Why Liberals (Sometimes) Love the Bible

Dear Friends:

Liberals will use anything to support their unsupportable worldview, even if it's the Bible. They will use the Bible when they can manipulate it enough to fit their agenda. How many times have you had a liberal throw Matthew 7:1 back at you when you mention that some particular behavior is immoral? "Remember what Jesus said, 'Do not judge.'" When you criticize a piece of unconstitutional legislation or a law that the president wants passed, you'll have "render unto Caesar" (Matt. 22:21) thrown in your face.

Every Christmas season we hear the inevitable revisionist version of the Christmas story in order to further government programs. Jesse Jackson was the first to turn Joseph and Mary into a "homeless couple" when he claimed that Christmas "is not about Santa Claus and 'Jingle Bells' and fruit cake and eggnog," of which all Christians would agree, but about "a homeless couple."1 He repeated his "homeless couple" theme at the 1992 Democratic Convention:

"We hear a lot of talk about family values, even as we spurn the homeless on the street. Remember, Jesus was born to a homeless couple, outdoors in a stable, in the winter. He was the child of a single mother. When Mary said Joseph was not the father, she was abused. If she had aborted the baby, she would have been called immoral. If she had the baby, she would have been called unfit, without family values. But Mary had family values. It was Herod - the [Dan] Quayle of his day - who put no value on the family."

Jackson made a similar claim about the biblical record in 1999 when he stated that Christmas "is not about parties, for they huddled alone in the cold stable. It isn't about going into debt to buy extravagant presents; the greatest Gift was given to them although they had no money. It is about a
homeless couple, finding their way in a mean time."2

We can agree with Jackson that Christmas is not about Santa Clause and all the modern commercial trappings, but to turn the biblical account of the birth of Christ into a political hobby horse cannot be supported by an actual study of the text of Scripture. Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today, following Jackson's early lead, scolded the Christian Right for opposing government welfare programs: "They should recall," she writes, "that Jesus Christ was born homeless to a teen who was pregnant before she was married."3 Hillary Clinton, in comments critical of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's homeless policies, sought to remind all of us that "Christmas celebrates 'the birth of a homeless child.'"4 Rev. William Sterrett told The Providence (RI) Journal the true Christmas story is about the poor and needy. "We have a very clear picture about the whole thing," Sterrett said. "But the truth is Mary and Joseph were homeless. She gave birth to Jesus in a barn. This image captures the essence of a Christmas story because you cannot get any poorer than that." Pat Nichols, writing for The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), concludes, "At the core, the story of Christmas is about a homeless couple about to have a baby. It is a story about poverty that most of us never experience, people with little more than they carry on their backs and a donkey to provide transportation."5 Have these people ever read the Bible?

• Mary did not engage in premarital sex. Her circumstances, to say the least, were unique (Luke 1:26-28). Many young girls got married as teenagers.
• Mary went to live with her cousin Elizabeth upon hearing about her pregnancy and "stayed with her about three months, and then returned to her home" (Luke 1:56). Presumably her parents owned a home and did not throw her out when they learned of her pregnancy.
• Mary and Joseph were actually married at the time she learned she was pregnant even though a formal ceremony had not taken place. Joseph is called "her husband" (Matt. 1:19).
• Joseph was a self-employed carpenter (Matt. 13:55).
• An edict from the centralized Roman government forced Joseph and Mary to spend valuable resources of money and time to return to their place of birth to register for a tax (Luke 2:1-7). Joseph's business was shut down while he took his very pregnant wife on a wild goose chase concocted by the Roman Empire to raise additional tax money.
• Typical of governments that make laws without considering the consequences, there was not enough housing for the great influx of traveling citizens and subjects who complied with the governmental decree (Luke 2:1).
• Mary and Joseph had enough money to pay for lodging. The problem was inadequate housing. The fact that "there was no room in the inn" (Luke 2:7) did not make them homeless. If we follow liberal logic, any family that takes a trip is by definition homeless and then finds "no vacancy" signs, is technically homeless.
• Joseph and Mary owned or rented a home. It was in their home that the wise men offered their gifts: "And they came into the house and saw the Child with Mary His mother, and they fell down and worshipped Him; and opening their treasures they presented to Him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh" (Matt. 2:11).
• Joseph, Mary, and Jesus became a family on the run when Herod, agovernment official, became a threat to them (Matt. 2:13-15).

