I think the only thing missing from this discussion is that we have invited too many third world people into this country that know nothing and care nothing about our inheritance and its architecture...they don't want to learn about it nor embrace it. They want to impose their way of life over ours. Evidence of this is overwhelming in places like Dearborn Michigan, Minneapolis Minnesota and Western Europe in general. To save itself this country needs to deal with the failures of not only mass migration but also that of a failed immigration system. I pray for our country every day 🙏
That topic is missing here because that is a separate discussion, downstream from the one this article flags. How can we meaningfully answer that question, while we are still divided and unsure of the common ground we should be standing on? Talking about just migration, which points to what mass migration makes impossible: what are people being asked to assimilate into? We need to have that answer ready, first.
You are right to hammer on the failed immigration system (and the resulting mass migration), but jumping in to answer that without clearing away the proper path to such answer has its own risks.
CaptK often reminds us to do our own research: These articles from CaptK are the single best source encountered so far of consolidated yet broad-based, educational, and insightful information. Inspiring.
Thank you! CaptK does have a good eye for what matters and not just for topics in his own lane of expertise. For my part, I am very grateful for his support of the topics in my lane.
This is the antidote to managed decline and performative division. Unity cannot mean surrender to the loudest faction, the administrative state, or the media’s binary machine. Real unity means recovering the floor beneath the Republic: God-given rights, moral citizens, strong families, churches, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and a government limited enough to leave room for civilization. The Founders did not build a secular bureaucracy with fireworks. They built ordered liberty on a moral foundation sturdy enough to hold difference without turning difference into civil war. “United we stand” is not a bumper sticker. It is a warning: remember what you stand on.
What wonderful summary, internalizing the main ideas!
Yes, recovering a shared foundation will allow us to "hold difference without turning difference into civil war." Nor without falling to indifference, either. Well done, Sir!
Thank you for sharing this essay, Seth. I want to share it with a number of people who have expressed interest in the constitution, and who love our nation.
Today, I want to celebrate and commemorate the events that transpired 250 years ago. This is a serious essay that reminds us of that foundation, but also forces us to look inward.
Hard.
And really face who we are today - individuals as part of a good and greater whole, and our roles and actions.
Are we building up? Or tearing down?
To whom are we serving? God and our fellow man? Or ourselves?
I will share this tomorrow and hopefully have it gain purchase within the hearts and minds of people who are willing to take that look.
Willing to examine their hearts.
Willing to change their lives.
Happy 250th birthday America!
Though not perfect in execution, the ideals we stand for are still worth fighting for.
And yes, even dying for.
That all men are created equal.
That we all have rights of freedom and life in our respective pursuits of happiness.
And that we afford the same courtesy to others as long as it does not take away from their rights as well.
And finally, thank you Seth for the indomitable spirit you possess to help restore the rightful balance of power to the people in our self-governing republic.
Great thoughts, Justin! As a new American, I am in awe of the richness contained in our founding documents, and the emotion and wisdom they keep inspiring, 250 later!
Thank you for your articulate observations and thoughts! I've been similarly inspired by the many people who have visited our country recently and shared their thoughts and gratitude for the blessings of our country and freedoms that we too often take for granted. Who knew Ranch dressing was an American icon? And that so many mentioned A/C, while heart waves are hitting other countries. The couple that let America's beauty do the talking while they traveled across this country.
And... The reverence for our country displayed (shamefully) by the Japanese tourists who cleaned our stadium after a match.
I watched Young Washington yesterday on Independence Day. And others came dressed as colonials, sharing their enthusiasm and bearing red, white and blue necklaces that they gave to all attendees. What a simple and profound gesture! (it is an AMAZING movie, BTW!)
I stood in church today and gave thanks for what we have in our country and tried to encapsulate in a few minutes what was in my heart, and to share the responsibility that we all have going forward, with the inspiring thoughts you wrote.
Welcome to America! I hope she continues to be a blessing in the lives of you and your family!
For anyone who wants to go further: this essay is one piece of a larger project.
The full pamphlet, Tending the Fire, traces this inheritance from the Flemish city charters of 1127 through the Dutch Act of Abjuration to 1776 - and the companion declaration, This We Declare, lays out the argument in seven points, five minutes to read.
Such a great post, full of details that MATTER. The part regarding Justice and Mercy, reminded me of this:
Micah 6:8 KJV. He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Micah is so underrated as a prophet, but you picked out a real gem here. The part about humility in the end is not just pious embellishment, but the core. Without a humble look at God and his example, that which he has shown us about what is good, we will never be able to square applying justice mercifully, or mercy justly.
