The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

Liberty Valance is the ultimate antagonist. He's the often drunk bully of the old west, walking with sharp spurs over anyone who dares get in his way. Liberty Valance has a hair-trigger anger that spews molten lava. Cross Liberty, and you feel the heat. His tongue, gun, and whip rule the town. Nobody stands in the way of Liberty Valance. He's like Lola: what Liberty wants, Liberty gets.

The stagecoach brings a mild-mannered lawyer to town, Jimmy Stewart, who believes in education and the Anglo-American rule of law. Backed by his books of Blackstone and hundreds of years of the English common law, Jimmie Stewart, complete with a strong dose of naïveté concerning evil and evil people, has never met anyone quite like Liberty Valance.

To Jimmy Stewart, you change the world by teaching reading (which he does) and the rule of law (to which he holds). Liberty holds to the rule of the fist and the gun; forget law and learning. The story moves to its conclusion: the ultimate confrontation between Liberty and the lawyer. Irony pervades: the lawyer who holds to the rule of law and education winds up confronting evil, gun-to-gun, mano y mano, on a dusty dark street.

Jimmy Stewart has been practicing, but he's no match for Liberty Valance. When they meet, Liberty takes his time before firing the final shot into Stewart. Just before he does, Jimmy Stewart fires, and Liberty Valance drops dead. Stewart lives; Liberty is dead. Jimmy Stewart becomes the hero, the man who shot Liberty Valance, grist for myth.

But what nobody knows is that across the street in a darkened alleyway is the other main character of the story, John Wayne, who fired his rifle at the same time Jimmy Stewart did. Stewart had missed, but didn't know it. John Wayne is the man who shot Liberty Valance, but no one knows and Jimmy Stewart's name goes down in the history books. Eventually the lawyer learns the truth. He's not the man who shot Liberty Valance.

Years later, Stewart, now a retired senator from the new frontier state, comes back to pay his respects to John Wayne, recently dead. He talks with newspapermen and tells the truth about who shot Liberty Valance. As they're mulling over the opportunity to debunk the myth, a senior reporter finally says, "There should be no story. When the legend is greater than the truth, print the legend." Eliminate the truth. There's no story. A statement right out of Orwell's 1984. A similar situation exists every December as people seek to eliminate the truth. Officials expunge the truth from our vocabulary. School librarians seize and remove books that tell the truth. Others declare portrayals of the truth illegal. From Georgia to points south, west, north, and northeast they don't print the truth about December 25^{th. There's no story.}

^{We celebrate December 25th because of the birth of Christ.
But December 25th is an orphan, a day of celebration with no official name.
Officially, no one knows why we celebrate the date. The truth never sees print.
There's no story. The word for December 25th becomes officially taboo and
through the magic of vocabulary, the day morphs into the "Holiday
Season." Children in a northeastern state are officially forbidden to say
"Merry Christmas" in school. They eliminate trees that commemorate the
event. Even red and white candy is out.

Here's the celebrated day of the Man whose birthday is the reason for it, and we
can't find one book on official shelves that will explain the day. We can't say
the word that includes His name, so, as we celebrate, you celebrate in a vacuum.
There's no story. Here's the Man that has had the greatest influence on the
western world, and officials control the books and vocabulary that explain
December 25th to the extent that there's no story. Read something else; say
something else. Like modern day Julians, thoughts are controlled by vocabulary
control. One can't think about what one has no language to describe. But let's
be honest. Such control isn't going to stop the Story. The Julians never have
stopped the story and never will. Such story control isn't new; it predates
Julian the Apostate, and is as old as the command in Acts 4:17-18. If the Herods,
the Sauls, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Julians couldn't stop the
Story, do we really believe today's powers will be able to do so? "Not
hardly," says Psalm 2:1-4.

Jesus is "the Man who shot Liberty Valance." The legend makers of
today will not have it, but people are hearing the Story of the Man who shot
Liberty Valance. No need to pout about them: His Story is history's two
thousand-year-old juggernaut.}

^{Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor}

For more information about our church or comments on this web site, please contact webmaster@countylinechurch.com.