Farrell: Time to relearn, reconvert to the freedom foundations and faith of our forefathers

by Steve Farrell

Each generation has its challenges. Defender of the sanctity of human life, the late Alphonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, writing in Faith and Reason: The Journal of Christendom College, in the Fall 2006, says of the challenge of our generation:

Unless we learn anew the foundations of life – unless we discover in a new way the certainty of faith – it will be less and less possible for us to entrust to other the gift of life and the task of an unknown future.

He’s right. This is the great test of our time. So much has for so long been taken for granted as givens: Marriage between a man and wife; the life of the unborn as sacred; the taking of that life out of selfishness, a grave sin; theft, in all its forms, as wrong as it was on Mt Sinai when God thundered ‘thou shalt not steal,’ and ‘thou shalt not covet;’ the obligation to “earn thy bread by the sweat of thy brow,” the stretching duty and obligation of man; offensive war, an affront to God as grave as murder, destined to produce unhappy national consequences; the necessity that a citizenry must be educated and moral for free government to self-govern itself to anything other than a swift and sure self-destruction. It was all commonly believed, upheld by both faith and reason. And for a time, a given, that needed no debate to prove.

But it’s all up for grabs today, after years of secularization in education, after years of dumbing down generation after generation courtesy of John Dewey inspired progressivism, out the door went the religious and moral foundations of true liberty replaced with yet another antagonistic to the old, to the Constitution, Way of Life, and devotion to God, that brought the greatest and most successful experiment in political and social liberty the world had ever known, promising something better, smarter, more relative to our day.

The latter – inspired by a Marxist-Leninist outlook that aims only at control and power, coming in under the radar masquerading as progressive, humanistic, and equality promoting – failed us. Imagine that!

Yet, the new paradigm has predominated for so long now, the propaganda so omnipresent, its advocates so  many, that we will fall and our children will fall to inevitable tyranny that the embracing of Marxist-Leninist ideas brings, unless we rediscover the fundamentals of liberty, of faith, of family, and reconvert, both by way of God’s gift of reason (coming to a solid understanding as to the value, validity, and applicability of what our forefathers believed), and by way of faith (through a study of the scriptures, through prayerful consideration, through living what we learn, and through the Holy Ghost), receiving that more sure witness that comes from only from God as his Spirit speaks to our spirits, to the Light of Christ within us, gently, quietly, solidly converting us to know, understand, and then stand by the truth, and high moral conduct, despite all challenges to it, temporal and spiritual, despite our individual failings and setbacks. For, this we will relearn, one so converted picks himself up, dusts himself off, and gets back to the battle, more determined, more grateful for his atonement, more sure of the knowledge of His plan for man, more tried and tested as the cycle repeats, and yet spirals upward, God inspiring us to press on, improve, expand, and enlarge.

This we need to do for ourselves, and need to help facilitate in our children and grandchildren, if the legacy of liberty under God in America will survive and prosper well into the 21st Century

The Liberty Letters with Steve Farrell are a project of the Center for Moral Liberalism