Group photo of the 2017 G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany.
To one and all, happy belated Independence Day. Yes, this past week Americans celebrated the fact that, twelve score and one years ago, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
As a kid, July 4th was always one of my favorite times of the year. How could it not be. It was summer. School was out. And it was all about baseball, backyard barbeques with family, and lots of stuff that went boom!
America’s Bicentennial year of 1976 I remember as if it were yesterday. Recently I was reminded how long ago it really was when President Trump made some comment about the upcoming 250th anniversary of America’s independence. Good grief! Where did time go?
Well, even thought a lot of Independence Days have come and gone since 1976, I still love the day for all the same reasons I did back then. An a few more to boot.
You see, when I was a child, I didn’t really grasp the importance of liberty and freedom from tyranny. But as an adult, and one who has been eyewitness to the kind of gross usurpations of liberty governments are capable of, I have come more and more to appreciate the bold stand for liberty of America’s founding generation.
One important facet of the American Revolution that is almost entirely forgotten in the present day is that it represents the political flowering of the Protestant Reformation. Simply put, no Reformation, no United States of America.
In the beginning all America was Protestant – 98 percent of the people. The numbers we have for church affiliation in the seventeenth and eighteenth century America show that three – fourths of Americans were Calvinists of one flavor or another. Puritan, Pilgrim, Presbyterian, Baptist, German Reformed, Lutheran, Congregationalist, and Episcopal. There were few Catholics, almost no Jews or Methodists, and no Muslims, Mormons, Moonies, Buddhists, Confucianists, Hindus, or atheists. Had there been any large numbers of these groups, there would have been no America as we have known it, not because the people who hold these views are somehow inferior, but because the views themselves are inferior: They are logically incapable of creating and sustaining a free society (John Robbins, Rebuilding American Freedom in the Twenty-First Century).
It was biblical political philosophy, not the thought of ancient Greece and Rome, that is the cause of America’s historic, if not present, commitment to limited constitutional government and private property.
The widespread preaching of, and belief in, the Gospel of Justification by Faith Alone created a whole new civilization in the nations influenced by the Reformation. And not only that, but the political implications of the Reformation created a whole new system of international relations called the Westphalian World Order (WWO).
Pre-Westphalian Europe was a mixture of declining empires, retreating feudal lords and an emerging class of traders and capitalist entrepreneurs with the Church remaining very influential as an instrument of European governance. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, brought to an end the Thirty Years’ War, the first pan-European war in history. Under the terms of the peace settlement, a number of countries were confirmed in their sovereignty over territories. They were empowered to contract treaties with one another and with foreign powers. In a nutshell the central authority of the empire was replaced almost entirely by the sovereignty of about 300 princes. The Peace Treaty was a turning point in the mutual recognition of sovereignty rights. Although the signatories of the treaty had only the peace of Europe as their ultimate objective, the unintended consequence of their efforts was to create a global order based on a “State System” (KImon Valaskakis, Westphalia II: The Real Millennium Challenge).
While it may seem like common sense to some, the idea that a nation state has the right to conduct its own affairs free from outside influence was a revolutionary idea in its time. Inspired by the Reformation, the vested powers of the day, most notably the Roman Church-State – note well that Valaskakis mentions that “the Church remain[ed] very influential as an instrument of European governance – fought against Westphalian Sovereignty and the emerging WWO with all their might. But simply put, the good guys won, the bad guys lost, and a new and better civilization emerged from feudal darkness.
