Avery Cardinal Dulles, writing in First Things, December 2001, Religious Freedom, Innovation and Development, cited Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, now best expressed in the Dignity of the Human Person.
Catholic Teaching on Church and State
On December 8, 1864, Pope Pius IX issued his Syllabus Errorum, Syllabus of Errors. Error 55 was: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” He cited in support the Church’s Allocution Acerbissimum Vobiscum, September 27, 1852. The teaching did not change but the form of its expression did. The question is why it changed. The answer is: circumstances changed. In 1947 the world’s most powerful and influential nation took up the Separation of Church and State as a constitutional principle.
Holy Mother Church realized that, “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church,” structured the principle from an organizational perspective. It was possible to imagine Church and State in various times and regions as mutually supportive or hostile. She needed to reframe the teaching within the context of her primary mission, to make us saints. To make us saints she needs state recognition of the inherent right of God’s image to religious freedom and a state duty to protect that right.
America
World history records only two nations founded on a vision: Ancient Israel and the United States of America. In each, the Dignity of the Human Person is inherent in its original design.
On October 13, 1884, Rabbi Yeshua had told Satan, “You have the time, you have the power. Do with them what you will.” And on July 13, 1917, the Blessed Virgin had warned that, “Russia will spread its errors.” In October 1917 the Russian Revolution installed Lenin’s communist government that brutally suppressed the Catholic Church. The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics began at the very time, the late 19th and early 20th century, when Pope Leo XIII experienced his private revelation and the Blessed Virgin appeared at Fatima. A fallen angel can decide on a strategy and move very quickly across a broad front. At that very time the “progressive” movement to completely replace God with government was born in the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the history of Charles Beard, the education system of John Dewey, the political writings of Herbert Croly and Charles Merriam among others, and even the literature of Upton Sinclair.
The Progressives soon realized that they’d need vast amounts of money for the federal government to take over most of what Christian families had been doing. They enacted the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 allowing them to tax ordinary Americans’ incomes. In 1935 they passed Social Security, a long step toward replacing God’s families Gen 2:24 with government to care for the aging.
But we Americans are a tenacious breed. We held onto our Christian faith. The progressives began looking for a more effective way to separate church from state. In Everson v. Board of Education, 1947, Justice Black ignored a mountain of evidence to focus on a lonely letter written by Thomas Jefferson to reverse the First Amendment, which begins, “Congress shall make no law,” from a prohibition on government to a mandate for government to separate Church and State.
Our Time
Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s chief ally during World War II, defined the doctrine of Fascism in 1932. “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” \We are Rabbi Yeshua’s spiritual warriors. God gave us America the Beautiful. 2:44 America has been to war, and she has returned with battle wounds. When we stand before our commanding general for inspection he will ask us, “Where are your wounds?” If we admit that we have none he will show us his wounds and ask us sadly, “Did you find nothing worth fighting for?”
The United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution are America’s most treasured jewels. Like the four Gospels, they are brief, clear, easy to read, easy to remember, and fit neatly together.
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence, the chartering document of the United States of America as a nation, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, sets forth the doctrine of natural rights, that underlies all of the natural law:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. … with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.
Its last line is, “And 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.”
Larry Arnn writes, “This is how people talk on a battlefield when they are ready to die for each other.” King George III had ordered General Gage to send his redcoat troops to find and detain them as traitors. Yet all 56 men with leonine courage signed the Declaration of Independence and sent it to the king himself. It was an act of obedience to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” above any king. This is highly consistent with St. John Paul II’s standard, “The real purpose of civil law is to guarantee an ordered social coexistence in true justice, so that all may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way” Evangelium Vitae, § 71.
It speaks of universal principles: “When in the course of human events …” And it specified those principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It declared that governments are subordinate to our Creator. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And it declared the penalty for any government that failed to secure these unalienable rights. “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.” And it offered a long list of charges against the king, for instance, “He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only,” “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people,” and one we see today: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
Constitutional Government
The Constitution of the United States, the chartering document of its government, is by Article VI § 2 “the supreme law of the land.” Mark the priority. The government is not the nation. It exists within the nation to “secure these rights.” The Constitution embodies two major principles, representation, in the election of the legislature and the president, separation of powers, in its first three articles defining the powers of the legislative, executive and judicial branches, and limited government.
