WHAT IS AN AMERICAN ?

Washington praying in the Thicket.

Patrick Henry, speaking in the Continental Congress, 1774, declared; “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American.”

In a letter to Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton expressed these same convictions. “We are laboring hard to establish in this country principles more and more national and free from all foreign ingredients so that we may be neither Greeks nor Trojans, but truly Americans.”

In his Farewell Address, George Washington addressed the same sentiment. “The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism.”

The American of 1776 and following was indeed a New Man. In courage, conviction, and sacrifice, he declared that the spiritual is supreme. That very First Principle of Americanism, declared in the Declaration of Independence, is that all men are created … endowed by their Creator.

The First Principle: The Spiritual Is Supreme

Therein lies the First Principle: The spiritual is supreme. By spiritual we mean of the Holy Spirit of God. The Founding Fathers knew that the First Principle of America was religious in nature.

Man is of divine origin and his spiritual nature is of supreme and eternal value to his Creator. His governmental philosophy rests on this First Principle.

Never before in all of history has a governmental philosophy rested on the brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of the Triune God. Only in a right relationship with God to man can man live in the right relationship with God and his fellow man.

The Second Principle: Fear of Government over Man

The “Kentucky Resolutions,” by Thomas Jefferson, makes this warning: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

In a spiritual world of both godly and sinful men, fear of government makes an apt corollary, a valuable lesson of history. A mixture of good and evil lies in the heart of man. The resulting abuse of power, with injuries to individual and collective liberties, predominates in the history of every nation and culture.

Would America be able to overcome the sin nature of man being prominent and dominant in the new government? What was the challenge to the American, this New Man?

Accordingly, until modernism set in, from the day of the Pilgrims and Puritans, Americans built from the ground up, an entirely new educational system. A system of Biblical principles formed the foundation for all knowledge.

These schools remain zealous for the safety of individual liberty. They treasure their God-given unalienable rights. The true American today, as before, continues to recognize government’s overreach, with its secular religion in government schools, and opposes it in every lawful way.

We understand the wisdom of fearing government. We understand what Washington meant when he spoke of the “love of power and the proneness to abuse it.” We see officials’ human weakness and love of power, and we see the corresponding weaknesses in the people themselves.

Yet observation is not enough. We may be inspired when we think of unalienable rights, but do we always cleave to the moral basis from which they are derived? Americans created government at all levels as a tool for preserving these rights, these liberties, and justice. They are the means of securing these rights for future generations.

George Washington, in his First Inaugural Address, he addressed every generation—then and in the future.

Referring to God-centered government, he admonished, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

In order to protect the unalienable rights given by God, the Founding Fathers recognized the responsibility that accompanies every single liberty. There is no “just power” in the world that can morally violate these rights.

To be the new man, the New American, each individual at the time of the new Constitution consented to his own limitations to some degree, in order to secure these unalienable rights.

Elbridge Gerry, writing in 1788, affirmed this in these words, “All writers on government agree … that the origin of all power is in the people, and that they have an incontestable right to check the creatures of their own creation, vested with certain powers to guard the life, liberty, and property of the community.”

Limited government was their passion. Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist, no. 78,* “The executive … holds the sword … the legislature … commands the purse … the judiciary … has no influence over either the sword or the purse.… Liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, [as usurpers] but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments” - in usurping power.

The importance of a decentralized national government, limited in power, with the careful balance of the greater power in the states - and that limited as well - demonstrates the genius of the Founding Fathers, and their clear understanding that the spiritual is supreme.

Let us then hold close to the words of Dr. Joseph Warren, one of the greats of that generation, who wrote in an oration on March 5, 1772, in Boston, “This [is] eternal truth, that public happiness depends on a virtuous and unshaken attachment to a free constitution.”

Notes:

The above essay is abridged from an article by Mrs. Bobbie Ames - a brilliant lifelong scholar and educator, and advocate for the faith of Jesus Christ, with its liberty under law. For over fifty years, she taught in the classroom and administrated Emerald Mountain Christian School in Montgomery, Alabama, founded with her husband in 1965.

* Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, The Federalist Papers. These were originally published in New York newspapers in support of the ratification of the United States Constitution.

Read more on what it is to be True Americans here.

The new Lady Donna Program in Spirituality, Academics and Citizenship @ the "I AM" School studies instruction about American Independence and America's Divine Destiny from the Great Cosmic Beings.