Moses and the Founders
By Ross Coggins
[Ross Coggins is a former college Religion professor, missionary to Indonesia, Christian Life Commission associate, and State Department specialist dealing with world hunger. He now lives in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Sherwood Forest in Maryland.]
Thank God for Charlton Heston! Whenever I turn on my television lately I find his ruggedly handsome image and his Moses-down-from-the-mountain voice exhorting us to reject the counsel of our lying leaders who would take away our guns or force us to register them. His logic is irresistible–especially when he intones the clincher: What would the founders think?
The appeal to the founders is long overdue. Just as our fundamentalist Christian friends insist on biblical literalism, we should insist that our politics be guided by the precepts of the nation`s founders. When they guaranteed constitutionally the right to bear arms, they rebutted every argument for gun controls. Never mind that they defined this right in terms of "a well regulated militia" or that conditions in colonial America were different. Our right to carry a gun is forever set in concrete. Every time we have forsaken the founders` clear guidance, disaster has resulted.
Take the right to vote, for example. The founders strictly limited suffrage to white property-holding males. Consider the chaos of our current political scene! Can any sane American argue that it would not be better if all these poor people, these minorities, these women were barred from the voting booth? The founders envisioned a more stable, a more tranquil society. They knew that by limiting the vote to the better element, peace, public righteousness, and civic order would follow. As a white, male property-owner, I cherish the hope that this great nation one day will wake up and restore the founders` electoral system.
Closely linked to suffrage is the way congressional representation is determined. Seats in the House of Representatives were apportioned on the basis of a census count. Here once again we have diverged from the original constitution, according to which the founders stipulated that in the allocation of congressional seats to the states, slaves were only counted as three-fifths of a person. (When Thomas Jefferson was consorting with Sally Hemmings, did he feel that the adultery was only three-fifths of a sin? A venal rather than a mortal sin? Has Jerry Falwell offered an opinion on this?) Back to our thesis: the founders were right. Think of the turmoil that has resulted from equal political representation for all: countless struggles for civil rights have disturbed our tranquility since 1870, when for the first time all humans in the nation were accounted as equals in the census. Give people equal representation and the next thing you know they`ll demand equal rights. As Charlton Heston says, What would the founders think!
We could list any number of subversive betrayals of our founders` vision, but the present challenge is to our right to bear arms. There are those who say that the proliferation of gun deaths across our nation constitutes a mandate to control the sale and use of guns, particularly hand guns. We must resist this. Fortunately, one of the presidential candidates, Governor George W. Bush, is a proven champion of the second amendment, even to the extent that he promoted and signed a Texas state law permitting citizens to carry concealed weapons, subsequently clarified to permit carrying them into churches. Unfortunately, there is recent news of a shooting in a church. A man entered a Texas Baptist church in Fort worth and shot four people before taking his own life. Gun control nuts will miss the real lesson in this tragic event! In all probability the victims were unarmed. Where was the pastor`s weapon in the moment of crisis? Could not a pistol-packing pastor have saved the day? In view of the proliferation of church conflict today, shoud not every pastor, every deacon, and every elder carry a gun?
Some of our Christian friends wear a button inscribed WWJD, meaning "What would Jesus do?" In these troubled times, I believe Charlton Heston would be happy to see us wear a WWFT button–What would the founders think-as we confront the complex ethical problems of this Brave New Millennium?
