Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, what are the 12 things that America has given the world, gifts to the world, that were never seen in their fullness in the broad sweep of history anywhere at any other time? Huh? It's not always easy to calculate the profound impact which the American experiment has had upon the world and her history and her future, for that matter.

Even if the United States of America were to disappear from the face of the earth today, our impact upon the world would continue ad infinitum throughout the course of human history to the end of the world. Well, yes, the abundant gifts given to the human race would continue to enrich humanity and improve her lot for the future. And as we approach our 250th year of independence, liberated from the tyranny of George III and the English Parliament, it is important to inject a bit of perspective on seen, given the vile, bitter recrimination being poured out upon our history, our traditions, and our way of life by our enemies.

And these vicious jackals include people like the progressives of the left. One example, a Mr. Sabri Abdussalam, who is a writer for the left-wing publication MinnPost, right? Sabri Abdussalam. He wrote a piece entitled, Why We Shouldn't Celebrate the Founding Fathers on America's 250th Anniversary. That was the title of his piece, Why We Shouldn't Celebrate the Founding Fathers on America's 250th Anniversary.

He accuses the Founding Fathers of, and I quote, Weaponizing Prejudice at the Time Against African Americans and Native Peoples to Unite the Colonists. He goes on to say, What does it mean if the document we treat today, that is the Declaration of Independence, as a representation of our commitment to freedom, also planted white supremacy into the country's roots intentionally? Is America's founding even worth celebrating, he asks. Of all the nerve, is the founding even worth celebrating? Well, then there are other enemies as well.

Immigrants who are avowed enemies of the United States and seek not to assimilate, and this includes the Somali community and ghettos like Minneapolis, Minnesota, and militant Islamicists who aspire to bring Sharia law to our communities, displacing our founding documents. Other enemies, they're tyrants of every stripe worldwide to whom America poses a threat, right? Why brandishing our Declaration of Independence and Constitution in the faces of people like Xi Jinping or the leaders of the European Union or the mullahs of Iran? Well, it's like brandishing the cross in the face of vampires, isn't it?

They recoil in horror and flee to the darkness ever hoping to destroy such emblems of liberty that threaten their very tyrannical existence. Well, all of these forces and more have fooled gullible Americans into hating their country and their history and rejecting these gifts that America has given the world of freedom and liberty. Perhaps we should remind all of our people at this time of the good gifts that history will look back upon with gratitude long after her vicious enemies have gone the way of tyrants, that is, to the grave. Last week, we articulated the first three of those gifts.

They were a Republican constitution founded on an idea rather than a tribe or race, smaller Republican constitution. In other words, we're a republic, not a democracy. The second gift the U.S. has given the world is a written constitution composed in a brief period of time rather than oral traditions developed over centuries. And the third gift that America has given the world in perpetuity is a system whereby power is transferred in an orderly, peaceable fashion. Today, we'll take up three more of those good gifts that America has given to the world.

Number four, the fourth gift that America has given to the world is our founding fathers succinctly and explicitly acknowledged our rights derived from God, not government. Yes, our rights derived from God and not government. Our founders did this for us. The phrase, all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Well, that sent and continues to send shockwaves through the course of tyrants everywhere.

From the days of Cain, the presumptive operating principle is that to rule was to occupy the place of God. Isaiah captures well the aspiration of the king of Babylon when Isaiah says, You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven. Above the stars of God, I will set my throne on high. I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.

I will make myself like the most high. Isaiah chapter 28. Bingo. This is the ultimate goal of Satan himself. This text is the perfect analogy of Satan, but it is also the hubris of every temporal ruler who gets a taste of power.

It's no mere happenstance that the ancient pagan kings were divinized, comporting themselves as gods with mandates to rule the people by fiat. The pharaohs of Egypt were thought to be incarnations of Horus and Ra, the Egyptian gods, Horus and Ra. And the kings of Mesopotamia, like Naram-Sin of Akkad, claimed to be divine. And the kings of early Mesoamerica too, like the Aztecs or the Maya, all claimed a right to rule because of their divine lineage. Even if a particular civilization did not see their king as a god per se, they perceived him to be in rule over them via the divine right of kings.

