The Real Symbolism of the St. Andrews Cross: Christian Liberty vs. the New World OrderDr. J. Michael Hill
Section One
The Confederate battleflag, writes League of the South board member Dr. Clyde Wilson in the August issue of Chronicles Magazine, is “the most potent symbol in all the world today of a spirit of resistance to all that is summed up by the label ‘New World Order’ . . . .” Well put, indeed. However, those of us who support the flag have suffered in the battle with our enemies until now precisely because we have not been able to rally behind a simple and clear definition of what our beloved symbol actually symbolizes.
To say that the battleflag (or what we should properly call the St. Andrews cross) stands for “Southern heritage” is a much too vague and unfocused definition. Our enemies have succeeded in casting the flag as a symbol of “hatred, racism, and slavery.” If we can reply only with wimpy slogans such as “Heritage, Not Hate,” then we will forever stand on the defensive in this conflict. It is high time we stopped reacting and took the offensive.
As Dr. Wilson rightly notes, the starry St. Andrews cross stands against all that is represented by the New World Order. But we would do better to frame the debate in terms of what our noble flag stands for, and that is Christian liberty.
It will be to our great benefit to simplify this fight, and we can best do that by pitting Christian liberty against its antithesis—the New World Order. This dichotomy clearly defines the real battle lines in a way that “Southern heritage” vs. “hatred, racism, and slavery” could never do.
In order to successfully oppose the New World Order elite, first we must define who they are and where their worldview originated. It is not enough to simply proclaim “liberalism” as the enemy (although liberals of all stripes are a major component of the New World Order crowd). We must go further and include among them many secular conservatives.
We would do well to remember that the modern political terms “left” and “right” originated during the French Revolution (1789-99). Those seated on the left side of the aisle in the Legislative Assembly were commonly seen as the most radical of the revolutionaries. Indeed the most extreme radical element, the “Mountain,” occupied the uppermost seats on the left side of the chamber; these were the infamous Jacobins. Those seated on the right were less extreme than the Jacobins and their leftist allies, but were revolutionaries nonetheless. The so-called “right” was dominated by the Girondins, the equivalent of today’s Republican Party. The Girondins are said to have supported the bourgeois (middle- and upper-middle class) commercial and business interests, while the Jacobins favoured the “people.”
Labels aside, however, both the Jacobins and Girondins were supporters of the revolution, and as such, advocated a secularized and centralized unitary state (the New World Order of their day). The left’s preferred means of operation would have brought about this new order more rapidly than would have the right’s. But like today’s Democrat and Republican parties, they were headed in the same ultimate direction.
Upon close inspection, there were more similarities than differences between the Jacobins and Girondins; the same holds true of the Democrats and Republicans in our day. As the great Southern Presbyterian divine Robert L. Dabney once said, conservatives (and he was speaking of “Yankee” conservatives)—a term synonymous with the “right”—have never conserved anything. Instead, they lag slightly behind the leftists on the road to perdition. Where today’s leftists stand, so-called conservatives on the “right” will stand within twenty years. Simply put, both secular leftists and rightists are revolutionaries. They are mere rivals for power and not true enemies to one another. The only difference is in their public rhetoric, their timetable, and their modus operandi (as our own Bob Whittaker says, Democrats will stab you in the chest while Republicans stab you in the back). The final goal is the same for both: the rule of autonomous man in a purely relativistic and materialistic universe. There is no place for the triune God of the Bible within either camp.
As proponents of true Christian liberty, we must be counter-revolutionaries. One of our first efforts ought to be to expose the origins and progress of this anti-Christian, statist agenda that now manifests itself under the label “New World Order.”
Section Two
The age-old question has been: “Does God rule or does man?” In other words, where does sovereignty (supreme power) reside? The 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary defines “sovereignty” as follows: Supreme power; supremacy; the possession of the highest power, or of uncontrollable power. Absolute sovereignty belongs to God only. Our problem today in the Western world is that we have a flawed understanding of the meaning of “sovereignty,” and until we correct that misunderstanding we will not enjoy the blessing of Christian liberty.
Since the fall of man through Adam, our federal head, in the Garden of Eden, sinful men have sought to “become as gods” themselves. Today’s New World Order elites are no different. Their god is autonomous man, and his religion is the civic religion of statism. The state is god, and it is to the state that we are told to look for salvation. The New World Order promises world peace, material prosperity, happiness, an end to poverty and hunger, preservation of the global environment, the enforcement of justice and “human rights,” and a host of other salvific measures.
The religion of the New World Order is thoroughly pagan (i.e. secular humanism). Throughout history, power-hungry elites have denied the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible as God’s Word. Consequently, they have also denied the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ over the affairs of men. The present regnant ideology sees politics, and not theology, as the “queen of the sciences” because it views the omnipotent central state as its god. In modern America, the dominant ideology has taken the form of “democracy.” Within this branch of the civic religion the most important sacrament is the act of voting. The voice of the people (presuming that elections are fairly conducted) has become the voice of God. It is they, then, who are said to possess sovereignty.
