Letter from an Ancient American to the New Americans

My fellow citizens,

I am addressing you from the Eternal Land of the Lord, our God, in the hopes that I might alter the course which you have inexorably followed since I and my fellow Delegates founded this "Shining City on a Hill" in 1787. The Constitution for which we fought so vigorously (with our minds, hearts and bodies) and that we thought of as the best we could hope for has been savagely transmogrified by the generations of citizenry that followed us upon this earthly stage. We, who are gathered here, in the Sight of Our Father, seek to correct the injuries done to our cherished document and to warn you that, without an alteration in your path, our nation - once so dearly loved by us and those who followed us - is surely headed for ruination.

The first point we seek to clarify in your muddled minds is the place we held God - and our country’s belief in Him - in the matters of government. We, the authors, held God to be the Great Power of the universe. As such, He directed the affairs of men through the subtleties of His Touch. God writes history through the acts of man. Our country, whose liberty and freedom was won against all odds and snatched, with hands soaked in the blood of our neighbors and friends, from the greatest power on earth, was deigned by God to exist. Thus, and for no other cause or purpose, it came to be. We knew, each and all of us, that without the Will of God, our great nation would not have come into fruition. And, knowing this to be an irrefutable fact, we all gave thanks to Our Divinity.

Since liberty for all was our ultimate purpose, we knew that complete and absolute freedom in those aspects of life dear to our citizenry was essential. This, since worship and spiritual fulfillment was primary to us, must include prohibition of government interdiction into individual religious selection. It is apparent to us now that the wording of our First Amendment has lead to much agitation in subsequent generations of our countrymen. We never intended to foment such tergiversation. Our purposes were clear, at least to our minds. Our singular intention was to avoid the situation that existed in the great country from which we separated - England.

In that mighty empire, there was a state-sanctioned Church which was created by a monarch for selfish reasons in times distant to all our memories. Though it sprang from great turmoil, it had achieved respectability among the peoples of that particular nation. As it was created and sanctioned by that commonwealth’s monarchy it was, from the start, intimately enmeshed within that form of rule, root and branch. We, likewise, knew well the temperament of our people and were acutely cognizant that they, having rebelled against that self-same rule, would not tolerate any vestiges of that peculiar system in our government. Our citizens were diverse in their origins and beliefs. Indeed, some had specifically abandoned their mother countries to enjoy the freedom in America to serve their Lord as they saw fit. As such, they were not, having just paid the most severe price for their liberty, of a mind to give their most precious of traditions - the nurture and sustenance of their immortal souls - over to a singular church, ordained and imposed by their new government.

It was with this design - and this design alone - that we consecrated the words "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." These words, in the century just passed, have become (to our eyes) the most abused and misapprehended words ever so ordained for such a simple intention. Your courts and your bellicose atheists have succeeded in driving God from the soul of the living, breathing entity that was our Nation. He who made us great has now been cast asunder from His creation.

This malfeasance will be, ultimately, ruinous for our nation. When a nation determines to remove the foundation upon which it stands, the structure cannot long hold. When we chose to affirm the mendacious doctrine of "offend no one; appease all," we mock the restive souls of generations long passed who lived their lives and built this nation in His service. When our mischievous courts ban the just acknowledgment of the debt we owe to the Lord, our God, the argument in favor of our national spirit and guiding soul is, thereby, reductio ad absurdum. A body of people without a pious soul and a grateful spirit can stand against neither temporal enemies nor the erosive winds of time. Such a nation is but a castle lain on sand, easily toppled with the first strong tide.

We further wish to voice our disapprobation of your interpretation, in the same Ammendment, of our phrase "Congress shall make no law... prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Our inclusion of this verbiage with what you have come to refer to as the "Establishment Clause" (discussed above) was simply to assure that dissent be allowed within the United States. In many countries from which our founding citizenry had immigrated, cruel despots and injudicious monarchs had inflicted cruel punishments for protesting against their rule. We affirmed, with this addendum, that our government would not follow this invidious practice against our peoples. As a nascent government with no precedents exact to our nature, it was natural and expected that it would have flaws and would require correction. The navigation of a new ship, when in the stormy waters of the great oceans, requires periodic adjustments of its rudders. We fully expected our citizens to petition us - publicly and privately - for remedies against these inevitable misjudgements.

It was with this design and sole purpose that we specified the extraordinary declaration of this right to dissent both verbally and in print. As you have transfigured our so-called "Establishment Clause," your courts have - apparently with your assent - wholly disfigured the substance of what you have come to refer to as "freedom and speech" and "freedom of the press." To allow protest and objection against government is, altogether, fitting and proper and it was given license by this codicil. However, we believe it entirely injurious to the intent to extend these freedoms to all speech and all print.

