I have been in this funk lately because I see our liberties and freedoms slipping away and it seems there is little we can do about it. Our vote in November is extremely important and yet I suspect there are forces in place that may invalidate this election. I truly believe that our government has reached a point where the will of the people is not considered as relative to their actions and Obama is focused on enacting his agenda through any means necessary. I read through the entire Declaration of Independence last night looking for similarities to what the colonies were facing as they considered separation from Great-Britian. In many ways our situation is not as critical as what it was when the colonies declared their independence and yet, when I read "...that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..." , I see what is happening and believe we are at that point. We no longer have a government operating as a protector of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness but one that doles it out as it sees fit. I also believe that our situation is actually much worse than that of the colonies because they had a moral and spiritual compass that led them to that point and geographical separation from their oppressor. This country is bankrupt morally and spiritually and those of us that still adhere to the principles of the Founding Fathers have no adequate representation to bring about the change that will save the Union. I believe we may be seeing the end of the great experiment put in place some 234 years ago. I believe it is time for a New Declaration of Independence. Perhaps not one that completely separates us for the purpose of starting a new nation but a Declaration that states we no longer recognize the government as it exists today. I believe that unless we unify the concerned citizenry to this end we will not effect a return to a Constitutional, Representative form of government. What are your thoughts? Am I being too extreme to think this way? I would really like to talk more about this. I do have a faith and a hope for my place in eternity but until I get to the next life I am compelled to make the most of this one. I have wasted many years living a self-serving life and I have now been called to a life that rises above those selfish desires - but how to fulfill this calling eludes me. I truly believe we are headed for a crisis of historical proportions and I am committed to being on the right side of that history. You counsel would be greatly appreciated.

The means of our deliverance is at hand if only we will take it up and smite our enemies with it. What is that means? Why, it is the anchor of our faith which always did and always will be the true source of our deliverance as it has been the source of our virtue and happiness. Without it, however, we are a people at sea. That is how you find us at the outset of the twenty-first century. At sea. In my reading of the Declaration, I find the most telling and profound words are the counterpoise to the initial emphasis on our RIGHTS. These words call us to our DUTIES. ". . . for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." To say this otherwise, the price of our RIGHTS is the willingness to give up all of the blessings that the exercise of our RIGHTS makes possible and sacrifice all that the very precept of RIGHTS may persist in time. That spirit of sacrifice reminds our people of the holy origin of our Creation and of the glory of the Creator Himself Who is the Author of our being. In that understanding, He has builded us not out of sugar candy, but of sterner stuff, and He has builded us a temple in our minds which is more powerful than any built of stone and gilded to shine in the sun. If we follow our motto, and Trust in Him, we will find the strength to avoid the easy path of despair. I remember a line from one of my kids' childhood books, Anne of Green Gables, I think: "To despair is to turn your back on God!" Such despair inevitably is grounded in resentment for the feeling that God has turned his back on us; but, God cannot turn his back on his own, and particularly not on His special Creation, that was made in His image. He has not turned his back on His people. I am reminded here of Job. In his sense of unrewarded piety, Job accuses God and God's reply is: "Where were you when I made the firmament of the earth?" This reply is telling; for the firmament of the earth was made for mankind - it was made for Job. Did God make all of this only to deny and abandon His people? If not, why then does he bring us woes and torments? Well, we bring these torments on ourselves. The fault lies not in the government, but in us; for the people have become soft and luxurious and they remember their RIGHTS, but they remember not the AUTHOR of those RIGHTS. They remember their desires, but they are oblivious to their DUTIES. They have become fit for tyranny as they have become unfit for self-government. Nature will always provide men with what they want; for there are among us those who are without an anchor who would rise over us with soothing words and visions of delight to draw us into a trance and to promise us what could never be in this world. As WE cease to be a people that pledges to one another our lives, who grasp tightly our pottage and would not sacrifice it, and as we become less and less capable of enduring the test of our honor in the face of our Creator, so we try to build ourselves a place out of His sight, that he may not judge us. Is such a people the vessel of a new government, intended to better secure our RIGHTS? Remember that the American Revolution began before the Declaration was written, or even conceived. The people did not need a manifesto to be told that they would have to resist earthly tyranny if they were to be true to the dignity of their Divine origin. They profited, no doubt, from seeing the thing laid out before them in eloquent prose, but not because it was novel. No, because it was FAMILIAR as an affirmation of their learning and experience, intellectual and moral. What sort of Declaration do you think men could produce today? I shudder when I contemplate such a thing. It becomes abundantly clear that our only hope is in clinging to what is left of a memory in our people of the words and spirit of that great charter of human liberty and its profound connection to the wisdom of Greece, Jerusalem, Rome, and of those versions of the English Constitution, free of the taint of nobles, kings, and the canon and feudal law. These inheritances were summarized in our Constitution. No amount of new effort will produce any improvement on it, unless it be returning it closer to its original without a few of the amendments which have denigrated it. More likely, the mischief that would arise in recasting that political monument would give us something more akin to the Soviet Constitution, or possibly the weak and easily manipulated Weimar Constitution of Germany. No thanks. I'll pass. We must hold to our heritage, hold to our patrimony, and trust in God. We are all in His hands and cannot fear for the weakness of our own poor powers. They will not be multiplied, but our faithfulness will be counted in our deeds and in our professions. Should our Republic and our Nation, and our very existence as an epoch in the history of mankind all vanish and never again be remembered; so the judgments of the Lord are altogether just and proper; but that we were FAITHFUL to the END and that we went down knowing what we stood for; these things will be noted by the only Observer whose gaze truly matters. Therefore, fight on for the OLD things, the things that came from a time when our people REMEMBERED WHO THEY HAVE BEEN and WHO THEY WERE DESTINED TO BE; for in the NEW there is a great emptiness and a great void. Be calm in your spirit and resolute in your judgment. All is well in the world of Nature and Nature's God. His Law still prevails and His mighty hands hold us close. In that understanding, greet the words of the Declaration of American Independence as a tocsin for counterattack, again, and again, and again until each of us goes over the parapet or falls trying. Be ready then, in the moment of sacrifice, to hand the banner to your nearby comrade in arms and call on him to fight on, and on, forever for our SACRED HONOR!

