Reflections on America's Semiquincentennial

by Justin Soutar

This year we celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States of America, one of the greatest nations in the history of the world and certainly one of the greatest in modern times. Our imposing geographical size and relatively isolated position, our fertile soil and abundant mineral resources, our natural beauty and temperate climate, our vast and diverse population, our productive industry and commerce, our high employment rate and comfortable standard of living, our thriving financial sector, our large and well-trained armed forces, and our prominent influence in world affairs all contribute to our country’s greatness. However, the core of that greatness lies in 1) our appeal to universal and timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and 2) our traditional character as a religious and moral people.

The concept of natural law formed the philosophical foundation for the American colonists’ rebellion against British tyranny and their eventual momentous decision, after many years of lively discussion and intense debate, to politically separate the thirteen colonies from England. This is clear from the ringing opening text of the Declaration of Independence, which was primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson and finalized by the Second Continental Congress:

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. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As men of faith and reason, our nation’s Founders unanimously recognized that “unalienable” human rights are gifts from God, and that the purpose of representative government is to protect these rights. In other words, they realized that human beings are given certain rights by God because of their very nature as persons created in his image, and that any government that refuses to respect these rights is not legitimate. It’s obvious that the Founders were not simply stating their subjective personal beliefs or opinions about the colonists’ problem and how it should be resolved. Justifying their course of action based on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” anchored the Declaration firmly in the objective truth of natural law. Benjamin Franklin implicitly acknowledged this natural law basis for human rights when he wisely stated: “A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

This is an important lesson for us today in the difficult battle against radical secularism, a virulent philosophy that directly attacks our traditional identity as a Judeo-Christian nation and the natural law principles of her foundation. In recent years, to cite just two of many examples, innocent healthcare providers and wedding-cake bakers have been dragged into court and threatened with huge fines for refusing to dispense abortifacient drugs or contraceptives or to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding.” The well-intentioned lawyers representing these good people usually base their defense on their client’s right to act according to his or her personal religious and moral beliefs and conscience, a right indeed protected by the Constitution. While this approach has been fairly successful, its major flaw is its failure to take advantage of the objective truth of natural law, leaving the arguments stuck on the subjective plane of “conscience rights”.

Abortifacient drugs unjustly kill innocent unborn children, violating their unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is a fact and not just someone’s sincerely held belief. No woman has a “right” to kill her unborn child. Contraceptives interfere with the essential love- and life-giving aspects of marriage as designed by the Creator. And natural law defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman; the immoral practice of sodomy is not “marriage”, and no two men or women have a “right” to call it that. Defense attorneys should be arguing their pro-life and pro-marriage cases from the natural law perspective that abortion, contraception for married couples, and sodomy are objectively evil (and thus harmful to society) by their very nature, not just because their clients happen to believe that they are evil and harmful, and that no one should be forced to participate in or to support such immoral activities. In order to effectively defeat the ideology of radical secularism, we should abandon the subjective territory of “conscience rights” and reclaim the unassailable moral high ground—-the objective truth of natural law.

Intimately related to the natural law basis for human rights at the core of America’s greatness is our longstanding identity as a religious and moral people in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is evident at every turn, from the words and examples of the Founders, to the speeches and writings of our elected representatives and judges down through the decades, to the tens of thousands of churches dotting our landscape, to the prominent Catholic role in the development of our education and healthcare systems, to Congressional sessions opening with prayer, to the display of the Ten Commandments in our Supreme Court building, to our national motto, “In God We Trust.”

George Washington declared: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” John Adams remarked: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” James Madison said: “We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity… to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” Having toured the young United States, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville concluded: “America is great because America is good; and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

In his Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863, Abraham Lincoln asserted that God’s blessings “should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.” In his famous D-Day Prayer broadcast on national radio in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt said: “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.” Ronald Reagan observed in the 1980s: “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” In 2024, Donald Trump attributed his survival of an assassination attempt to “the grace of Almighty God.” The fourth stanza of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” includes the words: “Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation… And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’” And in the Pledge of Allegiance, we declare that we are “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Our traditional character as a Christian nation, combined with our traditional natural law basis for human rights and liberties, has allowed us to achieve many remarkable things in the past 250 years in the areas of agriculture, architecture, art, aviation, communication, culture, economics, education, energy, entertainment, finance, foreign aid, geology, health care, immigration, law, literature, medicine, meteorology, music, political philosophy, science and technology, trade, transportation, space exploration, sports, world peace, and many other fields. We should celebrate and give thanks to God for all of these accomplishments.

