The president continued. “We’ve got a lot to cover, but let’s start with a brief recap of the state of our union today. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on these points because most of you living outside Washington already know these issues well, and you’ve just been waiting for someone here to voice them for you. Here goes:
“We are overcome by a sense of helplessness to deal with the crime and violence that invades our lives and our homes, making many of us prisoners in our own houses.
“We don’t trust our leaders, and often for good reason. And good people are afraid to step forward to become leaders because their private lives will be ripped open by the press.
“Our families are being assaulted at every turn. In the name of ‘rights’ for women and children, we’ve instead created an impoverished class of women and children, sent tens of millions of unborn babies to their deaths, and unhitched millions of men from any sense of male responsibility to raise, protect, or train a family.”
The vice president, visible behind the president whenever the television director chose a wide angle, twisted in her chair and looked off to her right, her arms folded tightly across her body.
“Our educational system, only two generations ago the pride of our nation, is a disaster.
“Selfishness, materialism, and ‘me-first,’ or at least ‘my group first,’ rule the nation. Our country was built on sacrifice, generosity, savings, delay of gratification, and building for the next generation’s good. But today we are awash in the false ‘truths’ of instant everything, consume now, discourage savings, and forget the children. I’m ashamed to say that my generation is probably the first in all of recorded history that, by ignoring our education system, promoting abortion, and encouraging divorce has openly and consciously chosen its own immediate happiness and convenience over the well-being of the next generation, our own children.
“Think about it. We’ve pushed suffering on those least capable to cope or to understand—our children—so that we don’t have to be bothered with some inconvenience, like figuring out how to stay married. And on top of that, we’ve saddled them with paying for the mess we’ve created by astronomically increasing the national debt, because we like to spend but haven’t even got the guts to pay for our own extravagances! This is almost unforgivable and has to stop.”
For the first time there was a smattering of applause from the audience, and even the Speaker of the House clapped briefly.
“Our welfare system, originally designed to help families with short-term needs, is now in many cases supporting the fifth or sixth generation of welfare dependency, promoting by its own inherent system the perpetuation of the problem. I said dependency, and I meant it. Our system promotes addiction, from one generation to the next, and destroys families.
“Our federal tax code, now stretching to several thousand pages of misguided social engineering, is incomprehensible. It’s estimated that over six billion man hours every year are wasted in some part of the tax industry, making, enforcing, calculating, collecting, or escaping taxes. This entire industry—including the hours and hours we all spend trying to understand it—serves no productive purpose whatsoever; it’s a huge drain on our economy, as we pay people to send paper to other people, for no productive result.
“In the name of ‘rights’ and ‘free speech,’ we’ve legitimized all types of aberrant behavior: pornography, abortion, divorce, homosexual activity— yes, you heard me right—and now suicide and polygamy, most of which not only fly in the face of our own Judeo-Christian rules for correct living, but also violate the laws of almost every civilized society that has ever prospered on this earth. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist—and thank God, because we aren’t making many of them any more—to figure out that we violate these universal moral laws at great and immediate risk to us and, again, to our children and their children.”
There was more applause, this time stronger and louder, though still clearly a minority in the chamber.
Leslie turned to Ryan and said, “He’s lost his mind. Next he’ll bring out clay tablets and show us the Ten Commandments! Where is he going with this?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“We could go on recounting these problems,” the president continued, “but there’s no need. As I said, most of you are dealing with one or more of these every day of your lives, and our purpose is not to further worry you, but to offer a real path for solutions. Unfortunately and tragically, what we’ve just reviewed is the state of our union today, and it can’t be papered over with pleasant political rhetoric.
“We’ve talked about the visible problems, but they’re just the logical and predictable results of the underlying cause, which we’re now coming to. In order to fix something, you’ve got to know the cause of the trouble. So before offering solutions, we need to examine what got us to where we are.
“We’re going to start with a very simple concept, one that really defines everything that is to follow. This concept is that we are standing today at the scene of a colossal collision of historic forces—a collision of two diametrically opposed worldviews which have been at war for a long time. If we understand these two opposing worldviews, then the details of everything else we’ll discuss tonight will fit into place. Without this understanding, we’ll endlessly debate secondary issues, which both political parties have done for three decades, missing the important points. So, please listen and begin now to decide which worldview is yours—that’s the key to turning this nation around.
“The first worldview is the Judeo-Christian one on which this nation was founded. It begins with the belief that there is a God, that he created us, and that he has a purpose for each one of us. It’s that simple. Do you believe that?”