I agree that we are a Christian nation and that Christianity cannot be coerced (nor any faith, including Christianity's antithesis Islam) . But I cannot disagree more about there being some tension between "women's rights" and abortion. Abortion is murder.
I am reminded of king Solomon's court hearing a dispute between two women over which was the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby to be cut in half and half be given to each woman. The woman who was willing to give up raising the child that he might live was truly the mother. She was not necessarily the one who gave birth to him, though many wrongly assume she was. Instead, she was the one willing to sacrifice her joy for his life. It is for this reason that abortion is murder; those who commit it are the other woman who was happy to accept death. God puts hard burdens on us all at times, but that is no excuse to break faith with God.
So, do you want a pluralistic country that is dead? Or a faithful country that is alive but under God's care and not yours? We are called not to repay evil with evil; we are to repay evil with good. We should not accept "pluralism" (which is actually idolatry, much as socialism is actually communism) but never stop encouraging faith as this article seems to suggest—our foundation is not pluralism. It is Jesus.
"But I cannot disagree more about there being some tension between "women's rights" and abortion. Abortion is murder."
No disagreement here. Notice how the article juxtaposed "a pro-life activist and a defender of women’s rights", and not pro-life and pro-choice. An important distinction, as the article tries to point at what is shared here: a desire to help, focused on the baby, on one hand, and the woman, on the other. If we can see that, and argue from that shared understanding (something Charlie Kirk was a master at!), we can break through the impasse and enmity.
As such, a pluralistic country is not idolatry, nor in the same vicinity as socialism or communism. True, those very ideologies have tried to usurp the term, and flattened it into a weapon to attack the individual, which is precisely the category mistake the article flagged.
" No single person can be “pluralistic” and express every possible stance. Instead, a person can hold his own view, divergent from others, while together we can have a society that is pluralistic.
As such, pluralism is not relativism at all. It does not mean that every person must pretend every position is equally true. It offers a social order where different partial goods, offices, vocations, and associations can coexist because they are held within a higher frame."
Which, in turn, does not mean we cannot and should not defend what is true. Killing an unborn child is indeed murder, and rightfully can and should be opposed. Wanting to defend a woman and her rights (however misguided the form that just desire might have taken!!!) is not evil or wrong, but a true good. We need people who care for women, for babies, for men, for children, for the sick, for the elderly, for animals, for plants, for the planet, for souls,... But it is nigh impossible to have such care for all, at once. People specialize, have a calling or heart for one group, and not the others. THAT difference is true pluralism. Not some relativist garble that is meant only to excuse evil.
Which is always a good starting point: piercing the lies of the enemy, distorting that which is good into something evil and harmful. Let's not discard the good, but restore and reclaim it.
I am glad to hear you are not tolerant of abortion, but tolerance is a slippery slope. Instead of calling for a pluralistic society, I prefer what Rupertus Meldenius said (roughly translated from Latin):
In essentials, unity.
In non-essentials, liberty.
In all things, charity.
It makes clear the limits on tolerance. Sadly, I do not think our nation is a Christian society any longer. I pray it might be with God's help, but it will a close thing. If not, then at least our end will come quickly as those in rebellion against God are quite zealous.
We don't have a country because we decided not to care about those things. God is the one taking our country away, not the leftists and muslims. They are just the means He uses. And the way to get our country back is to start caring about the things God cares about and trusting Him for the things that are not in our power to do justly.
I'm reminded of the sequence of events spanning from the exodus from Egypt by the Israelites, to the continued sustenance of hundreds of thousands in the desert for 40 years - necessary to purge the people of their generation of people exposed to idolatry and wicked traditions. This is continued through covenants made to the people of Israel if they would but obey that which the Lord asked of them, and in return the land would be blessed for them.
They did not obey, and as a result, were divided and then conquered. Time and again.
I fear that a similar withdrawal of the Lord's blessings await us in this land, should we continue to move away from the same divine care that is extended to us. I'm grateful for the divinely inspired men who laid down the foundations for a government that is obligated to preserve our rights to worship as we please, whereas I see so many instances around the world (even right next door in Canada!) where they're are efforts to persecute and prosecute those who openly call for repentance and a return to Godly practices.
We are being divided by people who seek after their own gods.
I want to just point out that in that same story involving Solomon, that it is prefaced by scripture describing that these were two harlots, women who would not typically get any respect, but did indeed assist in demonstrating the depth to which Solomon's wisdom and judgement were applied - themselves gifts given him by the Lord.
Rahab is in the lineage of Jesus (Matthew 1:5) and she was both a prostitute and a foreigner. Of the two women in the story, one was a mother. Not just biologically but spiritually.
