Allegiance
Our allegiance should be to God, family, country, and principles of freedom, not to people. We vote for and support people who we believe honor and advance God, country, family, and principles of freedom. But, we acknowledge that they can make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes, and we must not pledge allegiance to them. Allegiance to people can lead to politics of personality, not principle, then to demagoguery and unrighteous dominion.
If we honor and pledge allegiance to God, we we seek righteousness, love, kindness, and goodness. We seek to lift the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed. We have a civil, respectful debate on the most effective way to do that including having a thoughtful, balanced discourse on the proper role of government, policy, taxation, and public welfare in achieving that. If we honor God, we oppose racism, bigotry, and oppression and do everything we can to purge it from our culture, our government, and most of all our own hearts and actions.
If we honor and pledge allegiance to family, we strengthen our own homes around principles of righteousness. We should honor all families and the essential need to strengthen them. We should recognize the entire human race is one family of brothers and sisters where love and dignity are essential, where respectful debate is essential in solving hard problems, where contention and anger are a cancer that rots away all families from the entirety of the human family down to our own immediate family.
If we honor and pledge allegiance to country, we protect ourselves from evils in the world and those who would destroy us. We respect and protect our sovereignty including our borders and our economic agency. But, we also do that in a way that elevates our stature on the world stage so that we can spread the blessings of liberty we espouse throughout the world and establish peace, safety, stability, and tranquility to all people and all nations. We cannot be the world police beyond our means or disallow other nations from carrying their fair share of that burden. But, we cannot sit idly by and allow evil to advance. We must do what we reasonably can to protect the vulnerable outside our shores. And, we must know that if we don’t act, inevitably, those evils will invade our shores. We must expect our nation to be exceptional in every way, not because we think we are better, more elite, or because the plight and progress of other nations doesn’t matter, but because the better we are, the more we can lift our own people and then from there the rest of the world.
If we honor and pledge allegiance to freedom, we will uphold just enough honorable and righteous government to fill its proper role, but not so much government that we surrender or essential rights and freedoms. There is endless debate as to where to draw the line on that proper role. That debate must be had with civil respect. But, it is a foundational principle that there comes a point where too much government does more harm than good. The most fundamental aim of our nation’s founders and the Constitution they were so inspired to author is to shield us from the never ending pressure to grow government beyond is proper role, its proper limits of power, and its proper limits of control of our freedom.
There are men and women on both sides of the political spectrum that honor all of these things. There are also those on both sides that do not. Support, vote for, and thank the ones who do. But, allegiance is far too sacred and binding to bestow on flawed people who can so easily betray the only things we should pledge allegiance to: God, family, country, and freedom.
