The more I read on the history of America and the Scottish/English reformations, the more I am convinced that American liberty has far more to do with John Knox than it does John Locke. It has far more to do with the principles contained in Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and Lex Rex than it does Common Sense (incidentally, Vindiciae was said to have been more widely read and more influential in the year leading up to the American Revolution than was Paine's pamphlet. That is, if you're willing to believe John Adams...). The more I study, the more I am coming to believe that the loss of American liberty has more to do with the abandonment of these Scotch-Irish Calvinist principles/dedication to the crown rights of Christ than it has to do with the abandonment of "Enlightenment" humanism, rationalism, and Sensualism. (There's that book again...I link to it about once a week because I really do think it is that important...maybe one of the most important non-canonical books an American can read.)
In the above-linked article on the Scots-American connection, a distinction is drawn between Tory Scots and the Scotch-Irish. This is not to say it was an all-or-nothing, clear distinction throughout society and the Scots-Irish. These people were not anarchists, and many held loyalty to the English Crown through it all. At any rate, I would think that this distinction has far more to do with faith and confessions than it does blood- although no doubt the faith of the Scots-Irish was something nurtured and passed down from father to son. This faith was inherited from the persecuted Scottish Covenanters, who held illegal worship services in the freezing rain rather than submit to ecclesiastical tyranny, or compromise their belief in the headship of Christ, not the king, over the church. These same Covenanters (along with English Puritans and French Huguenots) were driven to Ireland, continental Europe, and wherever they could find refuge and religious freedom.
Many Covenanters and Scotch-Irish Calvinists came to America and various Island colonies quite unwillingly- as slaves. Some sources and books bring up the similarities and correlations that exist between traditional negro spiritual songs and Scottish psalter worship. These African slaves did not bring Christian worship music from their native lands, and these mostly illiterate slaves did not learn of the Christian faith by individually reading the Word. It is perhaps the case that they learned these songs and truths from their fellow slaves, that is, enslaved Covenanters.
These Scotch-Irish had learned well the lessons of tyrants, both of the civil and ecclesiastical types, and had suffered at the hands of the Erastians, who taught that the Church was subordinate to the state. They understood that failing to recognize the crown of Christ -in both the civil realm and the church- was to bow the knee to the tyranny of man.
I think that perhaps America and Americans should look to Greyfriars Church and the National Covenant to find her roots. I think that we as a people should look to these men for guidance and wisdom rather than the empty sensualists and rationalists of the "Enlightenment" period. Many of these men signed the National League and Covenant in their own fresh blood, only to later seal their commitment to it and Christ for eternity with more of their blood. These were not men who merely wrote philosophy books and produced writings and letters on abstract concepts of freedom and faith- they lived, breathed, suffered and died for it. These were men who lived, suffered, and died for their faith and for principles many Americans today would consider trivialities.
Even if one is not inclined to hold to the understanding of the faith that these people did, I am finding it harder and harder to separate America's founding and eventual separation from a covenant-breaking king and parliament from the spiritual roots and seeds sewn in Puritan England and Covenanting Scotland. I am also thinking it less and less likely that without such a firm foundation, these united States will ever be restored to anything remotely resembling just or free.
I pray that Americans who want less government and more freedom stop seeking and trusting in political means for their salvation. I pray that they turn to God, covenanting with Him and binding their families, communities, states, form of government, and their republic itself to Him in a new National Covenant- one that is all ours-
...A covenant that comes from the bottom up, from the people, the "grassroots," to use a modern term.
...A covenant that binds us to God, signed in our national lifeblood.
Without such a covenant, without such a restoration, commitment, and foundation, our national lifeblood, figuratively, and perhaps someday literally, will be spilled on the altar of tyranny, which is, as these great men understood, nothing other than the logical and inevitable outcome of a people's rejection of God. If there is one thing I have learned from history, this is it.
It is amazing to me just how loudly the silent dead can speak from their graves. Perhaps that is because, in a real sense, they are still with us:
Will we listen to them?Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. ~Hebrews 12:1-2