Taking America Back

By: Al Benson, Jr.

For over three decades, with my activities in conservative, patriotic, and Southern heritage movements, I have heard about all manner of plans, projects, and programs for ‘taking America back’ to where she needs to be. I have no doubt whatever that the vast majority of folks involved in most of these projects have been and are sincere, honest, patriotic people that love their country, see many of the real problems and really want to do something about them. And I would not discourge them from doing much of what they want to do. They protest against big government, liberals in Congress, foreign aid, and all manner of problems – and no honest person can disagree with them that all these are major problems in our day.

I guess my major problem with most of them is that they do not seem to know or understand history. Most of the ‘let’s take back America’ programs I’ve seen over the years seem to take the tack that we only ‘lost’ America sometime in the early 1930s, right around when FDR came into office. I think, without their realizing it, what many of these good people really want to do is to take America back to the America they remember growing up in during the 1950s and early 60s. Somehow it all seemed so much less complicated then, when they were young. It wasn’t, but it seemed that way to them and that’s what they would like to get America ‘back’ to.

Actually, these folks are 100 years too late. The disintegration of America did not start with FDR in the 1930s – it started with the advent of religious apostasy and socialism back in the 1830s – and the American culture has been slowly and systematically undergoing subtle destruction ever since then. The government school system in the North in the 1830s and then in the South after the War of Northern Aggression, as a major component of ‘reconstruction’ has played a major role in the destruction of the true American culture that was present at this country’s beginning.

No one alive today has ever lived in the America that our founders gave to us. To think that we have and do betrays an ignorance of accurate history – something else the government schools are mostly responsible for.

The truth is that the old American Republic the founders bequeathed to us died with the advent of the Lincoln administration in 1861 and with the later ‘reconstruction’ first of the South, and, as that seemed to prove successful, then the rest of the country. The conclusion of the War of Northern Aggression showed that we were no longer a nation of sovereign states that delegated certain specified powers to the federal government while retaining the rest. That was gone forever. Indeed, that war made of us a centralized nation-state like most of the rest of the world. Our experiment with a republican form of government was ended. Oh sure, we retained the verbal platitudes and lip service to our founding principles, but in reality, they were gone, and thanks to apostasy, much of the old Christian culture that gave us the original republic was gone, too.

What little of our original culture remains

[and most of that is in the South] is under constant assault by the minions of political correctness and the cultural Marxists – and the people who should have the backbone to resist this are rushing in droves to capitulate, so they migh remain ‘relevant’ to modern society. I am afraid that even if, by some fluke, we ‘got’ America back in our day, we wouldn’t know what to do with her and we would end up trying to remake her into a caricature of life in the 1950s.

Before we try to ‘get America back’ what we really need to do is to attempt to regain the Christian culture that gave us the original America to begin with. That culture was mostly gone in the North by the 1860s, thanks to Unitarianism, abolitionism, and other related apostasies, and the Yankee ‘reconstruction’ program drastically attempted to remove it from the South after that, and nearly succeeded.

We must go back and relearn our history. We must begin to grasp the fact that the America most people claim to want, and really know nothing about, was lost to us with the Northern victory in the war and has not been seen since then. Many will now complain that the liberties Mr. Lincoln boldly stole during the war have been restored, but have they really? Lincoln started a dangerous precedent that has been repeated right down to our day with such things as the Patriot Act.

The War of Northern Aggression was our French Revolution and America has never recovered from the results of it. It gave us the big government schemes of Lincoln and later of the Congressional radical abolitionists and all that has never been reversed to this day.

To its credit, the South, for all its imperfections, saw where Lincoln was going with the tariffs and as a lackey of the Northeastern money interests and they resisted. Frank Conner, author of the recent book "The South Under Siege 1830-2000 has noted that, in many ways, the war was really an ideological war. He says "The war of liberal North against conservative Christian South began in the 1830s; and it continues unabated to this day…Only when American history is viewed in that light do the relations between North and South from the 1830s until now make any sense at all."

So we need to go back and relearn our history, and, in doing that, attempt to recapture and grasp the mindset of the culture we have lost and which we need to regain if ever America is to really be ‘taken back.’ A good beginning in this critical area would be home education – the teaching of proper history to our children, that they might begin to know the truth and, in God’s time, begin to build on that truth. Short of a spiritual revival, America will not be ‘taken back’ in this generation, and if we do not begin to do the work of training our children spiritually, culturally, and historically, she will never be taken back.

Copyright ©, 2003 Al Benson Jr.

Originally Published at: http://www.patriotist.com/benson.htm