A Christian Historical Lesson: American Government

The two periods of American history most formative of the structures of our federal, national, constitutional government were the period of our nation’s founding and the period of the Civil War (or, if you prefer, the War Between the States). In both of those periods there was no shortage of governmental leaders, legislators, and judges who were prepared to say that there were objective laws binding on all men and all places which should be taken into account when our nation’s laws are being constructed and enforced. Property rights should be honored because God made men, and men as His uniquely special creation were blessed by Him with a legitimate claim on lawfully obtained property. A man’s right to the home he purchased was not granted by the federal government or any other institution of men; rather it was granted by God and could only be violated or protected by governments.

The Christian contention is that there is a God in the Heavens and that He made this universe and is its rightful Lord. He made man in His image and has given man the calling to take dominion over the earth, to be fruitful and multiply, and despite man’s wickedness he is still that uniquely made being with that unique calling. It is certainly true that not every legislator, judge, and member of the executive branch in 1776 or in 1865 was born again, not every man who contributed to the shaping of our constitutional democracy in these two periods was a true Christian or even claimed to be. What they had in common with the true Christian, though, is very important as it pertains to law and government. The majority of them shared the belief that there are objective, binding moral commands that men are obligated to uphold and obey and who are morally deficient when they do not. In 2023, the House and Senate would be shocked to hear someone stand up and say, “Men must obey God, and that is why we must enshrine this in law.” In 1865, it would have barely registered a reaction.

There is much that needed reformed in the governmental and legal structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably the legal protections of the slave trade and the wicked treatment of human beings as cattle, or as worse than cattle, in American chattel slavery. The America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, had tools to reform wickedness in its own midst that the America of the twenty-first century does not. The America of the twenty-first century denies that there are objective moral laws binding on all people in all places, and therefore only majority rule or political power can be appealed to in passing laws and enforcing laws. Why do you get to keep your house? Because there was enough political willpower to sustain that right legislatively. Why do you get to teach your children? Because enough people or enough influential legislators with that political will upheld that right. If, however, the majority dictates that private property is no longer a right, or that parents are no longer the lawful authority over their own children, then the right is gone, and no higher authority than the political power of our nation can be appealed to.

The book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published and widely read in the Civil War period, is particularly powerful because of its Christian arguments. It maintains that African men, women, and children are made in the image of God and because of that fact it is wicked, evil, despicable, tyrannical to kidnap them, maim them, treat them like animals, and murder them. The force of the book is its unrelenting call that the same Yahweh, Lord of all the earth, who made the plantation owner also made the slave on his plantation, and as such any laws that fundamentally denied that truth were themselves fundamentally unjust, and it wouldn’t matter how many human beings supported those laws.

The book was written in an America that still largely upheld the reality that there are objective moral laws binding on all of us, everywhere. It doesn’t matter what we feel or what we think or what we like. Something is wrong when it violates God’s laws and His character and revealed will. Something is right when it aligns with His laws and His character and revealed will. During these convulsive, formative generations clustered around the American Revolution and the Civil War, God’s nature as Lord could be appealed to, and the arguments made and won or lost in reference to that nature. The tools for reforming were available, and the nation at large knew what they were: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob exists, has spoken, and must be obeyed. We pass and enforce laws in full knowledge that He exists and has made our world.

We as Christians have a clear opportunity in this day and place to show the bankruptcy of secularism in attempting to make moral stands and defend any law or even any behavior or any belief on moral grounds against political power. The majority and the political influence of officials is all secularism can appeal to. There is no higher court, no external standard that it acknowledges is above us all and binding on us all. Christianity, however, accords with how we know the world to truly be. Christianity can account for the fact that rape is wrong, whether anyone knows it, likes it, or believes it or not. Biblical Christianity and the worldview it presents can build, defend, and reform a just legal framework. It has the tools to aim for justice and the tools to reform for justice.

Our current American posture does not. We deny that God’s law and character have any place in our halls of Congress, any place in our judicial system, any place in the execution of our laws by law enforcement and governors and our President. We do not permit our governmental officials to invoke God and the fact that He made us and defines good and evil conduct in their creation and application of laws, and therefore only bare political power can be invoked. We sanction so-called same sex “marriage” not because we have discovered something new about what God declares about marriage, but because enough people said we should. We have legalized the murder of infants in the womb not because we have learned more about how and why God makes people, but because the right people with the right political influence said we should. And so in reforming these wicked governmental sanctions, or any wicked governmental sanctions, we have decreed as a people that the only instruments available to us are bare political power. Get the right people or the right number of people to agree with you and change the law. And so we will always be susceptible, as early twentieth century Germany was, to the tyrant who can whip up enough support to make the government suit his evil desires.

Our forebears sanctioned and blessed evil actions, and like all of us they will give an account for every such evil to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All of their sins will be paid for either on the Cross or in Hell, and should they be paid for on the Cross they will still have been evil actions. Thomas Jefferson’s treatment of his fellow God-made human beings in his chattel slavery will have been paid for in one of those two manners. But my contentions is that these forebears made available for themselves the tools of reforming even their own evils: Their government work explicitly and implicitly contended that men were made by God, existed in His world, and were bound by objective morality that could be discovered and known. Their worldview fostered the correction of their own sinful laws.

Our worldview fosters crass political power.

The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

John Adams

Belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.

James Madison

The ways of Providence being inscrutable, and the justice of it not to be scanned by the shallow eye of humanity, nor to be counteracted by the utmost efforts of human power or wisdom, resignation, and as far as the strength of our reason and religion can carry us, a cheerful acquiescence to the Divine Will, is what we are to aim.

George Washington

I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection, that he would incline the hearts of the Citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to Government, to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the Field, and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.

George Washington

Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.

Abraham Lincoln

I prefer the Bible to any other book. There is enough in that, to satisfy the most ardent thirst for knowledge; to open the way to true wisdom; and to teach the only road to salvation and eternal happiness. It is not above human comprehension, and is sufficient to satisfy all its desires.

Robert E. Lee

Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future.

Ulysses S. Grant

The true greatness of a Nation cannot be in triumphs of the intellect alone. Literature and art may widen the sphere of its influence; they may adorn it; but they are in their nature but accessaries. The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man. The truest tokens of this grandeur in a State are the diffusion of the greatest happiness among the greatest number, and that passionless God-like Justice, which controls the relations of the State to other States, and to all the people, who are committed to its charge.

Charles Sumner