We don’t know a lot more about Audrey Hale, the young mentally-ill woman who shot dead three 9-year-olds and three 60-year-olds at a Christian school yesterday. But we’re learning a lot more about the trans community and their allies, of which she was a part.
Our noble media (*spit*) are blaming Republicans and Christians for what happened and spinning the story to make “trans” people the victims or to make the story about guns.
Forget that Audrey slaughtered six innocent people, including the three children. Instead, lecture those you despise with “Hate has consequences.” What are you implying, Trans Resistance Network? Seems to me the only one with “hate” around here is Audrey Hale.
And maybe you.
“Many transgender people deal with anxiety, depression, thoughts of suicide, and PTSD from the near-constant drum beat of anti-trans hate, lack of acceptance from family members and certain religious institutions, denial of our existence, and calls for de-transition and forced conversion,” TRN claimed.
“Anti-trans hate”? “Denial of … existence”? “Forced conversion”? You’d think the whole country was out hunting these people like fox hounds.
Matt Walsh addressed the shooting on his show yesterday.
Here’s a few paragraphs that I found helpful.
The transactivists are assured that, somehow, those who disagree with them are a threat to their very lives. Just by disagreeing. That those who do not affirm their self-identity are engaging in violence, simply by not affirming. That the refusal to affirm is essentially an act of murder, okay, because you’re murdering me by not affirming my self-identity, because my self-identity is the only identity that matters, and if you make me question my self-identity then you are basically killing me.
That’s the logic. And it is a logic that gives a green light to carry out atrocities. It is intended to do that. That is how it is intended. Let’s stop beating around the bush and pretending otherwise. This is what they want.
Every time someone, someone in the media, someone in D.C., anyone else, points at Christians, at conservatives, at any of us, and says, “They want genocide!” what they’re really saying is, “Deal with them! Shut them down! Silence them! Take them out!” That’s how the words are interpreted. How else could they be interpreted?! After all, if somebody was really carrying out a genocide, then violence would be the appropriate response.
Nobody I know wants to be targeted by transactivists for refusing to “affirm” a transsexual’s “identity.” But for most Christians, this poses a problem because it is clear that a person who is confused about whether they are a female or a male has some psychological issues. We don’t “affirm” someone who makes irrational claims. We get them help.
As believers, we also let them know that God loves them, right where they’re at, but we don’t let them stay in that confused state. We get them help. They need healing.
It’s a tough needle to thread.
This is the evil that we are up against. And evil is the point, here. Because, y’know, no matter who’s responsible for the latest burst of demonic evil, what lies at the root is the reality of human evil and a society that fosters this evil, and fertilizes it, to help it grow.
I think this is an important point. It’s not just that the people in charge are cultural Marxists; it’s not just that they celebrate the crazy over honoring historic and traditional norms; it’s that they encourage what is evil, what goes against “Nature and Nature’s God.” Our institutions, our politics, our universities, our entertainment, our mainstream heroes, are fostering evil.
We’ve become an evil empire. And why?
Whether it’s a trans person or anyone else carrying out the latest mass murder, the root is always a culture in a state of spiritual and moral decay. We’ve become a country filled with numb, detached, empty, desensitized people with no sense of underlying purpose.
Again, I’m brought back to John Adams’s statement because it so clearly underscores why things are off the rails in our country.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams, Letter to the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798
While there are exceptions, especially in our churches (but not always), the institutions that drive culture are no longer populated by “a moral and religious People.” And, therefore, says Adams, the Constitution they created is “wholly inadequate” to govern us.
Guns aren’t the issue. We’ve had guns for hundreds of years but it’s only been recently that “guns” have become a problem — that comes in the wake of a society that has forsaken God and actively fosters evil.
And that evil will go after the only thing standing in it’s way: Christians.
Daily Verse | Job 36:16 “He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food.”
