Just a quick word of encouragement to those of you who don’t like living in our current secular monkey house, and who dislike even more the idea that this demented arrangement was somehow foisted upon us by the Founders. It wasn’t.
So as you set off your fireworks this week, make sure you tell the children and grandchildren that you are doing so in remembrance of the fact that at our Founding, the United States were a Christian federation. And also remember that at our Founding, the United States would naturally take a plural verb. As the great classicist, Basil Gildersleeve pointed out, the Civil War was fought over a point of grammar. Shall we say “the United States is” or “the United States are”? That is a point worth revisiting.
But in any case, the current regnant nonsense has been dumped in our laps by Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1940’s, decisions which have played the part of Jeroboam telling the Israelites that the calves at Dan and Bethel were responsible for bringing Israel out of the land of Egypt (1 Kings 12:28). As I have said many times before, it makes a difference whether Jeroboam or Moses writes the history curriculum. History textbooks are not neutral. And Supreme Court decisions grounded in bogus history are not neutral either.
So then, the current madhouse secularism is not descended from a well-meaning and judicious secularism at the Founding. We are not talking about the unfortunate but logical outworking of a well-intentioned but bad idea. We are talking about an apostasy. Our nation was Christian at the Founding, and the quasi-recognition of the Christian faith in our nation was a reality within living memory. The plunge into apostasy was within living memory.
The revisionist history of the secularists picks out a few unrepresentative individuals, men like Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and had made them representative by fiat. Jefferson’s phrase—“wall of separation”—from an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists is given a legal significance it did not and does not have. The First Amendment has been twisted out of all recognition, and like a suicidal man pointing a gun at his own temple, the amendment is interpreted in a way that requires the government to figure out ways to prohibit “the free exercise thereof.”
So we have a secular holiday coming up, and the fireworks are a secular sacrament. This means you should set them off in a way that will be considered transgressive by our secularist overlords. Set one off in the remembrance of the fact that when the Constitution was ratified, 9 of the 13 states had formal ties to a Christian denomination or denominations. Set another one off in celebration of the fact that at the Constitutional Convention, 50 of the 55 men present were orthodox Christians. And yet another one, a noisy one preferably, should be a jubilant recognition of the fact that on the same day that Congress passed the First Amendment for the states to consider, the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution for a joint committee of both houses of Congress to urge upon the President the propriety of calling for a day of “public prayer and thanksgiving.”
There is far more evidence than this, more than enough evidence for many more Fourth celebrations. There is actually too much evidence to fit down the memory hole.