Freedom and responsibility
“endowed by their Creator ... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Reclaim the flag
On Saturday I walked to Uptown Espresso. I usually take a pathway through the Junction, which is the center of the neighborhood. There were around 60 people, many carrying large American flags. It was a Reclaim the Flag demonstration.
I liked the flags. Could have done without the drum beat and chanting.
Sister Michelle can testify to my complaining over the years about the lack of American flags at protests by groups on the left in their fight for their understanding of human dignity. It’s a relatively recent development. The suffragettes often carried flags. It was common in the civil rights movement of the 60s.
Apparently groups including the Democratic Party, but not quite encompassing DSA want to reclaim the flag. Pete Buttigieg, fellow Episcopalian, has been part of that effort. Who knows maybe some of our bishops will catch up.
Buttigieg recently made a speech in which he recounted something about the flag that he shared with his daughter, “the values that flag represents, the story, the incredibly rich and inspiring — and yes, very, complicated story, of everything that has happened under that flag and in the name of that flag.”
I have my own small effort. On a wall that had contained the Anglo Catholic icons (now at St. Clement’s Seattle) I have a display of prints that includes the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, a group of protesting suffragettes, and a print of Faith Ringgold’s Freedom of Speech poster. I also have devoted a small corner of my hutch cabinet to the cause.
Endowed by their Creator
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
Kevin D. Williamson is a very conservative writer for The Dispatch. Before that he had been an editor for the National Review. Not my politics. My informed conscience tends in the other direction. But I accept that his informed conscience has a legitimate place in the national conversation. In a recent article, anticipating the celebration of the Fourth of July, he unpacks a few of the assumptions in the Declaration of Independence. To find it you have to scroll below his main piece The Road to Smurfdom down to “And While I’m At It …” That’s where you’ll find his reflections on the Declaration and our current politics.
“The people who most loudly proclaim themselves “patriots” are, in point of fact, adherents of a politics that is fundamentally opposed to the principles spelled out in the Declaration, hewing to a vaguely articulated ideology that is not only illiberal but anti-liberal, autocratically personalist to a degree that would have made poor old King George puke from anxiety, and entirely hostile to the revolutionary document’s universalism. Above all, they reject its theology, operating from the assumption that liberty is not an endowment from the Creator but the gift from patron to client, from the powerful man to his abject petitioners.”
I’m sure that in other writings he has included in his charge about illiberal and authoritarian mindsets, much of the protesting taking place on the left. But his focus for the moment is on our President and his friends.
He is noting how the Founders held together two themes seen in the beginning of the second paragraph.
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.
“American liberalism, as attested to by the Declaration of Independence, is founded on the notion that rights reside in the individual—not in the nation as a whole, in the race, in a class, or in a caste or a guild—and that these rights are both inherent and non-negotiable rather than subject to ad hoc revision as demanded by the vagaries of political reality or the national situation.”
First, the rights are both inherent and non-negotiable because they are “an endowment from the Creator.”
Second, God may have endowed us with these rights but it is up to us, “the governed,” to fix them so firmly that they cannot be lost.
Freedom & Responsibility
Williamson is getting at something deeper, than what we see in the Trump derangement syndrome (TDS): Charles Krauthammer “defined Trump derangement syndrome as a Trump-induced ‘general hysteria’ that produced an ‘inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and signs of psychic pathology’ in the president’s behavior…. Journalist Fareed Zakaria, defined TDS as ‘hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people’s judgment.’”
Williamson wants us to notice the political and theological ground offered in the Declaration. A difficulty we face in holding onto that deeper truth, is the adoration of the President by some and the TDS of others. Each undercuts God's invitation into freedom and responsibility.
My take is that you’re in the syndrome if you are unable to see anything in the current administration’s actions that you can support or at least empathetically understand. You're outraged by Trump and the Supreme Court’s undoing nationwide injunctions but thought that when Joe Biden and Barack Obama opposed such injunctions that was perfectly reasonable. Yes, I know there’s something different about it now. One part of that is about how this administration talks. That's what the first part Williamson’s article addressed - “my goodness, these people talk like cretins.”
