WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Unpacking the Constitution: Early Precedent for the Constitution

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Going through the early American spirit of covenant and how the pilgrim settlers set the precedent for the later established American Constitution.

The Constitution is not simply a compilation of legal gobbledygook. It's something we can all understand, and we should, in order to grasp what it means to be American. Welcome to unpacking the Constitution. I'm Lauren Bixler, and I hope to take you line by line through the Constitution and come out of it with the tools to navigate everyday life as a citizen. Today, before we get into the technical side of the Constitution, I want to first explore the American spirit. Going back to early colonial history, a group of English pilgrims found themselves on the shores of Plymouth, Massachusetts. After traveling in perilous waters for about two

months, facing unknown territory and dangers, these pilgrims thought, we need to make a covenant with one another. What we now know as the Mayflower Compact, commonly mentioned in grade school, the original name was actually the Plymouth Combination, or Plymouth Covenant. In there it says, We whose names are underwritten, having undertaken for the glory of God, do buy these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one another covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic. Think about the ramifications of this statement. This group of a hundred or so people

just spent two months traveling from England to this unknown, undiscovered, undeveloped, massive land and said, you know what, we're in this together. We traveled all that way. God is our wetness. And we will do right by him and covenant with one another,

and no matter what we face, we will be bound to each other, as it says, combine ourselves together into a civil body politic. So not only is it just a spiritual community, because they were very religious and pious people, but it's also a political one. So they even recognized early on without a formal society that there needs to be some sort of political, civil body, but united in a religious covenant through the authority of God. Kind of to bolster this point, we'll fast forward to William Penn, who acquired what later became Pennsylvania. In his work, the frame of government of Pennsylvania,

he said this compelling line. Governments rather depend on men than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad. If it be ill, they will cure it. But if men be bad, let the government. be never so good, they will endeavor it to warp and spoil it to their ruin. Again, such a powerful statement, an idea that might seem more commonplace to us now, but when you had very top-down government structures, this kind of bottom-up society, community, then branching out to form their own leadership,

this is a new idea, this was a new shift, and this is American, speaks to the American spirit. because now we see what is described as a Confederate Republic, the United States, that is not just a Confederate, you know, a large monarchical power that has this common land, common culture, common bounds, but it's made up of so many communities of United Values. There's something interesting going on here, right? we have the early pilgrims talking about covenant, then we have later settlers talking about government as this kind of tool for us to use. And we see that today, and we can explore that further in the other episodes. And I just want you to ponder that as you leave what kind of government

do we have today, and does it reflect these ideas? And as we go through the Constitution, do we find similar visions of covenant, very community-rich life that America was built on, or have we fallen away from that? Have we been able to maintain a virtuous citizenry that will not abuse the government or have the checks and balances failed at letting the government become too powerful? These are important questions to ponder. And in the next episode, we'll go through the articles of Confederation, at least some of them, in theory, to see how that compares to what we will later discover as the format of the Constitution. Tune in when you can. I'm Lauren Bixler, and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.