This is not to say that our nation, comprised of flawed human beings, has perfectly lived up to her own ideals. True American patriots wholeheartedly celebrate all that was and is good in our nation while candidly admitting her past and present failures in certain areas and realistically acknowledging her current state of deep division and crisis. We unwisely tolerated the development of a partisan political system, which is now dominated by two major parties that are diametrically opposed on nearly every issue. We unjustly forced most Native Americans onto reservations, tolerated slavery and racial segregation for decades, and bombed innocent civilians in Japan in 1945. We’ve experienced a general religious and moral decline in recent decades with the spread of alcoholism and drugs, pornography, divorce, out of wedlock pregnancies, tens of millions of abortions, sexual abuse, sodomy, transgenderism, and mass shootings, as well as petty theft, vandalism, and littering. Civics education and prayer have all but vanished from our public schools.

Misguided DEI policies have barred hundreds of thousands of qualified people from good jobs. Inflation continues to depreciate the value of our money. Our $38 trillion dollar national debt is far beyond unsustainable yet continues to rise daily. Political corruption and media bias and censorship continue to threaten the common good and obscure the truth. Power struggles and gridlock have replaced bipartisanship and collaboration in Washington as Republicans and Democrats are now bitter enemies, with Democrats attempting to destroy President Donald Trump and to manipulate election laws to their own advantage. Israeli radical Zionists are systematically eliminating Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land, and we’re doing little if anything to stop it. And Communist China has stolen our computer software intellectual property; purchased large tracts of American farmland near our military bases; planted thousands of spies in our city halls and universities; and is actively working to replace us as the world’s leading superpower.

Worst of all, the rise of toxic radical secularist (aka “woke’) ideology, openly embraced by corrupt Democratic Party elites, has taught a large percentage of ignorant Americans to hate their country; to reject our traditional Christian identity and natural law foundation; to assert various new “rights” that exist only in their deluded minds; to discriminate against innocent white men; to disrespect our immigration authorities and police officers; to tear down statues of our national heroes; to stage violent protests; and to assassinate their political enemies. This dangerous ideology has profoundly divided our nation, seriously threatening its integrity and survival.

However, there are many signs of hope that our nation will survive the present grave crisis and enjoy a brighter future. Young Americans flocked to churches after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and purchases of new Bibles are on the rise. Millions of Americans are taking the free online civics courses offered by Hillsdale College, and Imprimis now has a monthly circulation of nearly eight million copies. Many employers are making color-blind and merit-based hiring decisions. More than 25 percent of American voters are now politically independent. The number of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics continues to dwindle. And the second Trump administration and congressional Republicans have already done much to repair and strengthen our country in many of the above-mentioned fields of endeavor.

America’s first Catholic president and Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” If we who continue to love this great nation are successful in converting and defeating her radically secularist traitors and in retaining the twin core of that greatness—-our appeal to timeless natural law principles as the basis of human rights and liberties, and our traditional character as a religious and moral people—-then she will not only survive, unite, and heal, but will also achieve even greater and more spectacular things in the next two hundred fifty years.

Long live the United States of America!

Copyright © 2026 Justin D. Soutar.

Quote of the Day

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."

--Benjamin Franklin

America v. China: Defending our Freedom in the Twenty-First Century

by Justin Soutar

As another Independence Day has come and gone, and as a sharply divided America marches inexorably onward to her two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 2026, I find myself reflecting on what has happened to our beloved country due to the coronavirus epidemic of the last several months. Specifically to date, the virus has infected millions of Americans, killing more than 100,000 of these; has spawned a climate of public anxiety, fear, and isolation, in turn leading to increased mental illness and various forms of abuse; has shut down millions of businesses deemed “non-essential”; has sparked unprecedented growth in the medical services and sanitation industries; has provoked authoritarian public safety measures unilaterally imposed by national and state government on individuals, voluntary associations, schools, churches, and businesses; has unrelentingly dominated mainstream media coverage; has precipitated a major economic recession resulting in double-digit unemployment and temporary shortages of essential goods; and has led to the most expensive economic stimulus law ever enacted, generating a massive increase in our already gargantuan national debt.

Taken together, the COVID-19 emergency and the broad scope of the official response from government, health care, business, the media and entertainment industry, schools, and churches has dramatically and profoundly altered the landscape of American society overnight. The individual aspects of this response to our national public health crisis—which itself has been just one small part of a worldwide health emergency—have tended to be interlocking and mutually reinforcing, forming a remarkably effective matrix of national defense against a dangerous invisible enemy. Indeed, the nationwide figures for infection and death from the coronavirus to date fall far short of the apocalyptic predictions from certain medical sources early this year.

