Where particular designs and private ends prevail against the public profit, there questionless is a tyrant and tyranny. (p. 159)
In the desert of fantasy found today in America’s intellectual, religious, and historical studies, the past is not only an unknown land but an invisible one. If the writings of the past — which would intellectually annihilate the validity of what are comically called “progressive ideas” — get in the way of contemporary authors, they and the elites, including clerics of all Christian sects, simply delete or suppress them to prevent an accurate recounting of history and irrefutable truth.
I have noted several times in this space that Calvinism-based, Reformed Protestant pastors were an essential component in the founding of American independence and liberty, as well as a quiet but indispensable partner with the Founders and their successors in governing the post-revolution republic. The strength of character and belief among Reformed Protestant pastors and their flocks helped Americans persevere to victory in the fight with Britain, Indeed, the British military named the pastors “the black-robed battalion”, and held them responsible for stoking and maintaining war-long colonial resistance.
After the war the pastors played their part in keeping their congregants on the Biblical straight-and-narrow and thereby limiting behavior that would create a need for national, state, or local governments to intervene and smash disorder and/or rampant crime. Then, as today, those pastors knew that a government which loses the affection of its citizens is on the road to civil war and tyranny. Today’s pastors, however, appear to ignore history and instead preach acceptance of tyranny and depravity as another form of normal, welcoming predators into their congregations, some even flying their flag.
Many of today’s Reformed Protestant pastors seem to keep the knowledge of their faith’s role in defeating the British and building the republic to themselves in order to maintain tax-exempt status, full pews and collection plates, donations of the rich and effete in their congregations, to keep the rainbow flag of sexual depravity flying, to normalize pedophilia, to keep silent about abortion/infant dismemberment, and the genital mutilation and grooming of youngsters, and support Democratic presidents who have lusted for and led us, since 1917, into needless, bloody, and bankrupting wars and now to deliberate national economic impoverishment.
For the past few years I have been — for another project — looking at the doctrinal basis of Reformed Protestantism’s sure-fire ability to identify tyrants and to, in stark and Biblical terms, justify the duty of their congregants – as Christians and free-and-armed men — not only to oppose the enemy but to rid their commonwealth of them. The leaders of Reformed Protestantism built this doctrine through their inherent commonsense, experience, Biblical knowledge, and writings that accrued over several centuries. One of the first books on this issue was published more nearly 450 years ago – in 1579 — by an author using the pseudonym “Stephen Junius Brutus”. The book is called Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants), [1] and it remains the groundwork of the doctrine.
That said, the book helps – via its commonsense, accurate depiction of human experience, and application of scripture – to frankly inform today’s citizen, he who in the 1500s was a king’s subject, of their personal religious and civil responsibility to, as a last resort, take up arms and rid their land of the tyrant and his associates.
Following are small portions of the book. The first set of quotations pertains to defining tyrants, the second speaks to individual Christians who are responsible to God for ridding what the author calls “the commonwealth” of a tyrant and his liege-men. I was tempted to annotate each quotation in the first section with examples of our current tyrannical regime’s actions, but the language of each quote is so clear and pertinent to America in 2022 that it might well be a mirror image of tyranny as it is described in Brutus’s book.
Identifying and describing a tyrant:
–“The tyrant advances above and in opposition to the ancient and worthy nobility, mean and unworthy persons; to the end that these base fellows, being absolutely his creatures, might applaud and apply themselves to the fulfilling of all his loose and unruly desires.” (p. 154)
–The tyrant hates and suspects discreet and wise men, and fears no opposition more than virtue, as being conscious of his own vicious courses, and esteeming his own security to consist principally in a general corruption of all estates, introduces multiplicity of taverns, gaming houses, masks, stage plays, brothel houses, and all other licentious superfluities that might effeminate and bastardise noble spirits….” (p. 154)
“A tyrant as much as in him lies, prohibits or avoids all public assemblies, fears parliaments, diets, and meetings of the general estates, flies the light, affecting (like the bat) to converse only in darkness; yea he is jealous of the very gesture, countenance, and discourse of his subjects. Briefly, after the manner of the abominable Vitellius [Roman Emperor in AD 69], he is not ashamed to say that the carcass of a dead enemy, especially a subject’s, yields a good savour. (pp. 154-155)
–“Therefore, it is that tyrants, although they have such numberless guards about them to drive off throngs of people from approaching them, yet cannot all those numbers secure them from doubts, jealousies and distrusts, which continually afflict and terrify their timorous consciences: yea, in the midst of their greatest strength, the tyrannizer of tyrants, fear, makes prize of their souls, and their triumphs in their affliction.” (pp. 155-156)
