One Nation Under God: A Flag Day Oration

My fellow Americans, I’m delighted that you honored me, and the Declaration Foundation by inviting me to address the 2002 Rally Round the Flag Day in Cincinnati Ohio. I’d like to thank Congressman Steve Chabot for being here and I send you personal greetings from chairman of our foundation, Ambassador Alan Keyes.

What were you doing when the news of Pearl Harbor came? In my parents’ generation that question was asked and re-asked; it was a day that changed everyone’s lives, as President Roosevelt said, “a day of infamy.” We ask a similar question in our day. When did you get the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon? I remember well, I was sitting at my computer on an Internet political site and a note came up on the side with the breaking news; it said, “Plane crashes into World Trade Center.” I have to confess I paid no attention.

Accidents. Pathetic accidents. Accidents that are of lasting harm to the people involved, happen all the time. Not much can be done about them. We pray; we wish them well. I imagined, in other words, it was a small private aircraft, something of that sort, and I got on with my work. More notices appeared. Finally I clicked on one of them, saw the pictures. One of the officers in my foundation called and said “Richard, we have to completely get rid of everything on the web page, get ready for what the President says. At the moment, we don’t know where he is.” It was a remarkable time for me, for you, for all Americans, indeed, for all the men and women around the world. It was a remarkable time. I remember, too, after I got over the shock of it, the initial shock, how angry I was.

I teach at a little liberal arts college and we read Virgil’s Aeneid. At the end of the Aeneid, Aeneas, the hero and founder of Rome has defeated his rival, the bloodthirsty Turnus. Turnus lies at Aeneas mercy, on his knees, on the ground. Aeneas sees on Turnus’ chest the belt that had been taken from his dear, dead friend Pallas by Turnus, earlier in the war. Turnus pleads for mercy; Aeneas looks at the belt; Fury comes over him. He draws his sword and says, “With this, Pallas slays you,” and kills him.

We were talking about the Aeneid that night, the first class after the attack, and we weren’t affected very much by that last scene when we looked at it. We were having a hard time seeing what it was. And then suddenly someone said, “I know what it’s like. It’s like the Marines that will capture Bin-Laden, have him at their mercy. He will get on his knees, talk to us about our well-known clemency, our principles, our Christian principles, perhaps. There will be a soldier on the edge, doing nothing, and suddenly he looks into bin Laden’s eyes and he sees airplanes, crashing into the World Trade Center, and he takes out his knife and says ‘This is not a knife, it’s an airplane wing, and all those innocent people kill you on this spot.”

Well, the remainder of the class was much more passionate when we saw what was at stake. We saw the nature of the choice. We thought of our anger. I’m not saying we approved of that marine’s action in the imagined event, but we sure did understand it. I think we all felt that way, too, for a while. That is to say, shock was replaced by anger, a furious anger.

My friends, Love is stronger than Anger, Reason is more enduring than Feeling. It’s now been nine months since those events took place. We were injured, grievously injured. It was a terrible injustice, an act of profound malevolence that was done against this country and against humanity last September, and we are at war because of it. But that war must be conducted over a long time by the steady force of Reason, not Feeling, and it must be conducted with a view to saving and promoting what we love, it must not be simply prompted by our feeling of anger or vengeance against those who have merited our hatred.

So what do we love? This is Flag Day. Americans love their flag. The rally today is called “Rally Round the Flag.” You know, in the old days, that actually meant something practical. In the Revolutionary war, the Civil War, our soldiers were not flying supersonic jets looking at highly complex technological targeting devices to find their enemies, guiding smart bombs. They were walking on the ground, with their comrades, with regiments, brigades that carried flags and when they were defeated and then rallied, when that happened, the standard bearer, the man carrying the flag, would sometimes hold his ground and the cry would go out “Rally ‘round the Flag!” It stood for their camaraderie; it stood for their firmness of purpose; it stood for the possibility of their recovering courage and resolve. It stood for the Republic for which they fought.

You have watched the award ceremonies at the Olympics where they play the national anthems of the victorious athletes. The French sing a passionate song about a battle, the British, a song in honor of their queen. The Americans, almost alone, have for our national anthem a hymn of praise to our flag. Now that’s worth thinking about. Why do we do that? It can’t be the material flag, the cloth. It must stand for something. What is that something?