William paused and looked around the chamber. There was only silence. Then he continued. “Since he created us, he’s given us rules to live by which, if we follow them, will benefit us, both as individuals and as a society; and if we break them, will result in our harm. Moreover, God has chosen to reveal himself and his laws through the Bible, which represents his ‘Creator’s Manual’ for us to read and to understand his will. Man in this worldview definitely has reason—he is created in the image of God. He is to be the master of the earth, which he needs his intelligence and reason to accomplish. But he uses these abilities within the moral framework provided by his Creator.
“This worldview also acknowledges that this world is only temporary, that there is more importantly an eternal world, and that what we do here influences what happens to us there. Finally, God has provided by his grace the only means for joining him in that eternal world through our individual belief in his Son, Jesus Christ, who voluntarily died on the cross, as a real historic fact, so that we have the opportunity to live with God forever.”
As the president spoke, the vice-president, seated behind him, lowered her head and rubbed her forehead with her right hand. The camera panned around the hushed audience, some of whom were listening attentively as the president spoke. Others, however, had joined the vice-president in postures of obvious disagreement.
“The second worldview begins with the belief that man and woman are it. It believes either that there is no God, and we’re all the result of some still-unexplained mistake, evolving on our own incredible strength from some unexplained but conveniently present ooze, or that there may be a God, but he simply made us and then left town, leaving us to our own devices. This worldview tells us that we’re on our own and that we’ve got to improve and even perfect ourselves on our own. There are therefore no overriding rules or absolute values in this view—everything like that is to be determined by us and refined continuously by our so-called enlightened reason.
“We’re to be fervently all-inclusive, and everything anyone might want to do is basically fine because it all starts from human reason. So what’s really okay and not okay must be decided by the majority or, better yet, imposed by those who have somehow obtained more ‘enlightenment’ than t
he rest of us.
“Since mankind has evolved on its own in this view, we and what we do must be inherently good because it’s ‘human.’ If an individual goofs up, it must just be because of poverty or educational deprivation or a bad neighborhood or bad parents or some other fixable mistake. If we could just fix those or get rid of outdated, constraining rules so that his behavior is redefined as acceptable—or perfect this person a bit further with one more government program to help him—then he’d be okay, too. And all of us could then work toward our ultimate goal—to be ‘free,’ to return to a state of pristine nature, where everything is wonderful and people are pleasant and prosperity pours out on everyone in a paradise of human enlightenment.
“Now those are the two opposing worldviews. One starts and ends with God. The other starts and ends with man. As a nation we’ve recently debated a lot of issues and programs, but the real question is very simple: which one of those views do you believe to be correct? They’re mutually exclusive, meaning that they can’t both be right. It’s either one or the other. They lead to completely different conclusions and completely different activities for our government. And tonight I’m proposing that each one of us has to choose.”
William paused again and looked around the House, stopping for a second to glance up at Carrie, who again gave him a nod.
Bruce, sitting with his mother in Boston, picked up the phone and called Atlanta. When Rebecca answered, he asked, “Are you watching this?”
“Yes. How are your parents?”
“Okay. Later. But how can your brother be saying all this? He’s talking like we’re living in the Middle Ages!”
“I don’t know. It sounds pretty logical to me so far. Let’s listen and I’ll call you back when it’s over.”
“Fine. But I hope he doesn’t go completely off the deep end.”
William continued, “How have these two worldviews played themselves out over the last three centuries, to arrive at this point? Historians use the words ‘the Reformation’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ to describe their two separate beginnings. And we have early examples of the two distinct results in the American and French Revolutions.
“Despite recent myths to the contrary, which I’ll address in a minute, America was founded as a Christian nation with the Christian faith as the foundation for its laws and morals. The colonies were essentially the completion on freer soil of the Christian Reformation begun in Europe, providing a new place and a new beginning for men and women seeking to submit their lives to God’s will. We don’t have time now, but if you read through the papers and the speeches of all the early leaders of the colonies and of our nation, as my wife, Carrie, and I have done over the past eight months, you’ll be struck by how much virtually every one of them not only believed strongly and publicly in God, but also gave him all the credit for their free nation, their lives, and their new government.
“The American Revolution was a revolt by one set of governments against another—calling on God’s authority in the Declaration of Independence to override laws which the colonists believed to be wrong and unjust. They never proposed doing away with rule by law, but proclaimed that the colonies had a responsibility to follow God’s higher law for their citizens’ lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And throughout the long years of the Revolution and then during the creation of our nation, these same leaders constantly called upon God—publicly, in these chambers, in their speeches, and in their laws—for his guidance, his protection, and his forgiveness.
“Contrast that approach, clearly following the first worldview, with the French Revolution only a few years later. There the rallying cry was not for God’s law, but for just the opposite—unchecked individual liberty and equality. The humanistic philosophers behind that movement believed that man was inherently good and government was always bad—and if they could get rid of oppressive government, first the king and then subsequent manifestations, then real ‘freedom’ could be obtained. As a symbol of their intent, the cross in Notre Dame Cathedral was replaced by a statue of Reason.