So what is the antidote to Trump Derangement Syndrome?
I love John Macquarrie’s statement, "..our belief is that the whole process only makes sense in so far as, in the risk and the struggle of creation, that which is is advancing into fuller potentialities of being and is overcoming the forces that tend toward dissolution; and that continually a richer and more fully diversified unity is built up. ...The end, we have seen reason to believe, would be a commonwealth of free, responsible beings united in love; and this great end is possible only if finite existents are preserved in some kind of individual identity. Here again, we may emphasize that the highest love is not the drive toward union, but rather letting-be."
A lovely phrase, “A commonwealth of free, responsible beings united in love.” We don’t know if his thinking was directly influenced by the work of Viktor Frankl but it’s obvious that they had some common ground. Both were existentialists and were concerned with finding meaning in life. And both used the freedom - responsibility frame.
Alex Pattakos article on TDS draws on Viktor Frankl’s, “Everything can be taken from a man but…the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.” Pattakos continues, “In other words, in all situations, no matter how desperate they may appear or actually be, you always have the ultimate freedom to choose your attitude. Frankl is equally well known for advising that when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. This recommendation echoes the wise words of the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus who is credited with the following: ‘It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.’ Notice how both pieces of advice assume not only the exercise of freedom of will (i.e., freedom to choose, even if it involves only your attitude toward the situation and what happens to you) but also personal responsibility (i.e., actually changing yourself or how you react to the situation and what happens to you).”
We of the church might focus on “a commonwealth of free, responsible beings united in love.” We might shape our parishes with that prayer in mind. As citizens, we may revise the wording a bit. Something that captures the common purpose of the nation. The Founders pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to those “certain unalienable Rights … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Or maybe the common purpose might be seen in that other document, “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
As we celebrate the 4th it might serve us well to give thanks for our capacities of freedom and responsibility. To confess our failures and pray for the growth of each within ourselves, our churches, and the nation.
This abides,
Brother Robert, OA
The Feast of Pauli Murray, Priest, 1985
The Feast of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Writer and Prophetic Witness, 1896
It’s a good practice.
First: his pandemic doubling of the child credit cut poverty in half. Joe Manchin was the one to removed it from Biden’s infrastructure bill.
I’m impressed by Trumps willingness - against all advice from anyone - to negotiate directly with Hamas, Iran and NK.
He may have been one of the few presidents to stand up to the Israel lobby. That goes against years of established thinking. He’s a bit of a chicken hawk most of the time. It turns out his bombing was performative, just as he accepted Irans performative response. He’s an entertainer and kind of treats war that way. I don’t think he understands how it benefitted Iran in the long run, but he’s a stable genius of some kind.
He also single handedly saved the economy under Covid by implementing something like universal basic income in the previous administration. If anyone ever says UBI doesn’t work, we actually have months of evidence to show that it does.
That he was also responsible for its devastation by his incompetence and dismissal of the pandemic plan that had been in place could be overlooked.
The deaths were sad. And when he began to realize that a majority were in red states, he acted upon it.
He got the companies to create a vaccine quickly, even though he doesn’t believe in them.
He also proved deficits don’t matter. Modern Monetary Theory is having its day, in part because of him.
Setting up concentration camps and proposing an internal 45 billion dollar deportation force may not be worth worrying about. I pass as white so I’m ok. I shrug. I don’t want to be deranged by concentration camps.
The impact of cutting all our soft power in the world? Well, who needs to travel anywhere internationally when one has the internet?
He is also a very good president for red states.
He may have been the first president who openly serves primarily white people and has never read the sermon on the mount.
Getting rid of DEI and installing really mediocre people ironically illustrates we need DEI primarily because it forces whites to be better. That wasn’t his intention, but I now appreciate the evidence.
But every now and again, he gets it right.
Given that he doesn’t actually read anything, barely spends time managing, and only feels alive when dominating his enemies, perhaps it shouldn’t matter.
I have a friend who did remark, The election of Trump taught me is that what really matters is spending time in the forest foraging for Mushrooms.