The Spirit of ’76

By: Steve Huston

 

As statues are toppling like dominoes in a row, we need to recognize that you and I are under those falling ivory towers of bone. An agenda-driven Marxist finger started the push; many well-meaning but unknowing who are the “controlled opposition” have joined in, while conservatives stand idly by watching the melee with proper contempt; and as the final communist tile falls in place, America, her citizens, and those who fled here for a better life will be crushed to a fine powder. The winds of time will blow our dust into an ever-flowing sea of forgetfulness, as America becomes a reproach and a byword among nations. The howling specter of communism seems to be drowning out the cries of “The Spirit of ’76,” who pleads with us to remember.

The Spirit of ’76 boldly calls America to remember The War for Independence and why it was fought, whispering the words of Noah Webster and John Quincy Adams respectively:

“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.” “The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” It says, “Remember, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD…'” (Psalm 33:12)

The Spirit of ’76 pleads with Americans to remember the truths of liberty when it comes to governing. It calls us back to self-governance, bound only by the principles of God, which offers all men true freedom.

“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.” (George Washington) “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (John Adams) It warns that “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” (William Penn)

As to education, the Spirit of ’76 warns, “Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” (James Madison)

The Spirit of ’76 would shout reminders throughout America’s illustrious, yet imperfect, history. It would call us back to the sanity and the only rational response of repentance and returning to God’s law. Here are but a few.

During the dark days of the Civil War, the Spirit of ’76 spoke through Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming April 30, 1863 to be a national day of fasting and prayer. Hear the reminder: “We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

Remember, as former President Theodore Roosevelt, in an address to the Knights of Columbus, reminded Americans that division is a danger. Hear the underlying current of Christ’s words in Luke 11:17 that “every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.” Hear the Spirit of ’76 cry out for unity; hear that call today.

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

We can see this same Spirit in a NYT telephone interview with Ward Connerly, the leading proponent of an initiative measure in California prohibiting affirmative action by the state government, in 1997. It went like this:

Reporter:“What are you?”

Connerly:“I am an American.”

Reporter:“No, no, no! What ARE you?”

Connerly:“Yes, yes, yes! I am an American.”

Reporter:“That is not what I mean. I was told that you are African American. Are you ashamed to be African American?”

Connerly:“No, I am just proud to be an American.” Then he explained that his ancestry included a plethora of ethnicities.

Reporter:“What does that make you?”

Connerly: “That makes me all-American.”

 

To all the above, the Specter of Communism attempts to drown out these reminders.  He prompts us to vice rather than virtue; confuses liberty with licentiousness; and steals the hearts and minds of our citizenry with propaganda, fear, and a removal of Truth.

In the words of Milan Kundera, a Czech writer who went into exile: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Or as Karl Marx said, “Keep people from their history and they are easily controlled.”

If there were room, I’d point to the Specter’s own words from Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and others. I’d point to Truth-tellers who warned against the Communist Specter’s fair sounding and deceptive words, like Whittaker Chambers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others who have lived through the deception and know the truth.

Friends of liberty and defenders of America, let the soft whispers from the Spirit of ’76 become loud clarion calls upon our lips. Let us claim and proclaim our history and heritage—the good, the bad, and the ugly—so that we may learn from it and continue our walk in freedom. Let the Spirit of ’76 flow through your social media posts as you quote from our founding fathers and others; through your interactions with friends and family as you speak truth into their lives; and think in terms of virtue and a Biblical foundation, reminders of who we are and where we have come from.

If we will not be led by the Holy Spirit; if we do not pray for, prepare our hearts for, and move toward repentance; then the answer to Francis Scott Key’s question will be to the negative:

“O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

And Daniel Webster’s warning will go unheeded: “…If an angel should be winged from Heaven, on an errand of mercy to our country, the first accents that would glow on his lips would be, Beware! Be cautious! You have everything to lose; you have nothing to gain. We live under the only government that ever existed which was framed by the unrestrained and deliberate consultations of the people.  Miracles do not cluster.  That which has happened but once in six thousand years cannot be expected to happen often. Such a government, once gone, might leave a void, to be filled, for ages, with revolution and tumult, riot and despotism…”

“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.” Isaiah 1:18-20

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