What made the American experience unique in all of world history was the phenomenon of bottom-up governance. From Nimrod to King George, all prior forms of human civilization were imposed upon humanity from the top down by those with the power to make their own will the law. This was universally true in the realms of both church and state wherever settlements grew beyond the ability of their member families to collectively govern themselves – and even in small communities, the tendency of strong-willed men of means to impose an order of their own choosing was likely. That is the reality of all human society because of the reality of unredeemed human nature.
But Jesus
When Jesus Christ – God Himself – briefly joined the human race, He taught us how we could maximize the blessings, freedoms and potentialities of His created order by receiving into the temples of our bodies His Holy Spirit and then operating as sovereign governors of ourselves, in cooperation with every other justified “Christian.” That model was best reflected by the Apostles in the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, which operated as a board of equals in the physical absence of the Master, using Holy Spirit intuition and the written biblical law as their guide.
That was the first example of self-governance under law since the Israelite Republic led by Joshua and the Judges. It was the first ever in which the Holy Spirit dwelt personally in each individual Christian, ending human dependency on priests and rituals, while affirming the terms of the Holy Scripture which Jesus (through the Apostles) then updated and upgraded during the Apostolic Age to suit the needs of the Last Days. Importantly, Jesus affirmed the covenant even as He clarified its meaning to a more matured humanity capable of higher behavioral standards than Moses had set for them (e.g. no more polygamy, concubinage and unjustified divorce).
But willful man
The Apostolic Age ended with the death of John and the close of the Canon of Scripture with his written recording of the Revelations of Jesus Christ (an updated and expanded version of the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24-25, Mark 13 and Luke 21). After that, the Jerusalem model of Christianity gave way to the Roman model, in which the doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers” was rejected in favor of top-down governance by an ecclesiastical order of priests under a dictatorial pope deemed to be God’s representative on earth. The transition happened slowly but inexorably, starting with an assertion of authority over church matters by Clement of Rome and eventually incorporating the “divine right” to murder dissenters to its increasingly un-biblical doctrines, which it enforced vigorously for centuries.
Yet even under this man-made institutional yoke, the Scripture itself was preserved and the lives of true Christians continued to be governed internally by the Holy Spirit. A great many Roman Catholic Christians lived (and still live) exemplary lives, and Christianity continued to reshape the world and raise the standards of human ethics and morality everywhere it spread. God’s will for individuals was not thwarted. Just as He had allowed the Israelites to reject His Tabernacle in favor of a Temple and His Republic in favor of a Monarchy, He allowed the Christian church to institutionalize itself in this Roman form and He worked around its deficiencies to achieve His goals for mankind.
For a season
In due time, abuses of power by both the church and the Christian kingdoms of Europe – most especially Spain – triggered the rise of a populist “protestant” movement of both Christians and Jews. In particular, the Spanish Inquisition’s torture-backed forced mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism convinced them they faced extinction as a religion if the trajectory of Christendom did not change. Similarly persecuted were Christian Millennialists, who shared with Jews the “heresy” of belief in a future thousand-year earthly kingdom under the Messiah. Out of that common experience and doctrine grew an on-and-off partnership known modernly as the Hebraic movement in Christendom, which to an unmeasured degree inspired and facilitated the Protestant Revolution.
Its effects also included the eventual overthrow of Catholic Spanish dominance of Christendom (and the Western world) by an ascendant Protestant British Empire, whose sense of destiny was heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian theory/ideology/doctrine of British Israelism (BI). While BI “doctrine” was largely debunked and discarded after WWI, it had helped shape and steer British self-identity and policy for the preceding five centuries. BI’s most prominent legacy was the British restoration of the House of Judah to the Holy Land in 1917, supplanting the Ottoman Turks whom the Brits expelled by military force. (To be clear, in regards to geo-politics it doesn’t matter how much of BI theory was true, only that it was believed to be true by British leaders.)
God’s Providence
The most powerful impact Protestantism had on the world, however, was the restoration of the “priesthood of all believers” that took practical form in Scottish Presbyterianism under Pioneer Reformer John Knox. That spawned the Scottish Covenantors’ movement which swept the British Isles with its example of self-rule by sovereign Christians directly empowered by God to set law by mutual consent. Out of this grew “constitutionalism” as the term was understood by America’s Founding Fathers – making possible the United States of America: The world’s first government in which limited power was delegated to elected representatives by the people ourselves. Because of that theological/ideological foundation, America matured to become the all-time pinnacle of civilization in the middle of the 20th century – the envy and immigration magnet of the world.
And yet Satanic statist enslaving Marxism still grew as a parasitic infestation amongst us – until now, in the early 21st century, it has nearly killed the host. History repeats. The MAGA movement is America’s populist uprising against egregious power-grabbing and power-abusing by tyrannical elites who hate the Bible and the Messiah, whom both Christians and Jews prophetically await.
It may not be possible, even under a Trump presidency, to restore all that has been stolen from us. But if the prophecy of a soon-coming Millennial Kingdom under direct rule by Christ from Jerusalem is true, we of the God-fearing remnant can still recreate the harmony amongst ourselves that reflects all of the best we once were – and perhaps even attain bit of the better harmony we’re promised in the age to come. We can do that amongst ourselves even if hell is about to be unleashed in all its fury because the Devil knows his time is short.
If, however, we have a few years’ reprieve under Trump, the MAGA movement can speed and maximize the restoration of our greatness by getting us back to first principles in citizen self-rule and constitutionalism – so long as we remember John Adams’ warning that those blessings are the gift of God for those who submit only to Him: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Our history proves his case.
