Americans are not free. I recall being required during the first few days of Army Basic Training to learn that Lee Greenwood song: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” It’s not truth, but a doctrinal assertion, a test of orthodoxy. As with most orthodoxies, were it not enforced, it would collapse. It cannot stand on its own.
There is no proper test of ultimate truths in the objective sense. Facts are always subject to interpretation. The forces of propaganda seek to play off the extremes of individual freedom versus common ignorance, of expertise versus common corruption, but no one wants to get down to the final issue: There is a God in Heaven, and neither you nor I are Him. Nor is anyone in government or other positions of authority. The secular morality is by no means moral. There is on foundation for any evaluation system except God Almighty. We have argued for eons already what that system is, and that will not end until the final End of All Things.
What’s left is each of us, not as gods, but as humble before God, deciding best for ourselves what He requires of us. That there will be conflicts in how that plays out is the inevitable result of the Fall. In other words, it’s all our fault. God didn’t make it that way. So we have to deal with it, and there is no absolute standard in the sense which we in the West tend to seek — which we insist simply must be. Each of us will stand before Him accountable, and no one can pretend to know what He will require of another. All my previous and future pronouncements in such a vein are really nothing more than my own seeking to obey what I feel certain He demands of me. I can’t pretend you are bound by me assertions. I know only they bind me, and I am also bound to declare them. What you do with them is your problem; it’s between you and God.
At some point, someone may well be certain they are serving God when they seek to confine my actions, to hinder or prevent me doing what I know beyond all doubt I must do for Him. It’s not a question of who is right. But one thing is sure: By the strength of my conviction regarding this theoretical object of dispute, I may well be willing to resist violently, even unto deadly force.
This is not nihilism. The very concept itself is a Western construct, a lie which rejects the revelation of God. There is a divine revelation which surely holds a meaning within a context, and we are obliged to blindly feel our way in seeking to explore and understand that context, now long lost on the earth. As before, it will hardly bring a uniform result. However, He has declared such an effort is what He demands of us, and as such, He promised to make it work out to His own satisfaction. What He demands, He supports.
Drawing from the field of understanding, my own evaluation is this: America is not free! The state to which we refer — “freedom” — is not an absolute, but by God’s own revealed standard, I defy anyone to show He would say we are “free” in any sense of the word. The Greenwood song us just noise, designed to make you feel good, but mostly to shut you up when some Child of Satan stomps on you in the name of any human authority.