In 2006, Jesse Jackson got it right: "The story of Christmas is about a couple - Mary and Joseph - forced by an oppressive imperial government to leave their home to travel far to be counted in the census."6 I'm amazed how politicians and social critics are quick to quote and misquote the Bible when they believe it supports their quirky political views. When conservatives appeal to the Bible, we hear the inevitable "separation of church and state," "you can't impose your morality on other people," "religion and politics don't mix." The Bible is clear on moral issues that are culture killers: homosexuality, homosexual marriage, and abortion. The Bible is also clear on the moral issue of poverty. Nowhere in the Bible is civil government given authority to help the poor by raising taxes on the rich to pay for wealth distribution schemes. In fact, as history shows, the "war on poverty" became the war on the poor.7

We would be more accurate to say, the Christmas story is about how taxes hurt the poor and government decrees can turn productive families into the disenfranchised by enacting and enforcing a counterproductive law.

SOURCES:

1 As reported in The Atlanta Journal/Constitution (December 28, 1991), A9.

2 Jesse Jackson, "The Homeless Couple," Los Angeles Times (December 22, 1999).

3 Barbara Reynolds, "These political Christians neither religious nor right," USA Today (Nov. 18, 1994), 13A.

4 Cited in "Washington" under Politics in USA Today (December 1, 1999), 15A.

5 Pat Nichols, "It's time to offer a helping hand," The Berkshire Eagle (December, 12, 2004).

6 Jesse Jackson, "Peace Is At the Heart of the Christmas Story," Chicago Sun-Times (December 19, 2006). In a January 8, 2009 article, Jackson once again describes Joseph and Mary as a "homeless couple": "The real story is about a homeless couple, immigrants ordered by the government to return home to be counted."

7 Thomas Sowell, "'War on Poverty' has left nation in poorer condition," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 18, 2004), A13

Respectfully,

Mark

Stories Behind the Christmas Carols

Dear Friends:

We sing them every year! We’ve sung them all our lives! As Thanksgiving ushers in the Holiday Season, we begin to hear their familiar strains on the radio and in department stores. As the days of December pass, we hear them more frequently – in pageants, programs and even by carolers who keep their tradition alive. Wherever we hear them, we find ourselves singing along! The carols of Christmas are the golden threads of the Season’s festive tapestry that actually turn on the Christmas spirit in our hearts.

But, as with so many familiar things, carols are such a basic part of our lives and our Christmas history that we often take them for granted. We hum them and hear them year after year, but we hardly ever think about the significance of the words or the origin of the lovely melodies. We can actually overlook the fact that somebody wrote these wonderful songs, and as a consequence, we miss much of their magic. Join me for just a few moments as we explore the fascinating history of the carol as a genre of music and the stories behind just a few of our favorites.

In their earliest beginnings, carols really had nothing to do with Christmas – or even with Christianity, for that matter. The melodies were originally written to accompany an ancient dance form called the circle dance which was associated with fertility rites and pagan festivities in the medieval Celtic countries of Europe. As the Christian Church established itself in these areas, the familiar melodies and rhythms of carols found their way into Christian meetings and celebrations. But because the songs had such pagan roots, the Church was very uneasy about them for a long time. In fact, a Church Council in the mid-Seventh Century explicitly forbade Christians to sing carols, and the Church continued to frown on carols well into the Twelfth Century. (See, kids, the old fogies have always been against hip music!)

As the austerity of medieval Christianity began to soften, a kind of renaissance took place and carols merged with folk songs that were the Pop songs of the day – the songs that were whistled or sung by ordinary people. History credits Saint Francis of Assisi with bringing about a new interest in the feast of the Nativity and the Babe in Bethlehem. The priests in St. Francis’ order developed a style of religious folk song called a lauda. Laudas had happy, joyful dance rhythms that were so catchy and memorable that the song form soon spread across Fourteenth Century Europe. The religious lauda got mixed together with a popular pagan custom called wassailing, in which people sang from door to door to drive away evil spirits and drank to the health of those they visited. What evolved from the marriage of wassailing and the lauda was the custom of caroling, which is still so much a part of our Christmases some seven centuries later.

