Issue 1 – October 2025
Why This Magazine?
What Is Solidarity?
What We Can Learn from the Abolitionists
Is “The Left” the Enemy?
The Pursuit of the Highest Happiness
What Next?
Why This Magazine?
I belong to the American Solidarity Party–America’s totally pro-life, Christian Democratic political party, a political home for Catholic and non-Catholic Christians, and for other pro-life people of good will. My wife does not. She’s afraid that, if she were to do anything for a third party, she would be helping to throw elections to the Most Undesirable Major Party (MUMP). So she sticks with the Less Undesirable Major Party (LUMP), despite its known and obvious faults.
The idea came to me that there should be an American Solidarity social movement including people who aren’t interested in third-party politics (like my wife) as well as those who are (like me). My small contribution to the movement, I figured, could be to start this online magazine, so I did. I decided to call it Solid for America instead of American Solidarity just to make it clear that it’s not a mere party organ and to avoid any possibility of confusion.
What’s it about? The ideas of Solid for America are pretty big, and the odds against them may seem pretty high–but perhaps no more so than in the 1830s, when the small and squabbling pro-liberty movement set out to bring down slavery in the US (success came in less than 35 years), or in the 1980s, when Solidarity set out to bring down Communism in Poland (success came in less than 10 years).
What are these big ideas? They’re all about progress toward the fulfillment of America’s greatest traditions–above all, the immortal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to its complete fulfillment in this life and the next. These rights aren’t only for Americans, they’re for everyone throughout the world–even in countries where, today, these rights are most disrespected.
We use different names for these rights, but they can’t be separated in reality. The right to life, in its fullness, includes not only the right to be born and not be killed, but the right to live in peace and freedom in a society ruled by justice and not injustice, which promotes good health and helps the weak and the sick; to seek to form a natural family, to bear (if possible) and educate children; to give and to receive a good education; to become a full member of natural, political, and voluntary communities; to find suitable, worthwhile, and fulfilling work and to own property; to express ideas freely while respecting those who may not agree; and to pursue true and lasting happiness, above all everlasting happiness.
Do we get these rights from any human government? No, they come from the Creator of all life. The purpose of government is to secure these rights, not to give them, much less to take them away. Or, in Lincoln’s words, it’s “to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves.”
The hope of Solid for America is to promote progress toward a society in which all people can exercise these rights for themselves and with each other’s help so far as possible, and in which government faithfully secures these rights so far as needed. For best results, this must be a society of greater respect not only for law and order, but more importantly for religion, morality, and human dignity. And respect for human dignity, it should hardly need to be said–but it does, in this age of constant dissension, vituperation, and increasing ideological violence–includes respect for the dignity of those who strongly disagree with us.
Do we face even more fearsome prospects today than the pro-liberty movement did before the end of slavery in this country, or than Solidarity did before the downfall of Communism in Poland? Maybe so. The wealth and power of those promoting anti-life, anti-liberty, anti-happiness agendas today are surely at least as great as those of any previous killers, slaveholders, and would-be soul-destroyers–and the number of their slaves and victims is surely not less.
But we, so long as we’re faithful to God and our neighbors, have the most important things the anti-life zealots and profiteers don’t have: malice toward none; charity for all; firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. This is why we hope and pray for solidarity among all Americans of good will; we hope and pray that powerful wrongdoers, of all kinds and all political persuasions, will dwindle ever more in numbers and in power; we hope and pray for lasting victory; we hope and pray that our wounded, divided nation will be healed and will become, more than ever before, a beacon of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all the people of the world.
David McClamrock
David McClamrock is a convert to Christianity, a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College and Notre Dame Law School, a Hoosier lawyer, a father of four home-schooled children, and (last and least) the editor of Solid for America.
What Is Solidarity?
Why is this magazine called Solid for America? Because it promotes “solidarity” for America. So what is the “solidarity” that this magazine promotes?
It isn’t just any old “solidarity.” A basic dictionary definition of “solidarity” is “community of interests, objectives, or standards in a group.” Even the most appalling anti-life, anti-justice groups can have that.
It’s not like the illustration at the top of the Wikipedia article on “Solidarity,” showing workers losing their hands to raise a gigantic fist in opposition to the ruling class. Even if you accept 100 percent of the ideas you’ll meet in this magazine, you won’t start to lose any part of yourself in a gigantic agglomeration, and you won’t engage in “class struggle” to grab money and power from those who have more than you do.
