“Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is,” wrote C. S. Lewis in “Mere Christianity.” “Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage,” he continued.
One needn’t be a Christian to look at America today and see it as enemy occupied. The daily news is filled with incidents large and small that would have appalled the American founders. Politicians and commentators on the left, for instance, advocate socialism and increasingly, violence in achieving their goals. Their opponents on the right reject Marxism, but also look to big government for solutions. Neither side addresses such looming crises such as our out-of-control national debt or the Islamization of the country. Despite popular support for the SAVE Act, the Congress can’t even pass legislation requiring ID for voting.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence would have been appalled, in particular because they and the Americans of their day rejected government solutions to problems. Instead, they saw individuals and communities as providing remedies to problems.
Thus, I believe that John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and many others call to us to become saboteurs in the ugly machine which is the present age. Here are four suggestions for keeping their dream of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” alive today.
Make Our Homes Places of Joy and Refuge
Whether you live alone or with your family, the home should be a bastion of beauty and goodness standing against the ills of the world. In my case, the furnishings of my apartment consist of several hundred favorite or useful books plus furniture, paintings and pictures, and odds and ends that all have personal meaning for me. It’s generally tidy – mess and clutter annoy me – and is my comfort and bliss.
Make your home your personal retreat center.
Become an American Aeneas
In the beginning of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” when the Greeks are ransacking and burning Troy, Aeneas escapes bearing his aged father on his back, his son by his side. From the calamitous present he carries away the past, the future, and the sacred.
Today we who love America are called to do the same. Like Aeneas, we mustn’t cling to delusions that the past will magically resurrect itself. We must instead work to thread together past and present into a future that may look entirely different from what has gone before but which remains as American as the Declaration and the Constitution.
We can’t return to the past, but we can bring the past into the future.
Build Communities
Here’s a fun and healthy way to counteract the negativity of our age. This can range from backyard barbeques to hosting a book club for your teen and her friends in the home to starting a prayer group at church. In Boonville, N.C., a longtime friend of mine has arranged events featuring speakers and musicians at the local library, both to raise funds and interest in the library and to tighten the bonds of community. On a larger scale, Connecticut resident Vanessa Elias started Block Party USA, which offers advice and help organizing neighborhood parties all around the country.
Building such communities offers a bouquet of benefits: trust in others, helping them and receiving help when needed, safer streets, and greater happiness.
Practice Gratitude
Here is where so many of our fellow citizens fail. Rather than appreciate the freedoms of our country, its history, and its unique contributions to the world, they point only to the moles and blemishes of its past and present. Rather than being thankful for its successes and blessings, they wallow in its failures, disregarding the idealism and sacrifices that have righted those wrongs.
A daily moment of gratitude for the good in our lives – and surely nearly all of us can be grateful for something, however small – goes a long way in helping us maintain a cautious optimism for the future.
In 1765, 10 years before the “shot heard round the world” was fired on Lexington Green, John Adams wrote:
Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.
When we take a do-it-yourself approach to our republic, when we make ourselves agents for the preservation of our God-given rights, even in small ways, we help keep alive that dream of the founders 250 years ago.
—
This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Piryl