Article I Section 8 specifies the federal government’s enumerated powers:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States; To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States; To establish Post Offices and post Roads; To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court; To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations; To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;–And To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
The Ninth Amendment, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and the Tenth Amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” represent the Catholic Church’s emphasis on subsidiarity, which is again very consistent with Evangelium Vitae, § 71, “so that all may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.”
The Constitution’s separation of powers responded to the Declaration‘s charges against King George III, “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.” The enumeration of powers responded to the Declaration‘s charge, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
The Constitution in Article V gives very clear direction as to how it can be amended, but progressives promote the idea of a “living constitution,” in which the Supreme Court, under the guise of interpreting the Constitution, continuously rewrites it according to “evolving standards of decency” Trop v. Dulles, 1958.
These “evolving standards of decency” should be in laws passed by Congress, not by the progressive movement through its hold on the commanding heights of western civilization, the public schools, the colleges and universities, the news media, the medical and legal professions, and the entertainment industry. This radical annihilation of the Constitution as it was originally written required a series of breathtaking acts of subterfuge. Let us look at one of them, the “separation of Church and state.”
The Constitution’s first substantive words are, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” This passage expressly bars delegation of the legislative power. The framers knew that delegation had been a problem in English constitutional history. The very first word, all, was placed in the Constitution and given the status of primacy expressly to bar any delegation of the legislative power.
The background was this: English kings were expected to rule under law. They had Parliament for enacting laws and courts of law for adjudicating cases, and they were expected to rule under these intermediary powers. In ordinary circumstances, they were content to do so. But when the intermediary powers did not satisfy the king with their decisions, he ruled anyway under “prerogative powers” exercised through dispensations and suspensions, thereby exercising absolute power. The justification for prerogative powers was always the same, necessity. Necessity, the kings said, was not bound by law. The framers said, “all legislative powers,” to lock out the possibility that an American president would ever be able to exercise absolute power seized from the American people.
English kings ordinarily enforced the law through courts of law, but when exercising prerogative power they created prerogative courts, such as the King’s Council, the Star Chamber, and the High Commission. Today we would call them administrative courts. The framers used similar language to bar prerogative powers in Article III. “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court.” Their phrase, “one Supreme Court” was intended to block American presidents from exercising prerogative powers through new higher courts as the English kings had. The framers were careful to describe any other courts the Congress might establish as “inferior.”
Absolute power had three main elements. It was extra-legal, outside the statute law, supra-legal, above the law in that kings expected judges to defer to it, and consolidated in the sense that the three major powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, were consolidated in a single entity, the king. Progressives smoothy replaced this sharp clear language with phrases such as “rule of law,” which they then defined as allowing the delegation of legislative and judicial powers to administrative agencies. They were careful to keep quiet about the continuity between absolute power and modern administrative power, as that nexus undermined their claims for its modernity and lawfulness.
We need to restore the more precise language of an earlier era by demanding rule through law and rule under law. And we need to reclaim the language of law by speaking not of administrative law but of administrative power, and of extra-legal, supra-legal, and consolidated power.
The Mountain of Evidence
Satan‘s overall strategy is to separate God from man Jn 8:44. He removes God from the state, and then expands the state so that it takes over the entire life of man. The Constitution’s First Amendment states in part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
After World War II the progressives found a man in New Jersey who agreed to sue a tax funded school district on the grounds that it reimbursed parents of both public and private schooled children for public transportation taking them to school. They brought a court case. The Supreme Court’s Justice Black, in Everson v. Board of Education, 1947, managed to transmogrify that ringing protection of the free exercise of religion into its exact opposite.
David Barton, a top authority on the Constitution, pointedly observes: “The Congressional Records from June 7 to September 25, 1789, record the months of discussions and debates of the ninety Founding Fathers who framed the First Amendment. That would have been the most authoritative place to look for their intent. Significantly, during those discussions and debates not one of those ninety Framers ever mentioned the phrase ‘separation of church and state.’”1 Justice Black, writing for the Court, did not discern the intention of the framers in that voluminous record.