Just spoke with a lady last week who was fumed over Texas laws that allowed a woman to die in a parking lot in spite of her unborn baby/fetus having already died. I'm sure this has happened to a vanishingly small number of people, but she was nevertheless hellbent in anger over it and promised to never visit much less move there.
As a former staunch pro-lifer, I came to the realization that God himself decided that some young and unborn life was worth taking (and it can't be questioned because it was decided by God), and given the 3rd world jungle in which we increasingly find ourselves, I no longer get into a moral outrage for those who choose to abort before the end of the first trimester (the nervous system is undeveloped and thus the unborn feels no pain). If you don't have a country standing because you've given it over to barbarian hordes, concerns about the justification or lack thereof for abortion will be the last thing on your mind.
Great article. My fear is that a lot of people on what I guess I will call the left, notwithstanding the idea that it’s not all binary, thoroughly reject the architecture. It was built by dead, white males, slave, owners, racists, sexist, on stolen land!
And yes, we do have our work cut out for us, as a lot of propaganda has muddied the waters. Yet we do see people wake up from that state, bit by bit. Never surrender and never give up!
Then Get the Hell Out of America, Sick of people not appreciating what we have and Why we have it. If you don’t appreciate America then Leave! This is the Best Damn Country in the world. God Bless America💙🇺🇸❤️
That is a very frustrating aspect of our freedoms... That it permits those who criticize our freedoms to attack them from within. I would gladly pay to have such people deported. I'm guessing that I would return a hefty profit from a much humbled refugee.
Make me. Just because I can visibly see it vanishing doesn't mean I don't appreciate what is increasingly slipping through our fingers (allowing tech oligarchs to set up a surveillance state under the guise of being competitive with China is foolish, same with the empire building on behalf of a foreign country as we fall further into unsustainable debt). The Boston tea partiers didn't bend over like you're insinuating I do, so heal yourself.
I think the only thing missing from this discussion is that we have invited too many third world people into this country that know nothing and care nothing about our inheritance and its architecture...they don't want to learn about it nor embrace it. They want to impose their way of life over ours. Evidence of this is overwhelming in places like Dearborn Michigan, Minneapolis Minnesota and Western Europe in general. To save itself this country needs to deal with the failures of not only mass migration but also that of a failed immigration system. I pray for our country every day 🙏
That topic is missing here because that is a separate discussion, downstream from the one this article flags. How can we meaningfully answer that question, while we are still divided and unsure of the common ground we should be standing on? Talking about just migration, which points to what mass migration makes impossible: what are people being asked to assimilate into? We need to have that answer ready, first.
You are right to hammer on the failed immigration system (and the resulting mass migration), but jumping in to answer that without clearing away the proper path to such answer has its own risks.
A difficult discussion that needs to be had for sure...
Asking lawless people to be e
CaptK often reminds us to do our own research: These articles from CaptK are the single best source encountered so far of consolidated yet broad-based, educational, and insightful information. Inspiring.
Many sincere thanks.
Thank you! CaptK does have a good eye for what matters and not just for topics in his own lane of expertise. For my part, I am very grateful for his support of the topics in my lane.
This is the antidote to managed decline and performative division. Unity cannot mean surrender to the loudest faction, the administrative state, or the media’s binary machine. Real unity means recovering the floor beneath the Republic: God-given rights, moral citizens, strong families, churches, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, and a government limited enough to leave room for civilization. The Founders did not build a secular bureaucracy with fireworks. They built ordered liberty on a moral foundation sturdy enough to hold difference without turning difference into civil war. “United we stand” is not a bumper sticker. It is a warning: remember what you stand on.
What wonderful summary, internalizing the main ideas!
Yes, recovering a shared foundation will allow us to "hold difference without turning difference into civil war." Nor without falling to indifference, either. Well done, Sir!
Thank you for sharing this essay, Seth. I want to share it with a number of people who have expressed interest in the constitution, and who love our nation.
Today, I want to celebrate and commemorate the events that transpired 250 years ago. This is a serious essay that reminds us of that foundation, but also forces us to look inward.
Hard.
And really face who we are today - individuals as part of a good and greater whole, and our roles and actions.
Are we building up? Or tearing down?
To whom are we serving? God and our fellow man? Or ourselves?
I will share this tomorrow and hopefully have it gain purchase within the hearts and minds of people who are willing to take that look.
Willing to examine their hearts.
Willing to change their lives.
Happy 250th birthday America!
Though not perfect in execution, the ideals we stand for are still worth fighting for.
And yes, even dying for.
That all men are created equal.
