Today we continue our seven part series on freedom principles in this broadcast
We look at the third and fourth citizen mandate that established the foundation for freedom and that's next
Hey, welcome back to the Barry Ferris show. I hope you're doing great. There are seven citizen mandates that lay the foundation upon which freedom is built.
You could call them contract terms and conditions, but that doesn't quite capture the force of keeping the government in its place.
I'm calling them citizen mandates to resurrect the concept that the government is supposed to operate with some humility as the servant of the people.
Though we've seen mandate after mandate come from the government and be foisted upon us, the citizens, it's really supposed to be the other way around.
We know we lose our freedoms if government functions as the ruler over our lives.
But when the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, it started with we, the people, and it started that way for a reason.
The seven citizen mandates had already been contemplated.
They didn't call them that, but they'd already been thought through.
And this document would have authority over any elected or unelected government official.
It would serve to protect us.
In this second episode of the seven part series, I'll describe two more citizen mandates and how they developed.
As a quick refresher from the last episode, the first two mandates date way back to when King John was backed into a corner to sign the Magna Carta of 1215.
He was a bad, evil king.
And even though he and future kings ignored the Magna Carta on a whole bunch of occasions, it laid a historic foundation for two things.
Number one, government shall be limited.
It can't invent arbitrary rules and laws to control the lives of citizens, and it's not supposed to do everything or solve every problem.
Number two, government shall submit to the rule of law.
It has to obey the laws of the land, too.
About 505 years ago, on October 31st, 1517, a German monk of the Augustinian order named Martin Luther sent a letter to his archbishop expressing concern about certain practices of church officials.
In Luther's era, it had become typical for clergymen to sell indulgences in exchange for a pardon from their sins.
To Luther, this amounted to a crime.
Everyone sins.
Using the power of the clergy to extract money from the everyday Joe by capitalizing on his fear was extortion.
So Martin Luther felt this practice was terrible and a terrible affront to real Christianity.
So he sent a letter up the chain of command and he outlined his 95 logical points in his argument.
Luther was initially very polite, formal, and not like in the movie.
He sort of offered the letter with an apology.
In fact, he asks forgiveness of the archbishop for having, and this is a quote,
dared to think of a letter to the height of your sublimity, your sublimity.
I mean, that's your exaltation-ness, your most highness.
So in other words, you're an authority over me and I'm just saying these things because I'm hoping you guys will see the issue at hand and correct it.
And since he's one of the most studied people in the past 500 years, we can say with certainty that he was not planning at this time to start a revolution.
He just wanted his church to reform from the inside.
And yet this letter, this 95 theses, this letter is responsible for kicking off one of the most important social transformations in all of human history.
What we now call the Protestant Reformation.
The Reformation was ultimately about the rejection of central authority, specifically the authority of the church.
In the early days of the Christian faith, the believers read the Bible in their community meetings and they talked about it.
As Christianity grew, just like a lot of companies or governments, it became more centralized and more bureaucratic.
When Rome fell in the 5th century, it left a power vacuum across Western Europe.
This is when the Catholic Church stepped in to fill the void.
By the 1500s, the Catholic Church had firmly cemented its influence over nearly every aspect of life in trade and commerce, politics, family affairs, war, social trends, and just about everything else.
The way they pulled this off was through an overemphasis on church.
And the way they pulled that off was with a monopoly on the Catholic Church.
and theology. Their ideas couldn't be challenged.
For Western Europe the Bible was written in Latin so very few commoners could
read it.
This gave church officials uncontested control over their flock.
Interpretations could be made to the benefit of a church leader and the
commoner would have no way to refute it.
Martin Luther became the champion of Catholics who were weary of church
authority.
He was immediately viewed as a threat by the Pope in Rome
and church officials everywhere ordered their top scholars
to refute Luther's arguments. Luther responded
by writing a short simple explanation of his views in the local German language
so that common people could read it and understand it. He became the equivalent
of a rock star.
His writing was incredibly popular and widely circulated
which infuriated the Pope even more.
So with the church's every effort to silence and malign Martin Luther he
responded with more
simple German language essays for the locals
and he used the Bible as his authority
and the everyday man ate it up.