We've talked about this briefly in the past, the idea of the divine right of kings. This ancient principle held great inertia throughout the ages, right to the dawn of the American experiment. The French philosopher Bossuet is often credited with best articulating the divine right of kings, particularly through his work, Politics Derived from Sacred Scripture, where he emphasized that a king's authority is derived from God and is absolute. Other notable proponents include James I of England, the Stuart kings, Charles I and II, and of course, Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, right?

Well, this theory, the divine right of kings, presupposed that the king and his government could grant or revoke rights and privileges to the people at will. The right to speak one's mind freely depended upon the inclination of the king and his government to tolerate such speech, as long as it didn't threaten the power of the regime, or the right to possess arms could be granted or revoked at will, depending upon the need for the monarchy to have at its disposal a militia to defend the kingdom. If the people became overly exercised at the tyranny of the king, weapons could be banned or seized at will.

The same could be said for all other rights that we Americans take for granted, trial by jury, the right to privacy, or the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishments. Oh, everything we may construe as being a basic human right could be granted, altered, or abolished at the discretion of the government under the divine right of kings. Can you see how radical our founding fathers were in their breathtaking rewriting of the presuppositions of government by acknowledging for the first time explicitly in writing in a charter of government that human rights are endowed by their creator God of the Bible?

Well, they overturned by one stroke of the pen millennia of tyranny. And the direct implication of this truth was that if God himself was the bestower of human rights and him alone, then no mere man or government of man could add, subtract, or alter them in any way, shape, or form. Our rights are etched in stone, if you will, for as long as the sun shines in the day and the moon glows at night. In fact, to add injury to insult for every wannabe tyrant in history, the very purpose of government was thereafter declared to be to secure these rights. That is the rights given by God.

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Oh, the founding fathers had relied upon enlightenment thinkers like John Locke or Montesquieu or Frédéric Bastiat to ground this principle that governments are here to secure rights and that they're given by God, not man. And they grounded this principle in biblical texts, these men. Such had been the thoroughness of this project that Jefferson could assert without descending into the weeds of scriptural proof. He would say, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

It's well worth your time and labors to read these men and their pertinent works. That would be Montesquieu, Bastiat, and John Locke. Read their pertinent works to see just how the ideas that we are endowed by our creator with rights and that the very reason governments are instituted is in order to secure those rights. Oh, it's all solidly grounded in scripture. And so, the divine right of kings is transformed into the divine right of the people to govern themselves and exercise their God-given rights in liberty.

Hereafter, every motion to abridge or abolish the rights of the people could and must be challenged and opposed with great vigor, even if it meant taking up arms against the tyranny. We must not squander the gift given us by God, articulated so clearly by the founding fathers that we are endowed, not by government, but by God, with unalienable rights. Progressives and Democrats and rhino Republicans cannot take them from us because of necessity, quote-unquote, right? When it comes to freedom of speech, the left constantly says it is not absolute, right? You can't yell fire in a crowded theater.

That's the old nostrum. Well, okay, but neither can you yell silence in the theater of the absurd when the government says, shut up. The excuses of the left are no match for the absolute liberty of the people to speak. And the same can be said for our right to wield weapons against tyrants who oppress us. The Second Amendment was not added for the sake of hunters or merely for self-defense.

No, the Second Amendment, excuse me, acknowledged the right of citizens to resist tyranny. The War of Independence started when British redcoats moved to seize arms and ammunition at Lexington and Concord. Patriots moved quickly to stop them. And the British knew that if the colonists had access to weapons, they could resist the predations of King George, which, of course, they did. As it was with that tyrant, well, so it is today with the tyranny of the federal dominion of demons.

That is the deep state. Always remember the good gift America has given to the world in explicitly acknowledging that our rights are bestowed by God, not government. All right. Well, the fifth good gift, the fifth good gift that America has given to the world in her existence is the United States of America as a nation which self-consciously ended slavery. Yes, this good gift we must share with Great Britain, however, which began its journey towards ending slavery with the Slave Trade Act in 1807 that banned the transatlantic, transatlantic, excuse me, slave trade in the British Empire.