Nor did he consult the records of Congressional activity of that time. A year after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the new nation experienced a shortage of Bibles. On July 7, 1777, Congress received a request to print or import more because, “Unless timely care be used to prevent it, we shall not have Bibles for our schools, and families, and for the public worship of God in our churches.”2 Congress responded by declaring, “The Congress desire to have a Bible printed under their care and by their encouragement,”3 and referred the matter to a committee. On September 11, 1777 that committee reported to Congress, “The use of the Bible is so universal, and its importance so great … your Committee recommend that Congress will order the Committee of Commerce to import 20,000 Bibles from Holland, Scotland, or elsewhere, into the different ports of the United States.”4 Congress agreed, and on the same day ordered the 20,000 Bibles.5
There were a great many such instances. During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, on June 28, 1787, Benjamin Franklin, widely recognized as one of the least religious of the founders, in a stirring speech, addressed George Washington, President of the Convention: “I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”6
But, of all the evidence of Congress’ intent that the First Amendment was not to restrict religious expression by the government, the most striking was its request to President Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving. On September 25, 1789, Congress approved this resolution: “Resolved, That a joint committee of both Houses be directed to wait upon the President of the United States to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness.”7
David Barton observes: “Strikingly, this request from Congress to the President was made the same day that Congress approved the final wording of the First Amendment.”8 This is rock solid evidence that Congress, on the day it approved the First Amendment, understood it to allow religious expression by the federal government. President Washington heartily concurred. His proclamation began, “Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor …”9
The Lonely Letter
Justice Black intentionally ignored the mountain of evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation guaranteeing free exercise of religion to all. Instead, he unearthed a single three-paragraph letter by Thomas Jefferson, who did not attend the Constitutional Convention. Let us look at all of this letter, not only the familiar eight words Justice Black wrenched from their context.
Connecticut residents were nearly all Congregationalists. Their state constitution declared, “Each and every society or denomination of Christians in this state shall enjoy the same and equal powers, rights and privileges.”10 Connecticut’s few Baptists wanted some reassurance that federal power would not be used against them. They saw the First Amendment‘s presence in the Constitution as suggesting that the free exercise of religion was government-given, not God-given, and therefore might someday be altered or abolished. The Baptist Association in Danbury, Connecticut, wrote a letter to President Jefferson on October 7, 1801, expressing its concern. “But sir, our constitution of government is not specific … Therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.”11
Jefferson knew his English history and had long believed that, without restraint, governments tend to encroach on religious freedom. He had written to Noah Webster on December 4, 1790, “It has become a universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors … and which experience has nevertheless proved they [the government] will be constantly encroaching on if submitted to them; … [including] freedom of religion.”12 Jefferson strongly agreed with the Danbury Baptist Association, and on January 1, 1802, wrote to reassure them, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”13
In that same letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson continued, “Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced that he has no right in opposition to his social duties. I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man.”14
Jefferson meant by “wall of separation” that the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law, …” was a wall of separation preventing Congress from encroaching on the free exercise of religion. In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Jefferson wrote, “No power over the freedom of religion … [is] delegated to the United States by the Constitution.”15 In Jefferson’s Second Inaugural Address, 1805, he declared, “In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the general [federal] government.”16 In a letter to the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1808, he wrote, “Our excellent Constitution … has not placed our religious rights under the power of any public functionary.”17 And in the same year he wrote to Samuel Miller, “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted [prohibited] by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions… or exercises.”18
Jefferson’s phrase, “Natural rights,” was clear to the Danbury Baptists. The Declaration of Independence, adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776, justified American independence on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
“We further discover that Thomas Jefferson attended Church services in the Capitol throughout his terms as vice president and president, which were often conducted by his friend Reverend John Leland. Ironically, Jefferson attended one such service just two days after he wrote his famous response to the Danbury Baptists.… President Jefferson clearly understood that his ‘wall of separation’ would allow his attending church services in the U.S. Capitol without even the appearance of the state either establishing a national church or imposing a religious belief system on the people. James Madison, who is widely considered to be the author of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, also attended these church services in the Capitol. In fact, while Congress was debating the language of the First Amendment, they were also working to pass legislation to hire and pay for official House and Senate chaplains.”19
Justice Black Decides
Reversing the First Amendment
Justice Black, in Everson vs. Board of Education, 1947, dismissed as not suited to his purpose the months of discussions and debates among the Framers of the First Amendment. He similarly dismissed Congress’ purchase of 20,000 Bibles for use in schools, homes and churches, and even its resolution for a national day of public thanksgiving and prayer approved on the same day it approved the final wording of the First Amendment, or at the Capitol church services.
