Michael Smith:
There is no question that people are hungry for a way to fight back against the leftist onslaught the years of our neglect has wrought. That neglect is not the fault of any particular person or group, it comes from assuming the left is just like we are – that they liveBut that is wrong.
There is an old saying within the trades and in the engineering community: “Rust never sleeps.”
It is the same with the political and ideological left, they never sleep either and as it turns out, they are just as corrosive.
“What can we do?” is probably the most common question conservative pundits (even amateur ones like me) get.
It is a lot like the old question of “How do you eat an elephant?”
Of course, the answer is “One bite at a time.”
Our system of governance depends upon people who believe in it. It was different in that aspect from most of the governments in existence when America was born. You are not forced to obey at the point of a sword, and it didn’t require being born into the right family or to be a member of the “right” religious group.
No matter who you are, no matter your station in life, you have the opportunity to participate in your own government.
That distills it down your family, your friends and neighbors and your home.
The American experiment was created by individual men in their own homes, in their local taverns and in their churches. Several of the greatest defenders of liberty were preachers, priests, and pastors – men of the Cloth – and as we all know, many of the first settlers in America came here to escape religious persecution in Jolly Ole England.
Why would the preservation of their legacy gifted to us be any different?
Chapter 20 of Matthew records Jesus talking with his disciples. In verse 20, Jesus says:
“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Jesus’s point was that one person alone does not make a church — but two gathered in the name of Jesus can. Three is even better. God calls us to be a community.
Not to be sacrilegious, but the same can be said of the spirit of our Founders. They left us all the information we need in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and their letters.
There’s already a tried and true model for us to use.
I was born and raised in rural Mississippi, in the deep heart of the Bible Belt.
We had Sunday School and Church services on Sunday morning and Sunday evening, as well as a service and Bible study on Wednesday nights. There were also several different groups that met independently to study the Word. We taught each other, we taught our kids, we discussed and learned and often speakers were invited to help us with things with which we struggled or just wanted to know more about.
But it was mostly lay people teaching and learning from each other. It was friends and family meeting together to understand and to learn how to be stronger in the Spirit.
I have been thinking that as Jesus called on us to be a community under God, the same is demanded of us as a people seeking liberty and freedom in a civil society.
Why would we not adopt that model to build and maintain our representative republic in the manner in which it was designed?
If our country is to be salvaged and saved, it is more likely to be done in the living rooms and dens of private homes than in the smoke-filled back rooms and cloakrooms in DC – but it can’t be done without some prep work.
It’s all there for the reading. Prager U and Hillsdale College have some great reference material available as well.
America was born in homes, taverns and churches of people just like us.
It can be saved and restored the same way.