What about the “Solidarity Agenda” promoted by an organization called Campaign for America’s Future? No, that organization promotes “solidarity” in favor of one major party by ranting about how bad the other major party is, and how you must avert utter disaster by getting together with the favored party to defeat the disfavored one. Far too much of that is going on already, in both major parties. You won’t see any of that here.
That’s not to say that everything in that so-called “Solidarity Agenda” is bad. For example, one of the points in that agenda is to “Guarantee the Constitutional Right of Women to Control their Reproductive Decisions.” Rightly understood, that’s a good thing. Women must have the right, without fear of retaliation, to reject loser boyfriends who wish to exploit them and dump them, leaving them to have no living children or to raise their children alone. They must be free to give birth without needless fear of personal or economic pressure to the contrary. They must be accurately informed about the pros and cons of the various non-lethal means of trying to regulate how many or how few children they will have. They must be free to do nothing that will have any chance of leading to unwanted reproduction–and much more.
But all too often, alas, the “right of women to control their reproductive decisions” is merely an ill-devised euphemism for a supposed right to bump off babies before they’re born. The basic idea, in other words, is that it’s all right for me to kill you if you’re small, hidden, speechless, and totally dependent on me–as you and I, and all the human beings who have ever lived, once were totally dependent on our mothers. To judge from its close connection to an anti-life major party, the so-called “Solidarity Agenda” favors merely selective “solidarity” of the big, old, and strong, excluding those who are smallest, youngest, and weakest. This magazine does not.
This magazine favors a pro-life, pro-liberty, pro-happiness conception of solidarity–in line with Christian teaching on human life and society, but not only for Christians. Here’s a basic definition of solidarity according to this conception:
Strong and enduring co-operation for mutual help and help for the helpless, in accordance with the common good.
Strong and enduring. This is the “solid” in “solidarity.” You can rely on solid things (if they’re not too fragile) to be strong and enduring, not evanescent like the hot air spouted by some politicians trying to get votes by making promises they won’t fulfill.
Solidity in human character is a good thing, too. This can be seen in the traditional definition of the virtue of justice: “a constant and perpetual will to render to everyone his right.” Human society and government, likewise, should be solid and reliable in securing the rights of all, not built on the shifting sand of competing factions struggling to subjugate or crush their opponents, or to slash them with razor-thin majorities. People who believe this and act accordingly may well be called “Solids.”
Co-operation. Abraham Lincoln said, “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not do so well, for themselves.” The basic idea is that human intelligence and initiative, on the part of individuals, families, and voluntary associations, should be given every chance to do what they can, before resorting to unfortunate necessities like taxation and government spending. Even where government is needed, things work a lot better when the governed can freely and honestly co-operate with their government for the common good (see below) than when they can’t.
For mutual help. This goes back to the divine plan for the family, the first human society. Even big, complex societies today have the same aim when they work right: mutual help for their members. People living in society need to help one another to secure the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and everything we need to exercise those rights to the fullest. That’s not just a notion made up by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, or by the 18th-century philosophers whose books they read. It goes back to the creation of human beings with freedom and intelligence, made in the image and likeness of God.
And help for the helpless. This also goes back to the divine plan for the family. Babies are helpless, both before and after they’re born; they need a lot of help from their parents and others to live, learn, and grow up. Grown-ups shouldn’t be helpless, but too many of them are, in the face of poverty, exploitation, war, and all kinds of deprivation, abuse, and crime. In short, solidarity is the Golden Rule writ large: you get together and stay together to help the helpless, as you would want and need help if you were helpless.
In accordance with the common good. What is the common good? It is not just the good of the government, or of the ruling party, or of any powerful group that might wish to exploit ordinary people by claiming their exploitation serves the common good. A common good, of any kind, is one that everyone can share, without diminishing it by sharing. A common good could be the good of the knowledge and love of God in the communion of saints, shared by all the blessed in eternal life. It could be the good of teamwork and victory for a basketball team. It could be the good of mutual love, shared by all the members of a family.
