We Unificationists understand that sovereignty is an attribute of the true love manifested by the perfect original father, true Adam. Adam begins by reaching the status of a true elder brother. He then is blessed and becomes a true father, a true parents with Eve his wife. They together assume the authority of king and queen in their own family and lineage. This translates into political sovereignty.

As we pursue the fulfillment of this vision, we Unificationists should understand that the idea that Adam is the root of the human race is not unique to the Divine Principle. Nor is the idea that Adam’s lineage is the root lineage of the world new, or the idea that there is a central line, the heir of which is the rightful king. The belief that Adam’s lordship over his own family translates into his central descendant’s lordship over his extended family, the entire human race, has been around for well over a millennia. The problem is that it was rejected with the rise of democracy. It is precisely what John Locke argued against in his first treatise on government.

Of course, we counter, what Locke was rejecting was the kingship of the false Adam. Unfortunately, Locke did not realize this point. He thought that the problem was with the very notion of kingship, not with the fact that kingship was being exercised by an imperfect man. Hence Locke helped construct a system best suited to the world of imperfect men—democracy. Now we come along with the confidence that we can become perfect men, and in the process affirm that the true government, based upon kingship, will be restored. To get there from here, we have to cover a lot of difficult territory.

Locke’s second treatise advanced the basic arguments for modern democracy. These together with those of Shaftesbury, Montesquieu and others form the philosophical foundation for the American constitution. Perhaps you have never heard of Locke’s second treatise, but if you have, you know that it is easy to find; there are many published editions. On the other hand, it is very difficult, nigh impossible, to find Locke’s first treatise. It just is not available. I don’t imagine that anyone planned to suppress it. I suppose that few copies exist simply because there is little interest in it. Which is a shame.

In order to set forth his vision for democracy, Locke, being a responsible man, first had to counter the arguments against democracy. This he did in his first treatise. I suppose that modern people are so convinced in the rightness of democracy that they are not even mildly interested in the arguments against it. Consider, even Marxist communism is presented as a form of democracy, a one-party rule by the people who are so liberated that they agree about everything. But we who are situated at the end of the second millennium might reconsider. Fukuyama, after all, wrote an influential essay called "The End of History." Times are changing dramatically. We have to check all of our assumptions.

Are Locke’s arguments against the opponents of democracy persuasive to us today? As Unificationists, we should know that what Locke was arguing against was that sovereignty is rooted in Adam’s fatherhood and Adam’s lineage. We should know this because we strongly affirm what Locke denied. We believe that sovereignty is rooted in Adam’s fatherhood—that is, true Adam’s fatherhood. Our formula is eldership, parentship and kingship.

In his first treatise, Locke argued against one particular royalist, Sir Robert Filmer. If there is anything more difficult to find that Locke’s first treatise, it is Filmer’s writings. Filmer’s successors include those French thinkers who said "I told you so" after the French Revolution, including Joseph de Maistre and Rene Chateaubriand. Alexis deTocqueville had traces of this royalist longing in his blood, which is how he could gain the critical distance necessary to carry out his brilliant and affectionate discussion of democracy in America.

Unificationists can benefit from knowledge of these things in our quest for national sovereignty. Of course, True Father’s quest centers on the nation of Korea, and it is probable that the foundations and assumptions that undergird sovereignty in the East differ from those in the West. After all, the East knows nothing of Adam and Eve, of the human race originating from one family. I would like to know how the East explains and justifies political authority. It has something to do with the mandate of Heaven, I guess, and that often boils down to the might of arms, just as in the West. But rising above brute force, superior civilizations must have a better justification for their sovereignty. But at the moment I can speak only of the West.

As I stated, Filmer’s view, the view of Christian royalists, is that authority rests in Adam’s fatherhood, the God-given right of the father to rule his wife and children, set forth in the Bible. In overturning this, Locke made a move as radical as that of Charles Darwin in revising man’s understanding of his origins. In Locke’s view, we did not originate in an original family with original parents, but rather as a lawless array of individuals living in the state of nature. A Unificationist might say that Locke begins with Adam’s descendants, all of whom had forgotten their common origin in an original set of parents.

In this state, each individual is his own king. Each has sovereignty over himself or herself. It is a world of complete individualism. Unfortunately, some individuals happen to be criminals—Cain-types, we would call them—who by dint of superior physical force rob, plunder, rape and murder their fellows. In order to protect against this, that is, in order to protect my possessions and myself from plunder, I enter into an agreement with others for mutual protection. This agreement becomes a covenant, a constitution. By this agreement, a corporate body is created. This corporate body is nothing more than our shared agreement to help each other and live by agreed upon standards. These standards are called laws. This corporate body, ultimately, is called a nation.