By the Seventeenth Century it was clear that everyone was having entirely too much fun! So the Grinch – otherwise known as the Puritan English Parliament – decided to abolish Christmas altogether! That’s right … not only did the carols get the axe, but the entire Christmas Holiday was eliminated. People who continued to celebrate the birth of Christ with happy and lighthearted carol singing were actually accused of witchcraft and risked imprisonment or death! It took several dark and gloomy decades before the prohibition against carol singing was lifted and people again began to write and sing carols freely. The popularity of the carol increased rapidly throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and it was during this time period that many of our favorite carols were created.

Which brings us to our first fascinating Carol Story and to one of the most prolific songwriters of all time. His name is Charles Wesley – all you Methodists will recognize that name as it was Charles’ brother, John, who became the patriarch of Methodism. During Charles’ lifetime, he wrote over 600 songs (quite a catalog for any songwriter)! One of his most famous lyrics is Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, which many theologians say is the entire Gospel of Christ in one song. The melody for this familiar carol was composed by the famous Felix Mendelssohn almost a hundred years after Wesley wrote the text. How did the words and music come together? Here’s the scoop behind the carol….

The little known fact is that neither Charles Wesley nor Felix Mendelssohn would have wanted this music to be joined with these words. Felix Mendelssohn, a Jew, had made it very clear that he wanted his music only to be used for secular purposes. Charles Wesley, on the other hand, had requested that only slow and solemn religious music be coupled with his words. However, in the mid Nineteenth Century, long after both Mendelssohn and Wesley were dead, an organist named Dr. William Cummings, joined the joyous Mendelssohn music with Wesley’s profound words to create the carol we know and love today! (By the way, if you hear a slight whirring sound as you sing this carol … it is probably just the sound of both Mendelssohn and Wesley turning over in their graves as they hear us sing the words and melody together!)

OK, on to the next carol! We have all sung the fun but zany lyrics to the Twelve Days of Christmas, but – if you are anything like me – you have absolutely no idea what the crazy images have to do with Christmas. Is this just a nonsense song? Not hardly!! The roots of this carol go back to that very depressing Puritan era in England when English Catholics were not allowed to openly practice their faith. The Twelve Days of Christmas was actually written as a catechism song for young Catholics to learn the basics of the faith. The True Love in the song represents God and the various gifts He offers to believers. The partridge in the pear tree is symbolic as well. Apparently mother partridges will act as decoys to lead predators away from their young. Also, in ancient times a partridge was often used as mythological symbol of a divine, sacred king. So, in the carol, the partridge represents Jesus who died on the cross. The other symbolic images are as follows:

• Two turtle doves are the Old and New Testaments of the Bible – another gift from God. Doves also symbolize peace.
  
• Three French hens are faith, hope and love – the three gifts of the Holy Spirit. (See 1 Corinthians 13). The French hens can also represent God the Father, His Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
  
• Four calling birds are the four Gospels in the New Testament of the Bible.
  
• Five golden rings are the first five books of the Bible also called the Pentateuch, the Books of Moses, or the Torah.
  
• Six geese a-laying are the six days of creation.
  
• Seven swans a swimming are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. (See 1 Corinthians 12:8-11, Romans 12, Ephesians 4, 1 Peter 4:10-11)
  
• Eight maids a milking are the eight beatitudes, Jesus’ teachings on happiness. (See Matthew 5:3-10)
  
• Nine ladies dancing are nine fruits of the Holy Spirit. (See Galatians 5:22)
  
• Ten lords a-leaping are the Ten Commandments. (See Exodus 20)
  
• Eleven pipers piping are the eleven faithful disciples of Jesus.
  
• Twelve drummers drumming were the twelve points of the Apostles’ Creed.

Once you know the story behind the Twelve Days of Christmas, you will never hear the song again without being reminded of its deeper significance.

Now, we can’t ignore America’s contribution to our catalog of Christmas favorites! Did you ever wonder who wrote Jingle Bells? It’s one of the first carols we learn as children and is so much a part of our lives that most of us probably never even have thought about the fact that somebody really did write it! That somebody was James Pierpont and he wrote both words and music for the song which was to be part of a Thanksgiving program at his church in Boston back in 1857. Jingle Bells became such a hit that the children in his choir were asked to sing it over and over again every Christmas … and we have been singing it ever since!