The common good of human society as a whole, in the simplest terms, is this:
Everything needed for society to protect and promote the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There’s no way to say everything about “everything,” but the common good of society includes at least these things: peace, traditionally defined as “the tranquility of order”; justice, including honest, unbiased, and effective enforcement of necessary laws; care for the earth as our common home; and the power to produce and rightly distribute an abundance of material goods, needed for the full exercise of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But we’re not talking merely about some dumbed-down, materialistic concept of the pursuit of happiness, for which an abundance of material goods would be all you needed. We’re talking about the pursuit of the highest and best happiness there is, fully worthy of free and intelligent human beings.
Solidarity isn’t only a possible way of life in human society; it’s also a good quality of human character. By slightly modifying the definition we started with, we get this:
Strong and enduring commitment to mutual help and help for the helpless, in accordance with the common good.
If you’ve got this commitment–or if you want to have it–the ideas of Solid for America are for you.
David McClamrock
This article is a revised version of an article that previously appeared in the American Solidarity Party blog.
What We Can Learn from the Abolitionists
The prospects were extremely bleak for the anti-slavery movement, which pro-life people today could call the pro-liberty movement, only a few decades before slavery was legally abolished.
Both major parties in the US, the Whigs and the Democrats, were trying hard to evade the issue of slavery whenever possible. Abolitionist petitions to Congress were routinely and deliberately ignored under the infamous pro-slavery “gag rule.” Mob violence extended to destruction of abolitionist presses and the murder of an abolitionist publisher, the Reverend Elijah Lovejoy. Even the slave-owning Postmaster General of the United States deliberately looked the other way while his subordinates illegally diverted pro-liberty mailings from their intended destinations.
Many abolitionists, led by the well-known William Lloyd Garrison, disdained politics. For those who did not, the “political abolitionists,” there was a political party dedicated to eliminating slavery, the tiny Liberty Party. In the 1840 presidential election, the Liberty Party received zero electoral votes and about 7,500 of the popular vote. That’s 0.3–zero point three–percent.
At that point, wouldn’t it have seemed wise to give up? Wouldn’t it have seemed most rational to conclude that the American people (those who could vote, all of whom were white men) were just not ready for the abolition of slavery, and probably wouldn’t be ready for hundreds of years? Maybe so, but only to those who lacked the abolitionists’ strong conviction–shared by the founders of our country, even though more than a few of them inconsistently owned slaves–that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And so the abolitionists forged on, trying to defend the rights of their fellow human beings, most of whom they had never seen. The Liberty Party did somewhat better in the 1844 presidential election, still getting no electoral votes, but getting about 2.3 (two point three) percent of the popular vote. On the dim side, the Liberty Party appears to have thrown that closely contested election to the Democrats, who (for the most part) were even worse on slavery than the Whigs. This happened because more Whigs than Democrats left their party in favor of the Liberty Party.
Did the “Liberty men” give up then, out of fear that they would keep throwing elections to the Most Undesirable Major Party (MUMP)? No. The most numerous and most influential of them co-operated with pro-liberty major-party members, mostly Whigs but some Democrats too, in an effort to turn American political conflicts away from “Whigs versus Democrats” and toward “freedom versus slavery.”
These efforts succeeded, in much less than hundreds of years. The Free Soil Party, a larger party opposed to the extension of slavery with many former Liberty Party members, didn’t win any presidential elections, but the Republican party did. Many Republicans, including President Abraham Lincoln, favored the gradual elimination of slavery rather than immediate abolition–but still the Republican Party was well known as the great anti-slavery party. Meanwhile, the Whig Party had swiftly died. “Freedom versus slavery” had indeed supplanted “Whigs versus Democrats” as the great divide in American politics.
We know what happened after that. The conflict over slavery may not have been the only cause of the Civil War–but it was no coincidence that the election of even a moderate anti-slavery president almost immediately provoked the slave-holding masters of many Southern states to rebel against the Union. Not many years after that, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was enacted, providing that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Despite all odds, the abolitionists had won.
The abolition of slavery didn’t abolish racial prejudice and discrimination; far from it. And yet, today, the abolitionists’ victory over slavery is complete. Today it’s simple common sense that no person should be permitted to own another person as property. Only in malicious hoaxes does anyone now propose that slavery should be re-instituted. When you look back at how things were before the Civil War, you can see that this is one of the greatest examples of genuine progress in American history.
