FREEDOM ANTHEM
By Harmony Grant
27 Jun 07
The Dixie Chicks lost thousands of patriotic listeners after their
lead singer infamously told a British audience, “I’m
ashamed the President is from Texas.” I just heard their latest
album for the first time; it includes a musical retort to the angry
listeners who abandoned them. “I’m not ready to make
nice,” wail the Chicks rebelliously.
To my ears, the song is a lament and I think that’s too bad.
I wish they had responded with a powerful anthem to freedom, celebrating
the vision of the USA for which our great grandfathers fought—an
America whose flame is fast being extinguished by social liberalism,
Zionist priorities and anti-freedom legislation.
Maybe the Chicks couldn’t write that shout to liberty. I
believe true patriotism requires understanding the positive powerful
freedom that comes only from moral absolutes. Democrats and anti-war
hipsters like the Chicks provide no alternative. They hate Bush;
they hate the war. But they offer no national salvation.
Without Christian morality and service of truth, there is little
self-sacrifice and few solutions with which to resist the same forces
that drove Republicans into no-win war in the Mid-East. The Democrats
are faring no better; witness their overwhelming vote to call on
the UN to charge Iran’s president with inciting genocide. This
411-2 vote is grandstanding for another war for Israel’s sake;
like the refusal to name a date of withdrawal, it merely demonstrates
the Democrats’ total obedience to the Israel lobby even if
that means attacking Iran.
The Dixie Chicks’ anti-war bleat reminds me of the bumper
stickers I see all over my liberal city, Portland. These decry the
war but simultaneously celebrate abortion, homosexuality, and anti-God
liberalism. It is a flaccid resistance that opposes one immoral act
while justifying even more. That incoherence doesn’t work.
Why should the administration observe international law if we humans
do not observe divine law? If there is no ultimate truth, there is
no compelling reason to respect any law. We should do it so that
we survive and pass this planet to our grandkids? That’s polite.
But without God and absolute values, who’s to say we should?
Who’s to say the human race even deserves to survive? As Dostoevsky
famously wrote, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” A
society that permits everything can’t rebuke its leaders for
immorality and injustice. Without God, we have no way to preserve
freedom or even describe what it is.
Without justice and morality, there is no freedom. True freedom
is the power to act against your own desires and do what is right.
It is better and freer to be a prisoner of conscience than a wealthy
sinner in Bel Air. I would rather be bound by prison walls than by
slavery to sinful compulsions and compromise.
The Dutch currently prove my point. The world’s most “liberated” nation
finds itself a tourist destination for drugs and debauchery, sickened
by the social problems caused by sin. The Washington
Post reports there’s now a broad movement in the Netherlands toward conservatism,
restricting drug sales and prostitution (which have both been legal)
and allowing civil officials to morally abstain from performing gay
marriages.
Politicians from the orthodox Christian Union doubled their seats
in the 2006 Dutch elections. The Post says desire for moral reform
isn’t limited to conservative politicians. Historian James
C. Kennedy attributes it to "weariness with moral squalor — the
Dutch have grown tired of it and unwilling to put up with it." These
famously “tolerant” libertines have found that freedom
without morality is not free after all.
American progressives should pay a little less attention to Dutch
environmentalism and more attention to the failure of the Dutch social
experiment. In the United States, the corruption and demise of Christianity
is our worst emergency. It is worse even than the Iraq war or the
perverse foreign policy that, like a poisonous spider, lures us into
further Mideast destruction.
Alexis de Tocqueville, famous French observer of early America,
wrote that “Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty
so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive
of one without the other.” But somewhere since 1776 we forgot
that religion and freedom are a package deal. Civil libertarians
seek freedom without religion; evangelicals pray on Sundays but don’t
bother to preserve civil liberties. That’s why our presidential
candidates are all lapdogs for Israel, our universities aren’t
worth the bricks with which they’re built, and big media offers
less substantive truth than you could get from a 1-900 call girl.
It’s July Fourth, and I want to celebrate. But fireworks
don’t seem appropriate. They are too much like the explosions
killing innocent Iraqis and American soldiers by the hundreds. Alcohol
(even if I drank) would be too ironic on a day when America is already
drunk with apathy, too sloshed to realize the prison being built
around us.
Only one ritual seems appropriate. You do it with your head bowed.
The day Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, John
Adams wrote his wife Abigail that the “general principles” on
which America became free “were the general principals of Christianity.” He
told her that these Christian truths “are as eternal and immutable
as the existence and attributes of God” and July Fourth should
be celebrated “as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of
devotion to God Almighty.”
It was with prayer, not six-packs and sparklers, that our Founding
Fathers wanted us to celebrate the Fourth. And right now, more than
any time in our history, American knees should be on the ground.
Harmony
Grant writes and edits for the National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative
watch dog organization.
Let the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith teach you how they
have saddled 45 states with hate laws capable of persecuting Christians: http://www.adl.org/99hatecrime/intro.asp.
Learn how ADL took away free speech in Canada and wants to steal
it now in the U.S. Congress. Watch Rev. Ted Pike's Hate
Laws: Making Criminals of Christians at video.google.com. Purchase
this gripping documentary to show at church. Order online at www.truthtellers.org for
$24.90, DVD or VHS, by calling 503-853-3688, or at the address below.
TALK SHOW HOSTS: Interview Rev. Ted Pike on this
topic. Call (503) 631-3808.
National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas,
OR 97015
