The Ghost, The Example, and Liberty or Death.

Someone forgotten and someone remembered on the 250th anniversary of a dream.

Photo: mine.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to tell you about the beginning of something that is not far yet done.

Last week I told you about a group of people who would not lay down and die. And writing all of that took a lot out of me. So right after I sent that to you, Beautiful Wife put a dog Cone of Shame on me so I wouldn’t lick my stitches and she’s been feeding me the yummy soft food from the can but I can’t reach the bowl because of the cone and now I clonk into door frames.

So this week I figured I’d write about something a little lighter. Just a little easier. Like the American Revolution. Or rather, a part of its origin that today almost nobody knows about. We just turned 250 as a nation this week so it seems like this week it’s a fitting story to tell.

I know about this particular thing because I live in Virginia and when you live in Virginia you can’t take ten steps without falling down face-first into something about the American Revolution. Or into some site of the Civil War. Virginia is wall-to-wall with places where Americans fought tyrants or racists or both. And with the reasons why they did.

So on Sunday after Easter lunch with my mother we drove just past the gas station to see “the womb of the Revolution” for ourselves.

That womb is the outline of a church that’s long gone: during the Civil War three Union snipers inside held off Confederate forces from its windows for so long that the Confederates got frustrated and cannon-shot the building so badly it burned to the ground. It was never rebuilt.

Or it was sorta rebuilt a few years ago: some people rebuilt the outlines of the church in white metal bars as it originally stood but the walls and windows and roof are gone. The wind blows through freely — the way a place that helped inspire American freedom should.

It looks like this:

It’s called Polegreen Church. It’s near Richmond, Virginia. Locals call it “The Ghost Church” because when you go past it in the moonlight it gleams like the spirit of something that will not leave this world.

Polegreen Church was an epicenter of the effort to establish freedom of religion and freedom of speech in the United States of America and it was proto-abolitionist before abolitionism could be. If you want to read the history of the struggle for freedom of religion — legally-protected freedom — not just in America but everywhere, the story is stamped into the bricks in the long walkway up to the front door.

Polegreen was the first of four “dissenting churches” that were established in the 1740s. They were the only four non-Anglican churches the officially-Anglican Virginia colony allowed to operate. Their existence was proof of the virtue of freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and of freedom of religion, and their pastors and members were among its champions.

Polegreen’s best known pastor was Samuel Davies — who nobody remembers today — considered in his day the greatest orator and one of the greatest preachers in the American Colonies. While he was pastor at Polegreen, collections of his sermons were published as books and were among the most read such collections in America and in Europe. He left Polegreen after 12 years to become president of Princeton University then passed away two years later at the age of 37.

During those dozen years at Polegreen, Davies preached and roamed and evangelized and worked to persuade others of the need for — and the virtues of — civil and religious freedoms.

Davies owned two slaves for some window of time during his tenure at Polegreen — something not even he could reconcile with his belief that everyone were equal in the eyes of God. He couldn’t conceive of abolition at the time — none of the Founding Fathers could. Just as they — George Washington and George Mason and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry — Davies’ failings weren’t of the heart, they were of his imagination.

So Davies did the next most revolutionary things regarding slaves in Virginia that he could think of: he educated them. He evangelized to them and baptized hundreds of them. He served them Communion with white people as equals. Black slaves preached the Gospel from Polegreen’s pulpit to white people and black people alike.

Davies and the members of Polegreen were so radical and ahead of their time that they did things almost no one in America even dreamed of doing at the time. They did things 300 years ago that many churches struggle to do today.

Davies’ sermons and Polegreen’s example inspired many. Davies’ sermons alone were legendary.

There was this one woman in the pews whose husband wouldn’t darken the door of a non-Anglican church so she brought her little son to Polegreen with her alone. She found Davies inspiring and so did her son. She found that her son had a pretty good ear and that he could remember Davies’ sermons a bit and he could sorta mimic Davies’ windup, half of his delivery, and a quarter of his meaning. So she started asking him to stand up in their kitchen on Sunday afternoons and deliver Davies’ sermons as best as he could remember. It was a little and a large and a fun and meaningful thing to do.

After a dozen years of Davies’ sermons and of Polegreen’s example, that boy later, when he grew up, became a sucker for what would become American Revolutionary ideals. He not only bought them hook, line, and sinker; he became one of their greatest articulators. He became one of the Revolution’s leaders.

See, at Polegreen Church years before, young Patrick Henry did not merely listen; he didn’t merely witness the impossible take place in front of him — he took heed. Patrick Henry learned oratory from watching Davies preach the gospel and preach the virtues of civil and religious freedom.

While most of us remember Patrick Henry only for his “Give me liberty or give me death” line apparently he spoke like that all the time, practically every day.

Patrick Henry’s contemporaries — his fellow Founding Fathers and anyone who heard him speak — said even in the moments when they were most afraid of starting the Revolution or of losing it, that in his presence they could not prevaricate, they could not fail to believe, and they would not dare despair. They knew that when Patrick Henry’s oratory was needed — and even when it was not — he could blow the roof off of the greatest cathedral in the world with splinters to spare.

He was a Founding Father not because he held position in the Colonies; not because he was well-educated or well-bred or had wealth. He had no stature. He became a Founding Father out of sheer force of personality and because he believed even when they doubted and because his words made the American Revolution a public groundswell. Pamphleteers who supported the Revolution routinely built entire arguments for democracy from Henry’s offhand phrases. Even Henry’s throwaway lines became battle cries. Henry made the American Revolution an aspiration and a public will. He helped make it into a movement.

He was difficult and uncompromising and complicated and flawed. He believed in and said impossible things when faith was needed and even when it was simply exasperating. He was a hero and sometimes he was horrible. We remember him for his better and not for his worse, thank goodness.

American democracy would not have been realized or made it these 250 years without him and we still have another 250 years in the tank despite how dark it is right now.

See, tyrants have this one feature: When people stand up to them, they try to crack down because they think it will work. They think it will intimidate. They think it will prove strength. They think it will dissipate dissent. They think it will rally their flagging support. They think a crackdown will be liked.

• Last week 250 years ago Boston was filled with thousands of British soldiers who were preparing to march across the countryside to arrest Revolutionary leaders and smash resistance once and for all. They failed to realize that crackdowns don’t produce results, they produce resolve. They produce response. At Lexington and Concord they didn’t produce acquiescence, they produced Minutemen.

• Today his support is beginning to flag and it’s going to flag even worse each week. So what do you think he’s going to do next?

Last Sunday my children stood where Patrick Henry first learned to believe and to speak.

I should teach them how to preach.

After all, this dog cone does sorta work like a megaphone.