What does all this have to do with us today? Today, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are all under attack by powerful forces, with the right to life in its fullness, from beginning to end, being pre-eminent and encompassing the other rights. Today, one major party is almost totally in the grip of anti-life zealots and profiteers, while the other favors an updated version of what Lincoln derisively called “Douglas popular sovereignty.” In case you don’t remember what “Douglas popular sovereignty” was, it was advocated by Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas said he didn’t care whether the people (i.e., the white men) of each state voted slavery up or down; all that mattered was “popular sovereignty” over permitting or prohibiting slavery in each state.
Today, violence against pro-life advocates is increasing, and efforts to suppress pro-life free speech are widespread. Today, anti-life rhetoric about “choice” rings totally hollow, as anti-life zealots and profiteers try to suppress the choices women make for life with the assistance of pro-life pregnancy centers and prayer campaigns. Today, America’s totally pro-life political party, though growing fast, is still even smaller in proportion to the US population than the Liberty Party.
What can we learn from the abolitionists today? Here are a few simple lessons.
1. Never give up. Our Creator hasn’t given up, and never will give up, on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We, made in the Creator’s image and likeness, must do no less.
2. Promote solidarity among all pro-life people, whether they favor third-party politics or not.
3. Turn the worst efforts of anti-life zealots and profiteers against them. The abolitionists and their allies gained wide support for the pro-liberty cause by persuasively arguing that the “Slavery Power” that controlled the major parties endangered the liberties of all Americans, which it did. It’s the same today. If pro-life free speech can be suppressed, any and all free speech can be suppressed at the whim of whoever happens to be in power.
4. Keep constantly in mind that the basic division among Americans today is not really Democrats versus Republicans, left versus right, or whatnot. The basic choice that Americans face today is between life and death; liberty and new forms of slavery; the free pursuit of happiness and the fate of misery. That’s not true only for Americans, but for all the people of the world. Seize every opportunity to make this known, and to transform politics, culture, and society accordingly.
The future is known only to our Creator (who isn’t confined in time), not to us. But if we’re faithful to our Creator’s plan for us, we can have hopes as great as our ancestors’ hopes for the abolition of slavery, which were fulfilled with the Creator’s mighty help. We can hope for a future in which the anti-life zealots and profiteers have vanished, and it is simple common sense that no person should be permitted to kill another innocent person, no matter how small, hidden, speechless, and totally dependent upon another person.
David McClamrock
Thanks are due to a real historian–Professor Corey M. Brooks of York College in Pennsylvania, the author of Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2016)–for most of the paltry few historical facts mentioned in this article.
Is “The Left” the Enemy?
Once upon a time–in the time of the French Revolution–the words “Left” and “Right” had some ascertainable meaning in politics. If you were in favor of the old regime, you sat on the right side in the National Assembly; if you were against it, you sat on the left side.
That was then; this is now. And decades before now, although the antiquated expressions “Left” and “Right” were still used to express supposed opposition in politics, they had already lost any meaning related to reality.
Blame it on the Communists. Evidently fascinated by the French Revolution, they designated themselves and their sympathizers as “the Left” and their opponents as “the Right.” Get it? They, like the guys on the left side of the National Assembly who rejected the old regime, were in favor of revolution, so they were likewise the Left, and their opponents were the Right. It didn’t matter who the opponents were or what they believed; if they didn’t want a Communist revolution, they were “the Right.”
This led to notable absurdities. Communists didn’t favor revolution any more after they took power (except in places where they hadn’t yet taken power), but they didn’t suddenly become the Right and their anti-Communist opponents the Left. Worse yet, someone like Hitler was supposed to be on the Right merely because he was opposed to Communism. The shocking similarities between a Communist like Stalin and an anti-Communist like Hitler–such as that they were both totalitarian mass murderers–were thought to be of no consequence, in view of a totally unrealistic, Communist-oriented distinction between Left and Right.
Fast-forward to the present. The same antiquated, unrealistic categories of Left and Right are still in use, and there have been many efforts to define and explain them. The definitions don’t define, and the explanations don’t explain.
The silliest non-definition seems to be that leftists favor “progressive” policies and rightists oppose them. In reality, “progress” and its derivatives are meaningless if they aren’t defined in terms of some goal, some state of affairs thought to be more desirable than a previous state of affairs. So, if you favor progress toward greater protection for the unborn and for old people who might be thought worthy candidates for assisted suicide–or toward greater understanding that biological males aren’t women and biological females aren’t men–are you a leftist?