Luther's popularity grew. Young people
flocked to Luther's agenda. They didn't do everything innocently. For example they
seized and destroyed some of the church's anti-Luther propaganda. That's
not good but
regardless by the time the church had excommunicated Martin Luther in 1521
he was already a hero
and a symbol of independent thinking. The following year Luther's German
language translation of the New Testament was published.
It was revolutionary. For the first time
in a thousand years people could read it for themselves.
They could compare what they read with what they saw and decide whether or not
they wanted to reject church authority and explore their own spiritual beliefs.
They could study it, think about it. Suddenly
there was no more middleman standing between an individual and his
relationship with God.
Talk about a massive restructuring plan.
This was the ultimate decentralization
plan. What made the Reformation take off with so much speed
was a relatively new game-changing technology.
It was the movable type printing press.
The Gutenberg printing press had been invented 80 years earlier but
in those days things move slow. There really wasn't that much to publish that
people wanted to read
until Martin Luther translated the Bible in their
language. So now this mystery book had become available
to everyone. The powerful technology allowed Luther and his followers to
rapidly publish their ideas
including the German language Bible and all their commentaries.
They could spread them across the continent. This changed
everything. Now all of Europe could read the Bible for themselves.
And there they found that they could find God for themselves.
There was a 500th anniversary in 2017, just a few years ago,
and they honored the Lutheran and Protestant Reformation
in general. It was honored by people from all over the world.
They came to Wittenberg, Germany to celebrate the meaning and the impact of
the Reformation.
The scholars lay out the fact that the Protestant Reformation was religious
but it was also much more.
It gave permission for people to challenge social,
economic, and political norms.
If Luther could challenge the basic
tenet of salvation, not by works but by grace,
not through a church leader, but by your own individual belief and faith,
then really anything was up for grabs. Luther also laid an important
philosophical foundation. Luther argued that the Bible was constant
and the ultimate authority. The Bible trumped any man
and their interpretation, including the Pope. So if the Bible read one way and a
leader did something else, the Bible was the ultimate authority.
And now the ultimate authority was in everyone's hands.
So this laid the foundation for corruption to be identified at the
leadership level and for interpretation of what is true
to be more thoroughly vetted. The religious leadership class would have
more difficulty making things up,
the most egregious of which was the selling of salvation,
the indulgences. The Protestant Reformation
emphasized marriage, family, hard work, and education.
Later, followers of Luther emphasized literacy, which expanded dramatically
throughout Europe.
But regardless of your faith or belief, it's an empirical fact
that the Protestant Reformation opened the door for the common man
to explore brand new worlds.
For example, people focus their attention to the history of Greece and Rome.
They had never done that before. That led to the Renaissance.
In addition to history, economics and philosophy was impacted
by the Protestant Reformation. And the Protestant Reformation led to a
scientific revolution.
The Bible says to test everything against the written word.
It's good to be skeptical. Men can fail.
Things should be measured, peer-reviewed, and open for public examination.
The scientific method would become mainstream.
And it led to economic theory being challenged.
Perhaps individuals could take control of their own well-being, invent things for themselves,
create and produce, and they could enjoy and own the benefits of it individually.
And it spread to politics.
The Bible spoke of equal treatment, due process, limited government, and the concept that leaders
should serve.
If the Bible was the ultimate authority in matters related to God and spiritual quest,
then some form of written law, later understood to be the constitutional law, would be the
ultimate authority for political debate.
This would trump what any leader, including the king or the pope, said.
The Protestant Reformation laid the intellectual argument for representative government.
It led to the case for capitalism, with its exhortations to work hard at an exceptionally
high level, even when your supervisor is not looking over your shoulder.
It led to individualism, with its focus on personal responsibility.
It led to civil rights, with its respectful treatment of all people, regardless of origin.
So things didn't immediately get better for everyone.
People just don't give up their power that well.
The king and the pope owned a coordinated, centralized power structure, and it would
take another 350 years to crumble.
But the Pandora's box had been opened.
The Reformation had a direct impact on the foundational mandates upon government that
enable the pillars of freedom to be supported.
So now let's fast forward 100 years.
In 1620, there were 101 passengers that were on this boat.
Many were fleeing the king's religious persecution.
They practiced a form of Christianity called Puritans.
Others were hired guns.