With usurpation of these just freedoms, you have allowed the proliferation of profane and obscene literature by your dazzling number of media sources. With your courts restraining any and all justifiable public and private censure of the resulting flood of blasphemous, bestial, perverted and ungenteel materials to which your citizenry are exposed, the morality and self-restraint of the governed has declined. Defamation and slander are routine practices defended by your courts in the name of "First Amendment Rights." Books are published by murderers, rapists, and traitors to titillate the crass appetites of the people. Women are demeaned and men debauched, all in the name of "freedom of the press." This was not our intention when this chaste Amendment was envisioned and formulated.

Finally, it is incumbent on me to address, in the most general terms, the overall direction of your current government. Shortly after we signed the Treaty of Paris, the nation of France was thrown into a political and constitutional tumult. The growing power and influence of the Encyclopedie with Diderot, Rousseau and Thomas Paine (who had, ironically, given no small comfort to our own Revolution) began to incite the citizens of that great and beneficent nation against its government as the culmination of the silly "Age of Reason." As you know, this vain and doomed attempt to capture the "Spirit of 1776" and to reenact the American liberalism, ultimately, failed and was climaxed with that most tyrannical of despots, Napoleon Bonaparte, assuming the throne as Emperor of France.

I call this to your attention because, regrettably, one sees today the same lust for improvement and innovation amongst your government and some of your political factions. While you have neglected the enlightening and instructive study of history in your schools and in your lives, you still may be aware that the chaos that befell France was based on the facetious and nonsensical logic that man can be "improved" or, even more, "perfected." All that would be required to achieve this miraculous mutation and to acquire this Elysium is for all to merely discard all that was old and traditional and embrace all that is new and "natural." Impiously called by the architects of this chimera the "Age of Enlightenment," their futile attempts to nullify religion in the name of progress and their Quixotic quest for the transitory pleasures of man’s bestial appetites cast a shadow over Europe and drew the Continent toward the abyss of anarchy.

We who united your many peoples under one banner and parented our nation through its painful labor, now see with rising dread the self-same lust for pleasure and fleeting enjoyments (at the sacrifice of more spiritually satisfying hungers) in our benighted citizens. Why have you so vigilantly and ignorantly pursued such a mirage? What has become of our nation’s leaders who are tasked to restrain the nation and guide it (much as a stableboy leads a powerful horse) toward mutual refinement and shared cultivation. Whither do you think such a path leads but to the yawning depths of despair?

Your hallowed and ancient institutions - church, family, village - have been subjected to derisive and injurious attacks from these new "Enlighteners" who have seized your imaginations with their fanciful rhetoric and promises of "equality at all costs." Those who have stolen the chalice and call themselves "liberals" (for they are hardly the embodiment of that worthy philosophy) are but false prophets, no less so than Voltaire, Rousseau or Robespierre. These new demagogues offer the illusionary leveling of your society and the counterfeit promise of perfection of man through science and innovation. They ask only that you sacrifice to their altar that which is most dear - your human birthright to individualism and personal achievement. They are, no less than termites gnawing at the mighty oak, tearing at the very rootage of your great state and strangling the vital nutrients - tradition, convention and habit - that sustain you and give you strength.

Just as the propagators of the Parisian terrors had wrong-headedly and prematurely declared the triumph of the "natural rights of man" (to their ultimate demise, I hasten to add), your reigning "liberals" have proclaimed that the irrevocable tie that binds "rights" to "duty" is nullified. All that is imaginable by man should be his "right" and, since the imagination of man is limitless, he will imagine everything to be his right. Unbridled, man ignores the ancient truism that, without duty attached, all "rights" are meaningless and worthless. But these infamous flatterers of your world, like the philosophes of France, would build castles in the sky and call them Utopia.

We, who have gone on before, beseech you: Do not abandon the prejudices and principles that have served you so well for millennia. I use these words in a way strange to your ears and will, therefore, define them as I mean them to be. By "prejudice" I imply, simply, the half-intuitive knowledge that enables men to meet the problems of life without logic-chopping. "Principle" evokes right reason expressed in permanent form; it is derived from comprehension of nature and history, looked upon as manifestation of divine purpose. The luminous twin lights of experience and sagacity are passed to each succeeding generation of man by the singular mind of the species. To ignore the knowledge that has been hard-won by your ancestors and vaingloriously attempt to build the world anew on abstract "rights" is to cut through the thread that binds society to nation and man to each other. Without this wisdom, inherent only in our species, mankind is condemned to retrace the stony path by which he left caves to build great cities.

America, turn back now! The path you so assiduously follow ends at the chasm of anarchy. You were once a noble people bequeathed an opulent and honorable legacy. Recapture your youth and the heritage that first set you upon the road to grandeur. Reach back and mightily grasp the thread that binds all mankind to those who have passed before and those yet to be born. Cast aside those who would convince you of the possibility of universal equality when every fiber of your being tells you men differ no less than every snowflake that falls in winter. The truth can be shouted down by the clamor of the politicians but it cannot be erased from your hearts and minds. Search for what is true and, despite the neglect of years, you shall once again know it.

In closing, we entreat but one simple task of you:

Remember.