Thomas Jefferson advised – “In matters of style, swim with the current; In matters of principle, stand like a rock.” Barrack Obama’s entire presidential campaign is based on the promise of “change we can believe in”. This election will determine who the “we” is in that proposition and what we believe as a nation. As we watch crowds of people get swept up in excited chants of “change,” it is well to pause and ask what exactly are we as Americans willing to change? Is everything up for grabs? What are the unforeseen and unintended consequences of the wrong kind of change? A strong nation knows the difference between experience and experiments. A strong nation does not discount its past nor foolishly surrender its future and its principles to the unknown and the untested.
Gertrude Himmelfarb has described the negative changes we have witnessed in the past few decades. In her book, “One Nation –Two Cultures,” she asks: “Have we forfeited the long view that enables us to put the present in perspective?…. Are we unduly impressed by change (a golden age lost or a new world gained) rather than continuity and permanence?”
Not all change is progress. There are fundamental truths and guiding principles, which Russell Kirk called “the permanent things”. It is one thing to progress from horse and buggy to automobile to airplane to spaceship and quite another to rationalize and retreat from the truths taught in the Bible. And yet, that is what we are witnessing in our generation. Firm reliance on the Divine Providence, the Creator, Nature’s God, the laws of nature and the Supreme Judge of the World so reverently acknowledged in our Declaration of Independence is exchanged for the contemporary logic and rationalizations of a few lawyers who by donning black robes now claim superior wisdom and authority. Do we truly trust in God or will we stand idle as our national motto is changed from a humble and unifying reality to a mere platitude with no daily application in the life of our nation. As Ronald Reagan stated, our future must be worthy of our past. He also said:
“Without God, there is a coarsening of the society; without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure…..
If we ever forget that we are ONE NATION UNDER GOD, then we will be a Nation gone under.”
Losing our way or choosing the wrong way through overindulgence and extreme individualism has always been the great internal threat to our freedom. From the beginning, the Founders of our nation feared that future generations may lose their bearings and turn freedom and liberty into vice and licentiousness. Threatening changes in our culture could change our Constitution without ever invoking the formal amendment process and checks and balances that were put in place to “insure domestic tranquility” and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The winds of change can throw us dangerously off course if we are not firmly anchored to the permanent things.
If every departure and every encroachment required the majority vote of the people, we could better see and prevent the adverse changes that threaten our future peace and stability. Unfortunately, however, they come in the form of cultural shifts that cause the people to lower or “change” their expectations and to first condone and then accept what was for so long rejected. In such a culture, salesmanship is everything and tipping point debates are decided by personalities more than principles.
During the same period that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was being published in Paris (1835)), an Austrian immigrant named Francis Grund published two commentaries on the United States (1837 and 1839), which were similar to the published works of de Tocqueville’s. Francis Grund was singularly impressed with the domestic virtue he perceived among the American people in his day. He saw a strong connection between the “domestic habits” of Americans and their religious and moral beliefs. In all the world, he commented, “few people have so great respect for the law and are so well able to govern themselves.” Perhaps, he surmised, they are “the only people capable of enjoying so large a portion of liberty without abusing it.”
Grund saw the morality and the religious devotion of the Americans as the key to their success in governing themselves as a free people. However, he also warned of the consequences if they ever abandoned that moral compass and anchor:
“I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principal source of all their other qualities. It acts as a promoter of industry, as a stimulus to enterprise and as the most powerful restraint of public vice. . . . . No government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States with a different code of morals. The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter in the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.”
The coarsening of our culture has indeed changed our Constitution without the people knowingly altering so much as a single word of it. Those who relish change and feel no lasting devotion to the “permanent things” look to liberal judges who speak of a “living Constitution” that they can twist and distort to suit their activist agenda. In our time, serious damage has been done to our Constitution without changing a word of it. These are not mere questions of style. They involve time honored truths and principles at a time when we should “stand like a rock” and not “swim with the current.”
WE THE PEOPLE must be alert, informed and engaged to carefully discern the many proposed changes that come along. We must diligently guard against those forces, ideas and individuals that would entice us to abandon the permanent things. Abortion, same sex marriage, stifling the role and voice of religion in our public life, judicial activism that shows little respect for the strict language and original intent of our Constitution, rampant obscenity tolerated and fostered by distorted applications of free speech, decline in the number of homes where children are loved and raised together by their natural parents are but some of the changed “domestic habits” of the American people that have set in motion the dangerous changes in our Constitution spoken of by Francis Grund.
This is a serious condition, which we must remedy and not allow to slide any further. We cannot say we do not see it for it is everywhere. It only remains to be seen whether we will rise up and reclaim the public virtue that has always been so uniquely American.
Only those who have lost the long view and the timeless connection between the past and the future that sheds needed light on the present would foolishly trade their birthright for a “mess of pottage.” (Gen 25:29-34). Not all change is good and a strong nation is not fooled or mislead by passing caravans of pleasant and appealing personalities who peddle their would be cure-alls. That is change we cannot believe in. That is an experiment we cannot afford. Tennyson lamented long ago, “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” To which George Will has noted, “The key word is down.”
Posted by: LaVar Christensen