Little Revelation on the Prairie
I suppose that I could call myself something of a scholar. Generally I reject such titles as they seem rather pretentious; nevertheless, I am fortunate to have what some would call an elegant education and something of a volume of research experience under my belt. For the past several years I have worked diligently to educate as many people as possible on the original intent of the Founding Fathers and the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, as well as a realistic look at the mainstream press and American foreign policy. Over the years, I have spent numerous hours with my nose buried in books, sitting in front of microfilm viewers, and digging through the plethora of information available on the internet. This has collectively been my life for the better part of the past sixteen years.
The particular point of my personal historical interest has been the Declaration of Independence. For me, this simple yet eloquent document is the most important treatise of freedom in the history of the world. Thomas Jefferson captured the theories of John Locke and transformed them into the birth certificate of a nation of free peoples. In my estimation, the Declaration stands above even the Constitution in importance as it is the Declaration of Independence that establishes the bedrock upon which the nation and its government must stand and operate. For most of my sixteen years of research and education, the Declaration has been my focal point.
When I was fortunate enough to meet and marry my wife, her passion for the same truth that I was seeking only personified my intensity to further discover the truth. In many ways our relationship has been symbiotic, not only from a personal, spiritual, and emotional level, but from an information level. As she has grown and expanded her knowledge, so have I…and we have both contributed to each of our collective journeys. It has all been an exciting and wonderful trek through the annals of truth.
Both of us have greatly enjoyed our journey, but almost simultaneously a few weeks ago, both of us agreed that we missed the release of the great works of fiction. I suppose that in many ways we both needed an intellectual release. As she picked through my dusty collection of books of fiction, I trolled through her books until I happened upon a boxed collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, nine classic books describing Mrs. Wilder’s life and adventures in the late 19th century American frontier west. I must admit that my only experience with the Little House story was the 1970s television show starring Michael Landon. I must also admit that I was somewhat remiss to read what many would consider to be a children’s book–and even worse, a girl’s book! Egats! Nevertheless, I removed the first of the small books one cold November evening and began, what I must now admit, was an interesting and wonderful experience.
Is this essay a book review of Mrs. Wilder’s books? No, though I do recommend them to everyone as they are a fantastic description of pioneer life and learned humility, as well as a beautiful piece of American literature. So what is the point, you might ask? Well, it all goes back to the Declaration of Independence and our American principles of freedom.
As I worked my way into the seventh book, Little Town on the Prairie, I was astounded to read in the words of Laura Wilder, a child’s interpretation (reflected fifty years later) of the Declaration of Independence that has long eluded me in all of my writings and studies. In this edition of the series, the Ingalls family was working their homestead in the harsh Dakota Territory and after an extremely difficult winter, the family ventured into the hard-scrabbled town to celebrate the 4th of July. The ceremony, though meager in means, was jubilant in a way that most modern Americans would not understand. Rather than the elaborate and showy displays of complex and nearly meaningless fireworks to which modern Americans are accustomed, the homesteaders ignited simple fireworks and rejoiced and harkened back to the not so distant battles of the Revolution. As the town and the Ingalls family happily watched, a townsman delivered an off the cuff speech on the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the general history of America up to the year 1881. The people rejoiced and reveled in the stories of the struggles of American freedom. As the story continued, the cheering crowds fell solemnly quiet as a gentleman proudly read the Declaration of Independence. Most of the people, including the Ingalls girls, knew the words of the document by heart and quietly mouthed the sacred words.
As I read along, I was saddened and reminded of the fact that most modern Americans haven’t a clue of the real story of the Revolution or the base content of the Declaration of Independence. In my ten years of college instruction, I found myself literally having to re-teach American history and government foundations from scratch to people who were high school graduates, and yet this little town in the 1880s, none of them with more than a basic 7th or 8th grade education at best, knew well their history and could recite the very foundation of their nation, the Declaration of Independence, from memory.
Though reinforcing my discouraged view of modern America and its failed education system, even this is not the point of my essay. The story continued with the town breaking into song:
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing….
Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King!
It was at this point that Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was raised on the harsh frontier, whose pioneer education couldn’t hold a candle to my modern “elegant” education, came to a simple understanding that had completely eluded me and the secular framework in which I was taught and live.
The crowd was scattered away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she
had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in
her mind, and she thought: God is America’s King.
She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free.
That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he
has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am a little older, Pa and Ma
will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to
give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.
Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means
to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, author of liberty–”
The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty.
Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives
you a right to be free. (pg. 76-77).
