Dear Commissioner Zylstra:

When a person or nation has sinned, the proper response is not treating it as no sin, but rather confessing the sin and repenting of it. The USA sinned in abandoning the original national Christian covenant – the Articles of Confederation – and illegally adopting the Federal Constitution. I fail to see any way out of our descent into a modern Babel that bypasses repentance of the apostasy at its root. Perhaps no nation in world history has been transformed from Biblical Christian to anti-Christian as much as the USA. At least Sodom and Gomorrah could argue they ended hardly worse than they began.

1. Why do I believe the Federal Constitution is not an explicitly Christian constitution?

I would love for the Federal Constitution to be explicitly Christian, but I cannot come up with arguments that rebut articles like https://constitutionalstudies.wisc.edu/index.php/cs/article/view/21/17 to the extent they prove there is no place in the text ratified that Jesus Christ is Lord. James Madison was a very detailed, deliberate man, who made sure every word and phrase of the Federal Constitution text was carefully crafted. Omission of the phrase “Year of Our Lord” from its text can surely be no accident, and quite fits the evidence concerning Madison’s view of the role of religion in politics, such as documented at https://americanreformer.org/2022/09/the-original-anti-christian-nationalist/ .

There have been various attempts to amend the Federal Constitution to make it explicitly Christian, such as documented in the book at https://academic.oup.com/jcs/article-abstract/61/4/658/5522927?login=false and https://banneroftruth.org/us/about/banner-authors/a-a-hodge/ , but all such historical efforts have failed. Furthermore, the Federal Constitution banned religious test oaths of any officer at the Federal level, and the 14th Amendment later extended that down to the state and local levels. The Federal level sin penetrated down to all parts of the Washington, DC-based empire.

2. Why do I believe the Articles of Confederation is an explicitly Christian constitution?

Because the prima facie evidence is there in the text of the document ratified by the states. Who is the “Our Lord” born “One thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy seven” years before the US Congress agreed “to certain articles of Confederation” and ” the Great Governor of the World” who inclined “the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union…”? It is clear they had one Person in mind as this sovereign Lord of the USA : Jesus Christ. It is right there in the text. All of the surrounding historical data corroborates it, and their political actions were consistent with it.

Furthermore, there was no ban on religious test oaths in the Articles, and in fact the national level officers in the Confederation Congress from the states were to be professing Christians (even if some were not sincere in their outward profession). All of the confederated States had Christian acknowledgments in their state constitutions, and many even required one to be a Protestant Christian to be a civil officer, including as representatives to the national Confederation Congress.

3. Why do I support your colleague’s’ Resolution over your amended version. Is it simply your explicit reference to the ability of the judiciary to interpret the Constitution?

Again, the Federal Constitution is really a hybrid document of two contradicting political philosophies: federalism and anti-federalism. The first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) are the essentially anti-federalist portion, and that is what the Ottawa County Board majority effectively hung its hat on for its resolution. (e.g., the 2nd Amendment gives elected local and state leaders the right to armed citizens militias to protect against national government tyranny, which implies they were empowered to judge when such tyranny was occurring.) Your proposed version hung its hat on the federalist portion of the Federal Constitution, which cedes to an unelected Federal judiciary (ending at the Federal Supreme Court) alone the supreme right to interpret and adjudicate the Federal Constitution. The Federal Constitution itself does not resolve the contradiction.

There is a huge consequential difference between your version and the majority version: your rudder steers the ship in a federalist direction, and theirs in an antifederalist direction. The rudder movement may seem small, but its effect on ship direction is massive. (Presumably you voted ‘no’ to the majority version because you felt there was some consequential difference. It is not like you supported both versions either.)

Since my political philosophy is anti-federalist, there should be no surprise that I would agree with the Ottawa County Board majority and disagree with your version, while at the same time urging the majority of the need to go further in their anti-federalism. If the majority takes their anti-federalism to its logical end, they will end up where anti-federalist Patrick Henry was when debating federalist James Madison concerning which constitution the nation should embrace. They will end up seeing the need to return to the Articles of Confederation. As a practical matter, under the Federal Constitution, the promises of the Bill of Rights lack the practical tools needed to protect them against overwhelming Federal Government power. It would be a fool’s errand and erroneous now to use guns to change the situation and return us to the Articles of Confederation. I for one would have nothing to do with such an armed revolt.

The proper tool to use under these circumstances is not guns, but the word of God. It is the tool God will bless. If they will imprison us or worse, it will be because we spoke the truth, and they did not want to hear it. It will not be because we used armed violence or planned to do so. “Kiss the Son” is far more powerful than anything the advocates of federalist secular humanism have. Christ’s victory is predestined: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CJ2CUNG .

Thanks again for the discourse,

J. Parnell McCarter

Note: Though I did not go into this in the letter above, I believe it would be erroneous to use guns (but instead the word of God and truth should be employed) because of the roadmap provided in scripture (and especially the Book of Revelation) as to what Christians should do with respect to this modern Babel.