We Americans love our creation stories. A hardy band of political pioneers, pressed beyond the breaking point, were reluctantly compelled to secede from dissolve their political bands with England. The heady Romanticism of Independence is ingrained into us from public grade school catechism, watching Disney’s Johnny Tremain adaptation and pledging our allegiance. We dutifully whitewash um, maintain, our marble monuments to our prophets of secession revolution Independence.
We also love our illusion spirit of solidarity. We love it so much that we eagerly repudiate our own creation story when necessary, proclaiming advocates of secession to be kooks. It’s not merely impractical; it’s fundamentally un-American. Didn’t we fight a war over secession? Didn’t Lincoln win? We have a whole other set of monuments to those prophets. (The ones who repudiate the earlier prophets.)
This double mindedness is so ingrained in our national character and discourse that it is completely unexamined. In other words, it’s the perfect opportunity for a trouble adventure seeking mouse to go poking an uninvited snout into dank intellectual byways.
Repeated Injuries and Usurpations
The published Declaration of 1776 contains a list of twenty-seven grievances, or causes which impelled the secessionists um, revolutionaries, er, Fathers, to… um, separate. Wiser mice than me have noted that a rough draft contained an extra, unpublished grievance: the King of England encouraged chattel slavery.
The delicately stated rationale for expurgating this grievance from the final Declaration was its likeliness to dilute of the hearty spirit of solidarity required for revolt, um resistance, or, put more plainly; the revolution would need Southerners in order to succeed. (Solidarity is a much sought-after feeling among those courting execution for treason, as supposedly observed by Franklin in his apocryphal comment about hanging together.)
The key men of the time, while being often heterodox but nonetheless more biblically literate than an average American Christian of today, would no doubt have been slightly discomfited with the knowledge that they were calling attention to the sin of man-stealing which, in the bible, demanded capital punishment. (It is unknown whether the signatories would have been more reluctant to note the King deserved to die, or that many of them deserved to die. No doubt, either consideration seemed fraught.)
This mouse finds it remarkable that Jefferson, an agnostic who created a bowdlerized bible for himself, was singular in his willingness to have the new republic go on record as denouncing slavery. It is unknown whether his motive was negative; i.e. a sublimated desire to avoid the capital crime he himself was guilty of, or positive; i.e. a glimmer borrowed from the Christian capital of a postmillennial hope in the gradual moral improvement of man, as championed in the preaching of his contemporary, Jonathan Edwards.
In either case, it is regrettable that the practice of politicking away moral challenges for the sake of ginning up solidarity for some scheme or another has become an acceptable routine tradeoff among American leaders.
But, Americans are a practical folk, and politics is the art of the possible. Kicking cans down the road is achievable, whereas it is difficult to get buy-in to comport our laws of the land with the necessity of loving neighbor.
One Nation, Indivisible
Unlike our godless contemporaries in France, whose bloodlust resulted in the guillotining of the prominent, the Americans had a conservative, God-fearing streak. We were not fanatics. Our zeal was tempered by our piety and a bedrock, conservative commitment to eschew rapid change; and certainly, not to change for light or transient causes.
Americans being practical folk, however, we also recognized the necessity, nay, the LIBERTY, to change our minds when necessary or prudent. But, being conservative, we would not do it in a light or transient or hasty manner. In fact, it was not until a hundred years after the Declaration, which gave twenty-seven reasons why countries (or, at the very least, England) are perfectly divisible, that the cleric Francis Bellamy, drawing upon the majestic rhetoric of Lincoln, composed his famous pledge of allegiance, which declared the nation to be Platonically indivisible1.
UPDATE and ERRATA
Upon further inquiry, this mouse discovered the so-called Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which was in fact the first American manifesto to declare political unions to be indivisible… world without end, amen. This was written in 1777, which (whips out calculator, does some quick math) renders the American about-face of bedrock political principle to have taken not 100 years, but 1 year. This mouse regrets the error and sincerely hopes it does not undermine his thesis on the essential conservatism of Americans.
One Nation, Under God
Once the idea had been firmly cemented that dissolving political bonds was an abominable act of treason, it remained to the Fathers to write the nation’s laws. One set, the Anti-federalists, were justly suspicious of the concentration of power of a new federal government, and insisted that the new Constitution list the human rights that the new apparatus would be obliged to defend. Their opposition, the Federalists, were power hungry statists by and large, but had one valuable insight; if rights were to be so enumerated, the government’s officers, and eventually the publick, would soon come to believe the list was exhaustive, and scorn those rights which were not enumerated. Why, they might even begin to think that human rights did not come from the Creator, but from the government’s officers’ whims.
The hysteria of this form of thinking would take a while to be revealed. In light of history, we now see that God almighty’s decrees cannot be so easily obscured. Today’s government, committed to the principle of cultivated fields, recognizes the divine right of sugar farmers to protection. For, as the fat goes, so goes the nation.
And Justice for All
Today’s Americans, this mouse is happy to discover, are even more profoundly conservative than our forebears. We would never secede for a mere twenty-seven causes, since Perpetuity is Perpetuity. And, the last people to secede were wicked, which just goes to show how wicked treason is. (With like reasoning, we have justly concluded that bad people using guns means guns are bad.)
Even better, we are more conservative than God. We divorce our spouses for light and transient causes, yet have the decency to chastely realize that Indivisible means Indivisible, when it comes to political bonds.2
No; double mindedness in Americans is one of our endearing qualities, not a trait to be despised.
Given Bellamy’s socialism, which was popular and remains so, especially among political conservatives who champion his pledge of allegiance, it is perhaps unsurprising that his theology was defiantly opposed to the word of God, which reveals only a single entity in the universe to be indivisible: the Godhead. In fact, violent division of political unions, nations, relationships, and even live human bodies was a regular feature of God’s acts of judgment in history. Under certain dire circumstances, God even permits divisibility of marriage covenants!
It is a little known fact that the Platonic Indivisibility of nations only applies in circumstances where those nations love liberty. In other words, if you love liberty enough, you do not have the liberty to form your own government; whereas, if you don’t love it enough, well, you’re free to form your own government. With this knowledge, US have helped many people achieve the liberty to start new governments. Which, ostensibly, cannot be re-formed after we Americans are done with them. Because now they love liberty.