Thank you for forwarding this email exchange. I have been thinking about this matter since our conversation last night. I had mentioned then that the root cause of this problem is not only a crisis in faith, as we have discussed in the past, but the fact that the faith has been abstracted (de-sacramentalized during the Reformation and then absorbed over time into a decidedly modernist, deconstructionist culture). For many, Christianity is first and foremost a mental assertion (proclaiming that "Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior;" or, in a more Catholic manner, proclaiming the Nicene Creed), interspersed with moments of some ecstatic feeling ("born again" experience; sentimental reaction when a "social justice" has been realized in the world; etc). As such, its impact is at best fleeting and, more often, not seen as relevant to the daily grind that passes for "existence" in our contemporary world. It is a sideshow to the human experience - pop psychobabble that has lost its "pop" and cannot therefore compete with the faddish sages of "feeling good," whether they be Doctor Phil, or Oprah, or Obama himself. One wonders why people clamor still for an imagined "separation of church and state," as if what passes for the "church" today can be any threat for the real or imagined authorities of Caesar. You have mentioned in the past that John Adams saw the Reformation as the birthplace of the American Revolution. Assuming that that is true, then could the same tendency toward abstraction (that gnostic impiety that confuses the assertions of men with the Logos) be at the heart of our foundation as well? The Declaration of Independence affirms what we know in revelation and in nature, that all men are created equal. We have discussed that equality as our shared inheritence in being made in the image of God but also in being separated in our lives in this world from that same God (or, as you said, being in such "middle kingdom" betweem the realms of God and of beasts, where we may behold but never capture by our own merits the perfection of God - like Moses beholding but not entering into the Promised Land - and where we may exercise dominion over the created universe as the agents of the Creator). There is an intrinsic tension in that reality - a cross to be born, where there is only struggle and never final victory - the pursuit, but never the attainment, of happiness. As that is indeed the case, then is it not inevitable that men will gloss over that tension, "seeing" a "final victory" in this or that election result, or judgment by a court, or conquest by arms? Is it not inevitable that men give into their gnostic pretensions, so as to try, however vainly, to escape the fact that the judgments of God are always good and righteous? If this is indeed the tendency of men, then is not the Declaration doomed from the very start? President Lincoln said that the men who had died at Gettysberg had not died in vain, since they had given their lives to the actual proposition that government of, by, and for the people should not perish from this earth. If the gnostic tendency is such that men invariably will be throwing aside their equality, for the dreamy solace offered by tyranny, then was Lincoln in fact wrong? Is there enough blood within this world to be shed, that government of, by, and for the people indeed may never perish? Perhaps my questions here - like the ones offered by [Name Omitted] - are indicative of the fact that we are seeing our Republic, and even its last auras of memory, receding ever so quickly into the catacombs. It will discover within the darkest environs of the catacombs a worthy companion in what is left of the Christian faith. It will have the Old Testament as its medium of communication with its huddled brother. We who are willing to offer our earnest voices within that cave will find plenty of occasions for despair, which you rightly said is the last seduction offered by the Devil before he finally takes away ones soul. We also shall be finding there the occasion for moments of courageous resolve - a good fight to be waged in the company of our brethren.

The answer to your question lies in these words: "Should our Republic and our Nation, and our very existence as an epoch in the history of mankind all vanish and never again be remembered; so the judgments of the Lord are altogether just and proper; but that we were FAITHFUL to the END and that we went down knowing what we stood for; these things will be noted by the only Observer whose gaze truly matters." I finally know what "faith" is and why it is essential to our lives. The Declaration of Independence is the antithesis of gnosticism. It gives a name to the City of Man: Politeia. The City of Man is the realm where we are born, grow, pursue happiness, suffer, fade, and die. Politeia is where the faithful dwell for awhile and the port where they embark on the trail of their Maker in the contemplation of His Creation to find Him and say, "In God is our Trust." Every part of that document guides us to the least expectation of deliverance in the City of Man, but shows us that, in the end, our Sacred Honor lies in knowing the glory of our making In Imago Dei, but inevitably the true worth of that glory finally revealed when it is placed on His altar as the merest sacrificial offering to the original Divine Being on Whose visage that image is based. This is what the Declaration of Independence teaches and it is what is most easily left unseen by the unprobing eye that is drawn to and mesmerized by the second paragraph's revelation of man's rights. These careless readers remain blind to the Declaration's corrective on the true value of man's dominion over nature in the final paragraph. Did John Adams conceive and Thomas Jefferson pen this document unaided? No one could believe that when this charter of our nation is read with the same care given by the holiest of men to the Scriptures. There is no failing in the Declaration of Independence so long as it is read in the true context of its Biblical foundations: its teachings are preparatory for that kind of citizenship which understands the tragic nature of the course of our lives, but offers us the basis for our reconciliation with that tragedy in unmitigated trust, i.e., faith. No. Faith is NOT blind. It is keenly focused and brightly lit: the product of a wisdom of which we are given but a glimpse, but a mere glimpse that refashions our souls and frees us from our hubris.