As we enter the weekend when we celebrate our independence and freedom, there are those who wish to abolish the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and remake our country into a communist utopia. There are reports, for example, that Antifa, an anarchist anti-fascist group, will march on Gettysburg and desecrate Confederate graves. Sounds like fascism to me. This is the same group that has been violently attacking conservatives across the nation. It is essentially the military arm of the left. This is just one example. As we celebrate this weekend with family and friends over a ‘burger or a ‘dog, let us remember the price of our freedom and the role of Christianity in preserving it.
With the immoral and amoral trying to place a death grip on our free society, Christians must stand otherwise freedom will cease to exist. “Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration.”–these are the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who came to America in the 1830s to observe what made the country so great. His “Democracy in America” is considered a historic treasure about the unique success of the United States. Tocqueville wrote that America is free because of its collective Christian religion.
He pointed out that the laws that governed the Plymouth colony were derived from the Hebrew texts. In the later 1600s, even the law of Connecticut stated that man shall not “have or worship any other God, but the Lord God.” He said that Americans “have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously…the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.” Tocqueville believed America was unique in this very way. As we look around the world and see the devastation of modern human trafficking-slavery-it is non-Christian states, such as Islamic nations and others that have no defined connection to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who are perpetrating humans in bondage.
Cotton Mather wrote in 1820, “There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty we are all inferior; ’tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives.” Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” As Christians we must demand and accept no other form of liberty.
