by Judge Mark T. Boonstra
Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D.
Like Volume I, this volume will not endeavor to catalogue those dangers or the myriad ways in which our country has strayed from the course set by our Founders. Tomes surely strayed from the course set by our Founders. Tomes surely could be written There’s the ever-expanding federal government ; the explosion of bureaucratic power and authority; the increasing governmental regulation of more and more facets of our lives; the concentration of authority in the executive branch; the deep state; rising totalianitarianism and “Orwellianism”; a judicial branch that often no longer adheres to the Constitution as written and intended by our Founders; American impotence in the face of internal and external threats to our security all facilitated by a media that has lost its way and ‘big tech” censorship and information manipulation. And that is just the beginning.
Rather this volume, like Volume 1, will focus on something more fundamental, the decaying moral fabric of our nation, which underlies all else. And fundamental to the decaying moral fabric of our nation is the fact that it has strayed from certain of our Founding Fathers’ core principles and beliefs, tenets that laid the foundation for the very thinking that gave rise to the birth of our nation and the freedoms that it guaranteed to us. It is our nation’s straying from those core precepts that at tits essence threatens our continued freedoms.
What were the core precepts of our Founding Fathers that modern-day society has lost? In a word….God. A fundamental and overriding belief in a Supreme Being, Who created and guides the universe, and from whom all of our natural rights flow. A conviction that we derive our rights and liberties not our freedoms transient government because they come from a Source higher than any government. One needn’t look far for confirmation of the fundamental nature of our Founders’ religious beliefs. The text of our founding documents (and those of our states). The inscriptions on our monuments and historic buildings. Our national Motto (“In God we trust”) and its placement upon our coins. Our Pledge of Allegiance (“One Nation, Under God”). Our long tradition of opening legislative and judicial sessions with long tradition of opening legislative and judicial sessions with prayer or acknowledgements of God. Supreme Court decisions acknowledging that America is “A Christian nation” and “We are a Christian people”. While some of those developments came at later points in the history of our country, they were made in confirmation not contradiction, of the core principles of the Founding Fathers that laid the very groundwork for our country. But we needn’t rely on those expressions, as convincing as they are, of the religious under pinning’s of our nation. For the simply confirm what the Founders themselves told us. And that is where this book will focus the reader, on the very words of the Founders (as well as the words of those who knew them), because they provide a first-hand account of the religious convictions of the Founders and the importance of those convictions in establishing the framework of our nation.
A , dispassionate reader, anyone with an open mind, will no doubt agree that the words of the Founding Fathers themselves demonstrate that they were men of faith, men of God and that it was their religious principles that formed the foundation on which our great nation, and the freedoms of Founders sought to secure, were erected. So, this book will endeavor to provide a sense of the religious component of the Founders’ loves and how it impacted their thinking and their role in the foundation of America. Where possible, it will set forth the actual words of t the Founding Fathers that reflect their views regarding religion, and where their actual worlds may not be available, it will supplement with the words of others who were in a position to describe their views. So who is to blame for the mess we’re now in? Certainly, no single source. After all, God has been battling Satan at least since the days of Adam and Eve. And Satan no doubt today employs minions far outnumbering the single serpent of the Garden of Eden.
It is the hope of this book that the American people will rise above partisan politics to demand of all political parties, governmental and societal institutions of all sorts, and of themselves, a return to the foundational principles of our Founding Fathers, including, most especially a humble recognition of the Supremacy of an Almighty God from whom our rights as human beings, and as citizens of the United States of America flow. Only by doing so can we restore the moral fabric of our nation, return government to the limited role our Founders intended, and secure for our children and grandchildren the liberties for which America was built.