Or how about O Little Town of Bethlehem? The writer of this carol was the influential American theologian of the Nineteenth Century, Bishop Phillips Brooks. Bishop Brooks wrote the beautiful words that we all know in 1868 in Philadelphia as he recalled a trip he had made to the Holy Land several years before. His organist, Lewis Redner, decided to write music for Brooks’ lyrics so that the song could be used by his children’s choir at Christmas. If anybody is still under the misconception that kids’ music is not as influential as more adult genres, consider the fact that both Jingle Bells and O Little Town of Bethlehem had their starts in kids’ Christmas programs!

And that brings us to one of the most beloved of all the carols – the lovely and elegant, Silent Night. The story behind this carol started way back in 1816 in Austria when a pastor named Joseph Mohr wrote the simple words as a poem. Then, as Destiny would have it, two years later on Christmas Eve, the organ in Pastor Mohr’s church broke down just before the Christmas Mass. Determined that the Mass should not be without music, Mohr gave the poem he had written two years earlier to his organist and friend, Fanz Gruber. Gruber immediately composed the melody and arranged it for two voices, choir and guitar – just in time for the midnight service.

But that was just the beginning of the impact of that simple song. The two writers of the carol thought they were simply doing something to get through a difficult situation with their church service. But almost two hundred years later, Silent Night is still the most performed and recorded Christmas song in history! In fact, there is a wonderful story about the song that comes out of World War I. On Christmas Eve fighting was actually suspended on many of the European fronts while people turned on their radios to hear Austrian opera star, Ernestine Schumann Heink, sing Stille Nacht. She was not only an international celebrity, but Ms. Heink was also a mother with one son fighting for the German Axis and another son fighting for the Allies. Her rendition of this beautiful song had the power to actually bring a few moments of peace to a very troubled world!

Such is the potential of a song and the challenge to songwriters. As you celebrate Christmas this year, let yourself experience and feel all the wonder of the Season … and then, let those feelings flow into the songs.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Respectfully,

Mark

The Third Rail of Academia

Dear Friends:

The Social Security system has long been described as the third rail of American politics. “Touch it, and you die.” You get electrocuted. If you should somehow survive, the next subway train will cut you in pieces.

There is such a rail in academia: the Federal Reserve System.

A fascinating article appeared on the “Huffington Post” on September 10. Its title was good, and its content was better: “Priceless: How the Federal Reserve Bought the Economics Profession.” The title is a veiled reference to a popular series of MasterCard TV ads. The author began with this, and never looked back.

• The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.
  
  This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed’s thrall, the economists missed it, too.

It is a long article and well worth reading. It presents evidence that the Federal Reserve for three decades has had almost the entire profession of monetary economists on its payroll, one way or another.

He offers this example. In 1993, Greenspan informed the House Banking Committee that 189 economists worked for the Board of Governors (a government operation) and 171 worked for the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks (privately owned). Then there were 703 support staff and statisticians. These came from the ranks of economists.

This was only part of the story: the proverbial tip of the iceberg. From 1991-1994, the FED handed out $3 million to over 200 professors to conduct research.

This is still going on. There has been growth. The Board of Governors now employs 220 PhD-level economists. But the real growth has been in contracts.

• Fed spokeswoman says that exact figures for the number of economists contracted with weren’t available. But, she says, the Federal Reserve spent $389.2 million in 2008 on “monetary and economic policy,” money spent on analysis, research, data gathering, and studies on market structure; $433 million is budgeted for 2009.

That is a great deal of money. This amount of money, the author implies, is sufficient to buy silence. He adds that there are fewer than 500 PhD-level members of the American Economic Association whose specialty is either money and interest rates or public finance. In the private sector, about 600 are part of the National Association of Business Economists’ Financial Roundtable.

If you count existing economists on the payroll, past economists on the payroll, economists receiving grants, and those who want in on the deal, “you’ve accounted for a very significant majority of the field.”

• In addition, the FED has editors of the academic journals on its payroll or grants list. “It’s very important, if you are tenure track and don’t have tenure, to show that you are valued by the Federal Reserve,” says Jane D’Arista, a Fed critic and an economist with the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This suggestion is dismissed as “silly” by Robert King, editor-in-chief of “The Journal of Monetary Economics,” who is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Just plain silly. Nothing to it.

If you do not get published in an academic journal, you do not gain tenure at the top three dozen universities in the United States.

The author cites a 1993 letter from Milton Friedman, which was sent to a critic of the FED, Robert Auerbach.

