A Letter to American Christians
Dear American Christian,
I know I am not one of you, so you have no particular reason to listen to me or trust me except that I'm trying to tell you a truth. If you value the truth, I hope you will at least listen to what I have to say to you here.
You have something backwards.
You think your Christian faith comes first and your American country comes after. In your personal life and faith life, that's correct, but in your civic life that's completely backwards.
It is true that your God, your religion, your faith, and your church come first for your spiritual priorities, but you fail to recognize how blessed you are to be able to live this way comfortably. What I fear you are missing is that, that blessing depends upon your civic situation.
You believe it is the norm for people to believe and worship their God as best their understanding and conscience dictate, in line with the Word of God as it is given, but that is because you are an American. That is good, and it is right, but it is not normal at all. If you were not an American, you'd know better what the norm is.
The norm of humanity and history is that a governing body, a state, a tyrant tells you what to believe and how to believe it, and you do, at least outwardly. If your conscience or your God demand that you believe otherwise, you only do so inwardly. If you wish to worship outside of the bonds set by worldly powers, you do so in secret, likely hiding and cowering. It is brave; it is unpleasant; it is necessary; and it is rare.
Simply, the norm with man is being prohibited from all faiths but one, and that one is dictated by someone else. Not God. Some man and his rough men. The human norm is persecution of those who dissent or differ. The human norm is the making martyrs of the faithful whose worship isn't secret or sanctioned. That is what is normal in human affairs.
America is the aberration. Religious liberty is an abnormal situation. Freedom to worship unrestricted is a blessing denied to almost everyone who has ever lived. And you get to take it for granted, American. You lead with the thing you have constantly at risk in your comfort of forgetting how or why you have it. You are so blessed that it is easy to fail to appreciate why you are blessed.
Our American Founders understood this blessing, even though it was already removed from their generation. Their fathers knew it better, firsthand, and risked everything for it. Many of their fathers across the Atlantic didn't know it and, as a result of their completely normal situation, found out for their faiths.
In the 1760s, John Adams called Americans of his day to learn and remember the sacrifices of the Pilgrims who came to this country. Why? Because he knew that only by remembering who we are and why we came here could we carry on against the challenges that had arisen to threaten everything. The Crown was bearing down, and their God-given liberty was under threat.
So why did the fathers of their fathers come to this far-flung and hostile wilderness? For liberty. For religious liberty along with its civic kin. Our country came to us from men who risked everything imaginable just to escape the bondage of tyrants who would tell them how to believe, how to worship, and how to live, all in the name of upholding some worldly idea of the needs of the common good.
Our fathers some three to four hundred years before us recognized that in order to put God and faith first in liberty requires liberty first, and thus liberty became their first priority. They recognized that the common good rests not in the hands of a tyrant but in the many hands of free men free to pursue happiness and the good conscience necessary to its maintenance.
That brings us back to you, today.
Do you appreciate that you can worship freely? Do you understand what you have?
You can put your God first in all parts of your life and not suffer state persecution for it. You do not have to hide your faith from the worldly powers and can proclaim it to them, lest they forget their role as servants to that which is Right. You need not minister and disciple your children in terror that the police will come for you as a result. But you can see the threat. It is at our door already.
Of course, you can always put your God and your faith first, but you can do so freely!
Ask yourself: A man might always be able in his heart and his mind and his soul to put his God and his faith first, under any threat, suppression, or torment, but is it not infinitely better to do so freely, without risk, without threat, and in comfort? Is it not better for you, for your children, for your church, for your community, for your country that you can do this in liberty instead of in hiding? Of course it is, and that's why liberty was worth the risk for our forebears and must be worth the risk for us as well.
As our fathers risked everything for liberty so that they can worship freely and believe without fear, and as we have also enjoyed this blessing and privilege, so must we defend liberty so that our sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, will forevermore also enjoy this blessing, this gift: to worship without fear, free from any terror or tyrant.
This liberty requires tolerance. Our forefathers realized they must be able to tolerate both the Catholic and the Protestant, the Congregationalist and the Anglican, and even those of greater difference, to secure their own liberty first. And so must we. That is the risk. That's the cost. That's the trade that must be made. Liberty for you costs tolerance for others.
This trade cannot be made foolishly, of course. Unlimited tolerance is a greater folly than none because it will tolerate that which destroys it, and the liberty that demands it. Tolerance should be limited, prudent, and reciprocal: I will tolerate what will tolerate me, and I will refuse to tolerate that which, given tolerance, would revoke in return that tolerance owed to me. I will treat others how I wish to be treated, and I will expect others to do the same. Tolerance must allow us to prohibit those who would mistreat our tolerance from taking that opportunity from us. Still, that trade, when prudently and justly made, is worth the risk.
That risk is the one that defined America. That people would have the liberty to believe as they will, use their property as they will, act as they will, so long as they don't infringe upon their neighbors' abilities to do the same, is the defining risk that has brought all of this American reward, not just material abundance but the blessings of freedom to worship your God without the fear of tyrants.
We must recognize: there is no great reward without risk, and surely our reward has been great.
That reward, we have called since our Founding Generation "the blessings of liberty," and it has now been handed to us to enjoy and entrusted to us to preserve and pass to our Posterity. It cannot be enjoyed, secured, or passed along, however, without accepting the risk that comes with it and facing it bravely and faithfully.
The reason for my letter is that, especially today, too many of you, American Christians, tend to get this backwards. Too many think "God first" means "Liberty second," but that begs for the reward without taking the risk. It gets the order backwards. The correct order in our civic lives, as we understood at our Founding, is to put our civic liberty first so we can put God first in each of our lives, freely and not in fear and hiding.
If you hope that your faith leads in American civic life, then you must first honor and defend American civic life and the liberty it gives to your faith.
I ask you to take this risk and to defend our right to our liberty. I ask you to recognize that without the risk of liberty, its blessings are inaccessible and will be withheld not only from you but from your children and their children. Our Posterity will be impoverished by our foolishness and fear.
Our civic inheritance is liberty. May we embrace it again now so that we and all future generations can worship in peace.
In the pursuit of truth and unity for the blessings of liberty, James Lindsay