The nation establishes procedures to protect the rights of its members. These procedures include police, courts, lawmakers and so forth. Only the police have the authority to mete out physical punishment. They do so on behalf of, in the name of, and representing the authority of the entire nation, for the sake of protecting its members.

In order to gain the protection of the nation, each citizen has to surrender his own natural sovereignty. For example, in the state of nature, if I feel someone has hurt me, then I can punish that person (or at least attempt to). No one else will do it for me. In the state of civilization, if I feel someone hurt me, I cannot punish that person by myself. I have surrendered that right. Instead, I have to report my problem with this person to the authorities. The authorities then investigate and come to a conclusion as to the bone fides of my complaint. If I am judged to have been wronged, then the authorities decide the punishment due to the one who aggressed against me.

This model is called democratic because the authority lies with the agreement made by the people. The sovereignty rests in each individual, and is turned over by the individual to the nation in return for the benefits granted by a society governed by law. Now, there are certain elements of natural sovereignty that cannot be turned over to, or alienated to, the state. These are the "inalienable" rights. It is impossible to alienate a person’s right to say and publish what he or she feels must be said, hold his own faith, meet whom he desires to meet, possess his own property and so forth. The state exists in part to guarantee that no one robs the individual of these God-given rights.

This is modern democracy. As True Father says, modern democracy recognizes no parents. John Locke, in fact, relegated the role of parents to nothing more than that of nurturing responsible citizens. Conjugal love he dismissed as of no importance. For Locke, after the offspring are on their own as citizens, there is no purpose to hold a marriage or family together. This was Locke’s thinking in the second treatise. This is the foundation of Western democracy.

The king did not adopt Lockean democracy. The English monarch understood himself to be the God-anointed head of the state and also of the church, with powers derived from God through God’s anointing of the royal lineage. In this, the king of England was carrying forward the ideal of Christendom, that of one church underpinning one national sovereignty. When the church in England refused to cooperate with him, Henry VIII managed to transmute it into the church of England, with the king standing in the position of the Pope. The Pope at that time was also the secular lord of most of the Italian peninsula, so it was a short jump, Henry concluded, to allow the man who was secular lord of the green hills of England to also serve as head of the church. Why, he opined, should the king of Italy rule the English church?

Filmer wrote his treatises on the rightful power of monarchs during this period. Seventy-five years later, when Locke wrote, the spiritual and political climate in England had changed. The Presbyterians and then Congregationalist Puritans were gaining power in both church and state. They resisted rule by the king in the state and by the bishops in the church. Among the most fervent rebels were those who took their lives in their hands to migrate to the wilderness known as the new world. The claim for sovereignty that eventually called into being the United States transferred across the Atlantic with them. How this happened is instructive.

From the viewpoint of sovereignty, three types of groups came to America. The first type saw themselves as extensions of English sovereignty, subject to a royal governor, a personal agent of the king. This typifies the groups that settled from Maryland south. The second type wanted nothing to do with the throne. These were radical independents, among which the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, are the most famous. Their lack of political sense rendered them ineffective as agents for political change at the time, however, although their ideas concerning the independence of the church from the state eventually won the day. In other areas the Pilgrims were less than successful. Their years of starvation after the first winter resulted not from harsh conditions as much as from Christian/Platonic utopianism—they held all things in common. They were socialists and as are all socialist economies theirs was a complete failure. After privatizing ownership of land and tools, they prospered.

The third type were the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Unlike the Pilgrims, who were commoners, wealthy landowners, lawyers and merchants headed the Massachusetts Bay group. And unlike the socialist dreamers of Plymouth Bay, these Puritans knew how society works. They departed England with everything in place. And to top it off, they brought with them, in their briefcases as it were, their legal sovereignty. It was they who established independent sovereignty, the right and authority of self-governance, in the New World. And they did it completely legally. How did they do this?

It all had to do with their company’s charter, its articles of incorporation. They wrote into those articles the right of self-governance. By signing it, the king of England handed over his sovereignty to the Company. He gave the company’s board of directors the authority to rule every aspect of life in their lands on his behalf. This was the Massachusetts Bay Charter. No other company before or since accomplished this. The American nation began as a business corporation!

Thus, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company had all the power of the king of England, lifted out of that island and set down upon a continent thousands of miles away. Thusly the Puritans embarked upon their providential experiment, to create what they called "a Model of Christian Charity," that is, a model of Christian love, for the world to see. This model was democratic in form. It established the Congregationalist Church as the state church. It called for periodic elections of all magistrates including the governor himself. It granted broad rights to congregations in the church and communities in the commonwealth.

