The first revolution was not political. It was angelic. Before any throne was overturned on earth, a created spirit of surpassing beauty looked upon the order God had established and spoke the two words that have echoed through every rebellion since: non serviam — “I will not serve.” Lucifer did not deny that God existed. He denied that he owed God submission. He preferred his own will, his own judgment, his own glory, to the order in which he had been placed. Every revolution that has followed, in heaven and on earth, is a translation of those two words into new circumstances. This is the lens through which the American founding must be read, and it is precisely the lens that Michael Knowles, in his recent and much-celebrated defense of the American project at a CatholicVote event, declines to pick up.

Dr. E. Michael Jones, whatever one makes of his many provocations and his uneasy relationship with the fullness of Catholic tradition, performed a genuine service in tracing this genealogy in his study of the Puritan settlement of America. The Puritan was the non serviam spirit incarnated in religious form. He had rejected not only the Catholic Church but the very principle of mediated, hierarchical, sacramental authority. He would have no priest between himself and God, no bishop above him, no king he could not depose, no tradition he was bound to honor. He carried his Bible and, in time, his gun, and with them he built a society on the explicit premise that the individual conscience, illuminated directly by the Holy Spirit, needed no authority above itself. This was liberation as Lucifer understood liberation. It was the refusal to serve, dressed in the language of Scripture.

Originally published in Integrity Magazine. Read original article

Original Tags: Church History, Catholic Social Teaching, American Founding, Americanism, French Revolution, Glorious Revolution, US Catholicism