Oh! thus be it ever,
when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home,
and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace,
may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made
and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must,
when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto,
“In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner
In triumph shall wave,
O’er the land of the free,
and the home of the brave.

We have a treasury of words in this country about the meaning and nature of our republic and its place in the world. St. Paul said long ago, about noble things, “think on these things.”

I would like you to think a little about these words. “Blest with victory and peace / may the heav’n-rescued land / Praise the Power that hath made / and preserved us a nation.” In this our national anthem we acknowledge that the birth and the preservation of the American republic is to be traced finally to the hand of God Almighty.

All over the country today, there is a simultaneous pledge of allegiance; we did it here in Ohio, a few minutes ago. Unlike other countries, we don’t take an oath to a king or even an oath, most of us, to the constitution. We pledge allegiance to the flag. That’s interesting. We pledge allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” So the flag stands for the republic and the republic is one nation under God. How is it one nation? The word “nation” comes from the Latin word for birth, it would mean something like a “tribe” or a “clan.” In the Old Testament, the peoples around the world the Amorites, the Moabites, the Children of Israel are called “the nations.” They are peoples united by blood. But we’re not united by blood.

I was hosted, most generously, for this event (since I had to fly out from California) by a family that lives here in the Cincinnati area. My most gracious hostess was born in Jordan. When I was driven out to the house I drove along Martin Luther King Drive and Ronald Reagan Highway, a black man from the south, a white man from the north. My wife’s uncle is Japanese; my brother’s wife is Japanese. The chairman of our foundation, Alan Keyes, is a descendant of slaves. His name, Keyes, comes from the fact that his ancestors were owned by the man who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key. His wife is a naturalized American citizen from South India. One nation, one blood? Not one nation by one blood, unless we mean the blood shed by those who fought to defend it on the fields of battle. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This is the first flag day of the first war of the 21st century. We have, in effect, been at war now for nine months. What do we fight for? One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And it’s that flag, the flag that carries the meaning of the republic united by principles of justice and human dignity and recognizing that all political authority and all good things come from the hand of the heavenly giver, it is that flag that we honor today in this flag day ceremony.

In the aftermath of those awful events of September eleventh the President of the United States, George W. Bush said this “I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

Perhaps we should think more on these things. More than two millennia ago the Children of Israel, who had been given the Law on Mt. Zion, suffered a catastrophic defeat and were carried off as slaves to a distant land. Scriptural scholars will tell us that in that land, many of the hymns, the anthems, the Psalms of that people were written. They had lost the land and in their exile, in their grief, in their loss, they wrote things like this:

“The Law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether.”

That law, which they had failed to obey perfectly, if even at all, came back to them in their suffering. Then they saw the treasure they had and had never used. Then they praised the law with a pure heart. Has it not been so with us? In our wealth, in our indolence, in our busyness, in our separation form each other, we were struck. We came together; we discovered we were carrying a treasure around with us. That treasure was in our hymns, our patriotic hymns. I’d like to look at one of those with you for a moment; it’s the one that was sung, among others, in the national cathedral when the president endeavored to rally the nation after those awful events. It’s America the Beautiful.

I almost said everyone knows it. If we stopped my speech right now, and all sang together, I’d bet everyone of you could sing the first verse. But it has four verses all together and we don’t always pay attention to the others. They did that day; they sang all four. It tells a story. I’d like you to think about that story with me. You all know the first verse. The second goes:

Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

Now the first verse is about the land. Everyone remembers the purple mountains’ majesty and so forth. It’s about the land. But America is not a mere country; it has a soul. It has history. The second verse takes us into that history. “ . . .for pilgrim feet whose stern, impassioned stress a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness.”

Surely that refers to our earliest days, when the pilgrim fathers landed on the rocky shores of New England and other Americans on other parts of the coast and carved out an empire of freedom in this new world, and they were heroic. The land was not altogether welcoming. There were wars with the Indian inhabitants, wars with the French. It was a labor and they were mighty in that labor. Well, we’ve all praised our colonial forbears, heard them praised in our schools. But there is more to think about. The words of America the Beautiful go beyond praise; they refer to a higher standard. “Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law.” Now whom could that be about? When did we act tyrannically? When did we fall short of the standard of justice and charity that the God who gave us this land required of us? Was it with the way we treated the Indians? Was it with some of the periods of excess in our lives? I gather that some of the colonial leaders drank quantities of rum that would astonish people of the present day; was there a need for self-control? Was it the blight of slavery? The song is not altogether in praise of our forbearers. It looks to the standard that measures the justice of their acts. Now hear the third verse:

O beautiful for heroes proved
in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine.

