[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 7 (Tuesday, January 11, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H36-H37]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      A RESOLUTION TO HUMBLE OURSELVES AND ENTREAT WISDOM FROM GOD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the gentlewoman from Washington (Mrs. Rodgers) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.


                             General Leave

  Mrs. RODGERS of Washington. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent 
that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their 
remarks and submit extraneous materials.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentlewoman from Washington?
  There was no objection.
  Mrs. RODGERS of Washington. Madam Speaker, I rise today to offer a 
resolution. I do not offer this resolution on my own behalf. I offer it 
as a representative of the people of the United States, to formalize 
the unspoken sentiments and concerns that abound in our Nation right 
now. Any authority I have is given to me by the people.
  And this is what we believe:
  Our Nation is unique. It is distinctive, exceptional. American 
exceptionalism is too often misunderstood to mean something that it is 
not. It does not mean justification to dominate or condescend to other 
nations, or indulgent flattery to ourselves that we are better. It does 
not mean that we are a chosen people, or that circumstances give us 
privilege to circumvent law. Our Nation is bound by the same universal 
moral principles that must bind and shape the behaviors of all 
civilized nations. In this regard, we are all the same, as nations, and 
yet, we are different, very different in a very important way.
  It is not wealth or military power that makes us exceptional. It is 
not our institutions nor the genius of our written Constitution or our 
Bill of Rights; not directly. These are manifestations of something 
more fundamental and profound.
  Our exceptionalism is based on something else, a singular belief, a 
proposition you might call it, a proposition underlying all legal and 
constitutional beliefs. Our assertions of human equality and 
unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness, 
the right to find meaning and purpose and value in our individual 
lives, derives from a single assertion--that life, given to us by 
Creator God, is the moral basis of the unshakeable bedrock of our 
Republic.
  That proposition, the thing that makes us distinctive, is that we 
believe a Creator God endowed us with rights. Not just us. Everybody, 
everywhere. It is a gigantic revolutionary belief, and it is a belief. 
It is our faith statement. It is what speaks to the soul of our Nation.
  There are many great and ancient nations that believe in freedom as 
we do. Most countries in the world claim the rule of law and have 
written constitutions. Many of us use the language of rights and 
equality and declare for human dignity. But none have a coherent basis 
for doing so. We alone occupy that space. God gave us rights; made us 
in his image and, therefore, demonstrated all human beings are created 
equal, even the unborn, from conception. The poor, the infirm, the old, 
the weak, all colors and kinds, all races, all of us, are endowed by 
the Creator equally because we are made in His image.
  Without this fundamental belief, rights become only social protocol, 
conventions, historic inheritances, creatures of state citizenship, 
class, identity and features of consensus. They become malleable and 
fading creatures in the capricious hands of willful men.
  But America is different. God endowed us with rights, and that belief 
is either true or it is false. If it is false, then we Americans, among 
all mankind, are most to be pitied. The experiment must fail. It cannot 
and must not succeed.
  But if it is true, then we have built our country on a foundation 
that cannot be shaken, if we are true to it, we are anchored in the 
eternal bedrock of all truths. As Lincoln said: ``As a nation of free 
men we will live forever or die by suicide.''
  To those who are given much, much is expected.
  And somewhere, deep down inside ordinary Americans know this. It is 
the air that we breathe.
  Only we ourselves can end this great experiment. There are no 
external mortal forces that can overcome the bulwarks of that eternal 
truth.
  And therefore, what we believe matters, Madam Speaker. Our invisible 
immaterial beliefs are the strength of our national soul. The things 
that we hold on to and serve are the foundations of our institutions, 
our laws, our liberty, and the hope of our Nation.
  When the Founders established this Republic 250 years ago, and 
created the institutions that guide us, they were well aware that those 
institutions were insufficient in themselves to govern a free people. 
The lifeblood and the heartbeat of the Nation is moral character, not 
the institutions. Not the institutions, or even the laws themselves. 
For laws and institutions are corruption without the rectitude and 
wisdom of a moral, decent people. Without the people bracing themselves 
to wisdom and the holdfasts of character, our institutions have no 
power to preserving us.
  If the people ever lose their love of truth, justice, goodness, and 
the efflorescence of beauty that flourishes in them, there can be no 
hope in the parchment barriers of a Constitution,

[[Page H37]]

or the institutions created by it; no matter how noble that hope is. In 
effect, everything rises and falls in our Republic as a consequence of 
the character of the people.
  As a Nation, we live or die by the standards of our own moral 
character. The Founders knew this, but many of us know we are 
forgetting it.
  ``We have no government armed with power capable of contending with 
human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, 
revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our 
Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made 
only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the 
government of any other.''

