You have time to knock on only one door.
- David Lane
- Jul 4
- 4 min read
Thomas Fairfax [1693-1781], 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, is the man for whom Fairfax County, Virginia, is named.
He inherited 5 million acres - specifically, 5,282,000 acres - known as the Northern Neck Proprietary: the land lying between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, stretching west through the Shenandoah Valley and into what is now West Virginia.
The largest successful land speculation in colonial Virginia history was the fruit of other men’s loyalty to King Charles II [1630-1685], King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Fairfax spent decades in colonial courts defending that inheritance.
The litigation arose from disputed boundaries and from the Virginia colonial government’s challenge to Fairfax’s claim. He eventually carried the dispute to the Privy Council in London, which in 1745, after 15 years of litigation, ruled in his favor, confirming his claim to the full western extent of the proprietary, including the Shenandoah Valley.
Victory in hand, Fairfax returned permanently to Virginia in 1747 and never left.
Five years earlier, in 1742, the Virginia General Assembly had carved Fairfax County out of the northern part of Prince William County and named it in his honor. Lord Fairfax was still alive, just 49 years old, and the naming recognized his status as proprietor of the Northern Neck and dominant landholder of the region.
After taking up permanent residence in Virginia and building Greenway Court near Winchester, Fairfax became active in civil, local military, and religious affairs.
Following his death at Greenway Court on December 9, 1781, he was buried within the communion rail in the church of Frederick Parish, the most honored position in an Anglican church, reserved for communicants in good standing.
The Fairfax family’s Christianity was not nominal. Across generations, it was bound to Protestant conviction, whether Presbyterian in the parliamentary branch or Anglican in the royalist line.
As the only British peer ever to reside permanently in the American colonies, Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron became George Washington’s [1732-1799] mentor, neighbor, employer, and friend.
Fairfax became Washington’s first employer when he hired the 16-year-old Virginian to survey his lands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A boy from a middling Virginia family suddenly had access to 5 million acres, and to the man who owned them.
Lord Fairfax gave Washington his first work, his first social elevation, his first political backing, and decades of personal loyalty across a revolution that would divide their worlds.
When Washington stood for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758, the race was contested, the outcome uncertain, and Washington needed help. Lord Fairfax used his influence on Washington’s behalf.
Washington won.
Years later, Washington returned that loyalty by protecting the old man until the day he died.
When the American Revolution came, Fairfax and Washington stood on opposite sides of the most consequential political rupture of the 18th century. Fairfax was a British peer, a Crown loyalist, a man whose title, land, and identity were bound to the monarchy. Washington became the commanding general of the army fighting to break from that monarchy.
By every logic of the moment, the relationship should have ended.
Instead, two men on opposite sides of a revolution continued honoring one another until death closed the account.
Which brings us to secularized America, and the recent story that “Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia are considering scheduling school on Christmas.” The Washington Examiner editorialized that Fairfax County has the longest school year in the United States because of its embrace of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.1,2
Fairfax County’s baptism and full immersion into cultural Marxism’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion regime did not happen by accident. It entered through the gates of education, bureaucracy, politics, and silence - one board meeting, one curriculum change, one policy memo, and one surrendered institution at a time - while the churches of the region slumbered on.
When they will have finally managed to completely dismantle the Judeo-Christian heritage and Biblically based culture established by the American Founders, we will point them to Daniel Lapin’s assessment.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin [born 1947], widely known as ‘America’s Rabbi’, is one of the most distinctive voices at the intersection of Jewish tradition, Christian culture, and American conservatism.
Lapin asks us to imagine being a Jew after curfew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, hearing the boots of the Gestapo gaining from behind. You turn down a street lined with townhouses. Over each door is a nameplate: engineer, composer, pharmacist, Baptist Sunday School teacher, doctor, lawyer.
You have time to knock on only one door.
Which door do you choose?
Lapin’s answer is obvious. You knock on the door of the Baptist Sunday School teacher. Why? Because the Bible teacher believes in God. If he honors God, he probably respects life. If he respects life, a Jew might be safe.
Then Lapin widens the lens. That is what happened on a national scale. Jews were being chased across the globe. The names over the doors read Argentina, Germany, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United States of America.
Which door did they knock on?
America’s door.
Why?
Because America believed in God. And because America believed in God, America respected life. And because America respected life, a Jew might be safe.
And so they came.
And they were invited in.
Rabbi Lapin’s warning now applies beyond his original audience, to every American who has inherited that door and is quietly unhinging it from its frame.
The crucifix is being removed from the wall. “Under God” is litigated out of the Pledge. The cross disappears from city seals. Christmas is on the verge of vanishing from Fairfax County Public Schools.
Not by foreign invasion, but by a sustained, determined effort from within to evict God from His prominence in American life.
And the project is succeeding.
But when it is finished, when God has been removed from His unique place in the architecture of this culture, the Godly respect for life that made America’s door worth knocking on will be gone with Him.
Anyone who knows anything about history knows what follows. When a civilization loses its reverence for life, it does not remain stable. In time, it becomes one of the places people flee.
Os Guinness [born 1941] reinforces the point: “The plain fact is that no free and lasting civilization anywhere in history has so far been built on atheist foundations.”
The question for the Church is whether it will defend the door or stand by quietly while the nameplate comes down.
Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs are entering America’s public square.
David Lane
American Renewal Project