“Liberating strife” . . .must be war. What wars would you call wars of liberation? The Revolution I suppose; Liberty was the slogan of that war. “Who more than self their country loved / and mercy more than life.” Mercy, why that? Who were the oppressed and those held in bondage for whom blood was shed in the fight for our country? The hymn takes us now to the Civil War, echoes the language of Lincoln’s second inaugural, that the freedom of our black brothers and sisters was paid for in our blood … and theirs. “May God, thy gold refine. . .” Gold. The next period in U.S. history is sometimes called “the gilded age.” It was an age of energy, excitement, expansion, increase of wealth, . . . and sweatshops, corruption. We look at that time in our hymn too. We were aware that we grew to be a world power, we were aware that we grew to be the world’s largest economy, we were aware that we were rich with gold, “gilded.” And we beg the God who gave us our republic, and sustains it, to refine that gold “till all success be nobleness / and every gain divine.”

Oh beautiful for patriot’s dream
That looks beyond the years
On alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears
America, America God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

I don’t know about you but when we sung those songs in the weeks following 9-11, I couldn’t sing that. Not that I didn’t think it was true or worth wishing for, but I would break in to tears. I would think of the vision of the purified city, the “alabaster city” and over my mind would come the picture of the devastated, smoking, and ruined New York City. And I would weep.

I think this vision, the alabaster city, is what all of us in the civic life and in our families, associations, and businesses have before us or should have before us all the time, and also the fragility of that alabaster city. The fact that we don’t have it perfectly, and it can be much worse even than it now is, was brought home to me with enormous force when I recalled what happened in New York.

But this is the “patriots’ dream that sees beyond the years.” This is the power of the ideal. This is the power of love, and it looks to that city as a copy of the brotherhood of man and the heavenly Jerusalem. That is to say, the song as a whole tells us that we must praise the accomplishments of our ancestors, the patriots who went before us, never fail to acknowledge our shortcomings, and theirs, and forever keep our eye on the ideals of the country as we live our daily lives in pursuit of liberty and justice for all. We have America the Beautiful in our treasure chest. Take it out. Sing it.

I am president of the Declaration Foundation. Some people think the Declaration is just a propaganda document or a little broadsheet to stir up the folks and win the War of Independence against the British, and now it should be buried at the bottom of a stack of papers, gather dust and never be looked at again. Abraham Lincoln didn’t think that. Abraham Lincoln, in Independence Hall, on his way to become President of the United States on February 22, 1861 said this about the Declaration of Independence:

“I never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” That is to say there’s something in that part of our treasury, the words of the Declaration of Independence, which is of permanent worth, and which can influence our actions as Americans every day of our lives. What do you think he had in mind?

“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Those truths were not stated simply to rally the patriots in the cause of Independence against the forces of King George. Those are eternal, profound, and true principles of human political action. We are equal, we have rights because of the kind of thing we are, and the kind of thing we are is a gift of the power behind the universe, the Creator. That means that we have to treat each other with respect; that we have to strive to live the life of liberty; that we have to have regard for life from its beginning to its natural end. In doing all these things, we act as servants of that Being who gave us our power and our rights by his Free Grace. That’s the national creed.

Lincoln applied that creed to the question of slavery at the end of a long and tragic tale, in which he was, finally, the martyr for that cause. This nation was purified in blood and fire and banished the stain of slavery. Martin Luther King Jr. returned to the same document when human inequality in the form of Jim Crow segregation laws remained as a blight in this country within our own lifetimes. King said this:

“The home that all too many Americans left,” [he means by that the home of ideas that we wandered away from], “was solidly structured. Its pillars were soundly grounded in the insights of our heritage: that all men were made in the image of God, all men are brothers, and all men are created equal. Every man is an heir to the legacy of dignity and worth, every man has rights that are neither conferred by nor derived from the state. They are God-given. What a marvelous foundation for any home. What a glorious place to inhabit.”

Hardheaded pragmatists will say, “actions matter, not words. Give us deeds, not words. Nothing ever happens in this world by words.”