And the biography of William Wilberforce, for example, shines brightly in his almost single-handed laborers in getting that action passed in his career in Parliament. And over many decades of education and policy changes and naval interdiction across the globe, England began to see the end of slavery in her empire. Especially significant was the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Well, the abolition movement was well underway by this time as well in the United States of America.

We can say that the movement to end slavery did not begin with the Civil War, no, but with the abolition movement that began in our colonial period of American history and stretched from roughly 1783 through 1888. This is why we can say the gift of ending slavery is an American gift to the world, shared with our mother country, Great Britain. The abolition movement began in the churches of America, dear listener. The Quakers were in the forefront of calling for the immediate abolition of slavery, and they were quickly followed by ministers and congregations across a wide spectrum of denominations all across the country.

To think that the first Americans to awaken to the evils of slavery were man buns, skinny jeans, lisping, pencil-neck Gen Zers, and millennials as a monument to the ignorance inculcated in our public school system. Millions of men and women, white and black, sacrificed themselves in blood, sweat, and tears to bring an end to the race-based slavery system that had flourished for centuries. Do not let the self-righteous, virtue-signaling progressives wield the sledgehammer of guilt against your conscience every time a new fault, foible, and piccadillo is detected on the surface of our collective body politic.

It is time to refresh the American memory on the sacrifices of Americans to end slavery in our history. Oh, just a sample of men like the journalist William Garrison, who was the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He worked for decades under countless death threats to end slavery, and he changed many hearts and minds. Or Julia Ward Howell, who was the composer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. She also worked tirelessly to end slavery with her speeches, her literary efforts, and her meetings in towns across America.

Others, like the black former slave Frederick Douglass and the free black David Walker, they demonstrated that well-educated, articulate blacks could fight on their own behalf. And for their brothers and sisters in bonds. So, there is no excuse for contemporary Americans to be ignorant of the difficult history of our struggle to end slavery. Many other stories could be told. It wasn't easy, it wasn't pretty, and it wasn't as complete as it could have been, but it got done as it had never been done in the history of the world.

What must be kept in mind by the hysterical hypnotized tribes of crusader rabbits out there in the streets, fighting ICE officers, decrying the racist society of America, and seeking systematic change, is that, remember, slavery was not unique to America. From the earliest mists of time, before recorded history, slavery has been practiced by almost every civilization that made an appearance on the stage of history. Without slavery, the pyramids would not have been built in Egypt, the Parthenon in Greece would be a worn-out shack, and the Colosseum in Rome would be little more than a man cave for Caesar.

Slavery was integral to every society on the earth. Catherine Austin Fitz was a very savvy economist and currency expert. Catherine Austin Fitz says it succinctly, slavery is, always has been, and always will be the most profitable venture in human history. Oh, Catherine Austin Fitz had it. Nailed.

The history of slavery is long and complex, dear listener. I urge you to consult our website, americastruths.org, where we have a catalog of all of our radio spots, and I just encourage you to check out this two-part series, The New American Slave, America's Unconscious Slide into Slavery, Parts 1 and 2, and that was broadcast on June 12 and June 26 of 2022. June 12 and June 26 of 2022. Well, the main point is that, unlike every other society in history who doubled down on slavery and increasingly relied on it, America ran counter to the stream and ended it.

The Civil War, of course, being Exhibit A, of the sacrifice made in blood and treasure. Many people point out that the war between the states was primarily over whether the South would secede from the Union or be forced to remain in it, and that is true. But what is also very true is that slavery was integral to the economy of the South and the moral inertia in the North towards ending it was very strong. It cannot be disentangled from the purposes of the conflict. America's gift to the world is her ending race slavery as an institution.

Now, this fact cannot be denied, even if it did not end racism, per se, or Jim Crow systems in the South, or the bitterness, suspicion, and tribal animosities that still haunt us today. History is messy, imperfect, and painful, but in this case, something was done never seen in history. A country put an end to slavery as an economic institution. Thank God for America. Well, the sixth gift that America has given to the world that will live on in perpetuity is that while Christianity was and is intended to be the religion of the people, there was no established state church.