Tuesday’s Reading: Job 38-39
There have been a handful of dreadful shootings over the last few weeks, including the NYC subway shooting, the racially-motivated bloodbath in a Buffalo, NY grocery store, and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There have also been several smaller, “one-off” shootings.
None of them should have happened. They aren’t what our Founders envisioned when they enshrined the right to be armed in our U.S. Constitution. What they envisioned was the right of the people to protect themselves from a tyrannical government.
America has a problem. We are guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms. But we are no longer the society in which that right was declared.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams
I’ve quoted this from Adams before, but I’ll keep doing so because the more I sit with it, the more profound it is. The Founding Fathers knew that freedom without virtue is license. If there’s anything that describes our society today, it’s “license.” And license is only a step removed from anarchy. All restraints, all standards, all guidelines are being thrown off in order to indulge our most naked desires or to give ourselves over to the darkest corners of our inner life.
When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild. But whoever obeys the law is joyful. — Proverbs 29:18 (New Living Translation)
Yet the Founders took the risk and bestowed on us our inalienable rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. — Second Amendment, U.S. Constitution
Brandon is going on these days about the Second Amendment not being “absolute.” (Actually, he has said that “There’s no amendment that’s absolute.”) What he means by that with 2A is that there were always some kind of limits on what “Arms” a person could keep and bear. His now (several times) debunked example is that private citizens couldn’t own a cannon.
I’m not a constitutional scholar, but a straight-forward reading of the text seems to be absolute. The modal verb “shall not” is absolute. My right to keep and carry (bear) an arm may not, will not, cannot, shall not be infringed.
“Infringed” here means to limit, to undermine, to encroach upon.
Rep. Donald Beyer (D-Va.), who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, is looking to put a 1,000% excise tax on AR-15-type rifles as a means of making them less affordable to the public.
“What it’s intended to do is provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen,” Beyer told Business Insider. “We think that a 1,000% fee on assault weapons is just the kind of restrictive measure that creates enough fiscal impact to qualify for reconciliation.”
With the affected guns ranging in price from $500 to $2000, the tax could add as much as $20,000 to the final sale price of the weapons. While bullets would not be taxed at the high rate, high-capacity magazines would be.
Hey Don, what is it about “shall not be infringed” do you not understand? He says, right there in his quote, that it “is just the kind of restrictive measure” they want. To restrict means to limit and 2A says, absolutely, that the government SHALL NOT do that.
Every time another “gun control” law is passed or another “gun free zone” is created, our absolute right to be armed is infringed upon. In other words, a case could be made that such laws or regulations are illegal.
Now, I’m not an absolutist in the extreme. Given that we are now an immoral and irreligious people who no longer view self-control and an orderly society as virtuous, we may have to admit that some regulations are in our best interest.
But let’s be honest: regulations don’t control the heart or behavior. At best they only tell us what is “legal” and what the penalties are for breaking the law. And that’s a poor substitute for personal virtue and responsibility. Take California for example:
An FBI report on ‘Active Shooter Incidents’ in 2021 shows that California was the number one state for such incidents, with six incidents total.
California is also number one for gun law strength, the Mike Bloomberg-affiliated Everytown for Gun Safety noted …
… California has universal background checks, an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, a red flag law, gun registration requirements, a “good cause” requirement for concealed carry permit issuance, a ban on carrying a gun on a college campus for self-defense, a ban on K-12 teachers being armed on campus for classroom defense, a background check requirement for ammunition purchases, and a limit on the number of guns a law-abiding citizen can purchase in a given month, among other controls.
All potentially illegal controls, I might add, because they violate the people’s right to “keep and bear Arms.” But the people in positions of power don’t care about our rights. They only care about getting and keeping power.
None of the gun control laws on the books stopped any of the killers I mentioned at the outset. And adding more laws—apart from confiscating all of our guns, which is the goal—would have done nothing more to prevent the tragedies.