The Founding Fathers had clearly written, “Congress shall make no law.” Their “wall of separation” blocked Congress, not the states or the Church. If Justice Black had wanted to corrupt Jefferson’s intention only as far as state neutrality toward religion, he could have set up a wall that would block both directions equally; the church could not touch the state, the state could not touch the church. But Justice Black went much farther:
The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. … In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to “erect a wall of separation between church and State.”
Justice Black continued:
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.
As the Heritage Foundation observes, Jefferson’s wall separated church and the federal government only. By incorporating the First Amendment non-establishment provision into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Black’s wall separates religion and civil government at all levels–federal, state, and local. By extending its prohibitions to state and local jurisdictions, Black turned the First Amendment, as ratified in 1791, on its head. A barrier originally designed, as a matter of federalism, to separate the national and state governments, and thereby to preserve state jurisdiction in matters pertaining to religion, was transformed into an instrument of the federal judiciary to invalidate policies and programs of state and local authorities.American constitutional law was forever changed. Since 1947 Americans have been told so often that, “The Constitution requires Separation of Church and State,” and the Court has built so complex a jurisprudence based on it, that the fiction has become nearly irreversible.
Reversing Church-State Amity
By putting the states on the federal side of the wall instead of the church side, Justice Black set up an adversary relationship between church and state. Decision Heritage Analysis
Most Supreme Court cases recognize a balance between competing interests. For instance, in Schenck vs. United States, 1919, Justice Holmes wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” By insisting, “We could not approve the slightest breach,” he ruled that no interest, however compelling, could be allowed to interfere with what he had done. When we look even briefly at the subsequent jurisprudence, we see the seething hostility to religion, the exact reverse of Jefferson’s intentions. For instance, in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the Court wrote: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” These questions are firmly in the territory of religion, but Casey moved them into the government’s purview as “the heart of liberty.” Decision Heritage Analysis
A Radical Departure
Justice Black’s departure from the traditional understanding of the First Amendment was so startling that it took a while for even the Court itself to get accustomed to the radical change it had perpetrated. In Zorach vs. Clauson, 1952, Justice Douglas, referring to Everson, wrote, “There cannot be the slightest doubt that the First Amendment reflects the philosophy that Church and State should be separated. And so far as interference with the ‘free exercise’ of religion and an ‘establishment’ of religion are concerned, the separation must be complete and unequivocal. The First Amendment within the scope of its coverage permits no exception; the prohibition is absolute.” Yet, two paragraphs later, Douglas wrote, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. … When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs.”
Justice Rehnquist, in his dissent from Wallace vs. Jaffree, 1985, observed, “The Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years.… the greatest injury of the ‘wall’ notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights.” Why Does Religious Freedom Matter? The Mythical “Wall of Separation.” Robert Frost, in Mending Wall, reminds us, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Frost wrote, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out,” but his neighbor only repeats, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The New World Order
The Administrative State
Rabbi Yeshua told us, “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” Mt 6:31–33.
Rabbi Yeshua gives us free will. Satan’s path through a democratic republic to slavery requires tempting a substantial number of people to voluntarily relinquish their freedom. A free people does not willingly accept chains so Satan’s forces set up traps and add appealing bait. In our time bureaucrats hunting for such persons bait their traps with money to pay their living expenses so that they need not earn a living. Once a man or family who without genuine need agrees to go on welfare the trap is sprung. Such persons will always vote for the people who promise them continued assistance. When a significant number of them begin to notice that they are no longer free but must follow the bureaucracy’s rules, the bureaucracy increases the amount of the welfare benefits.
In the United States, in the 1960s when this effort began to pick up speed, the welfare authorities quickly passed the “man in the house rule.” For a family to be eligible for welfare, a man of working age and ability may not live in the house. This had the effect to separating fathers from their families. God is our Father, our protector and provider. We are God’s image and likeness. God himself set men as heads of their households Gen 3:16; Eph 5:22, to be their protectors and providers. If too many men realized their responsibilities to father their families as God’s image and likeness the whole welfare trap would fall apart. Today’s fatherless ghetto culture is a disaster for the families on welfare, but they are already in the trap. As the state accumulates recipients of public assistance it eventually acquires enough to outvote those who vote for responsible governance. As soon as the number of people on public assistance rises above 50 percent the whole population is locked in. The voting majority for ever-increasing benefits forces the minority who pay the bills to work harder and harder to pay the expenses of the welfare state.