In these three simple paragraphs everything I had been trying to say for sixteen years was codified in the words of little “half-pint.” For years I have worked to educate people concerning the Declaration of Independence and its Lockeian framework. Locke’s 1690 work, Two Treaties of Government, written on the heels of the English Civil War, the failure of the Stuart attempts at absolutism, and the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights, framed the rights of mankind in a Christian context. Locke argued that God created all men equal (tabula rasa) and granted them the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and property. This, of course, directly carried over to Jefferson’s great opus in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. As we all should know, the Declaration created the sovereign American citizen with rights and responsibilities, not an arbitrary subject to a sovereign monarch.
The writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder brought me full circle. What she, as a child of 14 years, understood was that both Locke and Jefferson pointed to God above as the supreme sovereign or king. In traditional monarchies, kings are sovereign. The principle of this train of thought was best espoused by Niccolo Machiavelli in his 1532 work The Prince. Under the Machiavellian model, the people are subjects and are granted certain privileges by the sovereign monarch that can be taken away at the whims of the sovereign. Both Locke and Jefferson rejected this and argued that the people are the sovereign and are made so at birth by God. By definition, using Locke’s Treaties and Jefferson’s Declaration, God is indeed the king of America! Just as Machiavelli’s sovereign king granted privileges to subjects, so God gave citizens, all born equal, with rights, and free–and in the words of Laura Ingalls, to be free, “you have to keep the laws of God for God’s law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.”
I know that there are many out there that would disagree with this interpretation from a religious perspective. To them, I would simply advise that they study their American history; furthermore, I would advise them to read Locke in detail, upon whose writings Jefferson based the entire theory of what the American nation would be! It is only over the past eighty years (and specifically over the past forty years) that Christianity has been forcibly removed from our public and even private lives in the name of so-called diversity and political correctness. Two generations of Americans have been educated with an absence of Christianity in their historical understanding. For many Americans, their only understanding of public Christianity is found in the dubiously named “religious right.” Unfortunately, these so-called “religious right” politicians, based on their very clear and long standing record, are nothing more than petty political philanderers using a religious label to gain the votes of ill-informed individuals. These modern political charlatans have little or no relationship to earlier American Christian history, and based upon the platform of the modern Republican Party which caucuses nearly all of these politicians and those who would vote for them, hold nothing in common with the individual freedom message found in the Declaration of Independence (please, don’t think me partisan as the Democrats are no better). As a result of this bleaching of our common American history, modern America has essentially no link to the free Christian America that Laura Ingalls Wilder so well understood.
Many might read this essay and think that I am arguing in favor of America as a Christian theocracy of sorts; on the contrary, Jefferson spoke of freedom as the guidepost of the nation, tempered by God as the giver of rights and freedom. In a nation of free peoples, they can do as they chose until they violate the rights of another person. This is very much in line with the Christian doctrine of free will. Free will is the belief that people may believe as they wish, including the rejection of Christianity, with the belief that all peoples must eventually make an accounting of their life and deeds in the afterlife as they stand before God almighty. This does not make a theocracy; it makes for a free society in which, in order to keep your freedom you must, in the words of little Laura Ingalls, “…you have to obey your own conscience…It means you have to be good.”
As I pondered the revelation revealed to me by the long gone little girl on the prairie I became concerned as I thought of the correlation between man as king and God as king. Under a traditional monarchy, the king is the state. The king grants privileges, makes decisions of law and of life and death. When that king dies or is removed, the state is transformed into something new and different and the subjects are forced to submit to the will of the new sovereign lord. If our American nation, which was established upon the fact that God, the supreme sovereign of the universe, gave every person the right to life and liberty, were to reject our king from almost every aspect of our public and private lives, would our nation long stand? Could this nation, having deposed, in the words of Jefferson, “…the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God…” continue to be free and just? I fear not, and the signs of the times around us will only further this premise.
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville published his great work, Democracy in America. De Tocqueville wrote extensively regarding the goodness and greatness of America. He was particularly impressed with the high level of church attendance in America as well as the fact that in every American home three things could be found: The Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and a copy of the Constitution of the United States of America. He wrote in some detail how every American, regardless of their class status, was well versed in all of these documents. De Tocqueville also said something that is rather striking considering our current situation: “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” Based upon what I see and observe, I would suggest that America is no longer good as she has deposed her rightful king, God almighty, in favor of a secular agenda that is alien to our foundations of freedom. Our greatness rapidly erodes around our ears as our once cherished freedoms are legislated away by a clearly secular legislature, executive, and judiciary that have an agenda adverse to the principles of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. We should all look back in time to 14-year old Laura Ingalls and her appreciation to the King of America, God almighty, the sovereign of the universe. The king that Laura so easily gave thanks to for her freedom and rights has not abdicated, rather, we have abandoned our king. In the name of all good knights fighting for the republic and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we should all ride forward to the standard of our king who gives us our freedom.
Reb