Well, no. It all depends on whose idea of “progress” counts as real progress. “Progressive” policies turn out to be simply those that self-styled “progressives” favor. If they favor “progress” toward more dead babies, mutilated young people, suicidal old people, and silenced voices of those who don’t agree that this is progress, that’s it; no more needs to be said, according to the self-styled “progressives.”
How about the notion that leftists favor greater “social equality” and rightists oppose it? You tell me. Do Communists in power favor social equality between themselves and non-Communists? Do the supreme big shots in a Communist party favor social equality between themselves and the rank-and-file party members? Do so-called leftists in the United States favor social equality between themselves and those whose views they regard as loathsome, mindless, oppressive, fascistic, and the like? Enough said.
Well, then, maybe leftists can be defined as “liberal” and rightists as “conservative.” The fatal flaw here is the common but extremely bizarre notion that “liberal” is the opposite of “conservative” just as “left” is of “right.” The direct opposite of “liberal” is “illiberal”; the direct opposite of “conservative” is “destructive.”
It’s all too well known that a politician or party may be both illiberal and destructive. It’s not nearly so well known, but equally true, that a politician or party may be both liberal and conservative. The words “conservative” and “liberal” have meaning only in relation to what the “conservative” wishes to conserve, and what kind of liberty, liberality, or libertinism is favored by the “liberal.” They are not simply opposites, and they can’t be cogently defined as opposites.
Perhaps leftists favor big government and rightists oppose it. What about anarchists? Logically, they must be on the left in desiring to overthrow the established order, like the men of the Left in the French Revolution–but anarchists, to say the least, do not favor big government.
Do leftists favor entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and rightists oppose them? Tell that to the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC), which strongly supports Social Security and Medicare but also frequently complains about “the Left.”
Do leftists “tend to be hostile to the interests of traditional elites, including the wealthy and members of the aristocracy, and to favour the interests of the working class”? If so, are billionaires who support so-called leftist activities hostile to their own interests? Hardly likely. Are Hollywood, media, and academic elites, often thought to be largely composed of leftists, really so different from “traditional elites” as to fall into an entirely opposite classification? Equally unlikely. Do these elites really favor the interests of the working class? Just ask some actual working people. Enough said.
These few examples, found (with variations) in many more supposed explanations of the differences between Left and Right, should be enough to make the point. Left and Right had meaning in politics at the time of the French Revolution; today they don’t. Occasionally you will even find an honest admission that this is true, like this:
“[T]he old frame to understand politics became useless. It’s unable to explain politics, and there isn’t anything to replace it yet. That’s why we still use this old-fashion[ed] classification” [The Political Spectrum Explained: What Is Left and What Is Right in Politics?]
And yet, even today, we find many pro-life people still using the antiquated, unrealistic, meaningless categories of “Left” and “Right,” which were invented by Communists and French revolutionaries to express and advance their ideas about politics, not ours! Why? And what can be done about it?
Step one is to see what meanings people pile onto the word “Left,” which don’t agree with the meanings given to the same word by others. Step two is to see what words would be better than “Left” to express the meanings that people pile onto that word.
I’ve seen enough examples of pro-life people talking about “the Left” to have a pretty good idea what they mean. What do they mean? Well, they mean that “the Left” is in favor of abortion, euthanasia, fantasy-affirming (a/k/a “gender-affirming”) medical treatment, shutting down speech by those who don’t agree with “the Left”, restricting Christian and other traditional religious expression and practice, depriving parents of the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, squandering taxpayers’ money on harebrained schemes while defunding the police, and pretty much any destructive evil the human mind can devise.
What words would be better? Anti-life. Anti-liberty. Anti-happiness. These words meaningfully express opposition, in one or more ways, to what we can and should call a totally pro-life position, including pro-liberty and pro-happiness.
Note well that this opposition, unlike the supposed opposition of Left and Right, is not a polar opposition. No one who hasn’t committed mass murder followed by suicide is (or was) totally anti-life in every way. Even the Nazis were pro-life in regard to members of their supposed “master race”–but their “pro-life” position was seriously deficient, because they were anti-life in regard to members of the human race who were not deemed to belong to the “master race.”