The end-game for progressives in American domestic politics is the administrative state. This is certainly about increasing bureaucracy, but also much more. Increasingly, progressives in Congress are passing laws that create a broad environment for regulation, but then leave agencies free to write rules and regulations that shape our lives. The bureaucracies not only write the rules but also decide who will have waivers. Slowly, carefully, they are weaving a web of administrative rules that govern every moment of our lives. Congress could theoretically pass new legislation that would limit abuses, but as a practical matter the bureaucracies will eventually control Congress as well through the federal election regulations. A congressman who tries to cut back the administrative kudzu may find his office audited to see whether he has spent every penny of his campaign fund in accordance with the regulations. The number of regulations eventually becomes so great that even the most attentive congressman will eventually violate some of them. As the decades pass, the executive branch is transmogrified into the administrative state. Such a state could eventually dispense altogether with Congress, the Supreme Court, and elections. It could start to directly collect the taxes it wants from the people, whether or not it has congressional authorization or consent of the governed. It could shut down the existing judicial courts and substitute an administrative law judge office obedient to the state. With no further need for a Congress to appropriate money, it could shut down the whole election process and simply continue to govern indefinitely a tame and obedient population.
The Universities
The Ivy League and other prestige colleges and universities train the men and women who organize, rule and govern these institutions.
A few decades ago, when liberals were still storming the barricades, they stood for freedom to express diverse viewpoints, especially their own. Now, even as they continue to champion diversity, they work constantly to narrow its meaning. They want racial diversity, because whole continents populated by blacks, semites and orientals are more likely to trust one of their own. They do not want devout Christians who are likely to respect God’s authority above institutional authority.
To protect the institution against a ruler or senior executive who might someday become persuaded to undermine it, many universities have long insulated their students from diverse opinions by refusing to allow commencement or other speakers who do not reflect the prevailing liberal ethos. As part of that insulation, they inculcate in students a fear of diverse opinions. To assure that a student is not overpowered by a more intelligent outsider the universities add campus “safe spaces” where no independent thought is allowed at any time, day or night. Often the “safe space” is the entire university except for a small “free speech” zone.
In publicly funded universities, the Constitution prohibits limits on free speech, but the publicly funded universities ignore them. Lawyers have to retain the ability to deal with conflicting arguments, so most law recent school graduates have never seen a copy of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land! Rather, they study only cases in which judges describe what the Constitution says in ways consistent with the establishment view. These are called the landmark cases, the ones the student really has to know. Cases decided conservatively receive much less scrutiny. In this way they hope as the decades pass to remove the Constitution entirely from American jurisprudence.
The deliberately inculcated ignorance runs much deeper. Many colleges and universities are no longer teaching Western Civilization courses. Today’s students have been overwhelmingly trained to be relativist. They have no idea what freedom is, why it is desirable, why it is part of the American idea, or what it costs. They demand free tuition but have no understanding of the American economic system or what principles make it the world’s most powerful engine of prosperity. Millions of them sit in their mother’s basements complaining that they can’t get a job, while advocating policies that make it impossible for companies to hire them.
It is a system perfectly designed to fit the needs of the New World Order, an administrative state in which a small group of elites tells them what it wants them to do, and makes it impossible for them to question what they have heard. They have been compared to mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present. Patrick Deneen’s Res Idiotica sums it up well.
The Multinational Corporations
Most national governments believed that, since they had sovereign authority over their lands, they had sovereign authority over all that occurred on their lands. But the eighteenth-century rural farms and the nineteenth-century industrial corporations emerged in the twentieth century as multinational corporations. Multinational corporations were able to exercise power in ways that even the administrative state could not control. If one country raised its taxes on corporations far above the average, the multinationals simply moved their financial resources into a country where the taxes were lower.