That we all have rights of freedom and life in our respective pursuits of happiness.
And that we afford the same courtesy to others as long as it does not take away from their rights as well.
And finally, thank you Seth for the indomitable spirit you possess to help restore the rightful balance of power to the people in our self-governing republic.
Great thoughts, Justin! As a new American, I am in awe of the richness contained in our founding documents, and the emotion and wisdom they keep inspiring, 250 later!
Thank you for your articulate observations and thoughts! I've been similarly inspired by the many people who have visited our country recently and shared their thoughts and gratitude for the blessings of our country and freedoms that we too often take for granted. Who knew Ranch dressing was an American icon? And that so many mentioned A/C, while heart waves are hitting other countries. The couple that let America's beauty do the talking while they traveled across this country.
And... The reverence for our country displayed (shamefully) by the Japanese tourists who cleaned our stadium after a match.
I watched Young Washington yesterday on Independence Day. And others came dressed as colonials, sharing their enthusiasm and bearing red, white and blue necklaces that they gave to all attendees. What a simple and profound gesture! (it is an AMAZING movie, BTW!)
I stood in church today and gave thanks for what we have in our country and tried to encapsulate in a few minutes what was in my heart, and to share the responsibility that we all have going forward, with the inspiring thoughts you wrote.
Welcome to America! I hope she continues to be a blessing in the lives of you and your family!
Thank you again for your beautiful essay!
For anyone who wants to go further: this essay is one piece of a larger project.
The full pamphlet, Tending the Fire, traces this inheritance from the Flemish city charters of 1127 through the Dutch Act of Abjuration to 1776 - and the companion declaration, This We Declare, lays out the argument in seven points, five minutes to read.
The Pamphlet: https://arngrimr.substack.com/p/tending-the-fire-a50
The Declaration: https://arngrimr.substack.com/p/tending-the-fire
Such a great post, full of details that MATTER. The part regarding Justice and Mercy, reminded me of this:
Micah 6:8 KJV. He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Micah is so underrated as a prophet, but you picked out a real gem here. The part about humility in the end is not just pious embellishment, but the core. Without a humble look at God and his example, that which he has shown us about what is good, we will never be able to square applying justice mercifully, or mercy justly.
A lot to ponder, for sure!
I agree that we are a Christian nation and that Christianity cannot be coerced (nor any faith, including Christianity's antithesis Islam) . But I cannot disagree more about there being some tension between "women's rights" and abortion. Abortion is murder.
I am reminded of king Solomon's court hearing a dispute between two women over which was the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby to be cut in half and half be given to each woman. The woman who was willing to give up raising the child that he might live was truly the mother. She was not necessarily the one who gave birth to him, though many wrongly assume she was. Instead, she was the one willing to sacrifice her joy for his life. It is for this reason that abortion is murder; those who commit it are the other woman who was happy to accept death. God puts hard burdens on us all at times, but that is no excuse to break faith with God.
So, do you want a pluralistic country that is dead? Or a faithful country that is alive but under God's care and not yours? We are called not to repay evil with evil; we are to repay evil with good. We should not accept "pluralism" (which is actually idolatry, much as socialism is actually communism) but never stop encouraging faith as this article seems to suggest—our foundation is not pluralism. It is Jesus.
Thank you for the thoughtful engagement, David!
A small correction, if I may:
"But I cannot disagree more about there being some tension between "women's rights" and abortion. Abortion is murder."
No disagreement here. Notice how the article juxtaposed "a pro-life activist and a defender of women’s rights", and not pro-life and pro-choice. An important distinction, as the article tries to point at what is shared here: a desire to help, focused on the baby, on one hand, and the woman, on the other. If we can see that, and argue from that shared understanding (something Charlie Kirk was a master at!), we can break through the impasse and enmity.
As such, a pluralistic country is not idolatry, nor in the same vicinity as socialism or communism. True, those very ideologies have tried to usurp the term, and flattened it into a weapon to attack the individual, which is precisely the category mistake the article flagged.
" No single person can be “pluralistic” and express every possible stance. Instead, a person can hold his own view, divergent from others, while together we can have a society that is pluralistic.
As such, pluralism is not relativism at all. It does not mean that every person must pretend every position is equally true. It offers a social order where different partial goods, offices, vocations, and associations can coexist because they are held within a higher frame."
Which, in turn, does not mean we cannot and should not defend what is true. Killing an unborn child is indeed murder, and rightfully can and should be opposed. Wanting to defend a woman and her rights (however misguided the form that just desire might have taken!!!) is not evil or wrong, but a true good. We need people who care for women, for babies, for men, for children, for the sick, for the elderly, for animals, for plants, for the planet, for souls,... But it is nigh impossible to have such care for all, at once. People specialize, have a calling or heart for one group, and not the others. THAT difference is true pluralism. Not some relativist garble that is meant only to excuse evil.
