(Note: in a future column I’ll demonstrate how opposition to such things as abortion, gay marriage, physician-assisted suicide, and embryonic stem cell research have nothing to do with religion.)
I also don’t think that one political party is necessarily more “righteous” than another. Political parties are made up of men and women, and there are evil men and women of all political stripes. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that money and power attracts evil men and women to politics like flies to…choose your own image here.
I do believe, however, that certain political views are more in line with what we might call, “divine will” than others. For example, the last article I wrote for CFP discussed free will / free agency, and how I, like “
Smart Mormons” (and the Founding Fathers), believe that it is God’s will that humans be free to make their own choices, and then live with the consequences—both mortal and eternal—of those choices.
That being the case, I view most laws that curtail our right to make our own choices as running contrary to divine will. Obviously, in cases where behavior would bring about a direct, unwelcomed, injurious effect upon another (murder, rape, assault, robbery, etc.), there must be laws for the orderly functioning of society.
But in other cases, where there is no such injurious effect on another, I believe the divine will is to let us make our choices and be responsible for them. This would include such things as whether or not to smoke, drink (but not drink and drive, where I could injure another), wear a seat belt or a motorcycle helmet, and how large a soda I should be allowed to buy.
In fact, I believe that this principle is such a basic and key aspect of divine will that, while God stays out of human affairs most of the time to allow us that free will He promised us, at times He puts specific people in specific places at specific times in order to help preserve free will in the face of evil men and women who otherwise would destroy it.
I have no doubt that such was the case when George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John and Samuel Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others were found at just the right place at just the right time to create the seat of modern democracy (and FREEDOM)—the United States of America. Remove just one or two of these men from history, and the world might still believe that government of the people, by the people, and for the people—a quote taken from another who was in the right place at the right time—was simply not possible.
I also have no doubt that the same divine intervention—for lack of a better term—came into play in the late 1970s and 1980s. For those of us who remember, this was a truly ugly time in world history. The Soviet Union had enslaved millions of people behind an “iron curtain” and worked tirelessly to spread perhaps the most evil political philosophy in world history—communism, the ultimate loss of human liberty.
Even in so-called “free” countries, socialist governments had replaced individual freedom with government control and had imposed economy-killing economic policies on their populations, bringing about economic decline, astronomically high taxes, and a general “malaise” in their populations. Weak, leftist leaders like Jimmy Carter in the U.S. and James Callaghan in Great Britain believed that the West was in an inevitable decline. Their answer to these problems? Even MORE government growth and less personal freedom. In short, the forces of evil were winning.
But then there appeared on the world stage, miraculously in my view, a group of leaders who were at just the right place at just the right time. These leaders included, among others, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and Helmut Kohl.
Each of these leaders played a significant role in the turnaround of the West and the destruction of the Soviet Union and Soviet communism. Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl abandoned (for the most part) the failed socialist policies of their predecessors and adopted pro-growth economic programs that turned around their economies and gave hope to the citizens of their respective countries.
More importantly, rather than cower before the Soviet threat, they stood up to it. Led by Reagan’s philosophy of “Peace through strength” and a guiding role by Margaret Thatcher, who first announced about the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “I like Mr. Gorbachev; we can do business together,” the West lost its timidity and reminded the world that the best way to handle a bully is to stand up to him.
At the same time, Lech Walesa was leading the anti-communist Solidarity movement in Poland, while Pope John Paul II, behind his rallying cry, “Be not afraid,” was challenging the West to stand for human rights, and even visited communist Poland—a dangerous proposition at the time.
In the Soviet Union itself, Mikhail Gorbachev recognized that the evil system that ruled Eastern Europe could not survive this pressure from the West. He instituted glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring) in an attempt to reform the Soviet Union. Of course it could not be reformed. Evil is evil, and cannot mix with divine will. The Iron Curtain fell in 1989, and by 1991 the Soviet Union was no more. Freedom won, thanks to a group of amazing leaders who, I believe, God put in just the right place at just the right time for a specific purpose.
My fear today is that this was only a temporary victory for freedom and liberty. There will always be evil in the world, and if it is divine will that men and women be free, you can bet that one of the basic goals of evil will always be to deprive men and women of that freedom.
There are too few of us today who remember what the world was like before these providential leaders came on the stage. The Soviet Union is nothing but a boring historical term for today’s school children. “Communism” does not inspire the well-earned loathing and fear that it once did.
And governments around the world—even in the U.S. and Great Britain—have re-adopted the failed socialist policies that existed before these leaders rose to power. The results have been predictable: economic decline, rising taxes, loss of freedom, and malaise (I really love that word; thanks, President Carter).
Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion
In what would be a hilarious irony if it wasn’t so frightening and sad, the Russian newspaper Pravda, once the official voice of the Soviet communist government, recently said this:
The Communists have won in America with Obama… He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.
There is always hope, of course. If divine will has always been that men and women be free, then divine will still is and will always be that men and women be free. That is unchanging. And when it really matters, God comes through. He did it in 1776 and he did it in the 1980s. I guess the big question now is, who will be at just the right place and just the right time this time?