Understandably frightened by the threat of a rapidly spreading virus that they were told had no cure, the great majority of American citizens unquestioningly accepted the litany of stringent government restrictions on their public and private lives, from social distancing and bans on gatherings to closure of schools and businesses and stay at home orders, as necessary to protect the common good in this particular situation. They were entirely willing to sacrifice certain liberties to which they were accustomed for the sake of safety and survival, and they generally trusted that government was acting in their best interests.

There is no question that strict national and state laws based on expert recommendations from the CDC and NIH have greatly limited the spread of the virus and reduced its death toll. But did the gravity and risks of the threat actually require such a sweeping, dictatorial response? Should the recommendations of a sprawling and inefficient federal bureaucracy automatically become the law of the land without discussion and consideration by the people and their congressional representatives? Did slowing the spread of the virus and reducing infections and deaths really warrant this massive government intrusion into our daily lives, infringing on our God-given and constitutionally protected rights to freedom of religion and assembly and speech and movement and commerce? Did the American public and church leaders act prudently by quietly accepting and obeying such laws? Did the public health crisis justify the nearly wholesale government shutdown of the economy and the lasting consequences that ensued, or a stimulus package that adds trillions of dollars to a crushing national debt already in excess of $20 trillion? Can select provisions of our Constitution and some semblance of fiscal responsibility be legitimately set aside in a national emergency?

The key question of how far government can rightly go to protect our national security without encroaching on our cherished civil liberties was extensively debated in the early years of the War on Terrorism. Both security and liberty are essential to the common good and to the survival and prosperity of any nation. It is the responsibility and the challenge of duly elected government both to keep us safe and to protect our freedom in such a way that security and freedom are harmoniously balanced. All of the above yes or no questions can be more or less summed up in this one: Are public safety and national security more important than human freedom and individual liberty? Those who would unhesitatingly answer “Yes” place themselves in direct opposition to our nation’s Founders, who unhesitatingly answered “No” to this same question more than two hundred years by daring to rebel against the tyrannical British Crown. As Patrick Henry famously cried out: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!” And Benjamin Franklin calmly remarked in the same vein: "Those who would surrender their cherished liberty, for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty, nor safety." The South Dakota governor's comment that people should have the freedom to get sick and die may have generated a storm of protest, but it was certainly in keeping with the Founders’ perspective. Such ardent champions of human liberty, limited government, and fiscal restraint would not have approved of the federal and state governments’ wholesale interventions against the coronavirus, complete with record-busting deficit spending to try to revive an economy consigned to limbo by their own heavy-handed policies.

Classically educated, devout Christian, and wise men that they generally were, the Framers were aware that ancient Roman law provided for a temporary dictator in times of war and crisis. They certainly foresaw that our nation would also experience various kinds of crises and emergencies in future decades and centuries. Yet they were also painfully aware from history and their own experience as British colonists of the perennial truth that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thus the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that they painstakingly crafted to guide our nation do not include any provisions allowing any part of them to be set aside during a national emergency. The purpose of this deliberate omission is clear: Americans’ God-given and unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are to be respected and protected by government at all times, regardless of the circumstances in which the nation finds herself. Individual liberties may not be sacrificed on the altar of national security. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights have no expiration date.

Unfortunately, faced with the coronavirus epidemic, our government has apparently and unilaterally decided that protecting the public health is more important than preserving the individual liberties of the American people. Yet even a casual look at the draconian state and federal response to the pandemic reveals that the sinister agenda of big-government socialism is at work. Unelected federal bureaucrats, Democratic state governors and elected representatives of both parties have all taken advantage of the virus situation to enlarge the size of government far beyond its proper and reasonable bounds, in the process catering to special interest groups that run the political and media show in Washington and state capitols, running roughshod over the Constitution, and abandoning any pretense of fiscal conservatism. For example, the $2 trillion CARES Act, with its chunks of pork-barrel spending for Big Agriculture and the performing arts, is an outrageous travesty of justice because it adds further weight to our already unsustainable national debt burden. And the same governors who have shuttered thrift stores, libraries and movie theaters and severely restricted public gatherings for worship in their states have kept Planned Parenthood abortion mills running full bore and allowed massive public demonstrations in large cities to proceed unhindered. Such blatant hypocrisy is a staple of corrupt and godless socialist government, and it clearly demonstrates that such politicians cannot be trusted to guarantee public safety, let alone individual liberty.