The global mobility of capital today is absolute. Billions of dollars can be moved across an ocean in a fraction of a second. This global mobility of capital has also overcome advantages that the labor movement once believed it had. If labor unions drove wages up too high, multinational corporations would simply transfer their capital to lower wage jurisdictions. Even something as apparently immobile as an automobile production plant can be moved over a few years. In the northern United States the United Auto Workers had put great effort into securing state laws that required workers to join a union in order to work. Corporations based in Germany, Japan, South Korea and other countries therefore built their factories in southern states where the right-to-work tradition was much stronger. Some American car companies moved their factories from the United States into Mexico.
Corporations today sell most of their products and services to financial and cultural elites who are highly mobile, ethically flexible, politically liberal, consumerist, and comfortable in a rapidly changing environment. These fit well with the libertarian movements in both parties, so there has emerged a “corporate party” consisting of financial and cultural elites and catered to by both of the national parties.
The administrative state works with libertarian corporations through consensus. Consider the Same-Sex Court Case. The state sees itself as having an interest in eliminating competing authorities, first and foremost the Catholic Church. Same-sex “marriage” destroys the family which is a foundation of the Catholic Church. The multinational corporations recognize that the homosexuals have made adherence to the Sixth Commandment so unpopular among the unchurched that support for same-sex “marriage” assures them of friendly relationships in the media. That leaves Catholics and Evangelicals with strenuous objections, but media lions make sure we don’t get much publicity or sympathetic explanations for our worldview. This is visible every January 22 when the March for Life gathers more than 100,000 Catholics, and many other Christians, on the Washington DC Mall, even in inclement weather, and is hardly mentioned at all in the secular media.
The Supranational Organizations
The United States itself began the trend toward larger government institutions that gathered and organized smaller institutions, when its once-sovereign states banded together as the United States of America. In our time the European Union is the prime exhibit among supranational institutions. The once-sovereign nations of Europe freely chose to surrender their centuries-old national sovereignty to a bureaucracy centered in Brussels, Belgium. The United Nations began as a simple gathering of nations to facilitate common-sense cooperation, but as the decades passed it drew its own member states into a web of treaties that had the force of international law.
Even nominally smaller organizations cumulatively have great power. The International Criminal Court in the Hague claims worldwide jurisdiction. The International Monetary Fund uses market forces to shape economic policy in many putatively sovereign nations, as the Gates Foundation shapes technology policy.
Tying it All Together
“Will God or man be the organizing principle of our lives and the source of all that we need?” The New World Order is clearly being set up as Satan’s counterpart to the Catholic Church:
The administrative state is its head, with universities, the multinational corporations, and the supranational organizations its body. Their senior executives meet from time to time now and will continue to do so, but it will not be strictly necessary. For instance, in the United States federal government, for decades, OSHA has rigorously inspected private sector safety procedures. The appearance is that it is protecting safety in the workplace. The reality is that OSHA is exercising control. It does not inspect any federal agencies because it trusts even federal agencies with no occupational safety experience! They all think along the same lines, so whenever one of them starts a major project, the others cooperate.
In Washington, DC, headquarters of the administrative state, we already see beautiful expensive neighborhoods, construction cranes everywhere, luxury cars on the streets, while in most of the country we see poverty, welfare, violence, and hard times. Imagine what it will be like several decades from now. Pray for the girl in the 1984 Apple commercial.
Just as the Church exists to lead souls to Rabbi Yeshua, the administrative state will “be like God, knowing good and evil” Gen 3:5, distracting souls from God.
What We Can Do
We can, we must, restore the Constitution as the the supreme law of the land. Judge Andrew Napolitano 7:29 sounds the call.
We can resist, quietly, inviting Rabbi Yeshua to send us many children, home schooling the beautiful souls he sends, and leading our well-formed children toward the Formative Professions. There are prayer and radical transformation, which we will need in that very dry time. We can pray for The Glory to Come, that it will come soon. If we ask Rabbi Yeshua in his name he will conquer the new world order for us, but we will certainly not be able to conquer it on our own Jn 15:5.
There is not much time, so we need to start now.
The Administrative State Always Fails
The Administrative State’s premise is, “Men organized as governments are and should be the organizing principle of our lives and the source of all that we need.” The subtext is, “Would you rather depend for everything you need on God who is invisible and who allows some people to be very poor, or on us, the government, who will always be there to provide all that you need?” Many people do not see the larger picture, that God who created the universe has final authority over it, and believe the siren song.
