Be of good cheer!
If you are discouraged about the Presidential choices we have today, imagine picking from these candidates: a former Secretary of State who became the worst President in American history, a rogue Republican who knew little or nothing about the government and had an unfit temperament for the office, while a Know Nothing Party ran a former President whose name nobody can now recall.
On the nation’s birthday, here is a thought from an American textbook:
Let our prayer then be that the same God who brought our fathers out of bandage, into a strange land, to found an empire in the wilderness, may continue his protection to their children. Let us indulge the hope, that in this Western World freedom has found a congenial clime; that the tree of liberty which has been planted here may grow up in majesty and beauty until it shall overshadow the whole land and beneath its branches the nations may live in unity and love. . . “*
Of course, this book only makes it to the James Buchanan administration. The author doesn’t know if we are going to survive, but he prays that we will: in print, in a textbook.
For those who claim the idea of a “Christian America” was a creation of the 1950’s or the Cold War should note that this book was published in 1864 not 1964. Any examination will show that though America was not a nation founded only by Christians or just for Christians, the vast majority of Americans were and are Christians. They expected their values to show up in the books their children used in school.
That much is obvious, but there are other lessons for the patriot and the Christian (not the same categories) to learn from this passage.
Patriotism was taught as the best check to sectionalism and jingoism.
An American Christian should be a patriot, not a globalist, sectional, or jingoist.
Why? Americans are both hopeful and wise. We aspire to paradise, but do not expect perfection in this life. We do not trust princes, because power is tough to handle well. For every Abraham Lincoln, we are get a Congress full of James Buchanan types.
Globalism gives too much power to a single government. What checks that much power?
We distrust sectionalism, because too much division breeds endless wars between weak powers.
Jingoism takes love of our folks and pretends our folks are better than everyone else’s.
While I feel like my Motherland is the best, I know that feeling is not a fact. I would love the United Kingdom, Kenya, or Singapore if I had been born there. Jingoism takes a good thing (patriotism) and turns love of country into love of an idol.
I love God and then country, but in that order! The 1864 textbook has some good points, but it falls too far into a bad form of American exceptionalism where America is “best.” There are ways America has been best, but as my British friends point out: they were ending the slave trade while we were buying slaves.
Of course, a good school will also introduce students to globalist, sectionalist, and jingoist thought. Any idea is open to challenge. School can do so by talking a clue from a better era and giving students books written by authors, not textbooks pasted together by committees.
American schools used opinionated books.
The American Pageant** is the product of a Stanford professor who has strong opinions on everything. I loved this book as a high school student because it provoked me to rage, agreement, and discussion. You could fight with a book written by a person, but not one written by a committee.
Since I am a traditional Christian and a political conservative, it is worth saying that a good school needs opinionated books from a variety of perspectives. Nothing is so chilling to intellectual growth as a school (left or right) that only allows one “worldview” or perspective into reading . . . at least from junior high forward.
Education is not enough- we had a Civil War.
Oddly, reading books and speeches before the Civil War remind me that education is not enough. The politicians of the North and the South were often fearfully erudite and had carefully, logically worked out positions. The good guys, the abolitionists, had the truth on their side, but also worked hard on art, scholarship, and mass media to support their cause. However, the bad guys, the slavers, also thought hard, argued well, and had an entire artistic (especially in music) bulwark for the “peculiar institution.”
Both sides had plenty of smart people, polemics, apologetics, and rhetoric. They also had stopped talking to each other. Both sides viewed the other as immoral and not just wrong. Now I think race based slavery was immoral and had to go, but the Civil War was a bad and bloody solution. While slavery was wrong, slave holders and the people of the South who were not slave holders, were not just slave holders…they had other characteristics.
They were people (just as the slaves were people) and so complicated.
Abolitionists stopped listening to people and started seeing only slavery when they looked South. Many an abolitionist was funded by factories that got their charitable largess by exploiting the poor and recent immigrants. It is always better to be free than a slave, but some factory conditions were immoral.
Of course, there could be no compromise on the rights of the slaves . . .those rights came from God and not from any agreement of human beings (North or South). If progress toward abolition was impossible, then Civil War may have been inevitable, but one gets the sense that partisans welcomed it. Abraham Lincoln was right not to rejoice in the war, but to use it to accomplish what good he could.
Never forget: it was the self-educated Lincoln (a year of school or so) that saw the truth. Intellectual abolitionism lacked his creative imagination because old arguments had locked them into positions. When the old order fell apart, as it always does, they did not know what to do. Lincoln did.
Education is good, but not enough. Education will always teach the status quo and in a revolutionary moment the status quo, the old wisdom, may be foolish. The Daniel Webster cry for reason and unity with which the text ends was good for the early 1800’s, but was too little for the crisis of 1861. We need Abraham Lincoln . . . and by God’s grace got him.
So in this trying time:
Let our prayer then be that the same God who brought our fathers out of bondage, into a strange land, to found an empire in the wilderness, to proclaim liberty to the captive here and in foreign lands, may continue his protection to their children.
————————-
* Taken from History of the United States by Marcus Willson (New York: Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman and Co, 1864)
**The American Pageant Thomas Bailey (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In