So, although a totally pro-life position will not have a single opposite that is anti-life in every way, we can identify positions that are anti-life in important respects. A pro-abortion position is anti-life as to the very beginning of life–the life of you and me and every person on earth, as we once were. A pro-euthanasia position, even if not as extreme as that of the Nazis, is anti-life as to human beings not deemed worthy of continued life. A pro-assisted-suicide position is anti-life as to human beings who imagine themselves to be unworthy of continued life, with the assistance of those eager to agree that they’re unworthy of life. Needless wars, and even needless imposition of capital punishment, are anti-life as to their victims, who do not completely forfeit the right to life even if they have engaged in serious evildoing, and much less if they have not. Obviously the same is true of the crime of murder, which should be severely punished (though not by needless capital punishment) in any truly pro-life society.
Then there are positions that are anti-life as to the transmission and nurturing of human life. Among these, one of the most egregious (if not the most common) examples is the exploitation of young people, confused about whether they are boys or girls, to lead them to accept lifelong deprivation, by chemical and surgical mutilation, of their ability to transmit life to a new generation. Coercive or semi-coercive population-control programs, promising a better life to poor people if only they are rendered infertile, are equally egregious, far more widespread, and anti-life as to future generations of their victims. Governmental and corporate activities that weaken rather than strengthen the natural family are anti-life to the extent that they do so.
Still more positions are anti-life as to the full flourishing of human life. These can’t be adequately summarized here–and there may be some disagreement about what and how bad they are–but they include at least the following:
* The exaltation of money-making and power-grabbing for a favored few above the human dignity of all, as manifested in failure to pay adequate wages for work, deprivation of opportunities to own property including productive property, failure to give adequate support to those who cannot fully pay their own expenses, and failure to protect and improve natural resources for maximum long-lasting benefit to human life.
* The promotion of division and inequality among human beings on the basis of race, sex, nationality, and any number of additional characteristics, to the detriment of the unity and cohesiveness of the human community.
* Efforts to suppress speech and other expression, disfavored by some merely because they hold opposing views, whether by calling the disfavored expression “misinformation” or by any other means.
* Needless arrogation of power to direct human life–including power over the education of children–to some supposedly supreme political authority, to the detriment of supposedly lesser authorities such as families, voluntary associations, state and local governments, and individual decision-makers.
Finally, there are positions that are anti-life in being opposed to the hope of eternal life and happiness. In politics, these include primarily the positions of those who seek, to a greater or lesser extent, to restrict the free exercise of religion and conscience to purely private matters.
This brief sketch can hardly set out every possible detail of a totally pro-life position. There may be much disagreement about what is necessary for such a position. What there should not be disagreement about is that the antiquated, now-unrealistic categories of Left and Right are not meaningful and useful today. Instead, we need to categorize political positions as either totally pro-life, or as anti-life in one or more important ways.
The great thing about the political category of “totally pro-life” is that, unlike Left and Right, it won’t go out of date, nor will it be arbitrarily redefined ad nauseam. It arises from real human life–not from seating arrangements that vanished long ago, nor from the imaginations of totalitarian fanatics–and it will endure as long as human life itself endures. Whatever disagreements there may be about details, it will provide a firm and realistic conceptual foundation for political discourse and action, as Left and Right do not.
So let’s use it, and dump “Left” and “Right” in the trash bin of history! This isn’t the French Revolution, nor the Russian or Chinese Revolution; let’s keep it that way!
David McClamrock
This article is a revised version of an article that previously appeared in the American Solidarity Party blog.
The Pursuit of the Highest Happiness
Everybody wants to be happy–except, perhaps, a few who have totally given up on happiness–but many people look for happiness in all the wrong places. Where is the right place to look for happiness? How can you not only pursue it, but attain it?
Me, I looked for happiness in many of the wrong places before concluding that living a faithful Christian life is the right way to pursue and attain happiness. If you don’t agree, I sure won’t try to stop you from trying other ways to see if they work (as I did)–but I’m pretty sure you’ll find they don’t work.
Whatever you may find in wealth, pleasure, fame, admiration, power, human love, or anything else in this world that’s only in this world, sooner or later you’ll have to face these facts: all these things are too limited to give you lasting happiness, and they’ll all conk out when you die, if not before. Even if you were to live forever in this world, you’d get mighty tired of all these things that are just not good enough to make you totally happy.
