What Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Gets Right—and What He Doesn’t
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., born in 1954, is an American environmental lawyer, member of the prominent Kennedy political family and activist who became a champion during the shadowy COVID-19 vaccine phantasm.
In April 2023, he launched his campaign, seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 2024 United States presidential election. In October of that same year, however, he announced that he would run as an independent.
Last week he gave his own State of the Union address:
I grew up in an America that seemed to have achieved its promise as an exemplary nation. Modern democracy had spread from one nation—ours in 1776—to six by 1865, and to 190 by the 1960s. We had become the city on the hill.
We were a moral authority around the globe. Our government institutions, our Congress, the court, the regulatory agencies and even the American press were renowned for their integrity, and they were revered worldwide. Other nations wanted our American leadership. They knew the difference between leadership and bullying, which is something our current leaders seem to have forgotten.
We were the template of liberty, proof that for a country to thrive, its people must be free. Free to speak, free to worship, free to build great companies, [and] free to start small businesses. We were the freest country in the world and by no coincidence, also the most prosperous.
Working Americans could provide for their families on a single salary. They could buy a home, raise a family and save for retirement without mountains of debt. We made the best music. We made the best movies. We made gold-standard automobiles that everybody in the world wanted. We made blue jeans. We reconstructed Europe. We put men on the moon.
We had the world’s healthiest, best-educated children. Our productivity, ingenuity, our can-do spirit [were] the envy of the world. We had confidence in our strength, our capacity and the limitless potential of our country.
Yeah, we had serious racial and environmental problems, but in the heady days of my youth, the environmental movement and the Civil Rights Movement were picking up steam. My father and some of his allies were fighting to eliminate the last pockets of hunger in Appalachia, in the Mississippi Delta and on the Indian reservations.
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And we became, for the first time, a true constitutional democracy in this country, with all races voting and holding political office. Other countries aspired to be like us, and our children grew up proud of their passport, proud of their flag.
My uncle, President Kennedy, left this legacy of peace and the hope of ending the arms race and winding down the Cold War. Those were the traditions of freedom, prosperity and peace that my father, my uncle and Martin Luther King Jr. were striving to protect and advance.
In the half-century since their deaths we’ve lost touch with that vision for our country.
Truth be told, we like many things about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with the clear and unequivocal exceptions of his endorsement of the [interminate] taking of unborn lives, his call for homosexual marriage and his championing of LGBTQ rights. All three of such patently left-wing ideologies are nonstarters for evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christians.
Most interesting in Kennedy’s version of the State of the Union was that he let America’s history begin in 1776 instead of in 1607 or 1620.
A simple reading of the 13 original Colonies’ charters and constitutions—Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, North and South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia and Rhode Island—will unquestionably reveal that America’s Founding Fathers systematically devised and established a distinctively Christian nation over the first 150 years of early America.
Kennedy also fallaciously disregards the American founders’ game-changing, world-changing declaration on Nov. 11, 1620, known under the name of the Mayflower Compact: “IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith …”
A return to the model the Founding Fathers established over the 17th-18th centuries (1620-1776)—the Judeo-Christian heritage and biblically based culture—may be the only chance to guarantee sustainable freedom for the coming generations of Americans.
Os Guinness notes in his book “A Free People’s Suicide” that one cannot point to a free and lasting civilization anywhere in history that was built on atheistic foundations. Yet America’s dalliance with pagan secularism and cultural Marxism over the last century or so continues.
The nation teeters on the brink of moral bankruptcy, having engendered a culture poisoned in and by the structures, sights, sounds and smells of foreign gods, where lines between idolatry and secular indoctrination are impossible to discern by the contemporary biblically illiterate citizenship and where blatantly pagan public education holds sway in paganism’s sacred buildings.
America has reached a point where we will have to decide whether to be pagan or Christian—and then get on with it. The restoration of America’s once biblically based culture—put in place by the founders—will require the depaganization of the state. And with the state becoming less pagan and profane, the culture will naturally become more scriptural and spiritual.
This will be no easy task, not even if we just ignore that secularism’s disciples dominate the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, vocational and cultural levers of power.
The 21st-century absence of Christians from the public square expose the political challenges we’re facing. Include the lopsided sterile model of attendance, holdings and portfolios as a measurement of successful ministry, and the minuscule Christian footprint in the culture, and one can easily foretell the extremely difficult, energy-intensive, time-consuming and expensive conundrum that evangelical and pro-life Catholic Christians are facing.
To address the political challenges, every church in America should have a pastor, elder, deacon or congregant running for local office in 2024, 2026, 2028 and thereafter if we are to maintain freedom and liberty for our future generations.
Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs are entering the public square.{eoa}
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David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.