“The result was an orgy of death, destruction, and dictatorship that perfectly previewed later revolutions also begun by supposedly enlightened philosophers who believed in the second worldview. But these later revolutions in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere were all ultimately defeated, like the French Revolution, not by the promised blossoming of perfection, but by their own godless murdering strongmen: Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler. These killers filled the vacuums that are created every time we turn over the rule of society to some group that is going to ‘perfect’ us, because then the only arbiter of resources and power becomes the state. This is the ultimate irony of the second worldview: in its rush to embrace romantic individual freedom, it always degenerates into the loss of real freedom, either to a coercive state in a humane society or to a dictatorial state in a less tolerant one. But freedom is always lost to the government.
“And why not? In this view, since there is no God in control, then by default, who is? The state must be. And who is the state? The ones with the most power. Who loses? Those without power, such as the weak, the nonviolent, and the ‘unenlightened.’ The natural state, which the second view seeks, turns out not to be a pristine and glorious paradise, which it never was anyway. What we have instead are the ugly rules of ‘eat before you are eaten’ and ‘survival of the fittest.’ That’s what nature has really always been. And mankind always returns to it without God’s laws to lift up his better ideals and to promise punishment for those who insist on doing wrong. Far from being constricting, a Christian society is actually freeing and uplifting. Without its influence, we are each someone else’s meal. And we’re already seeing that truth beginning to infect our own society today.
“Back to our worldviews. The overriding view of our own founders was the first, the one in which man only acts knowing that God is in control. It’s not surprising that hardly anyone realizes this fact any more. For forty years if the word ‘God’ appeared in a text, that text couldn’t be used in our schools. And because our nation’s founders spoke so often with references to God, hardly anything they said could be taught to our own children! Isn’t that absurd? Is it any wonder we’ve lost our way, when simply quoting a speech by our first president, George Washington, in which he gives thanks to God for delivering our nation, is somehow equated with establishing a state religion to which we all must belong?
“So, what, then, is the cause for our current unhappy state of the union? It’s that we’ve slowly but certainly been led off the path of a nation founded on God’s worldview and are instead fast becoming just another one of the many nations that have come and gone because they’re founded on man’s worldview. Look at history—what a miracle the founding of this nation was! How have we then been led astray?
“As recently as 1892, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer could write in an official court opinion, ‘This is a religious people.’ And he quoted an earlier opinion that stated, ‘Christianity, general Christianity, is, and always has been, a part of the common law.’ And it was. Then starting in about 1910 our universities began seriously embracing the teachings of men such as Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and others—all of whom proclaimed, like Rousseau before them, that man is the master and God is meaningless.
“By the 1930s many of the university faculties in this country accepted that worldview, and by the sixties, when my generation came of age, it was further embraced by the media and the nation’s entire ‘enlightened intelligentsia,’ from students to, sadly, the Supreme Court, which at that time was made up of men almost exclusively from political rather than judicial backgrounds.”
William looked down at all the Supreme Court justices seated just in front of him and noted a look of surprise on most of their faces. “While rightly correcting the aftermath of one great blemish on our Constitution— the institution of slavery—this court also went, without precedent, directly against 150 years of rulings and many judicial precedents to falsely pro
claim, on its own, that our Constitution erected a ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ which was simply not true.”
Several of the justices shifted in their seats, and the vice president, already red, was almost hugging herself in obvious anger.
“Since then, the eternal principles on which this nation was founded have been removed from almost every aspect of public life. Again, it’s no wonder that people today don’t realize what’s happened, because this same spurious idea of separation and the ever present threat of a lawsuit keep us from even being exposed to the real founding principles of this country. And most people’s obvious first reaction—believe me, I understand it—is to discredit the kind of statements like I’ve just made. But from the bottom of my heart I want you to know that I’m telling you the truth. The problem is that you can never be taught the real truth if by definition you can never be taught about God’s role in our nation! Why, any day now I expect the Declaration of Independence to be proclaimed unconstitutional because it mentions God! Could the Constitution be unconstitutional as well? Only the justices in their enlightened wisdom know—and the rest of us will find out.”
There was a smattering of laughter as the thought sank in of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution being declared unconstitutional.
“This is wonderful,” Graham Prescott whispered to his wife in the fourth row of the chapel in Raleigh. “I can’t believe he’s saying this to the nation.”
“Yes, it is,” Mary replied. “God bless him and give him strength.”
“This is preposterous,” Ryan Denning hissed under his breath in the press booth in Washington. “I can’t believe he’s saying this to the nation.”
The President Page 44
