The Alternative to Trust in God

For those who call America home, last week was the celebration of our independence from tyranny, injustice, and despotism. On July 4th we paused from our labors, cooked on the grill, spent time at the lake, laughed, celebrated, wore red, white, and blue, and concluded our victory over oppression with fireworks.

Independence Day.

Freedom! The ideal sought by people the world over.

To quote FDR, the freedoms we just commemorated and celebrated are:

Freedom of expression.

Freedom to worship.

Freedom from want.

Freedom from fear.

Before moving along, lest we tolerate speaking from both sides of our mouths, as I write to you about Roosevelt’s four freedoms, it is striking that those in charge are actively prohibiting me from enjoying these four freedoms. My expression in society’s discourse is blocked because of my Christian belief, thus creating unsated want and very real fear.

Sometimes, it’s hard to properly value what you have until it is jeopardized.

Freedom from tyranny and subjugation. Freedom to assemble. Freedom to live with equal opportunity before God and others. Freedom under the law against unjust recrimination.

As we recognized last week: Freedom is not free. All who have labored on behalf of freedom have given, many gave all, to advance an ideal and demonstrate with their sacrifice that the cause of freedom is rooted in the conviction that freedom is worthy of dedication, for without sacrifice there can be no clarion ring of freedom’s bell.

History is filled with talk of freedom, only in America were freedom and faith connected.

America. The Christian Nation. In God we trust, our money says. One nation under God, our pledge declares. Most recognize the nation was founded upon Christian principles.

But why? Why does this matter? While I’m compromised because my country has censored me over my Christian convictions, why should this cause us corporately to pause and reconsider the causal link between Christianity and societal freedom?

We frown upon the worst among us because they remind us that such are we.

Are other nations not Christian Nations? Other peoples not Christian? Are America’s principles of founding unique in their Christianity to the extent that no other country can say their founding documents are Christian in concept?

The waters are wide and deep in these questions. Many books line copious shelves exploring what is meant by Christian founding and Christian principle.

What the founders realized and embraced, based upon their experiences in life, their reading, and their exploration of other governments, countries, and national ideals, is that humankind is a fallen race of people. Fallen in the sense that we were designed to live with God in the utopia of Eden. But in the Garden of Eden, we succumbed to the temptation that we could ascend to God’s throne, and in our embrace of that arrogance, we fell from Eden’s utopia with God and settled alongside Cain in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

The founders of America believed in, and fully embraced, this one teaching of Christianity. All of their founding work and developmental thought started from this singular supposition that they deemed inescapable and universally true: Man is a fallen creature, darkened in all his ways, and in desperate need of redemption in order to properly value freedom.

There is no such thing as man's inhumanity—to man or creature. That concept has as its presupposition that man is good and behaves badly at times. The founding fathers of America realized that all of the dark, despotic, deplorable things that the world's history contains are there to remind us of man's humanity.

In our humanity, we are dark and fallen. We frown upon the worst among us because they remind us that such are we.

All law, education, finance, philosophy, and power are structured to allow for and guard against the fallenness of humankind. Yuval Levin writes, “We all need to be morally formed before we can be capable of freedom.”

From this conviction, America's founding fathers began. It is a unique inception point among all the nations that have ever risen or fallen in the history of the world.

Said another way, every nation on Earth is founded upon other principles than the singular principle America’s founders recognized and sought to manage: that all humanity is hopelessly in need of redemption that only God can supply, and until appropriated, any organizational structure must recognize humankind’s innate propensity toward darkness and establish structures to mitigate humanity’s fallenness.

The founders presupposed that an aspiring nation of people who believed themselves noble would inexorably default to rely upon their own resourcefulness.

All other nations and their governments believe that humankind is basically good and will default toward right if given the chance. No matter how ignoble his offense against society, if given the chance, even the worst among us aspires to the noble path of good and doing right by his fellow man.

America’s founding fathers did not believe this. They believed that all men are fallen from God and His ideal and are thus predisposed by nature to darkness.

As they set about establishing the Constitution and the First Amendment’s freedoms, America’s founders sought to establish a country's whose laws, systems, and government are established to guard against society’s fallenness long enough, and stridently enough, for fallen humanity to humble themselves, not in hopes of recovering a potential for good, but to honestly face their utter depravity without redemption and their irretrievability from darkness without the light of the Christian Gospel.

Only with this realization is there a probability that fallen man, in his fallenness, will look outward from his own resourcefulness to ponder if any remedy exists. The founders presupposed that an aspiring nation of people who believed themselves noble would inexorably default to rely upon their own resourcefulness to establish good and right [as suited them].

History is replete with such [failed] efforts.

Thus their conviction that only a society recognizing its depravity and fallenness would reject the temptation to believe human ingenuity sufficient to establish good and right and look outward from themselves to the guiding hand of God. America’s national declaration states in four words the founders’ conviction: In God we trust.

Our founders used as their guiding document, Psalm 127.

Every cent of every dollar carried in an American’s pocket reminds us about our founding supposition: In God we trust. None other.