Is that really true? Martin Luther King had no sword in his hand. He had few dollars in his purse. He walked the dusty highways of the South, he entered the churches, he came to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., and he worked a mighty act of statesmanship, he and many of us who were with him. And how did he do it?

The words of the Declaration; the words of Scripture, the words of the American creed. Miracles can be done by words if we cling to them with all our being, if we engrave them in our memory, if we resolve to live them in our lives.

“Think on these things,” that means study them, delve into them, and find their depths. Think about how a right to liberty means something about freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Think about how a people who demand self-government as their right must learn how to govern themselves in their own private lives. Think about how high a thing pursuit of happiness is, happiness, perfect human happiness. It’s not simply a full belly or an afternoon water-skiing on a lake. Happiness. Blessedness. It is the sweetness of conversation with friends, the joys of divine worship, and every good and noble thing. Those are your right to pursue. Those are your right to pursue, and those are stated as your right in the Declaration of Independence. Study it.

You in Ohio have a piece of legislation called “Founding of America Bill.” It’s the work of citizen activists just like the people in the True Blue Freedom Foundation. Looks like it won’t pass this session. But don’t despair.

What will it do? It will require your public schools, your schools, for you are the public, to teach your young the principles of the declaration and the way they’re carried out in the constitution and the bill of rights. You have a perfect chance for citizen activism here in Ohio. Moved by your sense of national unity and the precious gift of American Liberty that you have in this country, that we all see as more precious after September eleventh. You have a chance to pass on that heritage to your children more than it’s been done in decades. For we must not only remember the golden words of our heritage, we must study them.

“Teach these things to your children” says the Old Testament, teach them to your children, have them on your lips in the morning, inscribe them on the doorposts. Think of them when the sun rises and when the sun sets. Be faithful to the law you have been given. Be honest in your public dealings. Take part in your civic associations. Treat one another with respect. Respect life. Be Americans. Build the alabaster city.

Let me remind you one more time of what President Bush said “We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

Thank you again for your attention and for the honor of being asked to address you this day. God bless you and may God bless America.

In case you didn't guess, the internet site where I was that morning was FreeRepublic!

Cheers,

Richard F.

Richard, that is wonderful...simply wonderful!

God graced you immensely, by allowing you to deliver such timeless words at this point in our history.

Glory to God.

God graced you immensely, by allowing you to deliver such timeless words at this point in our history.

Glory to God.

He is the giver of all good things, and to Him be the Praise.

Richard F.

I like the pledge except for the "indivisible" part, as that is not just not true.

I, along with Washington, Madison, Webster, Jackson, J.Q. Adams, and Lincoln, of course, respectfully disagree.

Cheers,

Richard F.

I write with some fear that this thread will be hijacked by my neo-reb friends, but I must say that the Constitution was adopted to form a "more perfect" Union, and that the anti-federalists and all those who wanted absolute state sovereignty and a mere league, not one nation, failed.

Perhaps it would be good to believe the anti-federalists when they complained that what the Convention designed did, indeed, make for a national sovereignty, at least in some sense.

But that was what we ratified.

Therefore, by the arguments of P. Henry and others, there was, though they did not want it, "One Nation, under God, Indivisible ... etc."

Cheers,

Richard F.

Bump back to you!

And now I must turn in ...

Cheers,

Richard F.

To: rdf
I have read the Constitution several times
and have yet to see anything forbiding secession.
If they thought so much of making it "one nation, indivisible,"
then why not spell that out in the one document that counted?

Guess they knew that secession was a viable option.
# 16 by CommonLaw
*************************

Secession was a known power of the States before the North defeated the South.

In the War Between the States, the South seceded. But that wasn't the first time our nation was threatened with a breakup caused by member States leaving.

In the War of 1812, President Madison's main problem was convincing the New England States to remain in the Union.

Well, I've had plenty to say on secession on other threads, and I thought I'd stay out of it on this one.

Did you agree with the rest of the speech?

Did you like it?

Cheers,

Richard F.

I have to respectfully disagree with you on this one exodus.

I am a proud Northerner and in regards to the Civil War, I do not believe that the states had any Constitutional Right to secede, especially since they essentially stomped out because they didn't get their way with the slavery question.

Richard, you wrote a very fine article. I never knew you had a doctorate, although it certainly doesn't surprise me :)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.