of the general European of the day. They were not