They were headed to northern Virginia, but the storm sent them north to just south of
Boston near Cape Cod.
There were laws in Virginia, but there were not laws here.
This could have turned into a disaster.
Just about any form of government is better than total anarchy.
So they drafted a simple document.
Every able adult man would have to sign the document before anyone was allowed off the
boat.
The compact acknowledged liberty based on law, based on order, and gave each person
the right to participate in the government.
This was known as the Mayflower Compact.
It was very simple and short, like a paragraph.
But effectively, they all had to make a covenant that they would comply with the terms before
getting off that boat.
No to anarchy, yes to justice, equality, and personal responsibility.
It's pretty amazing because it was not just the first document that established self-government
in the New World, but it remained active until 1691.
So the Magna Carta laid out the first two mandates for government to be limited and
obey its own laws, and the Mayflower Compact lays out the third.
Government shall apply all laws equally.
And when there was a doubt about what that meant, they would consult the Christian faith
for guidance.
It had to give the same hearing to a person of low standing as the person with high standing.
No favoritism.
Later, some complained about the explicit Christian faith component, but it worked pretty
well for 71 years.
19 years later, and about 130 miles west is booming Hartford, Connecticut.
Connecticut's called the Constitution State for a reason.
It established the first real constitution.
In 1639, the state adopted the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut.
This established the framework for our federal U.S. Constitution.
It governed the river towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield.
The preamble states, under the guidance of God.
The Mayflower Compact was a solid one-paragraph statement.
The Fundamental Orders set up a more detailed scheme of how government should work and how
free men would remain free.
It trumpeted the right of the individual.
It did not honor the British crown for ultimate authority.
It gave that to the elected general court, which came from the people of Connecticut.
It described how you could vote by secret paper ballot.
There would be no religious test for serving in politics.
There'd be term limits.
How about them apples?
This became, in many respects, the basis for the U.S. Constitution.
In this document, the first three mandates are certainly covered, or at least assumed,
but there's an important fourth mandate that's covered in this document and not in the previous
three.
Government shall protect the rights of the individual.
The right to vote in secret, no religious test to run for office, and remain limited
in size and reach.
We're going to protect that individual.
Keep his rights protected.
That's going to become an obligation of the government.
The first four of seven mandates, which establish a foundation for the people of Connecticut,
Pillars of freedom are government shall be limited, government shall submit to the rule
of law itself, and then government shall apply all laws equally to everyone else, and government
shall protect the rights of the individual.
The concept that no class of person was better or worse than another in terms of treatment
by the government, I mean that's new.
This was great news for the lower class.
If they obeyed the law, in theory they would have equal standing in the court of law next
to the wealthy guy or the wealthiest guy in town.
The concept that the government would be responsible to protect the rights of the individual, wow,
this is extraordinary, brand new.
Government would now view one of its primary responsibilities to craft laws and adjudicate
those laws on the basis of protecting people's individual rights.
These mandates upon the government were building the foundation for the incontrovertible case
for the three pillars of freedom, but at this time the U.S. is not a country yet.
There are other documents of influence, I mean certainly you've got the 1689 English
Bill of Rights, but in 1776 the founders weren't feeling the love from England.
They had a lot of complaints about those very rights not being applied to them or being
violated.
In their minds, before the Declaration, the three most influential political documents,
documents that had a stamp, a seal, or a signature that had impact on the community with the
force of law, are the Magna Carta, way back in 1215, an explicit attempt to impose upon
the king a limit to his power and to ensure protection of rights to the citizen.
This led to the belief that constitutional law is superior to a monarch's.
Number two, the Mayflower Compact, 1620, a voluntary commitment to be governed by equal
laws.
It stressed justice, equality, and personal responsibility.
And then number three is the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 1639.
This increased the rights of the individual, the right to vote secret, limited the power
of the government, established the basis for much of the U.S. Constitution.
So now we've discussed four of the seven mandates that we the people have upon our
government.
Next time we'll look at the case for absolute truth and its role in the foundation for freedom.
In a couple weeks we'll have the whole foundation laid.
It'll all cure.
And it will be obvious to any honest observer that the three pillars of freedom were not
frivolously derived.
To your freedom.
God bless you.
See you soon.
Hi, I'm David Farah.
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