Good morning, 

The American model of self-governance, based on the idea that citizens – not kings – should reign supreme, is all the more necessary in a crisis. 

Here is today's Texas Minute.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Monday, March 23, 2020
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• When the people of God fled their Egyptian captors, they were instructed by God not to appoint just another king. He wanted them to govern themselves under the laws He would provide. If nothing else, the Old Testament is repeating series in which the people reject His gift of self-governance, fall into hard times, and are then called back to what God had designed for them.
       
• The American Experiment in self-governance began in the late 1600s; when the colonies were allowed to simply govern themselves without interference. As one of the original Minute Men from the Battle of Concord later told a historian, he and others fought because: “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to and [the British] meant that we shouldn’t.”
       
• That is our legacy, to be a self-governing people.
       
• But with the power of self-governance comes responsibility. We mustn’t look to government to care for the least among us; we must do so ourselves.
       
• In his seminal work The Tragedy of American Compassion, written nearly 30 years ago, Marvin Olasky traces how the modern approach to serving the afflicted and needy through government programs has failed. It’s failed not because it spends too much or too little, but because it is a failed philosophy. It is what he calls “pseudo-compassion.”
      
• “We like the way a welfare system, corrupt and inefficient though it is, removes the burden of material care from our consciences, and protects us from the mean streets that we traverse only by day.” – Marvin Olasky

• This present crisis is no different than any other, except in that it is happening to us and not to distant people in distant places in distant times. Plagues, pestilence, disease – those are the norm in human history.
   
• We will survive the Chinese coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, or whatever you choose to call it, in one of two ways.
    
• On the one hand, we could emerge as cowering serfs, eager for the ongoing protection of whatever strongman is running government. On the other, we could emerge as a people re-dedicated to liberty.
      
• Remember: whatever power we encourage government to exercise for us today, we also grant it to do to us tomorrow.
          
• In the Book of Nehemiah, the people of Israel begin to gather after a period of captivity and separation. They began to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, but there were those who opposed the existence of their faith, and even as people. And so the author records that the people “prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.”
     
• What they did not do was cower in fear. What they did not do was wait for someone else to take care of the situation. What they did not do was hope the threat would go away. They confronted it boldly, directly, and proportionately.
      
• They did what we should do: pray and act. By taking prayerful action, and acting in prayerful obedience to God, we can emerge from this present situation with greater joy and a renewed strength in the gift of self-governance.

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