Romneys American Creed - Road to the Middle Class

YOU CAN read the MSM’s hostility to religion any time you open a newspaper or tune into a network news broadcast. Here’s CNN on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on religion and America December 6, 2007.

White House hopeful Mitt Romney on Thursday articulated his position on the role of religion in America, but avoided details about his personal faith.

What is it about these people? What is it?

Well we know. Or modern secular educated elite thinks that it has a better belief system than the one developed by our Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the religious culture of the United States. And you can see why.

The pluralistic non-established religions of the United States cannot be controlled by the secular educated elite. That is why they are trying to create an established secular religion with its “teachers” and “counselors” in every public institution of education.

But Mitt Romney is an American, not a secular American. And the danger is that he can talk, as a presidential candidate, over the heads of the media directly to the American people.

He can appeal directly to the American tradition that goes back to the founders, the tradition that the secular educated elite want to replace.

He can talk, as he did about the first prayer breakfast of the United States of America, before there was a United States. It happened in the fall of 1774. Given the dark clouds of war closing in, the members of the Continental Congress felt the need to pray. As told by Romney:

But there were objections. ’They were too divided in religious sentiments’, what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.

That’s the sort of thing that our secular educated friends don’t want to hear, and they don’t want you to hear. And if they had their way no American in public life would dare to recount that incident, at least not without irony or scare quotes.

That is why there is a culture war being fought in the United States. It is a war between those who want to continue the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States and those who want to replace it with a secular culture.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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