Our Political Leaders Have Been Revealed
Above all, even in the political realm, our relationship with God gives us perspective.
The result has been a government that has moved further and further away from the people.
That’s no small thing. Our perspective is the way we see the world.
Things we don’t associate with religion depend on that perspective.
This has played out in Western history. Of Europe’s Age of Faith, the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote:
The Middle Ages formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense of order … The habit of definite exact thought was implanted in the European mind by the long dominance of scholastic logic and scholastic divinity. The habit remained after the philosophy had been repudiated, the priceless habit of looking for an exact point and of sticking to it when found.
It is not only our science that built upon a frame of mind instilled by the great religious enterprise. Our politics as well has its roots deep in the soil of our religion.
We can trace the foundations of the republican constitutionalism that gave birth to this country back to the Bible. In the brief space of this article, we will follow one idea from the Bible forward. The following text is from Psalm 146:
3 Put not your trust in princes,
Nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
4 His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his dust;
In that very day his thoughts perish.
5 Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
Whose hope is in the LORD his God,
6 Who made heaven and earth,
The sea, and all that in them is;
Who keepeth truth for ever;
7 Who executeth justice for the oppressed;
Who giveth bread to the hungry.
Read straightforwardly, this text speaks of God as sovereign on earth as in heaven. The long domination of tyranny, whether of Roman Caesars or medieval feudal lords and kings, accustomed us to concentrate on heaven exclusively, as that always remains the reach of human corruption.
But Hebrew Scripture, plainly read, affirms God’s governance here on earth as well, and as constitutionalism took hold, writers like the medieval justice Fortescue affirmed the biblical idea that kings owe obedience to God; their own sovereignty is only a kind of a user’s license, granted on God’s terms.
In the 1600s, England rose against its king, who had attempted to concentrate all power in his person. Political thinkers of the day dared to speak even of the illegitimacy of kingship. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan:
When the Elders of Israel … demanded a King, Samuel displeased therewith, prayed unto the Lord; and the Lord answering said unto him, Hearken unto the voice of the People, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. Out of which it is evident that God himself was then their King.
By this time, non-Jewish scholars had turned to the great wealth of post-Biblical Rabbinic literature. One rabbinic text was known and quoted by republican thinkers of the day. It is from Devarim Rabba, a rabbinic compendium of traditions and explorations on Deuteronomy. The discussion here referenced the section of Deuteronomy that set down legislation for future kings in Israel:
The Rabbis say: God said to Israel: “I planned that you should be free from kings” …
The Rabbis say: Whosoever puts his trust in flesh and blood passes away and his dignity also passes away, as it is said, Nor in the son of man in whom there is no help (Ps. 146:3). What follows on this verse? His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his dust. God said: “Although they know that man is nought, yet they forsake my Glory and say: ‘Set a king over us.’ Why do they ask for a king? By your life, in the end you will learn to your cost what you will have to suffer from your king.” Whence this? As it is written, All their kings are fallen, there is none among them that calleth unto Me (Hosea 7:7).
More than a century after Hobbes, the Framers of our Constitution, well-versed both in Bible and in classic history, recognized that merely setting up a government of the people would not guarantee that they would avoid tyranny or anarchy. The Bible itself records the troubles into which Israel fell even when there was no king. So the Framers designed a structure of government in which the divergent interests of those in power would counterbalance each other, much the way that in architecture, a structural triangle resists the pull of gravity and the beams set against each other stand firmly in place and stabilize the great weight of the structure.
The Framers were deeply aware of the power of religious commitment. The revolt against King Charles I in the 1600s did not gain traction until it became inflamed as a religious struggle between the Puritans and the Church of England’s episcopacy, with a generous dose of Scottish Presbyterianism as another combatant.
So as never to unleash the most powerful of motivators against the new Constitution, the Framers forbade the new government to favor one religion over another or to prohibit free exercise of religion. Yet, as John Adams affirmed, the Constitution would not work unless the citizens who empower the Constitution accepted the moral order of God as sovereign in their lives.
Today, the extended crisis of American political life has reached a turning point, and we need this grand religious perspective from which to grasp its size and power. For a long time, so many of our schools have taught that our political freedoms have come as we have left religion behind and judged that facts, instead, should lead us. This, they led us to think, is what “science” means. Instead of the old ideas that could not be verified as factual, we accept the final word of appropriately credentialed “experts.” The People are not experts and should relinquish their political power to those smarter folks.
The result has been a government that has moved further and further away from the people. And the people, after long study of this idea, and after seeing the experimental evidence of how poorly it has worked in their lives — the people have deliberated and the outlines of their verdict are starting to appear.
The ruling political elites have soiled themselves with their lies. The stench has grown too great. The politicians who engineered a regime of lies, the media and the schools that supported them, the bureaucrats who betrayed the Constitution whose power they have enjoyed and then usurped, all stand naked in their incompetence, venality, and unfaithfulness, covered with their own filth.
The people are seeing this. And day by day, they are slowly letting everyone grasp that they will have their say.
They are ready to clean up the mess.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
The Lies of the Biden Presidency Are a Problem
Becoming a Moral Person Takes Work
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