What is even more shameful than this corrupt and unconstitutional government, however, is that we the people of the United States as a whole have quietly tolerated and passively accepted this new level of government tyranny and fiscal recklessness. Sadly, this is just part of an early twenty-first century trend in which we have been gradually relinquishing many of our God-given and constitutionally protected rights, especially our privacy rights, to big government and big business, the two great enemies of the common person. We’ve allowed the federal government to take over our health care through the Affordable Care Act. We’ve allowed the Supreme Court to redefine marriage and sex contrary to natural law. We’ve allowed cell phones and other electronic devices to track our location and movement and send that information to a government database. We’ve allowed websites and browsers to track our Internet habits and preferences. We’ve allowed Microsoft unrestricted access to our private emails in Outlook. We’ve allowed Apple admittance to our digital storage files. We’ve allowed state government to tax our Internet purchases. We’ve allowed eBay and PayPal to track our buying and selling habits and sell and rent that information to third parties. We’ve allowed software vendors to sign us up for unwanted automatic renewal just so we can purchase their software in the first place. We’ve allowed Congress and our President to spend tens of trillions of dollars we don’t have. And now we’ve allowed our leaders to confine us to our homes, shut down our restaurants and businesses and schools and libraries, ban unnecessary travel, forbid us to gather in a church building or anywhere else, and spend trillions more dollars we don’t have.

Apparently, our cherished human rights and fiscal responsibility are not so cherished anymore, because we are too timid and unwilling to fight for them when they are threatened or to hold our government accountable when it tramples on them. Two centuries ago, America was “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but now it seems to be the land of the chained and the home of the cowed. Like the grumbling Israelites in the desert, we seem to prefer slavery to freedom. If we now truly value safety above liberty, then we certainly deserve to be neither safe nor free.

The great pandemic of 2020 is a moment of reckoning for the American people. Will we timidly continue to allow big government and big business ever-increasing control over all aspects of our daily lives? Or will we courageously stand up and boldly demand that our leaders govern in accordance with the Constitution and fiscal sanity, thus simultaneously ensuring our security, prosperity and freedom? The choice we make will determine not only our future, but the future of the twenty-first century world.

How ironic it is that the coronavirus epidemic originated in Communist China, whose repressive anti-religious government has been trampling on the human rights of its vast people for decades and whose leaders are now positioning the country to replace the United States as the leading world superpower, thus threatening the liberty of billions of people. In a written statement published by ZENIT on April 3, Cardinal Charles Bo, the Archbishop of Yangon, Myanmar and president of the Asian bishops’ conference, publicly and courageously denounced the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government for deliberately allowing the virus to spread throughout the city of Wuhan for three weeks and intimidating, arresting, and imprisoning doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the Chinese public of the threat during that period.

Indeed, it is not only possible, but likely, that the radically secularist CCP regime deliberately orchestrated the release of the virus from their state-controlled lab in Wuhan as a biological weapons experiment on their own people and the rest of humanity. If that is the case, then we have been offered a terrifying glimpse of the brave new world the Chinese Communists are planning to create within the next few decades. If their short-term goals were to sicken millions and kill hundreds of thousands, to spread fear and panic through media propaganda, to close churches and cripple voluntary associations, to restrict freedom of movement and association, to isolate and confine hundreds of millions, to promote government takeover of public and private life, and to damage thriving free-market economies, they could hardly have done a better job in all of those areas. With one tiny virus, the CCP has powerfully influenced the entire world, including its ideological arch-enemy, the United States.

The COVID-19 plague--which is actually among the smaller and less devastating epidemics of ancient and modern history--should sound the alarm to freedom-loving people everywhere that the once sleeping giant of Communist China is now awake, aggressive, and dangerous. Politically, economically, technologically, militarily and in many other ways, China has been gearing up for many years now to take over the world by the middle of this century. Given the glaring distinction between America’s traditional Judeo-Christian values and the atheistic ideology of Communism, this will have profoundly negative consequences for the entire human family, as tyranny will replace freedom around the globe.

If we do not wish this grim future to become a reality, then we must immediately take concrete steps to strengthen our own country and develop a comprehensive long-term foreign policy plan so that we can effectively fight, and win, a lengthy "Cold War" with the Chinese Communists, just as we did with the Russian Communists in the last century. To begin with, we should fiscally discipline ourselves by balancing the federal budget within four years and cutting our 14-figure national debt in half by 2030. This all-out effort will require unity, education, wisdom, determination, courage, and perseverance in order to be successful. The United States versus China will be the signature foreign policy battle of the twenty-first century. If we the people of the United States will recover the Founders’ zeal for liberty, return wholeheartedly to our Judeo-Christian founding principles and to the Constitution based on them, and place our trust in God, then we will not only enjoy the twin blessings of liberty and security in harmonious coexistence for ourselves and our children, but the rest of the world will be a more free and secure place for our brothers and sisters in the human family.

Copyright © 2020 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.