Has America Lost Its Creed?

The people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it. – John Adams

“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed,” observed English writer G.K. Chesterton in What I Saw in America. America’s creed, Chesterton explained, “is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.”

Margaret Thatcher put it this way: “Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.”

In his book, Liberty’s Secrets, Joshua Charles wrote:

We no longer know where we come from, the grand story we fit into, and the great men and women who inspired the noble vision which birthed the United States of America, the first nation in history to be founded upon the reasoned consent of a people intent on governing themselves. Previous to this great experiment, all governments had been the result of happenstance, of conquest, of accident and force, but not of reason and virtue – not of purpose.

The creed, the philosophy, the noble vison, to which Chesterton, Thatcher and Charles refer to is the protection of “unalienable” natural rights.

John Locke’s ideas on natural rights heavily influenced the Founding Fathers. In Locke’s The Second Treatise on Civil Government he explains natural rights and the purpose of government:

“Every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his…The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”

Notice that Locke intertwined personal and economic liberty. These are the rights that Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence immortalized as “unalienable”:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In his book To Secure These Rights: The Declaration of Independence and Constitutional Interpretation law professor Scott Gerber explains how “the natural-rights principles embodied in the Declaration [of Independence] are not ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the Constitution; they are at the heart of the Constitution.”

With certainty, Gerber writes, “To secure natural rights is, therefore, why the Constitution was enacted, and to secure natural rights is how the Constitution should be interpreted. That is the ‘original intent’ of the founders.”

Holding to America’s creed and affirming “original intent” does matter. All three branches of government increasingly ignore the natural rights basis of the Constitution and, as a result, our rights as individuals are eroding.

“Governments are instituted to ‘secure’ our preexisting rights, not to bestow them,” George Will makes clear in his foreword to law professor’s Randy Barnett’s book, Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People. “Government can derive many powers from the consent of the majority,” Will explains, “but not all exercises of those powers are, simply because they flow from a majority, just.’” [Italics added.]

Will cautions that if you don’t understand the natural rights basis of the Constitution, you’re likely to misinterpret the first three words of the Constitution. “We the People” is not referring to a collective entity. When you understand the Constitution was meant to protect the inherent rights of individuals, you see clearly that “We the People” refers to individuals.

Thus, “We the People” signals that the Constitution, rather than being an open-ended document intended to enable majority rule, is in Will’s words a “a device for limiting government, including government’s translation of majority desires into laws and policies when those conflict with government’s business of securing the natural rights of individuals.”

When we forget the natural rights basis of the Constitution we allow our unalienable rights to be abridged by government in the pursuit of some vaguely defined “social good.” To those who are so willing to violate the rights of others while pursuing a “social good” we might ask this question: If you want to live in a world where rights are not unalienable, who or what do you think will guarantee your rights?

If individual rights are not secure, has America lost its creed?

But why have we forgotten? In many cases, it’s because we never learned.

The Founding Fathers understood a people without grounding in the principles that keep them free, will soon lose their freedom.

John Adams wrote:

This spirit [of liberty] ... without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage. Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature, search into the spirit of the British constitution, read the histories of ancient ages, contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome.

In short, Adams argued, “If nations should ever be wise, instead of erecting thousands of useless offices, or engaging in unmeaning wars, they will make a fundamental maxim of this: that no human being shall grow up in ignorance. In proportion as this is done, tyranny will disappear.”

Adams advised, “Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.” Of course, today, our educational system has been hijacked, and for the most part, children are taught to cherish principles that are contrary to America’s creed.

Jefferson was prescient when he wrote, “Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”

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