The American Judeo-Christian Heritage: A "Bold & Fresh" Look

We attended an early stop on the recently launched “Bold & Fresh” tour by Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. What a window on the power of what’s going on in America!

At the second tour stop in Tampa, Florida, O’Reilly and Beck were appearing roughly coincident with a post-State-of-the-Union appearance by Obama in Tampa. Obama’s appearance reportedly attracted a crowd of 2,000+ (no charge to attend), while O’Reilly and Beck sold out a 16,000 seat venue. The level of energy reflected by these crowd differences is enormously significant by itself—it is a manifestation of the Scott Brown snowball that is turning avalanche-sized as it sweeps the country.

But even more important than crowd statistics is the palpable audience response and connection with Glenn Beck’s increasingly spiritually-based message and observations about what is driving America’s nationwide awakening. Bill O’Reilly, for all his proud independence and intellect, is missing either the capacity to grasp or the ease of relating to the stirring of Americans’ faith in God that is at the core of what may very well be the second American Revolution.

The nationwide rejection of the radical left Obama agenda is not, as O’Reilly believes, part of the normal ebb and flow of American politics---the comfortable ‘pendulum’ paradigm where a swing too far in one direction leads to a correction in the other. As Ronald Reagan once put it, it’s not a question of right or left, but up or down. “Up” in the rallying to the right identification of man and woman as endowed by one Creator, God, and entitled to the ‘liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free’, as the Bible puts it; or down into the godless morass of human tyranny, where freedom and opportunity and the rule of law are corrupted by the cynical calculations of a mentality that is defiant toward the very idea of unseen spiritual verities and values—in other words, that is defiant toward God.

Glenn Beck can feel this real stirring; he connected with the Tampa audience more than O’Reilly can even comprehend when Beck stated that the American people have started to sense that the Obama/leftists’ nationalization of healthcare was not about healthcare. It was about the tyrannical appetite for government power over individuals; in simplest terms, the definitive, final substitution of human government for God. Once the government decides what human health consists of and what leads to it and what leads away from it, and goes forward to promote and regulate, and restrict and prohibit and jail whoever and whatever gets in the way of its definition of health, government is effectively in charge of all of human life, and God is out of the question. So are morals. And so is freedom.

It’s been said that the birthplace of civilization was not Athens but Calvary. We’d add that it took about 17 centuries after Calvary for civilization to mature out of its cradle, and mark its first footsteps in the founding of the United States of America. But make no mistake, the two events are and always will be related, and civilization’s progress is correlated with them.

America is a Christian nation. Maybe a little more accurately, America is a Christian nation built on Judeo-Christian teachings. And let’s not make this too complicated. The “Judeo” part of “Judeo-Christian” in essence refers to the foundational building blocks of civilization called the Ten Commandments; the “Christian” part refers to the Ten Commandments, as uplifted by the life, love and teachings of Christ Jesus, which culminated in the stunning and world-transforming power of his crucifixion, resurrection and ascension.

It is from the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ Jesus that the idea emerged that there can be such a thing as ‘self-evident’ truths; that included in these truths are the ideas that “all men are created equal” by God; and that they “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The full meaning of those self-evident truths wasn’t understood at the time—‘all men’ needed to grow into ‘all men and women, regardless of skin color’—and will continue to be uncovered in future generations—e.g., what does it really mean to be ‘created equal’?; what does it mean to be created by one God?; what are the full dimensions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as ‘unalienable rights’ from God?

Americans obviously don’t have a uniform level of knowledge as to these foundational issues, but they have an inner compass which tells them that what they have in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are not just the transitory views of a few people at a certain time and in a certain place. Rather, there is the sense of ‘divine Providence’ (as the founders referred to it) behind America’s formation, or Immanuel or “God with us” as the Old Testament prophet put it. They sense when those God-given gifts are at risk, and they rise naturally and fiercely to defend them.

The Obama/Soros agenda has always been an attack on God and America’s Judeo-Christian faith in God, as we noted over a year ago. If they can just get God out of the picture, then they’re free to control everyone and everything, and to make up morals to be whatever they want them to be to suit their purposes of control. Indeed, “moral equivalence” is one of their signature perspectives, and is pointedly trotted out in their narrative of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” or the “Israeli-Arab conflict”—which in reality do not involve moral equivalence and in fact have always been nothing more or less than Judeo-Christianity v. Islam conflicts.

Historian Angelo Codevilla, in his outstanding work, “The Character of Nations”, observed that two authors distinctly aware of the dangers of human totalitarianism--George Orwell, author of the infamous 1984; and Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon--identified the radical leftist’s/moral relativist’s ultimate enemy: ”the soul that is stiffly independent because its anchor is beyond the reach of the regime.”

Americans are soul-filled people with an anchor that is beyond the reach of Obama and his fellow leftists: an unshakable faith in God and in America’s Judeo-Christian heritage of individual freedom and responsibility under God. The stirring of this faith is what is going on across America. It is what Glenn Beck feels and is increasingly able to articulate (and is why his audience growth has been exponential). As and when American political leaders emerge who are unafraid to affirm this faith and act in step with it, the path out of economic and social decline will be apparent, and no hysterical picture of financial or any other collapse will stop humanity’s progress down that path.

Obama and Soros will be added to the footnotes of history as among those who thought that with enough money and enough media control and enough deceit, they could defeat and destroy ‘self-evident’ divine truths. Not going to happen.

Paul Gable

January 31, 2010