  John Adams wrote that to the militia of Massachusetts. What he is 
saying is this: The power of the State is not secured by the power of 
arms. It is anchored in the honesty and decency of the people.
  Today, this may seem a quaint notion. I hope it is not. But the 
Founders who experimented in government to create a just and free 
society understood explicitly that freedom and justice are not the 
products of institutions, but, rather, institutions that defend freedom 
and justice are the product of a moral people.
  Freedom cannot exist without morality. George Washington understood 
this. John Adams understood this. Abraham Lincoln understood this. Dr. 
Martin Luther King understood this. I believe this, not because they 
believed it, but because it is true. I believe that most Americans 
understand this.
  When we drift from the Creator, we drift from the source of our own 
liberty. When we forget our duties to God, we forget our duties to each 
other. When we become proudful and lazy and forget the father of all 
rights, we become orphans of oppression. We are lost without the 
guiding hand of the Almighty.
  It may seem that Congress is not the place to introduce an appeal to 
God. I disagree. Insofar as all our rights and all our institutions are 
based upon the presumption of a just and Almighty God, and since this 
Congress itself rests upon the foundation that our Creator gave us the 
right to govern ourselves, to quote my hero, Abraham Lincoln: ``It is 
altogether fitting and proper that we do this.''
  It is precisely because of America's distinctive belief that I rise 
in this House to offer a resolution to humble ourselves and entreat 
wisdom from God, the Father of all blessings and mercy; a resolution of 
contrition, prayer, and fasting; a resolution in the great tradition of 
our free people.
  We have, as His guidance many times before, a resolution to return to 
the wellspring of liberty and our rights; a resolution to depart from 
iniquity and entreat His guidance; a prayer that we remember Him as the 
Father of every good thing that we have, and everything as a Nation and 
people we aspire to be.
  Whereas, We the People of the United States of America continue our 
search for a more perfect union and;
  Whereas, we are a people conceived in liberty and dedicated to the 
proposition that all are created equal, yet like in the days of Abraham 
Lincoln, when he observed that ``We have forgotten the gracious hand 
which preserved us in peace and multiplied, and enriched, and 
strengthened us;''
  Whereas, ``We have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our 
hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom 
and virtue of our own;''
  Whereas, we confess we are self-consumed, prideful, and unloving, 
quick to point out the speck in another person's eye while missing the 
log in our own;
  Whereas, we are trusting in our wealth and skill, and leaning on our 
own understanding;
  Whereas, we have become ungrateful, lovers of pleasure, stubborn, 
hard-hearted, divisive, and unforgiving;
  Whereas, we confess that instead of speaking of forgiveness, we cry 
out for vengeance. We have allowed the poisonous root of bitterness to 
grow up and trouble us;
  Whereas, the global pandemic of COVID-19 has intensified fear, 
unknowns, chaos, and confusion;
  Whereas, the impact of lockdowns and isolations has been severe, 
further exacerbating the breakdown of mental health, families, 
communities, and our Nation;
  Whereas, we are divided, perhaps like we haven't seen since the Civil 
War, when Abraham Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln, by faith, prayed, 
saying:

       May we again devote ourselves to prayer and acknowledge as 
     a people and as a Nation our dependence upon the overruling 
     power of God. Let us confess our sins and transgressions in 
     humble sorrow, yet with the assured hope that genuine 
     repentance will lead to mercy and pardon;

                              {time}  1530

  Whereas, by faith, at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when the 
outlook looked grim, Benjamin Franklin appealed to the delegates and 
urged prayer, asking: ``I have lived a long time, and the longer I 
live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth--that God governs 
in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground 
without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his 
aid?'' and
  Whereas, during World War I and at the signing of the Armistice, 
President Wilson proclaimed: ``Complete victory . . . God has indeed 
been gracious, let us thank him.'' and
  Whereas, this year marked the 80th anniversary of the initial 
National Bible Week declaration made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt 
just weeks before the start of World War II; and
  Whereas, George Washington Carver, born a slave during the Civil War, 
testified in 1921 in front of the House Ways and Means Committee 
expounding on the myriad of ingenious uses for the peanut transforming 
the economy and which had been revealed to him by faith as he regularly 
walked through the woods at 4 a.m., and
  Whereas, President John F. Kennedy said: ``The guiding principle of 
this Nation has been, is now, and ever shall be `In God We Trust,' '' 
and
  Whereas, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraged to us 
``Pray daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free,''
  Therefore, be it resolved by those assembled, we pray that in this 
hour of our great need, our Sovereign God will come and do again as He 
has done in days gone by; we pray for a time of healing from our 
brokenness, broken lives, broken families, broken communities, and 
broken systems.
  We resolve to humble ourselves, pray, seek God's face, turn from our 
wicked ways, and thank and praise the God of our ancestors who has 
given us wisdom and strength and who controls the course of events; and
  Therefore, it behooves us to call upon the people of our Nation to 
humble ourselves before our Creator and acknowledge our complete 
dependence upon Him, to repent of our pride and selfishness, and to ask 
the Lord to break our hearts for the things that break His heart;
  That we may not miss hearing His voice, and that He will pour out His 
spirit, once again, on our Nation and leaders; and
  We proclaim a year of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer. What 
might God do in the next 365 days if we commit to reading His Word 
daily and praying together for our Nation? In our families? For the 
young generation, this generation in misery and despair? We are 
expectant that He will do immeasurably more than all we could ask or 
imagine and that He will hear from heaven, forgive our sins, and heal 
our land. May He be as original with us as He has been with others. 
Amen.

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