For nearly sixty years, from 1630 to 1689, the Massachusetts commonwealth maintained its sovereignty. The Puritan revolution came and went in England and much to the Americans’ dismay the kingship was restored in church and state. With the popular reaction against the Puritan regime in England, the king determined to break down the Puritan sovereignty in the New World as well. He revoked the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company and sent a royal governor to represent his authority over the state. This governor was universally disliked because he was not elected. Sovereignty had returned to the king. And the king sent a bishop to establish the Church of England. He never succeeded in doing so, in New England at least, and within 94 years, the royal governor was thrown out as well, by the victorious armies of George Washington. American sovereignty, based upon government of the people, by the people and for the people, became a reality.

I will conclude with some constructive theology. With the fall of man, Satan gained sovereignty in stages. First he controlled Adam through Eve, based upon Adam’s body taking dominion over Adam’s mind or spirit. Then he controlled Abel, the humble and weak, through Cain, the arrogant and strong. From there he could establish false kingship based upon Cain-type leaders. Cain founded the first city, the origin of human civilization. Abel tended flocks; he was a nomad with no place to settle and hence no sovereignty.

The American Revolution marked the liberation from the false kingship. The children overturned the rule by the false parents. Next the relationship of the brothers had to be worked out, i.e., the relationship of the races. The next major wars—the American Civil War, World War I and World War II, were fought to defeat the notion that one race is superior to another, that sovereignty is racially-determined. Next, the relationship of mind and body had to be worked out, that is, the relationship between the material and spiritual realms. This was the essence of the struggle between communism and democracy. The fall of communism signaled our liberation from sovereignty based upon materialism. After that, the final relationship to be worked out is that between man and woman. We are presently in the midst of that struggle.

This is the struggle between the realm centered upon the false Adam and Eve, with Eve in subject position, and that centered upon the true Adam and Eve, with Adam in subject position. The Bible’s book of Revelation refers to this false Eve as the whore of Babylon, who is worshipped by the merchants and kings of the world—the false Adams. I think that the realm of the false Eve is best denominated paganism. It is a pluralistic world of many gods, of wealth and luxury, of worshipping beauty, or, as Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist everything except temptation." It is the world of free sex. The world of paganism places women, the object of beauty, in the position of subject. The first to succumb to its allure is, naturally, women themselves. They give their bodies in return for power over men. This is why Reverend Moon is so critical of American women, who represent this usurpation of sovereignty.

He is quite right. Read Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture. Douglas describes how feminization began in the 1830s through 1880s, the first decades when women had time and ease. The culture became softer, centering on liberal Christianity. Douglas observes a virtual conspiracy between liberal clergymen, mostly Congregationalist and Unitarian, and the wives of their affluent families. Children were no longer victims of original sin, but became pure innocents who themselves should be worshipped. The afterlife was no longer most likely hell for 99% of us, but was surely heaven for all but the most heinous. Jesus turned from stern judge to loving and ever-forgiving friend. This era saw the introduction of the Jesus with Lady Clairol hair. This era saw the rise of pulp romances in paperback books, and then magazines full of advertisements. Laws of inheritance were changed, allowing women equal access to wealth in the cases of death and divorce.

While none of this seems evil in the least bit, it led to the world of, to get to the main point, pornography, which is the blatant, unselfconscious worship of the female by both sexes, the viewer and the viewed. And there are books on the emasculation of American men, leading to the status of "fatherless America" and the myth of the happy single mother.

To gain sovereignty, short of violence, one must work through the political system. To make progress through the American political system, one must make compromises. In making compromises, one sacrifices the purity of one’s cause. One famous example of this was the abolitionists, those who demanded an immediate end to slavery beginning in the 1830s. They were a small vociferous minority and most Americans wrote them off as wackos. They were uncompromising and they could not get elected to any public office. To succeed, they had to make alliances, and to make alliances they had to make compromises. By making compromises, they entered the mainstream and eventually got their man into the White House, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was no abolitionist, but he opposed slavery and was able to steer the north through a devastating war to end it.

For we Unificationists to attain our goals, we must work with our natural allies. To do so, we must make compromises. Some may feel that we are sacrificing the purity of our cause and may feel that it is unacceptable. Jesus certainly did not sacrifice the purity of his cause. True Father is not one to sacrifice the purity of his cause. What about us? We are not in the position of parents in this society; we are brothers working with our siblings. We have natural allies—in America, our natural allies are the pro-family religionists, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. True Father has said that we cannot accomplish the blessing of 400 million without Christianity. After all, embracing one’s enemy is what true love is all about.

Working with our allies in the culture war will lead to a society that is friendly to families. The goal of such a society is the protection of its youth from the fall. The pagan society, the fertility cult society, turns its youth into sexual fodder. That is clearly the result of sex education and the message of our popular media. This is a cause around which all people of conscience will rally. To achieve such a culture in our lifetime is nothing to be ashamed of. It is nothing short of messianic. And it is the key to true sovereignty.

 Download entire page and pages related to it in ZIP format
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Tparents Home