So what is good enough? There’s no way to say it all, but here are a few basics. You need to find the source of endless, limitless love and bliss. You need to share your happiness with everyone else who will accept it. You need to live and rejoice forever–all of you, not just part of you. And, on your way to living forever, you need to be able to get through even the worst the world can throw at you (think of Jesus on the cross), and persevere to the end of your life in this world and beyond.
Can this really be done? Let me tell you a little about how I came to believe it could.
When I was a boy–a bad, selfish brat who incorrectly thought I was a good boy–I couldn’t stand Jesus. Sunday-school teachers made feeble efforts to turn me into a Christian, to make me be like “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”–but with no success. What, me turn the other cheek, give bad guys even more than they demand, never put them in jail as they deserve, and finally bow down to them and let them kill me? Never!
Me, I favored the way of life of Western heroes I saw on television. They sure didn’t act like Jesus. They killed bad guys or put them in jail; they saved beautiful, admiring girls from the bad guys; and they lived to tell the tale. There was only one problem: it didn’t work in real life.
I got into a few fights with bad boys when I was a boy. The bad boys always won, and the police cared nothing about putting them in jail for their bad deeds. Obviously I couldn’t save any girls from the bad boys if I couldn’t win the fights, and no girls seemed to have any interest in being saved by me anyway. I started to despair of ever seeing good triumph over evil.
Even worse, although the Western heroes never died in the shows, I knew I was going to die. I didn’t know much, but I did know I was alive and I wanted to keep on living. And I had to admit I hadn’t given myself life, and I couldn’t keep myself alive forever–it was like my life was heading toward a big waterfall in a flimsy barrel–but there was nothing I could do about it.
Fast-forward through years largely filled with boring idiocy and despair–but not entirely. With the help of some actual Christians, I did encounter the writings of C.S. Lewis, who wasn’t at all like the boring, half-hearted, mediocre Christians in Sunday school. But I didn’t yet become a Christian myself, and I wasn’t happy.
I tried hard to find fulfillment of my desire for limitless life in something, anything, other than the Christian religion I had detested since childhood–but with no success. In every other religion and philosophy I could find, the concept of eternal life seemed deficient, unworthy of acceptance by a fully human person. There was nothing in them like a man who was also the one true God, who conquered death by dying and rising alive, who led the way to boundless fulfillment of every fully human longing for all who would follow him.
I didn’t like it, any more than C.S. Lewis did when he was unsuccessfully struggling to avoid believing in God (Surprised by Joy, Chapter 14)–but if I really had to become a Christian to attain limitless life, I decided I was going to do it. I turned again to C.S. Lewis for guidance, and I tried to read the Bible with an open mind.
It didn’t take me too long to see the truth of the apostle Paul’s words: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). If Jesus conquered death for us, we too could rise again and live forever; if he didn’t, we couldn’t, in the absence of some other way to attain limitless life that no one seemed to have ever found.
So, I had to wonder, did he–or didn’t he? Were the men and women who proclaimed his resurrection liars, body-snatchers, clever myth-makers, seeking to control the gullible masses by deceiving them? Were they merely mistaken–say, mass-hallucinating, or taken in by unknown tricksters with remarkable power to pull off a fake resurrection, or simply misinterpreting what they saw, heard, and touched with their own hands? Or were they simply, almost incredibly, telling the truth?
Their opponents’ first reported story was that they were lying, which seemed far more likely than that they were merely mistaken–but there seemed to be a fatal flaw in the story. People may often lie to get themselves out of trouble, but rarely do they lie to get themselves into trouble. Absolutely never do they lie to get themselves into trouble if their aim is to survive and control the gullible masses, which will not occur if they get into really big trouble and suffer martyrdom. If there was any truth in the Bible accounts, then the apostles knew they were facing really big trouble for proclaiming the Resurrection; they did it anyway; and they must have really believed what they were saying.
But what if there was no truth in those accounts, and the whole thing was a fabrication by clever tricksters and myth-makers of a later age? Well, it couldn’t have been a much later age, because it was a simple historical fact that the Roman Empire was taken over by Christians within a few centuries, with no blood shed but their own. They, too, must have really believed what they were willing to die for. Another known fact was that the Christians were already widespread and well known a mere 30 years or so after the (alleged) Resurrection, when the emperor Nero saw fit to blame them for the burning of Rome. I had to think it more likely than not, at least, that there was no fabrication–that the story of the Resurrection, and what happened afterward, was true from the beginning.