Because of the beginning presupposition of America's founders, their conviction was that the statements, guiding documents, and philosophy of America must acknowledge and establish that human self-determination will fail and the stated ideal of all men being created equal will disintegrate. A government for the people, by the people, and of the people; a government where all men are created equal; a society where all citizens are endowed with certain inalienable rights; a Constitution guaranteeing five freedoms, is a government that does not look inwardly to itself, but looks upward to God alone who is capable of supplying light, future, and hope upon a humble people who routinely and as a matter of conviction acknowledge divine providence.

From the beginning presupposition that all men are fallen, there is no reasonable hope that individuals or collections of individuals within a society shall long endure unless God intervenes with redemption upon a humble and needy population. Thus, the founders were confident in their declaration: In God we trust.

Thus, we sing a national prayer: “God bless America [we are incapable of doing so ourselves].” Every cent of America’s trillions of dollars declares the founders’ presupposition and conviction: “In God we trust [because we are predisposed to darkness].” We state with our hands over our hearts that America is, “One nation, under God [because history records that all other governmental systems have failed].” We [used to] acknowledge and request God’s blessing at every gathering of Americans, because we are the only nation on the planet that recognizes as foundational to our forming that we are destitute apart from the shinning blessing of God.

America’s founders were students of history and philosophy. The weight of mankind’s humanistic endeavor and categorical failure to achieve a legacy upon earth, haunted them and incentivized them.

As they met to form a more perfect union, one where all men are created equal and each is endowed with certain inalienable rights and freedoms, they recognized that to follow history’s precedence was to destine the grand dream of a new world to failure upon the scrap heap of nations. What was it that other founders, kings, monarchs, despots, tyrants, dictators, and social engineers had failed to understand? What prevented, and destined to failure, all other nations to achieve lasting freedom?

As they toiled in Boston, debating, lingering long, it came to them: The failure heretofore is the failure to account for the fallenness of the people themselves. Therefore, this conviction must be the beginning point. This conviction must guide us if we are to form a more perfect union.

Roughly a hundred years after the founding of the United States of America, a collection of states segregated themselves and our young nation fought a civil war, testing the nation’s dedication to the founding ideal of a united collaboration of states. The Civil War was the bloodiest and costliest war in our nation’s history. For all the inane blathering of late by the media and ignorant others, America’s internal war tested whether the ideals formed by the founders would survive: Can a diverse collection of individuals and states become a united country by humbly acknowledging reliance upon divine providence and guidance?

Following the Battle of Gettysburg—51,112 human dead; 5,000 horses and mules killed; burial pyres burning for weeks—President Abraham Lincoln rose in the battle’s aftermath to speak and voice rationale for the slaughter, brother against brother. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”

I suspect if we could ask our founders about our current state of national disarray, they might quote from their guiding document, the document used to establish America as a Christian nation: “Unless the Lord builds the house, / those who build it labor in vain. / Unless the Lord watches over the city, / the watchman stays awake in vain” (Psalm 127).

In God we [must] trust.

But the lure of independence is great in all of us. Must we truly trust in God? Alone? Surely there are other options.

The best alternative, at least on paper, is Socialism and its [vain] belief in humanity’s innate goodness.

Of course, any novice student of history recognizes that Socialism has been tried and found lacking. As the notion of Socialism popularized, Marx understood this would be the fate of Socialism and taught [correctly] that Socialism is Communism not yet perfected.

Whether they recognize it or not, many of today’s Progressives call themselves Socialists, when in reality, what they are advancing is Communism. After working extensively within the former East Bloc, it is my observation and conviction that the greatest offense and abuse ever created by man and unleashed upon humanity is Communism. Compliance is required, any distinction eliminated, and no freedom tolerated.

To properly implement Socialized Communism, it is estimated that as of 1997 a hundred million people have been terminated to advance Communism. Today’s Socialists argue that Socialized Communism should be given another chance because it has not yet been sufficiently tried.

It’s a fair question to inquire of these folks: How many more people—those deemed dissident or obstructionists—will you need to eliminate in order to adequately implement this grand notion?

Socialism. Man’s alternative to freedom, even though their bluster is varnished with talk of democracy.

Why are we in the West advancing the horrid ideology of Socialism and Communism that our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents suffered under? What part of history class did Progressive ideologues miss? What part of a 100 million murders are we missing? What is the justification to do to me—and likely thousands of others—what is being done to me “to protect democracy?”

Why is America flirting with Socialism/Communism?

Because the alternative is to humble ourselves before God, recognize that in Him alone we must trust, and in so doing submit ourselves to the necessary remedies by which a free people truly live.

Humility before God. Admission that we are in need of forgiveness and redemption. This is a desperate place to be. Indeed, it is a desperate place when you have no alternative apart from trust in God.

Given the unvarnished humility that humankind must adopt in order to trust in God, it is reasonable to see why it seems preferable to flee from God and settle alongside Cain, in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Preston GillhamJuly 11, 2024