From Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder:

The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America's king.

She thought: Americans won't obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. No king bosses Pa; he has to boss himself. Why (she thought), when I am older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn't anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. "Our father's God, author of liberty—" The laws of Nature and of Nature's God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God's law is the only thing that gives you a right to be free.

Laura had no time to think any further. Carrie was wondering why she stood so still, and Pa was saying, "This way, girls! There's the free lemonade!"

Little Town on the Prairie, Ch. 8, pp. 76-77.

Little House on the Prairie was released November 20, 1941, a few weeks before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. The state of the world must have been weighing heavy on Wilder's shoulders.

In the wake of The Donald, I've been thinking about kingship—what it is, what it is in us that desires it, what it is in us that desire to be a king.

Nothing in today's current political situation should come as a surprise. My husband said some years ago after all the Obama-as-Messiah hullabaloo that the next Messiah figure would probably come from the Republican side. Quod erat demonstrandum, etc.

Kingship is written into our persons. As Christians, we are declared priest, prophet, and king in our baptism. But God calls some people to a lifelong, vocational expression of these as well, whose purpose in life is to be a priest, a prophet, or a king. These people are incarnational stand-ins for and/or reminders of God Himself. Some medieval theologians argued that the coronation of kings and queens was a Sacrament. Even today the Oil of Catechumens is used for coronations.

However, America is a democratic republic. We elect our political leaders. We don't have kings who inherit their nation.  Therefore we lack a clear notion of what a king is.

Yet there's something in us—in our human nature—that wants one. I'm reminded of The Lord of the Rings and its appeal among Americans (if the box office sales were any indication). Peter Kreeft points out that the three main characters fit the three roles: Frodo as priest, Gandalf as prophet, and Aragon as king. All three must play their part in order to achieve the defeat of Mordor.

What's interesting to me is that we readers and movie watchers so easily rally around Aragorn, who claims a right to the throne of Gondor not by democratic election, but by some other rule that's written deeply into the culture of Middle Earth and also our own. We Americans don't have this; we're a nation of revolutionaries and immigrants who've said good riddance to our various kings and queens. And yet we love good, courageous Aragorn and want him to be king. It's part of the story's resolution, and it satisfies.

So, are we missing something? George III was no fictional Aragorn, but still, his kingly vocation at least pointed to God's kingship. In cutting us off from the king, did the Founding Fathers misunderstand or overlook this deep human desire? Like the prophet Samuel, did they overestimate people's ability to trust in God as King? Are we, in a sense, adrift?

"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, They may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies."

John Adams, Letter to Zabdiel Adams, 21 June 1776.

Image Credits---for some reason the captions keep disappearing:
First image: John Trumull, General Washington Resigns His Commission, via WikiCommons, CC0. Second image: Pinched from Facebook. I thought it was funny.

In an effort to be an informed citizen of the polis, I've been reading Michigan: A History of the Great Lakes State by Bruce Rubenstein and Lawrence Ziewacz. This is our fourth year living in Michigan and I decided that it's time to concede its (Michigan's) existence and try to like living here.

The view outside our house this morning. It's Pretty, But It's April.

For me, learning to like Michigan means getting to know the state's history and its current issues. That it is an election year helps; I don't like going to the polls to vote on local and state issues without knowing something.

In the wake of having also read Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons, one paragraph in Michigan struck me in particular:

Growth of cities [due to manufacturing, including the automobile industry] caused new societal problems as well. Decreasing agricultural prices coupled with a declining rural population meant that the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer being the cornerstone of the Republic was rapidly becoming a fading memory. (pg. 210)

Why the yeoman farmer as the cornerstone of the American experiment? Why not manufacturers? Why not workers?

My husband suggested that the farmer is rooted to the land and their local communities in a way city dwellers are not; therefore they vote differently. I will go one step further and say that the stability of traditional agrarian life lends itself to a strong, intact family culture, one that was lost in the American Industrial Revolution.

Michigan brings up the fact that the invention of the automobile lead to a weakening of family ties as young adults left home instead of settling in their own communities. Manufacturing cities became populated by people who left home. For a job, yes; to support themselves and others, yes. But as a collective, they were in many ways transients and therefore together formed a transient culture separate from extended family. To extend the "rootedness" analogy, these people were transplants, set down in the murky and overcrowded soil that was the poor living conditions of burgeoning cities.

This kind of city life stood not only opposed to agrarian life but traditional city neighborhoods, where families settle down within blocks of each other and where people get to know their neighbors because they walk, work, and shop locally. Traditional neighborhoods are like Cheers, where everyone knows your name. The primary difference between the traditional city neighborhood and the rise of manufacturing towns was the strength of its extended family ties.

The weakening of extended family ties leads to a decline in family culture, and as family is the most fundamental and important societal structure, this decline leads to the decline of the Republic. This is the argument social conservatives have been making for years, and there's a lot of truth in it. Family reminds us that we have a responsibility to others. Family leads to solidarity with others in a community as well. The more individualistic we become, the less we feel responsible for others' well-being. Does this affect public policy? Bet your life it does.