Frankly, the driving force behind all the “gun control” laws is to make it as difficult to own a firearm as possible, if not make it outright impossible. Jack the price of a firearm up by 1000% and you can plausibly deny that you’re infringing on anyone’s right to keep and bear Arms. “I’m not saying you can’t keep and bear a weapon; of course you can. I’m just going to make it so expensive that most people won’t be able to.”
That’s infringement.
Worse still is a growing attitude of contempt for the U.S. Constitution. Here’s Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) expressing his feelings about constitutional rights:
Cicilline: You know who didn’t have constitutional right to life respected? The kids at Parkland and Sandy Hook and Uvalde… so spare me the bullshit pic.twitter.com/xji3Cv7lFr
“… so spare me the bullshit about constitutional rights.” Really? Why is this guy in Congress? Didn’t he take an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States when he took office?
Then there’s Brandon.
FLASHBACK
Joe Biden said “bingo!” when asked if he was “gonna come for” Americans’ guns. pic.twitter.com/kk9uPKLzjP
This is what the erosion of liberty looks like. When you have “representatives” in the legislature and executive branch who have contempt for the very ideas they swore to protect, it’s a house of cards.
And that’s an infringement on the security of our rights as citizens.
Daily Verse | Job 4:15 “A spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body stood on end.”
Thursday’s Reading: Job 8-10
Thursday and I’m back after a short visit with my mom for another milestone birthday. I hope to be remembered as one of those children who “arise and call her blessed” (Prov. 31:28).
I was in upstate New York during my time away, about an hour away from the Tops grocery store in Buffalo where a white 18-year-old self-described “mild-moderate authoritarian left[y]” shot and killed ten people in a racially-motivated massacre. On my trip home, another massacre occurred, this time in Texas, where an 18-year-old Hispanic, Salvador Ramos, killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
The two massacres bookend a string of shootings; in a church in California where an Asian man shot and killed one and injured five, and in a Dallas hair salon where a black man shot and injured three Korean Americans. All come just a month after a black man, Frank Robert James, was arrested for shooting and wounding ten people in an attack on a New York City subway train.
I remind you; I only mention their skin color because the Klown Klub in Washington DC is convinced that “white supremacist domestic terror attacks are the number one threat we face, you guys!” and of the five shootings I just mentioned, only one was a white dude—and he wasn’t even of the correct political persuasion. I mean, of course, that he wasn’t a right-wing conservative Trump supporter protesting a stolen election while bitterly clinging to his guns and religion.
These are horrific crimes not only for the loss of life, but the fact that these are innocents—people just going about their daily lives. Particularly heinous is the killing of the children.
Worse still are the absolute hot takes of our political class in the wake of these killings. Progressives waste no time in capitalizing on these calamities because they are, for the most part, heartless trolls who have a political life to juice with outrage. If they can just get in front of the cameras and gnash their teeth with the latest sound bites, it keeps them in the news to advance their political agenda.
Here’s Irish-American Robert Francis O’Rourke, otherwise known as “Beto,” the fake Latinx and failed presidential candidate, storming a press conference held by Texas governor Greg Abbot and other officials as he gives an update on the shooting.
The bodies weren’t even cold yet. I’m sure Beto, who’s currently challenging Abbot for the governorship, thought this stunt would “fire up his base” and he’d be heralded as “speaking truth to power.”
Nah. He’s a disgusting male Karen who steps on the bodies of dead children to score cheap political points.
Beto really used a press conference about dead children to pull a political stunt to help his campaign. What an utterly soulless piece of shit. These people are just absolute demons. My God.
Then there’s Resident Teleprompter, another fake humanitarian who, to his credit, started with some heartfelt words.
To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There is a hollowness in your chest. You feel like you are being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out. Suffocating. It is never quite the same. It is a feeling shared by the siblings and the grandparents and the family members of the community that is left behind.
[…]
So tonight, I asked the nation to pray for them and give the parents and siblings the strength in the darkness they feel right now.
