LINCOLN, WASHINGTON DEFEND GEN. BOYKIN
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By now, you know the story: Lt Gen. William Boykin said, in uniform, that he's a Christian. He also uttered various other offensive remarks, such as that America is a Christian nation (meaning majority Christian, not officially designated by law Christian), and that his God is bigger than the god of a bloodthirsty terrorist. How gauche.
There have been calls for his head; his bosses have demurred, arguing shockingly that the general is free to be a Christian and say so. How horrifying. What have we come to if we're actually free to be--shudder--Christians--and say so in public? Surely the Founding Fathers, and surely that legendary agnostic Abe Lincoln, would disapprove. After all, the Founders drew up the American blueprints, and Lincoln perhaps more than any other President put real stone around those plans.
Surprisingly, of the Americans of old could rise from the grave and speak, what they would say might just shock us all: Honest Abe and the first George W. said things that sound like they and Gen. Boykin share speechwriters.
The Weekly Standard's David Gelernter has the low-down:
It used to be accepted in America that it was a Christian's right to believe in Christianity and to say so in public. The right even applied to soldiers--in fact to highly placed ones. In the Order for Sabbath Observance of November 1862, Lincoln quoted to his army George Washington's own first general order following the Declaration of Independence: "The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country."
I was struck by this fact during a visit to the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis a while back. For a while, that beautiful structure served as the nation's capital. It was in that building, in the Old Senate room preserved to this day, that Gen. George Washington resigned as commander of the Continental Army and resumed life, for a while, as a private citizen. There stands in that room a mannequin dressed in a replica of the uniform Washington wore on that day when he delivered his resignation speech, and paintings and drawings adorn the walls in the room next door to give us some impression of where everyone was when he delivered that speech. All the heavyweights were there--Franklin, Jefferson (who lived in Virginia, which had adopted Christianity as its official religion at some point in its past, a fact which didn't seem to trouble Jefferson in the least), Madison--the British crown's usual suspects. In that very speech, Washington refers to the "patronage of Heaven" as having helped him toss out the Redcoats. Further, he "consider[ed] it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life, by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping."
If we allow Gen. Boykin to be fired for his remarks, we are not only throwing away a highly decorated soldier, a loyal officer and a fine warrior for the cause of freedom when we need him most, we will also be acting with supreme disregard for the values upon which men like Washington and Lincoln founded and preserved this nation.
Posted by B. Preston at 11:45 AM |