While it is true that our Founding Fathers gave us a polity in which the people of the individual States were sovereign, they did not go so far as to openly acknowledge that the sovereignty of the people of the States was only a delegated power from God. As Webster’s 1828 Dictionary noted, absolute sovereignty belongs to God alone, and in the temporal (or earthly) sphere there are only delegated and limited powers granted from that source. Thus no earthly authority, be it totalitarian, authoritarian, or majoritarian (i.e. democracy), can possess true sovereignty. Those political systems that claim to do so have set themselves against God and His Son, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
No political community can hope to enjoy prolonged periods of peace and prosperity (not to mention liberty) that does not acknowledge the triune God as its true Sovereign. This we are promised, and history demonstrates it to be so. The United States, contrary to popular myth, is no exception. Though the Framers of our Constitutional, federated republic attempted to give us a system in which popular freedom might flourish, they committed a fundamental error by not recognizing the sovereignty of Christ over our civil government.
Temporal wisdom allows that our republic is based on the popular will of its citizens—the “consent of the governed.” And, as far as it goes, this is surely an honorable estate. Civil rulers are to be the servants, and not the masters, of their subjects. But legitimate rulers are not only answerable to those over whom they rule; they are, most importantly, answerable to God. Indeed, they are His magistrates and rule by His sovereign decree. Romans 13: 1-4 (KJV) says:
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
Therefore, all just government (i.e. that which promotes good and punishes evil) is the ordinance of God, and all rulers (ministers) must answer to Him for their actions. Whether they are kings, dictators, oligarchs, or democrats, they rule only as God’s appointed ministers and not as true sovereigns themselves. Their power is merely derivative of His absolute power.
By failing to articulate the proper relationship between the Sovereign God and His earthly ministers, our Founding Fathers neglected the most significant bulwark against tyranny, both real and potential. They provided a system in which the people (albeit the people of the separate States) might become a law unto themselves with nothing superior that could control their desires. There was to be no higher standard of accountability than the voice of the people in their capacity as citizens of the several Sates. The people, then, became a god, and their voice could command no wrong. They were the ultimate and superior tribunal to which all questions of right and wrong were appealed. As Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell noted: “A foundation was thus laid for the worst of all possible forms of government—democratic absolutism.” The will of the majority (much like Rousseau’s “General Will”) becomes the supreme law, and as majorities shift from age to age, so do the moral standards of the law.
The failure of our Founding Fathers was simple: they saw civil government as a man-made and man-centered institution. For that reason, it cannot and will not endure. The current decline of American “civilization” bears this out. We see in Daniel 2 that King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon’s dream (which the Prophet Daniel alone could interpret) foretold the fall of mighty empires (the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman) that opposed the sovereign rule of the true and living God. These empires would be smashed (the fate of all such worldly empires) by the “stone cut out without hands” (2:34). This stone represents the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is extant even today and will continue to grow and cover the whole earth until all His enemies have been made His footstool.
In order that we may be in conformity with the sovereign rule of Christ, our civil governments must acknowledge that both rulers and ruled alike are subject to God’s supreme authority. All civil magistrates must be benefactors of good and revengers against evil. But they are not at liberty to give their own interpretations of these opposite moral categories; rather, God’s word as revealed to man in the Holy Scripture is the only inerrant and infallible standard by which we can judge good and evil. Rulers who insist on calling evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20) are illegitimate and tyrannous men and must be actively opposed by God’s people (i.e. the Christian Church). As the seventeenth-century Scots Covenanters declared: “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”
To be legitimate, civil governments must acknowledge God as their superior and His law as superior to all human decrees. God jealously guards His position as absolute sovereign; therefore, He has seen fit to bless with Christian liberty those peoples and nations that conform to a proper model of the devolution of power. In I Samuel 8, the elders of the Hebrew tribes (a confederacy or league at the time) made it known to Samuel that they desired a king to rule over them in the fashion of other nations Samuel voiced his displeasure with this arrangement, and went to the Lord in prayer for Israel’s sake. The Lord thus told Samuel: “Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them [8:7]. God also told Samuel to inform the people as to what sort of king they would have: “He will take” your son, daughters, fields, vineyards, oliveyards, seed, menservants, maidservants, and livestock, and “ye shall cry out in that day because of your king [i.e. Saul] which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.” Sadly, this is the lot of all peoples and nations that refuse to have God as their true sovereign king. [I am indebted to my friend Jeff Sinclair of Mississippi for bringing the importance of I Samuel 8 to my attention.]
The New World Order will not have the true and living God as its sovereign. It recognizes no power above itself. Thus it is in a state of open rebellion against God. Because of this apostasy, all Christians must stand against the new pagan order. If we are to have the blessing of liberty from our Creator, we have no choice but to oppose any and all worldviews that are contrary to His word and law. We begin by submitting ourselves, as creatures, to the one who made us. By doing so, we demonstrate a correct understanding of the ultimate and absolute sovereignty of God. And by implication, we admit of our subordinate standing to Him. Wherever and whenever our starry St. Andrews cross waves, let it be in defense of this vital truth.