But then he raised his voice and began a rant filled with lots of rhetoric and no specifics. He also called on “God’s name” a lot.
“When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” he said.
Oh good. He’s identified the culprit: the “gun lobby.” And he knows what needs to be done.
Good.
Good.
What are we going to do?
Next, he invoked the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, Santa Fe High School, Oxford High School and other shootings.
“I am sick and tired of it. We have to act.”
Good.
Good.
What are we going to do?
“And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage. When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”
Wait. This is a flat-out lie. The “assault weapons ban” of 1994 had no discernible impact on mass shootings. Yes, the number of shootings with so-called “assault weapons” tripled—but only in 2012, eight years after the so-called ban ended. Otherwise, the number of shootings remained essentially the same.
So “don’t tell me” that we should do what you did in 1994—which did nothing.
“What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for, except to kill someone? Deer aren’t running through the forests with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake!”
This lame joke was from his “campaign” for resident. He thinks that “assault weapons” are some kind of military-grade guns that are powerful enough to penetrate “Kevlar vests.” The truth is that an “assault weapon,” often (wrongly) called an “assault rifle,” is a semi-automatic rifle that shoots .223 caliber rounds that pack less punch than the .308 caliber rounds used by the M-1 rifle the AR-15 replaced.
“For God’s sake, we have to have the courage to stand up to the industry.”
OK, finally. We’re going to stand up to the “industry.” Great. When? How?
“Most Americans support common sense gun laws.”
Define “common sense gun laws.” Then show me the data.
“These kind of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world. Why?”
Well, in Australia they took everybody’s guns away. In a lot of other countries, citizens are not allowed to possess guns. That might have something to do with it.
Wait. Is that what you’re suggesting?
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
Who said we’re “willing” to live with it? Why are you blaming us for “letting this happen”?
“Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to stand up to the lobbies [sic]?”
It’s the lobbyists’ fault. I have heard this before.
“It’s time to turn this pain into action … It’s time to act.”
Right. You said that.
“It’s time for those who obstruct or delay or block the common sense gun laws, we need to let you know that we will not forget.”
Is that what time it is?
“We can do so much more. We have to do more.”
So I gather.
What I think I heard was, we need to act. We have to “stand up” to the gun lobby, implement “common sense gun laws” like the failed 1994 assault weapons ban, and we must not forget those who oppose “common sense gun laws.”
Like I said, short on specifics.
Here’s the bottom line: nothing that Brandon or any other politician says or does will “fix” this problem we have because it’s not a “gun” problem.
It’s a heart problem.
“But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him ‘unclean.’” — Jesus, Matthew 15:18-20
We were a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values, and our Founding Fathers understood that only a virtuous citizenry would be able to responsibly handle the freedom that our Constitution gave us. As John Adams said,
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.“
As I’ve argued before, we are clearly no longer “a moral and religious People.” If Adams was correct, then our Constitution is wholly inadequate to govern us. It will take a return to faith and the virtues of Judeo-Christian values.
Hancock added, “At the heart of the problem is the fact that the majority of the young men that were involved [in shooting incidents such as the one in Uvalde, Texas] do not have an active father at home. It points to something that’s relatively recent in our society: a national boy crisis.
“We are praying that God will be near in this time of pain and loss, that the church will rise up, and that amid tragedy, courageous men of faith will stand in the gap to love, serve and mentor a generation of hurting boys struggling to understand what it means to be a godly man,” added Hancock of Trail Life USA.
Not a single politician is asking: 1) How did this murderer get into the school? 2) What security did this school have and how can we protect schools like we protect our concerts, banks, museums? 3) WHERE WERE HIS PARENTS AND THE ADULTS IN HIS LIFE? 4) How did he buy a handgun? 5) Did he pass a background check? 6) No one in his house saw what was going on?
These are the questions asked by people who not only want answers, but solutions.