• “I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.”1

How many economists who sit on the seven top journals as editors are connected to the FED? Almost half: 84 of 190.

Nothing to it. Silly. It’s just one of those things, just one of those crazy things.

The author cites testimony from Alan Greenspan before the House Banking Committee in 2008. This quotation is all over the Web. The version cited in the Wikipedia article on Greenspan states:

• Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
  
  Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.
  
  “Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”2

And yet, and yet….

The author did not ask what should have been an obvious question. “Why was the Federal Reserve System immune to criticism from 1914 to 1975?”

Ask that question, let alone answer it, and you will not get your article published in anything but a conspiracy journal or LewRockwell.com.

IMMUNITY FROM 1914 TO EARLY 2009

The Federal Reserve System has been untouchable from the day that the Senate passed the Federal Reserve Act late in the afternoon of the day before Christmas recess in 1913, when only a handful of Senators remained on the floor to vote, and Woodrow Wilson signed it that evening.

There have been a few critics in Congress. In the Wilson years, there was Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh (the father of the flyer). He laid it on the line. His statement appears in his Wiki entry.

• This Act establishes the most gigantic trust on Earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized, the people may not know it immediately but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed…. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill.

In the 1930’s, there was Congressmen Louis McFadden, a former banker. He was the author of the 1927 law that prohibited interstate banking. (It was repealed in 1994.) He was a hard-liner. He moved to impeach Herbert Hoover in 1932. For a Republican, this was unique for his era. Seven House members voted with him. He even introduced a resolution to bring conspiracy charges against the FED’s Board of Governors. It also failed. He was hard core. He was a fringe figure, as hard core people usually are.

In the 1940’s, there was Jerry Voohis, a fiat money greenbacker whose claim to fame was that he lost to Richard Nixon in 1946. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was Wright Patman, the eccentric populist from Texas, who chaired the House Banking Committee. For the last three decades, there has been Ron Paul.

That is pretty much it, 1914 to 2009. This is why Ron Paul’s bill to audit the FED is such a breakthrough. For the first time since 1914, the FED is being called into question.

That is why the “Huffington Post” article misses the point. The economics profession, the American political system, and the media have been silent about the FED until the last year. This is what needs explaining.

ACADEMIA’S SILENCE

A generation ago, there was only one thoroughly critical book on the FED that was written by an academic free market economist: “Fifty Years of Managed Money.” The author was Elgin Groseclose, who was an advocate of the gold standard. The book did not go down the memory hole. It never got out of it. In 1980, it was republished under a new title, “America’s Money Machine.” It stayed in the memory hole. The good news is that it is now available on-line for free at http://mises.org/books/moneymachine.pdf.

All this is to say that the FED received a free ride from academia and everyone else long before it began doling out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to academic economists.

How was this possible? Consider these suggestions, each of which would make a great rejected doctoral dissertation topic.

1. The advisory cartels that shape public opinion and politics in every nation, without exception has always favored central banking.
   
2. The methodologies of all schools of economic opinion except Austrianism and Marxism favor central banking.
   
3. Politicians of all parties want a lender of last resort to buy government debt at below-market prices.
   
4. Investors and their brokers want a floor for stock prices.
   
5. A conspiracy of bankers has pursued a cartel protected by central banking ever since 1694: the Bank of England.

But, you may respond, some of these topics are suitable for a dissertation topic in a history department. Political science, too. Quite true, and the dissertation will be rejected on the day the ABD (all but dissertation) student proposes it. Yet the FED does not fund historians and political scientists.

The protected status of central banking is universal. This is not unique to the United States. Central banking is by far the most protected anti-democratic institution in the modern world. The supporters of no other institution publicly defend the institution on this basis: a necessary means of protecting the nation from its legislature.

“IT’S THE METHODOLOGY, STUPID!”

Modern economics, except for Austrians and Marxists, teach that economics is a true science. Its model is physics. The economists are unwilling to accept the fact that human beings, unlike rocks, make decisions. These decisions make economics a realm of human action rather than physical cause and effect.

The Austrians begin with acting individuals to explain economic causation. The Marxists (all eight of them) begin with the mode of production. The Marxists are collectivists in every sense, but they view economics as a science based on dialectical materialism, not physics.

There is a third group, behavioral economists, who also break with the mainstream. But they do not break with the mathematical formulation of their theories of human action.

