By Rick Manning
There is a battle for the soul of America.
The first shots of a long simmering revolt were fired when Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama pledged to “fundamentally transform” America five days prior to his winning the presidency in 2008.
Twelve years later, in President-elect Joe Biden’s victory speech on November 8, 2020, Obama’s oath was spun into the battle-cry to “restore the soul of America.”
Last year, this refrain was more ominously stated as President Biden spoke in front of a red-lit backdrop of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and gave his infamous “Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech.
And Biden continued the assault in his 2023 State of the Union speech before Congress where he began by defining supporters of President Trump as ‘domestic enemies’ which must be fought against as robustly as foreign ones.
But it was breathtakingly audacious for President Biden to usurp the symbolic meaning of the building where liberty was conceived in America.
The choice to give this speech at the same location where 56 colonists met declared a new nation, conceived in liberty, that individuals had God-given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness felt like Lady Liberty had been slapped in the face.
Those who created a nation governed by the consent of the governed, rather than a people provided indulgences and favors from an all-powerful king must have shuddered in their graves.
For generations, Independence Hall has stood as a monument to the clarion call for freedom issued by the 56 brave men who “For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
And in doing so, birthed a new nation that has stood as a beacon of freedom for oppressed people around the world.
When Christians think of the word soul, we think of the eternal essence of each person that can only be saved through the blood of Jesus Christ.
And when politicians talk about the soul of the country, they are referring to the DNA that makes us America. That DNA was declared at Independence Hall in a hot summer of 1776, and it is now under attack.
The battle for the soul of America is real. The war has been engaged for decades by the left, but in spite of warnings, has only recently been joined by those who would defend America’s history of ever expanding individual liberty and the freeing of more people from tyranny than any nation in the history of the world.
To those who wish fundamental transformation, many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including its primary author, Thomas Jefferson, are irredeemably tarnished as evil slaveholders. As such, the nation they brought forward is not only unexceptional, but it is irrevocably evil with the original sin of slavery extinguishing the idea of America as a shining city on a hill as false and illegitimate.
In his famous 1989 Shining City on a Hill – Farewell to the Nation, President Ronald Reagan warned about the educational system moving away from teaching “an unambivalent appreciation of America.” And worried that while “our spirit is back,… we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important – why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant.”
And today, Ronald Reagan’s worse nightmare has come true. Many in our nation have either forgotten or never learned the basic precepts and the actions that flowed for more than 400 years from the soul of America.
We are in a battle for not only what America is and hopes to become, but also over what America was, with every sacrifice for the freedom of others negated by those who only see the struggle but never the expanded liberty that came out of it.
Americans who stood for traditional values became defensive and more and more unwilling to stand for common sense virtues and the Judeo-Christian ethos of all being equal under the law that underpins western civilization. Cowed and shouted down by an academia intent on the destruction of those values and a complicit media and entertainment industry, people across the land longed for someone who would fearlessly defend our great nation without fear or apology.
John Wayne was dead, replaced by angst-ridden movies like the Deerhunter and Apocalypse Now, and the people were worried about our national future.
It was shocking to discover not only that what were once commonly shared values were not only under attack, but our political class seemed either unable or unwilling to defend them.
Until Donald Trump, the most unlikely warrior for American culture, entered the political arena.
Donald Trump is a man born to the wealthy class. He is a man who spent much of his life being saluted by the entertainment and political elites in venues as far flung as partying at Studio 54 to receiving the Ellis Island Medal of Honor along with Mohammed Ali, Rosa Parks and others. Donald Trump is the developer who saved the Central Park Ice Rink free of charge after its restoration was mired in the bureaucracy of the City of New York.
Donald Trump has lived the advantages of the wealthy, yet it is through those experiences that he has become a champion of those whose jobs were shipped overseas and whose communities have been ravaged by drugs.
Donald Trump has become the champion of the American Dream, an unlikely hero fighting to maintain the promise of America that all can achieve based upon their ability, hard-work and ingenuity.
There is a battle. It is not lost. It is a battle for religious liberty as Christians find those who preach tolerance don’t practice it when confronted by Biblical truths. It is a battle for a way of life where the people expect to be left alone, and not have their family’s values assaulted in public schools.
It is a battle that cannot be lost as it would mean the end of this great uniquely American experiment in declaring that individual rights and basic liberties are inviolable as they are not privileges handed down by government, but indeed endowed by our Creator.
As we are now three months from election day 2024, the question is simple? Will you stand up for the American dream by dedicating yourself to identifying friends, neighbors and relatives who share your vision, but don’t realize what is at stake and encouraging them to vote for America.
If you are not willing to stand up for America, then who will?
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