The “gun lobby” didn’t head his household, the “gun lobby” didn’t neglect to monitor his behavior, the “gun lobby” didn’t neglect to secure the school, the “gun lobby” didn’t leave any doors unlocked, and the “gun lobby” didn’t tell him to murder anyone.
Right.
We have to rebuild a virtuous culture. “Culture is a powerful force for good. When good behavior is normalized and deviant destructive behavior is ostracized, shamed, and marginalized, you get more good behavior.”
The foundation of a virtuous culture is a return to God.
Daily Verse | Genesis 26:24 “I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bless you and will increase the number of your descendants for the sake of my servant Abraham.”
Wednesday’s Reading: Genesis 27-29
It’s Wednesday and I can’t help but feel that we’re headed toward a showdown between the forces of freedom and the forces of tyranny, which in full flower is the evil of communism. In yesterday’s post I mentioned that there have been several articles by lefty publications fretting about a new “civil war.” They’re late to the table, though, as I, myself, have been warning for years (recent samples here, here, here and here) about the trajectory we’re on as a country, concluding that the natural (though not inevitable) end of the arc was a violent clash between Left and Right.
Today I would modify my statement to say that the clash is between those who are alarmed over the restrictions being placed on their natural rights and freedoms, and those who want to consolidate power and lord it over the citizenry. At its core, it’s a clash of visions over what America will be: will it collapse in on itself and go the way of European multi-cultured socialism, or renew its strength as the sole bastion of personal freedom and opportunity never before seen in the history of the world?
Into the debate about whether or not we’re on the cusp of another civil war drops this article by William Sullivan, titled, “What Issue Was Really at the Heart of the Civil War, and is it Relevant Today?” After tracing the causes of the war way back to 1828, Sullivan explains, “The federal government issued new tariffs which were, by design, both harmful to the South and beneficial to Northern producers. A tariff of nearly 49-percent was issued on nearly all imported goods.” In response, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union, but war was averted with “the 1833 passage of both the Force Bill and the Compromise Tariff, which gave the federal government the right to militarily enforce tariffs and lowered the tariff rates, respectively.”
However, that raised the question that remained unanswered right up until South Carolina actually seceded from the Union in 1861:
If the people of a state surmise that the federal government is pursuing a policy that compromises the liberty and prosperity of its citizens, does that state have to conform to what is perceived by the people of the state as an unconstitutional abuse of power, or, more bluntly, intolerable tyranny?
Sullivan goes on to quote Clifford Dowdey, who “offers a fairly good summation” of what led the country to civil war:
[The North and South] had diverged into patterns of life which became increasingly antithetical; antagonisms and rivalries grew in intensity. The industrial North did wish to buy cheap and sell dear at the expense of the South, while Northern money power needed the South in a colonial status for exploitation. Slavery did exist in the South, and there was a high moral tone in the issue of freedom, held by a small minority. Extremists on both sides did inflame passions. There was, as an amalgam of all this, the nationalistic sweep of the new industrial middle-class society represented by the North, in alliance with the expanding, democratic West, and against these the South stood as an anachronistic, arrogant feudal culture in the path of manifest destiny. All of this defines the elements of duality within the corporate body of the nation; yet, put them all together, with equal emphases or any single emphasis, and the element of explosion is missing.
Sullivan then draws the parallels with our own age:
Red and blue states have, in fact, diverged into patterns of life that have become increasingly antithetical in recent years, and antagonisms and rivalries are growing in intensity. Blue states did fleece the taxpayers of red states last year by demanding a federal bailout for their decision to keep their states irrationally closed during the pandemic and in order to keep their broken, and internally unsustainable, entitlement programs afloat. There is a high moral tone being expressed on abortion in red states, an institution that disregards the right to life among the unborn just as the institution of slavery disregarded the right to liberty among slaves. Extremists on both sides are inflaming passions. Effete coastal liberals and elitists in the media and academia view middle-class, red-state denizens as anachronistic God-worshippers who prioritize their families and communities before the needs of the national collective, and are thereby impediments on that Hegelian path of history toward their inevitable vision of “progress.”