The supply-siders have yet to develop their theories into a consistent system. There is no college-level textbook based on their views. Their main pitch is that the government can and should cut marginal tax rates so that the government can and should collect more revenue.

The methodology of Keynesians, neoclassical economists, monetarists, behavioral economists, public choicers, and even rational expecationists are united: it is possible for central bankers to create economic growth and avoid recessions by increasing the money supply. They argue about the correct rate of fiat money growth. None of them concludes: “Shut down every central bank and let the free market decide the correct supply of money, given the right of non-fraudulent contract.”

This is a legal question: What constitutes the right of contract in monetary affairs? This has been answered comprehensively and in great detail by Prof. J. H. de Soto. No other legal theorist-economist has ever presented anything comparable to his 874-page book, “Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles.” It is on-line for free at http://Mises.org/books/desoto.pdf.

The economics profession favors either central banking or else, in the case of strict monetarists, believe the central bank can keep the economy working smoothly by a constant increase of the money supply by 3% to 5% per annum.

CONCLUSION

Until Ron Paul’s H. R. 1207, Congress had remained comatose with regard to the FED ever since 1914. Bernanke is the first Chairman to face skepticism regarding the independence of the FED. This has to do with politics. Politicians want to find out which big banks got how much. This has nothing to do with the fundamental question, namely, the theoretical case for a bankers’ cartel enforced by a central bank.

That question has not been raised by 99.9% of academia, the media, and politicians since 1914.

The Powers That Be will keep the public bamboozled for as long as the economy does not collapse, either through mass inflation, mass depression, or both.

They have had a free ride for a long time. The central banks’ bad policies have resulted in what Austrian School economists had said would happen. Only they have provided a highly developed theory of how central banking necessarily distorts supply and demand, and why this distortion will inevitably be corrected by economic crisis. They do not say when, only that it must take place when the market vetoes the plans of entrepreneurs and politicians who believed in central bank planning.

The bills are coming due. The crash will come. The consumers’ veto will come. The FED’s free ride will end.

In the meantime, audit the FED.

SOURCES:

1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/07/priceless-how-the-federal_n_278805.html?view=screen.

2 http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/greenspans-mea-culpa/.


Respectfully,

Mark

State Constitutions and the Tenth Amendment

Dear Friends:

Our early state constitutions were our first constitutions. They were the fundamental laws of their states, in most states replacing the colonial charters. (Connecticut retained its colonial charter as its constitution until 1818; Rhode Island, until 1842.) They grew out of more than 140 years of their separate histories which gave them distinctly different, deeply rooted cultural and governmental traditions. They were products of the collective worldviews and values, the histories and corporate identities of the people of each of our states which were striving to win their independence, or had won their independence, from Great Britain.

These state constitutions established and defined the institutions of civil government for each state. They defined the powers of civil government for their respective states and placed legal limits on the authority and powers of civil government’s institutions, offices, and officials. Through these means and the formation of declarations of rights or bills of rights they placed legal limits on the kinds of laws each state government (and its legal “creatures,” the local governments) could enact. They stated rights of the people of their states which civil government could not legally transgress.

These early American constitutions, with their declarations or bills of rights, were Christian documents – some more manifestly, even beautifully, so than others. They honored God, recognizing His existence and stating (some more fully than others) certain truths about His nature: Almighty, Creator, Lord, Governor of the Universe, Savior, Inspirer of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and the like. These are Christian affirmations, not products of eighteenth-century Deism. Many of these declarations implied that the people of the given state are in a covenantal relationship with God: in their recognition of Him as the “Governor of the Universe,” the “Great Legislator of the Universe,” and their recognition of His divine providence. This covenantal relationship is particularly clear in their numerous statements – reminiscent of Deuteronomy 8, 28, and Leviticus 26 – of the necessity of “religion,” Christianity, to the preservation of virtue in the people and of the necessity of virtue to the preservation of liberty. They spoke of “rights,” “natural rights,” and “the law of nature,” but the context of these statements made it clear that these rights, and that law, are from God. Some constitutions had Christian oaths or affirmations – of belief in Christianity, Trinitarian Christianity, or Protestant Christianity – which holders of public office were required to make.