But was “more likely than not” good enough? If the creator of the universe was so concerned for the wisdom and well-being of his rational creatures, I had to wonder, why did he not provide indisputable proof of the truths he wished them to accept? Why did Jesus Christ show himself unmistakably to one lone man who doubted the truth of his resurrection, and yet proclaim, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:24-29)?
At the time I couldn’t really have said, any more than C.S. Lewis could say how he came to believe. When he set out on an omnibus to go to the zoo one day, he said, he did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God; when he got to the zoo, he did believe (Surprised by Joy, Chapter 15). That was it. I, too, found myself coming to believe, coming to be born again, but hardly knowing how and why it was happening, any more than when I was born the first time.
At long last, I think I know how and why it happened as it did. When something is indisputably evident, you can accept it with little or no free and rational choice. But the right use of the power of free and rational choice, above all, is what makes a person fully human. To have this power–to have the right to liberty–is to be made in the image and likeness of God; to use it rightly is to become like God, who freely and wisely chose to create the universe.
So, if you believe in Jesus without having seen him after he rose from the dead, you are blessed because you freely choose what you have good reason to believe has been divinely revealed, but the evidence does not force you to believe. St. Thomas Aquinas, I later learned, says this is why you have the “merit of faith”–if you do.
And that was what I did. Did I have good reason to believe I was created by a God who wanted me to hope for limitless life? You bet I did! What was the alternative? At best, that my desire to live forever was a meaningless, unexplainable illusion, to which I should respond “ho-hum” and try to forget about it–until my barrel went over the waterfall and smashed me up forever. At worst, that I was living in a nightmare fantasy in which a vicious creator gave me this desire, only to laugh like a maniac when it wasn’t fulfilled.
You tell me: which belief is the best supported by evidence and rational inferences? And which belief is the most consistent with living a free, rational, fully human life?
The suffering and death of Jesus before his resurrection, which I found so loathsome as a boy, turned out to fit in perfectly with this belief, and with my long-suppressed desire for good to triumph over evil. The Western heroes who always made good triumph over evil in this life weren’t real. Bad guys often won out in this life. By letting the bad guys do their worst, and showing that they still couldn’t win in the end, Jesus had shown the only realistic way toward the ultimate victory of good over evil.
When I was thinking about this, I came across a helpful illustration in a story about a really bad guy, but a really tough bad guy: Stalin, who later became the Communist dictator of the Soviet Union. Before the Russian Revolution, the story goes, Stalin was arrested and put in a prison camp. One of the soldiers’ grim amusements was to make the prisoners run between two lines of soldiers while the soldiers whacked them with rifle butts. Most of the prisoners were terrified and ran as fast as they could–but not Stalin. Stalin walked between those lines of soldiers–slowly–while they were hitting him as hard as they could and blood was streaming down his face, to show them they could never beat him down, no matter how hard they tried.
I couldn’t help seeing that Stalin wasn’t the originator of that kind of behavior. Jesus was. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” was even tougher than Stalin, and he showed that the bad guys could never beat him down even when they killed him.
So here I am, a Christian, hoping for the highest happiness in eternal life. If you are too, you may wish to give thanks to God for saving a wretch like me. If you’re not, you may wonder whether you’d be a lot happier if you were–and you may well wish to make some progress toward endless, limitless happiness.
David McClamrock
What Next?
That’s it for now: a few short articles, all written by me. Why?
Well, I was reading a few articles about how to start an online magazine. They said things like “First you need to develop your business model.” I thought, “Nonsense. First you need to produce an actual issue of the magazine.”
The most efficient way to produce an issue of the magazine was to do everything myself, so I did. But for future issues, I’ll invite some other people to help me if they wish, and I’ll try to interview some people too.
Only God knows whether this magazine will take off and fly. That depends on whether it turns out to be well suited to help do the immense job that needs to be done. What job is that? In a few words, to enlighten, inspire, unite, and strengthen Christians and people of good will to promote the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America and throughout the world.
Do you want to help? Do you think contributing to this magazine–or commenting on it, or making suggestions for its improvement–might be a good way to help? If so, please let me know by sending an e-mail to the editor (see the contact form below).
David McClamrock
Editor
Solid For America