By Robert Kimball Shinkoskey
In America today, we think that what we have is all that we own. We have possessions like our homes, our phones, our families, jobs, food and clothing, entertainments, friends. We truly do have a lot. Many of us have a God, a church, an education, a political party, local governments, grandparents . . . things that anchor us more fully in the towns and cities we live in.
Even so, according to the ancient prophet Jeremiah, we are still missing a huge part of what is actually ours. Jeremiah said, paraphrasing now, “You were once a tender-hearted and healthy people, very prosperous and generous. But then you and your culture became full of ‘vanity,’ and forgot how you got started in this land, and what motivated you to become such a great people and a great nation.”
Jeremiah added that the people living in his own society (about 600 B.C.) never thought to ask about the particulars of their history, how they were brought “into a plentiful country.” Those who “handle the law”—basically the legal and political experts of the time—did not know that crucial history and therefore “transgressed” and “walked after things that do not profit.”
This political critique turned out to be very prophetic. Because the people of Israel did not know and possess their own history, the “northern kingdom” was earlier conquered by one foreign power and then in Jeremiah’s day the rest of the land was fully taken into “captivity” by another foreign power.
In Jeremiah’s day, the people had not forgotten the basic fact of their time in Egypt and their Exodus back to the Canaan of their ancestors. They could recite that. They had forgotten the detail, the color, the emotion, the intellectual basis, the cause, the sophistication, the power of that amazing story. The people essentially were saying, “History . . . yeah . . . whatever . . . we have technology today, so why do we need history?”
In America today, we have the same attitude and the same glaring lack of ownership over our very substantial past. We don’t know what happened before we were born, let alone before 1941, or before 1860, or in 1787, or during our ancestors’ 200 years on this continent before 1787, or what the original people on this land experienced during all of that time.
We have a history that tells an extremely powerful story, one that could inspire and lift our people out of obesity, drug addiction, social isolation, economic poverty, political repression, and spiritual lethargy. We have a history in England. We have a history in other European countries. We also have a history in Africa, Asia, even Central and South America.
In England, many of our ancestors lived as free and independent people until 1066 when the Norman King William from France conquered the island and turned it into a personal possession. He doled the land out to his favorite generals, who then became dukes and barons lording it over all within their territorial boundaries, a system of government called aristocracy.
Eventually some of the most impoverished and oppressed of those original conquered inhabitants were sent across the Atlantic Ocean to settle an unexplored continent. They were commanded to send back gold, tobacco, and whatever riches they could extract from the land and the people in “America.” During their time in exile there, those religious dissenters, felons freed from English prisons, and rustic corporate managers eventually built something real and stunning in America.
When the English king and the English parliament saw that their American colonial possessions were starting to act rather uppity, they came down hard on the colonists they had sent across the ocean.
That hardship is documented in our Declaration of Independence. You need to read it, and let it sink in, people. And you need to read the history of the colonies and their rebellion in 1776, and the government they hammered out in 1787. This is the roadmap to where you are and who you truly are today. Strangely, today you are just like those people 250 years ago, mired under a long-term, highly partisan wealthy ruling class that does not care whether you have any personal prosperity or power or not. That wealthy ruling class wants all the available money and all the available government power to be funneled into the hands of America’s new dukes and barons.
Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of Biblical Captivity: Aggression and Oppression in the Ancient World (2012), Democracy and the Ten Commandments (2016) and The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama (2014).
