Comprehensive Freedom Theory (CFT) is proposed as an interdisciplinary examination of faith, law, and psychosocial process in the American pursuit of freedom.  The organizing principle of CFT is that God grants the gift of freedom, and that divinely granted freedom is unalienable, unifying, and altruistic.  CFT analyzes how the intersectionality of faith, Judeo-Christian morality, the U.S. Constitution, and commitments to individualism and free speech sustain freedom of thought, word, and deed in America.  CFT distinguishes between freedom that humanizes and the trickeries of man-made entitlements and libertinism that dehumanize.  It examines why Americans, foremost among the nations, have fought wars and waged campaigns against their own safety, natural prejudices, and material interests for the ideal of freedom.

A personal CFT study is offered as I ask my own American ancestors what they would do to preserve freedom.

On 11/03/20, I retired early, telling my anxious son-in-law, "Nobody can cheat all over the country, millions of votes.  Don't worry.  Trump won."  The next morning, I faced the truth.  The media/government syndicate, not the people, chooses the president.  People don't like to talk about the stolen election, but in 2020, after four years of government coup attempts, I was a disenfranchised alien, a victim of a criminal conspiracy.

Ironically, the DOJ provides a framework for crime victim recovery, counseling a recovery process of impact, recoil, reorganization.  Impact is assessment of damage.  Recoil is immediate survival.  Reorganization is making changes to reaffirm life after crime.  Our national reorganization must recognize that freedom theory, not race theory, is the fundamental narrative of American history.  Racism is a dull and deadening subject; freedom is fascinating.  It is divine sport in human consciousness.  We must rejoice in freedom history.  Whether it's twelve generations like my father's, or two like my mother's, we must hold fast the courage of our ancestors to find hope in this baffling time.

Summer 2020 was an urban apocalypse of anarchy, murder, smoking wreckage, and nightmarish lawlessness.  With that backdrop, I watched a talk by a scholar I respected.  Instead of an erudite lecture, he peddled manipulative foolishness called Critical Race Theory.  CRT is the opposite of CFT.  It is sullen, anti-God neo-Marxism, with heaps of victim/oppressor glop and demands for bucks based on a one-eyed view of history.  When the speaker's anti-American defamations worked back to the Puritans, he said, "Even the Puritans did witch-burning."  This was absurd.  There is no evidence that any Puritans of the Great Migration (1620–1640) owned slaves, much less burned people up.  I knew I was descended from Puritans named Loomis.  My reorganization was to collect my family's CFT history and join the DAR.

Puritans Joseph Loomis (1590–1658) and wife Mary White Loomis (1590–1652) emigrated with their children from Braintree, England to the Connecticut colony on 04/16/1638.  Mary was from a wealthy family, and Joseph was a successful woolens merchant.  They were not religiously persecuted — it was 1638, after all! — and it was against their economic interests to board a creaking tub, the Susan and Ellen, and cross a vast ocean.  Joseph's writing makes it clear he envisioned a greater freedom.

CFT recognizes the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1638), the first written constitution in  history to govern an intentional community.  The Orders included religious tolerance and legal rights for non-Puritans.  Four hundred years ago, these prototypical Americans were more humane and tolerant that many communist and Islamic countries today.

"Forefather Joseph, Your dream of freedom was fulfilled beyond your imagination, but now it is slipping away.  There is nowhere else on Earth to go to find such a path to freedom.  Where do I turn now?"

After the Battle of Lexington and Concord on 04/19/1775, Governor Turnbull of Connecticut spoke not of revenge, but of the horrors of civil war.  Nevertheless, the general muster of May 1775 represented "our utmost duty to save our country from absolute slavery ... and the dangers to which the liberties of all America, and especially the New England colonies are exposed."

A brother to forefather Nathaniel, my great-uncle Oliver Loomis, Jr., was 16 when he joined the Continental Army, a skinny farm boy leaning against his tall musket in a sunny field in May.  That month, his cousins Simon (3rd Regiment, 2nd Company, Connecticut Continental Army) and Asa and Jesse Loomis (6th Company) joined an Army, which could not afford weapons or provisions, to face the greatest military power on earth.

"My forefathers, absolute slavery is closing in on us again, but how to fight a revolution when the enslavers are ourselves?"

A DAR genealogist found my "qualifying" great-grandfather, Samuel Barrett (1739–1798).  Sam is on the Massachusetts Honor Roll for lending money to the Revolution.  In 1789, he was broke, and he wrote to George Washington seeking a government appointment.  (Thank goodness he fed his son Phineas, or I wouldn't be here.)  Barrett schmoozed Washington as being "in every respect, incomparably his superior."  Barrett also had a friend put his John Hancock on a letter of reference.  Oh, wait — his friend was John Hancock.  Grandpa did not get a job.

CFT explores why slavery has been repugnant to Americans from our founding.  Let's study anti-slavery resistance in Yonkers, N.Y., where my ancestors, the Sherwoods, lived since 1740.  In 1799, the New York Legislature passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.  Male children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 would become free at age 28, females at age 25.  In 1799, what other tribes or realms of the world passed legislation for the inevitable banning of slavery?  Slavery finally ended in Yonkers and across Westchester County in 1827.

"Great-grandmother Matilda Sherwood, great-great grandfather Isaac Sherwood, where do we turn when our legislatures will not secure our votes, much less cure the abominations of this day?"

CFT studies why in the Civil War soldiers fought and died to make distant brethren free. My great-grandfather Leonard Reynolds graduated from West Point in 1865, and at 21 joined the terrible war in its twilight.

"Grandfather, we are again fighting a great civil war along spiritual lines. We are losing our faith in God-given freedom and the rule of law. Can this divided house again be reunited and stand?"

CFT above all considers the pre-eminence of individuality in the life force of American freedom.  The eminent psychologist Leona E. Tyler, pacifist and conscientious objector, used her freedom to counsel soldiers during WWII.  Her brother, Robert L. Tyler, wore the uniform of the U.S. Army in Scotland.  Professor Tyler, the "village explainer," told us young ones, "It was as if Charles Manson became the president of Germany."

Paul Newberry Loomis was a medic in an Army hospital on Long Island.  Imagine Bella Portnowitz Loomis, dragging her polio braces over the curbs of the Lower East Side, bright flare of the first generation.  Molly Erlich Tyler, another first-generation comet, joined the Navy Waves in 1942 and worked for Admiral Rickover.  Her dying words were "Love America."

CFT explicates American resistance to Soviet domination.  They also died to make men free, the American warriors of Korea and Vietnam, liberators of eastern Europe.  Edward Loomis Lathrope went from Peace Corps to draft to the Vietnam War in 1968, where he helped save a wounded Vietnamese woman at Bien Hoa-Long Bin military base.

Our forefathers preserved for us, through vigilance and sacrifice, the Constitution and freedom.  Will we follow in their footsteps and find a way to maintain this gift of God?

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.