Red and blue states do, in many ways, seem like separate parts locked in a struggle that must be resolved if we are to function as a nation. Will this warring duality be resolved, or will we explode when, for example, the federal government decides to mandate vaccination IDs be issued by all of the states, and several states refuse?
Nobody would deny that we’re deeply divided in our country today. But what is the core cause of this divergence that we’re experiencing between red and blue states or, more candidly, between progressive activists and conservative citizens? What started the divergence in the first place?
Sullivan hints at it when he writes of “red-state denizens as anachronistic God-worshippers.” Remember that a key feature of cultural Marxism and its ultimate state, communism, is the superiority of Man and the rejection of God in any form. In his book, Witness, written 70 years ago, Whittaker Chambers explained that the trial of Alger Hiss, “was a trial of ‘the two irreconcilable faiths of our time — Communism and Freedom.’ And that struggle, that trial, he wrote, ‘can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.'”
Communism, he wrote, is
man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.
It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals …. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
That is the root cause of the division we are experiencing in our nation today—the denial of God in favor of the supremacy of Man. As John Adams wrote,
“Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and Religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.“
If we are no longer a “moral and religious people” who acknowledge the sovereignty of God and our Constitution wasn’t written with such people in mind, then we find ourselves adrift with no governing structure fit for us. Our system of government depended on self-restraint, or self-governance, which came from a belief in a sovereign God.
The core of our conflict is a clash between those who believe in God’s Providence and those who would assume for themselves the ruler’s throne. We can’t go on this way indefinitely. One or the other of the competing visions for our life together will be destroyed, but which—freedom under God or communism under Man?
Daily Verse | 2 Chronicles 24:1 Joash was seven years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem forty years.
It’s Friday and the end of the first full week of May. Spring is in the air but hasn’t landed yet.
One of my favorite quotes from our Founding Fathers is the one from John Adams that I referenced a couple of days ago. It is from a letter he wrote to the Massachusetts Militia on 11 October 1798. Below is the specific quotation in bold, situated in its paragraphical context.
While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while she continues Sincere and incapable of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned Us by Providence. But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
This is a warning written by a man who was one of the central Founders of the United States form of government. Adams drafted the 1780 Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which served as a model for the United States Constitution. Adams and others made edits to the draft of the U.S. Constitution before it was adopted by the United States.
John Adams was intimately involved with and intimately familiar with the structure and purpose of the U.S. Constitution. So when he makes an observation about it, we should listen to him. And he has plenty to say in this letter that both acknowledges and addresses human nature.
To set up the final sentences that comprise the quote, he starts by saying that if our country “continues Sincere,” remaining “untainted” by (political) practices that produce desolation in other parts of the world, that we will be most happy with our local lot in life. But he warns that should we become good fakers (“deep simulation,” e.g. pretending) with ourselves and other nations while, in fact, we are “rioting in rapine [the violent seizure of another’s property] and Insolence [rude, disrespectful; contemptuously impertinent],” our Country will become “the most miserable Habitation in the World.”
In other words, if we talk a good game to ourselves and to our friends but, in truth, we’re a country full of selfishness and greed, we will be a miserable people.
The reason for this is that the government does not have enough power to deal with human passions that run wild and unchecked by “morality and Religion.” Therefore, he concludes, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Right there seems to be the crux of the problem in the United States. The Founders understood human nature and were willing to assume that where government left off, personal responsibility guided by Judeo-Christian teaching would fill the gaps.
And therein lies the problem. God is no longer central to our shared civic life together. We have retreated into separate sects, each claiming his right to do what the hell he wants and complaining when he can’t. God has been forced out of the public square and many people believe He should stay removed from our civil discussions.
In the vacuum left by God, however, the government steps in to guide your life and decides what is “good” and what is “bad.” In the United States, the government is trying to do what it was never meant to do: act as your conscience.