–“If a tyrant wants civil broils to exercise his cruel disposition in, he makes wars abroad; erects idle and needless trophies to continually employ his tributaries, that they might not have leisure to think on other things, as Pharaoh did the Jews, and Policrates [AKA: Polycrates, tyrant of Samos 540-522 BC] the Samians; therefore, he always prepares for, or threatens war, or, at least, seems so to do, and so still rather draws mischief on, than puts it further off. (p. 156)
–“A tyrant leaves no design unattempted by which he may fleece his subjects of their substance, and turn it to his proper benefit, that being continually troubled in gaining means to live, they may have no leisure, no hope, how to regain their liberty.” (p.156)
–“A tyrant (the enemy of nature) compels them [his subjects] to turn the points of their swords into their own proper entrails. A tyrant fills his garrisons with strange soldiers, builds citadels against his subjects, disarms the people, throws down their forts, makes himself formidable with guards of strangers, or men only fit for pillage and spoil, gives pensions out of the public treasury to spies and calumniating informers, dispersed through all cities and provinces. … Therefore, it is that tyrants, although they have such numberless guards about them to drive off throngs of people from approaching them, yet cannot all those numbers secure them from doubts, jealousies and distrusts, which continually afflict and terrify their timorous consciences: yea, in the midst of their greatest strength, the tyrannizer of tyrants, fear, makes prize of their souls, and their triumphs in their affliction. (pp. 155-156)
“A tyrant leaves no design unattempted by which he may fleece his subjects of their substance, and turn it to his proper benefit, that being continually troubled in gaining means to live, they may have no leisure, no hope, how to regain their liberty.” (156)
“A tyrant extorts unjustly from many to cast prodigally upon two or three minions, and those unworthy; he imposes on all, and exacts from all, to furnish their superfluous and riotous expenses: he builds his own, and followers’ fortunes on the ruins of the public: he draws out the people’s blood by the veins of their means, and gives it presently to carouse to his court-leeches.” (156-157)
“If a tyrant, as heretofore Tiberius, Nero, Commodus and others, did suffer his subjects to have some breathing time from unreasonable exactions, and like sponges to gather some moisture’ it is but to squeeze them out afterwards to his own use…” (p. 157)
“[The tyrant] feigns also to be exceedingly affected to the public good; not so much for the love of it, as for fear of his own safety. Furthermore, he desires much to be esteemed just and loyal in some affairs, purposely to deceive and betray more easily in matters of greater consequence: much like those thieves who maintain themselves by thefts and robberies, yet cannot long subsist in their trade without exercising some parcel of justice in their proceedings. He also counterfeits the merciful, but it is in pardoning of such malefactors, in punishing whereof he might more truly gain the reputation of a pitiful prince.” pp. (157-158)
–-Duty to remove the tyrant
“Now, at the last we are come as it were by degrees to the chief and principal point of the question. … It now follows that we treat, how, and by whom a tyrant may be lawfully resisted, and who are the persons who ought to be chiefly actors therein, and what course is to be held, that the action may be managed according to right and reason.” (p. 159)
“First, the law of nature teaches and commands us to maintain and defend our lives and liberties, without which life is scant worth the enjoying, against all injury and violence. Nature has imprinted this by instinct in dogs against wolves, in bulls against lions, betwixt pigeons and sparrow hawks, betwixt pullen [domestic fowl] and kites [hawks], and yet much more in man against man himself, if man become a beast: and therefore he who questions the lawfulness of defending oneself, does, as much as in him lies, question the law of nature. … If therefore, any offer either by fraud or force to violate this law, we are all bound to resist him, because he wrongs that society to which we owe all that we have, and would ruin our country, to the preservation whereof all men by nature, by law and by solemn oath, are strictly obliged: insomuch that fear or negligence, or bad purposes, make us omit this duty, we may justly be accounted breakers of the laws, betrayers of our country, and contemners [those who despise] of religion.” (p. 161)
“The body of the people must needs be the sovereign of those who represent it, which in some places are the electors, palatines, peers; in other, the assembly of the general estates. And, if the tyranny have gotten such sure footing, as there is no other means but force to remove him, then it is lawful for them to call the people to arms, to enroll and raise forces, and to employ the utmost of their power, and use against him all advantages and stratagems of war, as against the enemy of the commonwealth, and the disturber of the public peace.” (p. 169)
“But that people are truly acquit from all perfidiousness, who publicly renounce the unjust dominion of a tyrant, or he, striving unjustly by strong hand to continue the possession, do constantly endeavour to expulse him by force of arms.” (p. 170)
Reflected on the foregoing for a few minutes. Then ask your pastor – Reformed Protestant or of any other Christian sect — why he or she has abandoned God, his fellow believers, and our common country.
–Endnotes:
–1.) Stephen Junius Brutus. Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants), Moscow, Idaho, Canon Press, 2020. Translated by Walter Walker, with an introduction by Glenn Sunshine. All bracketed page numbers above are from this book.
–There also is an English-language PDF of Brutus’s work at: http://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3020pdf/vindiciae.pdf