We know that the devil is a liar Jn 8:44 who always destroys his followers in the end. The liberal state will always fail eventually because it tries to imitate God’s compassion for his people. In the United States, look at every state and city under strongly liberal governance. In Europe, look at the countries that have had liberal governments for decades. In every case the state, believing Satan’s first lie Gen 3:5, has promised its people more than it has money to give them. When it runs a budget deficit it borrows the money in the hope that a higher level government will bail it out. The bankrupt municipal government looks to the state for a bailout. The bankrupt state looks to the federal government for a bailout. The European Union’s constituent nations look to the central EU government for a bailout.
All the while, these liberal governments remain in office by enticing people into their public assistance schemes. “You don’t have to work. We’ll take care of you as long as you vote for us.” Great numbers of young people have learned in the government indoctrination centers that they are in fact entitled to live at public expense. And it appears to work for a time. Each one graduates from college, finds his way onto a public dole of one sort or another, and sees no need to earn a living by his own productive skills. After a while any productive skills he may have acquired in college atrophy, and he becomes in fact unable to earn his own income. But, he thinks, the benevolent state will always be there to pay for his food, clothing, shelter, health care, and whatever else the government promised that he would always have. He does his part. He always supports the party that supports the dole.
There is great danger in surrendering our own productive ability so that we might live at the state’s expense. As Hurricane Katrina approached landfall, the City of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation before the storm began. Most of its citizens evacuated to high ground and were safe, but in one particular neighborhood people simply waited for city buses to pick them up. The buses never came, and many of them perished in the surging flood waters.
Also, the money has to come from somewhere, so the cry is always, “Tax the rich. Take their money by force and give it to us.” Liberal governments usually succumb to this logic. But men who have high incomes are highly productive. They move to states where taxes are not so confiscatory. So, the liberals believe, the answer is raise federal government taxes, thinking, “Then they will have no place to go.” In May 2012 Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship and moved to Singapore, a low-tax Asian technology and finance hub, to avoid paying millions of dollars in US capital gains taxes. It was perfectly legal, but liberals howled. Their real complaint was not so much that Saverin left, but that he attracted a lot of attention to what has been going on for several years now, wealthy men and women moving from high-tax to low-tax countries.
Meanwhile the state and national debts rise so high that they are actually greater than the nation’s entire annual productivity. In that way the politicians actually confiscate wealth from generations yet unborn. The nation’s currency is already inflated, its debt is already dangerously high. More and more wealthy people become tired of being piñatas and move to low-tax havens where their wealth and productivity are greatly appreciated.
The liberal’s final recourse is world government. “We’ll tax rich people wherever they are in the world. Then they will really have no place to go.” For a time the rich continue to escape to small offshore islands where they have their own governments that are not members of the United Nations. When the world government closes even that possibility, the rich do: nothing. They stop being piñatas. They stop generating new wealth.
That’s when Satan’s trap closes. The socialist government can no longer spend the money it used to because it has run out of people to tax. No one will buy its debt. Finally, it literally has no alternative to sharply reducing its welfare spending. And then it has riots in the streets as young people scream, “You promised! You owe us!” The socialists can’t afford to pay for the police to arrest the rioters or repair the damage they have done. Everything becomes dull and gray.
Satan always shows his contempt for his own followers by showing them how obvious it all is. Margaret Thatcher, on the Thames TV program This Week, originally broadcast on February 5, 1976, said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” Now, decades later, socialist governments are making a bigger mess than Margaret Thatcher ever saw.
Satan’s contempt for his followers is so great that he even shows them their own folly by pointing to a simple folk tale called The Little Red Hen 2:28. In the tale, the Little Red Hen finds a grain of wheat, and asks the other farmyard animals to help her plant it, but none volunteer. So she does it herself. The same thing happens at each stage, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking. Each time, the Little Red Hen asks for help but gets none, so she does it herself. Finally, she asks who would help her eat the bread. This time all the farmyard animals eagerly offer to help her eat the bread, but she says that no one helped her prepare the bread, so no one would help her eat it. So she eats it herself, leaving none for anyone else.
Catholics owe charity to the § 544 poor and lowly, those living the § 915 evangelical counsels, and those in dire straits Mt 25:31–46. But St. Paul told us, “If any one will not work, let him not eat” 2 Thes 3:10. “We hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work” 2 Thes 3:11. We owe them no food.
There is not much time. But if we pray, there remains hope.