{"id":1641289,"date":"2022-09-14T18:04:13","date_gmt":"2022-09-14T22:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1641289"},"modified":"2022-09-14T18:05:04","modified_gmt":"2022-09-14T22:05:04","slug":"christian-nationalism-americas-traditional-political-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/christian-nationalism-americas-traditional-political-order\/","title":{"rendered":"Christian Nationalism: America\u2019s Traditional Political Order"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">12<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fchristian-nationalism-americas-traditional-political-order%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1641289&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The following remarks were delivered on Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at the third annual National Conservatism Conference in Miami.<\/p>\n<p>It is such a pleasure to be with all of you \u201csemi-fascists\u201d and \u201cextreme threats to our democracy,\u201d as the President affectionately calls you. And not just you, of course. When Biden refers to \u201csemi-fascists\u201d and existential \u201cthreats to our democracy,\u201d he is referring to a larger group. He is referring to half of the country. He is referring to the \u201cMAGA Republicans,\u201d which is to say, statistically, the Republicans, which is to say, about half the country.<\/p>\n<p>Which is strange thing to think: that \u201cgovernment of the people, by the people, for the people\u201d could be threatened by the very existence of half of the people. That our \u201csacred,\u201d two-party system faces the threat of annihilation if anyone even thinks of voting for the party out of power. Something certainly seems amiss about \u201cour democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I suppose the first thing amiss about \u201cour democracy\u201d is that we don\u2019t actually have a \u201cdemocracy.\u201d The men who built our country were deeply distrustful of democracy from the beginning \u2014 not just back in 1789, when our Constitution went into effect, or even 1776, when the Founding Fathers declared independence from Britain. It goes even further back to 1630, when Governor Winthrop described the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a shining \u201ccity upon a hill\u201d and \u201ca model of Christian charity,\u201d and even further back, in 1620, when Governor Bradford and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. All of those men, and especially the Framers of the Constitution, gave us a mixed regime with an executive power, an aristocratic element, and, of course, a strong democratic representation in a federal system that balanced power between three branches of government as well as between three distinct interests \u2014 the people, the states, and the higher unity of the people and the states \u2014 in a nation.<\/p>\n<p>The nation has a physical aspect: spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, above a fruited plain from sea to shining sea. The nation, in its physical nature, has a body: that is, the body politic. But our nation, just like the people who constitute it, is not merely a body. Our nation, like all nations, is also a soul. It must be. The soul is the substantial form of the body. It is the intellectual principle of the body. The soul animates the body. Without the soul, the body is dead. A body politic must have a soul in order to live. So what animates America?<\/p>\n<p>For most of American history, the answer was obvious: Christianity. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower undertook their voyage primarily \u201cfor the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.\u201d Our Founders and Framers established our nation, according to John Adams, \u201conly for a moral and religious People.\u201d Adams spelled out what he meant by morality and religion in 1813 in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: \u201cThe general Principles, on which the Fathers Achieved Independence, were the only Principles in which, that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite . . . the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Adams\u2019s clear articulation of the nation\u2019s religious grounding poses a problem for the secularists who deny America\u2019s Christian spirit because it contradicts another quote, also ostensibly from John Adams, on which the argument against America\u2019s Christian character rests.<\/p>\n<p>According to the secularists, John Adams declared in 1796 that \u201cthe Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.\u201d So how do we make sense of that apparent contradiction? Here we see the proof of Alexander Pope\u2019s warning that \u201ca little learning is a dangerous thing.\u201d Because when we look into the origin of the phrase, we find that it does not come from any founding document. It does not come from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist, or even the private papers of the men who built the country.<\/p>\n<p>The statement comes, instead, from the Treaty of Tripoli, which, though signed by Adams, was not written by him. It was written by diplomat and Jeffersonian Republican Joel Barlow, and it was only written to persuade Muslim pirates to stop abducting and enslaving American sailors. The statement was not so much a statement of principle \u2014\u00a0or even of law \u2014 as it was a ransom payment by a struggling nation to international criminals.<\/p>\n<p>When they were not attempting to placate Muslim pirates, our Founding Fathers spoke much more favorably of Christianity and its role in American public life. Adams, obviously, directly contradicted his own professed nonsense from the Treaty of Tripoli, and most if not all of the other Founders did as well. John Jay, co-author of the Federalist and the first chief justice of the United States,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following remarks were delivered on Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at the third annual National Conservatism Conference in Miami. It is such a pleasure to be with all of you \u201csemi-fascists\u201d and \u201cextreme threats to our democracy,\u201d as the President affectionately calls you. And not just you, of course. When Biden refers to \u201csemi-fascists\u201d and &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1641291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1641289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1641291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}