The Theocracy Shibboleth

It’s a combination of amazing, amusing, and sad to watch various members of the ruling class convulse over what to make of Glenn Beck’s phenomenal “Restoring Honor” rally on August 28, on the Constitution Mall in Washington, D.C. They clearly don’t get anything having to do with calls for faith and trust in and prayer to God, but what is maybe the most astounding aspect of their reaction is that they spout off attacks on Beck and on the event as if they think the American people don’t have access to the internet.

The vast majority of the American people (1) participated personally in the rally, or (2) knew someone who participated personally in the rally, or (3) watched the rally live on C-SPAN, or (4) watched video clips of the rally after it was over. They have all seen pictures of the crowd. In the face of these facts, we continue to have Pravda media outlets like CBS peg the crowd at precisely 87,000 people (not 86,000 and not 88,000); we have left-wing journalists like Joe Klein speaking of Beck as a raving lunatic; and we have proliferating pundits looking desperately for an angle to dismiss or discredit the rally’s significance.

Included in the ‘discredit’ category is the classic leftist leap made whenever someone visible speaks unapologetically of God and of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and of the need to honor America’s founding principles and pray for the country. “Beck Wants a Theocracy!” is the standard wail that has popped up—a shibboleth that wasn’t true of the founders’ intent and isn’t true of Beck’s.

To start with the obvious, God existed before human government. The need for individuals to engage in moral and righteous living in order for there to be some semblance of law and order—in order for there to be such a thing as ‘civilization’—existed long before the advent of American constitutional democracy. (Moses’ stone tablets provided the first ten rules; Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount supplied more.) The issue and the dispute has always been over who decides what constitutes moral and righteous living. Even more basic, the issue and the dispute relate to the question of the very origin of law and order.

The godless left has forever hated a claim of a divine, unseen authority as the origin of life, law and order, and is especially rabid in hatred of the idea that the authority for morals is also beyond their ability to control, define, amend or destroy. Hence their hatred of America, because right up front in the founding documents of America you will find specific references to the origin of life, law and order: called ‘the Creator’ and the Creator’s self-evident truths. You will also see the idea of human liberty or freedom grounded specifically in faith and trust in ‘divine Providence’. And so the contempt and ridicule and hatred toward America from the thought that opposes God is forever manifest.

But it is nothing but deceit, manipulation and godless hysteria that would transform America’s founding principles and Beck’s call to honor them as equivalent to advocacy of some kind of theocracy.

It is the individual adherence to Judeo-Christian moral teachings that makes freedom and limited government possible in the first place. When the individual is self-disciplined by what he knows and has been taught as to right and wrong, and good and evil, he doesn’t need a human government to tell him what to do or not do. Conversely, when the individual is consigned and sublimated to the collective, and is denied any teaching about God, he becomes incapable of self-government, and authoritarian control by a central human power becomes the only means for maintaining order in society.

The undeniable, heartfelt response to Beck’s rally is reverberating throughout the country, in ways that baffle the ruling class. It is not driven by a desire for theocracy; it is a much-needed upheaval of opposition to an aggressively secular aristocracy upheaval of opposition to an aggressively secular aristocracy that has finally made too clear to the people exactly what its agenda is and how it intends to ‘transform’ America.

But Americans know in their hearts exactly what Sarah Palin described at Beck’s rally—we don’t want to transform America; we want to restore America.

Beck’s call for ‘restoring honor’ was really a call to restore America by restoring the place of God in Americans’ lives—and in that regard it was in reality just a modern affirmation of what John Adams (America’s 2nd President) said around the time of the founding:

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Paul Gable

August 31, 2010