Which is always a good starting point: piercing the lies of the enemy, distorting that which is good into something evil and harmful. Let's not discard the good, but restore and reclaim it.
I am glad to hear you are not tolerant of abortion, but tolerance is a slippery slope. Instead of calling for a pluralistic society, I prefer what Rupertus Meldenius said (roughly translated from Latin):
In essentials, unity.
In non-essentials, liberty.
In all things, charity.
It makes clear the limits on tolerance. Sadly, I do not think our nation is a Christian society any longer. I pray it might be with God's help, but it will a close thing. If not, then at least our end will come quickly as those in rebellion against God are quite zealous.
We don't have a country because we decided not to care about those things. God is the one taking our country away, not the leftists and muslims. They are just the means He uses. And the way to get our country back is to start caring about the things God cares about and trusting Him for the things that are not in our power to do justly.
I'm reminded of the sequence of events spanning from the exodus from Egypt by the Israelites, to the continued sustenance of hundreds of thousands in the desert for 40 years - necessary to purge the people of their generation of people exposed to idolatry and wicked traditions. This is continued through covenants made to the people of Israel if they would but obey that which the Lord asked of them, and in return the land would be blessed for them.
They did not obey, and as a result, were divided and then conquered. Time and again.
I fear that a similar withdrawal of the Lord's blessings await us in this land, should we continue to move away from the same divine care that is extended to us. I'm grateful for the divinely inspired men who laid down the foundations for a government that is obligated to preserve our rights to worship as we please, whereas I see so many instances around the world (even right next door in Canada!) where they're are efforts to persecute and prosecute those who openly call for repentance and a return to Godly practices.
We are being divided by people who seek after their own gods.
I want to just point out that in that same story involving Solomon, that it is prefaced by scripture describing that these were two harlots, women who would not typically get any respect, but did indeed assist in demonstrating the depth to which Solomon's wisdom and judgement were applied - themselves gifts given him by the Lord.
Rahab is in the lineage of Jesus (Matthew 1:5) and she was both a prostitute and a foreigner. Of the two women in the story, one was a mother. Not just biologically but spiritually.
Just spoke with a lady last week who was fumed over Texas laws that allowed a woman to die in a parking lot in spite of her unborn baby/fetus having already died. I'm sure this has happened to a vanishingly small number of people, but she was nevertheless hellbent in anger over it and promised to never visit much less move there.
As a former staunch pro-lifer, I came to the realization that God himself decided that some young and unborn life was worth taking (and it can't be questioned because it was decided by God), and given the 3rd world jungle in which we increasingly find ourselves, I no longer get into a moral outrage for those who choose to abort before the end of the first trimester (the nervous system is undeveloped and thus the unborn feels no pain). If you don't have a country standing because you've given it over to barbarian hordes, concerns about the justification or lack thereof for abortion will be the last thing on your mind.
Great article. My fear is that a lot of people on what I guess I will call the left, notwithstanding the idea that it’s not all binary, thoroughly reject the architecture. It was built by dead, white males, slave, owners, racists, sexist, on stolen land!
Thanks for the support!
And yes, we do have our work cut out for us, as a lot of propaganda has muddied the waters. Yet we do see people wake up from that state, bit by bit. Never surrender and never give up!
God Bless America WWG I WGA❤️🇺🇸💙🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸👍
The only place we seem to be going is into the digital gulags.
Then Get the Hell Out of America, Sick of people not appreciating what we have and Why we have it. If you don’t appreciate America then Leave! This is the Best Damn Country in the world. God Bless America💙🇺🇸❤️
That is a very frustrating aspect of our freedoms... That it permits those who criticize our freedoms to attack them from within. I would gladly pay to have such people deported. I'm guessing that I would return a hefty profit from a much humbled refugee.
I loved the opening clip on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss8O8kKiekM
Make me. Just because I can visibly see it vanishing doesn't mean I don't appreciate what is increasingly slipping through our fingers (allowing tech oligarchs to set up a surveillance state under the guise of being competitive with China is foolish, same with the empire building on behalf of a foreign country as we fall further into unsustainable debt). The Boston tea partiers didn't bend over like you're insinuating I do, so heal yourself.
You are completely missing the Point! Figure it out before you jump your skies learn the facts!
Please enlighten me to these facts. I don't subscribe to some secret military operation. No one's coming to save us but ourselves.