To one degree or another, these constitutions, bills of rights, and declarations of rights were based on a Christian view of the nature of man. They saw man as having been created by God (not “evolved”!); thus they saw man as being valuable (and far more important than animals). They saw man as being responsible, under God, for his actions: not as a naturally “neutral,” much less “naturally good,” product determined by his environment. They saw man as having certain inherent, God-given rights, liberties, and duties. Given the overwhelming predominance of Christianity in these states (contrary to the myth that America of the day was dominated by “Enlightenment” rationalism) – in religion, education, law, legal thought, legal education, and political thought – it is easy to see that such “rights” were based on biblical ethical thought. The right to life was based on God’s law’s prohibition of murder (with no pietistic, humanistic, antinomian prohibitions of capital punishment for those whom God’s law deems worthy of death). The God-given right to liberty meant freedom within the boundaries of Christian morality. The right to religious freedom or the freedom of worship meant the freedom to worship God within the boundaries of Christian morality (not an unbounded freedom of men to engage in all manner of sins under the guise of “religious worship”). The right to property was based on God’s law’s prohibition of covetousness, adultery, and theft.

Consistent with the Bible’s teaching that all men are fallen in sin, these governmental documents were founded not upon a confidence in human nature but instead on a realistic distrust of the nature of man – of all men including the officials of civil government. Consistent with Romans 13’s teaching that civil government is a ministry of God to protect those who do good and punish and so restrain those who do evil, these constitutions and their bills or declarations of rights saw the purpose of civil government, under God, as to protect men’s God-given rights against both the private and the governmental actions of men. Denying the neutrality or goodness of man and believing his sinfulness, they framed civil governments. Believing that all men are sinners, they made written constitutions, buttressed with bills of rights or declarations of rights, to limit the authority and powers of the rulers of civil government – and the authority of “great men,” minorities, or majorities in control of the machinery of civil government. They designed republican (representative) governments so that the people of their states could influence their civil governments, but they made these limited governments. They designed systems of separation of powers, with checks and balances between and among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of their governments to do what they thought best to prevent these institutions and officials from usurping power and violating the people’s rights and liberty. They implied (because they were products of each colony’s resistance to British tyranny), and in some cases explicitly stated the right of resistance against arbitrary, unjust laws and tyranny.

And, consistent with biblical teaching, they did not rely on the design of their constitutions alone, nor on that plus their bills of rights or declarations of rights. Rather, they taught that the preservation of liberty depends on the preservation of morality or virtue among the people, which in turn depends on the continuing influence of “religion,” or Christianity on the people. They talked of “free government,” but they meant by it a civil government which protects the freedom and honors the rights of the people, not a civil government free to do whatever its rulers think best. They taught that “free government” cannot be maintained if the people are not virtuous, and that “religion” is the foundation of that necessary virtue, and so of freedom.

These states’ constitutions, declarations, and/or bills of rights were more than works of necessity. They were the products of their respective cultures, or subcultures, histories, and cherished ways of life. They were, by the language of the Declaration of Independence, the constitutions, declarations, and bills of rights of nations, of separate and equal peoples which had won their stations as in principle equal to the other nations of the earth. The people of each of these states wanted to preserve and protect not only their individual liberty but also their corporate identities as sovereign states, their beliefs and values, their ways of life. They were willing to give up, at least for the foreseeable future, a small portion – a very small portion – of their state’s authority in order to better protect their individual liberty and their state’s corporate identity via the Articles of Confederation.

When the government of the Articles did not work well, they were willing to delegate a little more authority and power to the new governmental system established by the Constitution. But only a little more authority and power. Not enough to threaten their own state’s (or, in principle, any other state’s) corporate identity or its right to govern itself. Nor enough to threaten their states’ protection of their people’s individual liberty. For the Constitution’s federal system of civil government was intended to be consistent with the states’ constitutions, bills of rights, and/or declarations of rights: not to threaten them, nor the corporate identities, nor the ways of life they were framed to protect.

That is why, when thoughtful opponents of the Constitution – and thoughtful men who were neither opponents nor advocates of its ratification – raised legitimate questions about the efficacy of the Constitution to preserve and protect individual liberty, justice, and the rights or powers of the states to govern themselves and preserve their ways of life, so many states’ legislatures or ratification conventions proposed amendments to the Constitution protecting the reserved powers of the states. That is why what became the Tenth Amendment was so easily added to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution or prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Respectfully,

Mark