Yes, no established state church. One of the most destructive institutions of Europe over a millennia of our history were the corruptions of the state church. For example, the Peace of Westphalia, which was concluded in 1648, was determined after the Thirty Years' War, a terrible war, that whatever territory came under the dominion of a particular prince, his religion would be the religion of the people. And so France under Louis XIV would be Roman Catholic, the religion of Louis. England under James I would be Protestant, the faith of James, and Charles V of Spain would dictate Spain's loyalties.

Well, on and on it would go. Our founders reflected on the rivers of blood and the perpetual catalog of souls sent into the afterlife by this war, among others, and they determined that the chief problem was the insistence that every Christian worship not according to his own conscience, but rather according to the dictates of the conscience of one man or group of men in a country. That conscience then bound those of the people, regardless of their convictions or beliefs. It had become the pretext for countless wars and conflicts for centuries. Well, the colonists had experienced this from the beginning of the American experiment too.

They had immigrated to the New World from England, most of them precisely because the Church of England had imposed an absolute regulation of worship and practice uniformly on all the people. The state church was the Church of England, the Anglican Church, to which all must subscribe. This was especially acute under the zealous rule of Bishop Laud under Charles I and later under the Acts of Uniformity of 1662. Ministers and followers of anything other than the Church of England were persecuted and jailed, physically abused. The idea of an established church had these important features.

Number one, it had government financial support of the state church. Your taxes went to support the state church. Additionally, government control over the creeds, the order of worship, its polity and clerical appointments. There were also restrictions. Number three, mandatory attendance at worship services in the state church and prohibitions on church services by others.

Number four, there was micromanagement of daily life, use of the state church to record births and marriages and deaths and to perform all marriages and funerals, too. And then number five, membership in state church determined who could vote. There were religious tests. Public office and voting rights were confined to members of the state church.

Dear listener, imagine yourself in such a situation believing as you do, having to face a federal government that strictly mandated that you believe in worship as a Catholic when you're not a Catholic or a Lutheran when you're not a Lutheran or a Baptist when you're not a Baptist or even a Presbyterian when you're not a Presbyterian. Although I can't imagine why you would not want to worship as a Presbyterian. Actually, I can. Anyway, this was a situation all across Europe when the American colonists came to America. And for most of them, all they did was reproduce what they came from in Europe.

Yeah, there were state churches in the colonies in the states. For example, Massachusetts had an established state church, a Protestant congregational church, until 1833. And famously, Virginia did not disestablish its state church, the Anglican Church, until 1786 with the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. And Thomas Jefferson was a champion of this measure, supremely conscious of the dangers of an established state church. Thus, he wrote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.

It seems to be in the human bloodstream for humans to dictate what others believe, doesn't it? I hope you see the genius of the American system that actually showed restraint when it could have exercised power. Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion. Do you see the significance of that word establishment? It meant no established state church in the United States of America.

But does that mean that we're not to be Christian? Au contraire, dear listener. All historians have acknowledged that America is a Christian nation. The important distinction is that we are not one sect or denomination of Christianity. As we have pointed out on countless occasions, the Christian faith was seen to be the religion of America.

And the Christian faith was relied upon to shape the moral and ethical life of the nation. Listen to what the Supreme Court said in 1892, in the case, Church of the Holy Trinity versus the United States. This is the Supreme Court. And they said, our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise.

And in this sense, and to this extent, our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. Unquote. That was the Supreme Court of 1892. You wouldn't see that being said by the Supreme Court nowadays, would you? So, dear listeners, as we celebrate our 250th anniversary, declaring ourselves independent from Great Britain, let us not forget the good gifts to history that the United States of America has given.

They cannot be denied. The world is and will forever be better for us having been here. May we be here another 250 years and beyond. Teach these good gifts to your children. Mention them at your church and see to it that those who are attempting to erase the good that the United States of America has done.

They will not prevail. Let's see to it that they do not prevail. And may God continue to bless the United States of America. May the 12 gifts that I mention in this series of broadcasts, may those 12 gifts be only the beginning. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

We meet for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. I encourage you to stop by and see us sometime this summer. Give us a visit. You'll find a warm welcome. And we love and respect the good gifts that America has bestowed upon all of history and pray that there will be many, many more.

New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church meets for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street. Call us at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.