From this week’s Newsletter.
This is the world’s most important public holiday.
Independence Day is one of the most important public holidays in the world. July the Fourth should not be regarded as solely an American celebration. America’s independence should be celebrated by the entire free world. For without a free and independent United States, the free world wouldn’t be free.
The U.S. made it possible for the nations of Western Europe to shake off the Nazi yoke, the German people included. America’s steadfast opposition to Communist totalitarianism not only kept Western Europe free, it enabled the people of Eastern Europe—including the people of the Soviet Union, itself—to throw off the yoke of Marxist socialism.
Nor was is it only the people of Europe and the Middle East who have benefited from America’s dedication to the cause of freedom: The people of Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines and the islands of the Pacific occupied by the forces of Imperial Japan were liberated at the cost of much American blood. And Taiwan, South Korea, and democratic Japan are free thanks to the United States’ vigilance.
But while the Fourth of July should be an international celebration, it is important to remember the people who made these celebrations possible—the people who defined principles that underpin this great nation, and the people who dedicated their lives to translate the founding fathers’ vision into reality.
The American Revolution is unique among the many revolutions that have taken place since the Surrender at Yorktown. It is unique because it is the only one that did not “consume its authors or its children.”
This is because it is unique in a more fundamental way: It is the only revolution that was impelled by a genuine spirit of Christianity. Far from seeking to impose any particular political or religious vision on anybody, the purpose of the American Revolution was to enable individuals to exercise their God–given gift of free will.
This is what was meant when the men who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence affirmed that our Creator has endowed each and everyone of us with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Certainly, the founding fathers expected that our individual pursuit of happiness would, somehow or other, involve the practice of the Christian faith—that’s what they meant by the word “religion.” But they did not seek to dictate what brand of Christianity people should profess or, indeed, that they should espouse any religion at all. Indeed, they left the question of religious belief up to the individual.
In other words, they were careful not to tamper with the fundamental qualities manifest in our humanity: our freedom to make our own decisions: right or wrong, wise or foolish; to worship God or to reject Him … This might seem self-evident today, but at the time it was an entirely novel concept.
This is the critical difference between the American Revolution and the other great revolution of the 18th Century, the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries claimed to have been inspired by the American example. But this is true only to a superficial degree.
The French revolutionaries were not seeking to uphold the God–given rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Quite the opposite, in fact. Theirs was a collectivist vision. The motto by which they defined their enterprise was “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Their aim was to subordinate the individual to the common good—an entirely theoretical concept defined by a political elite.
But the fundamental difference between the American and French revolutions lies not so much in the visions of the protagonists as in their respective religions. The Americans were inspired by the teachings of Jesus and the belief that each one of us is equally beloved by his Creator and endowed with certain inalienable rights.
The French revolutionaries, by contrast, worshipped an entirely different God: the mind of man. They acknowledged no higher authority than that of human reason. In fact, they instituted worship of the “Goddess of Reason” as France’s official state religion—abandoning the public worship of the human mind only when the appalling consequences of it brought human reason into disrepute.
It is not accidental that the fruits of the American Revolution have been a degree of human intellectual achievement and material prosperity hitherto unrealized by the human race. History teaches us we’ll continue to prosper so long as we uphold the rights endowed upon the individual by our creator.
Nor, I would further contend, is it accidental that the fruits of the French Revolution and the others it has inspired—notably the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Nazi revolution in Germany, the Fascist revolution in Italy, Mao’s revolution in China, Pol Pot’s revolution in Cambodia—have been a tidal wave of misery and death unprecedented in human history. While God is a benevolent creator, human reason turns out to be an insatiably blood–thirsty tyrant.
If you’ve ever puzzled over the increasingly brutal history of the two centuries that have past since our founding fathers first issued the Declaration of Independence, it is vital to understand that the two revolutionary visions are utterly incompatible. It is impossible to reconcile governance founded on the principle of the divinely endowed rights of the individual with a collectivist vision directed by the political and sociological fads and fancies derived from human reason.
Small wonder then that young Americans have been called upon many times over the past 225 years to shed their blood, indeed to lay down their lives, to uphold the rights and worth of the individual against the dictates of the human intellect. Few of them have been philosophers.
But most of them have been instinctively aware that their obligation to fight was rooted in America’s special and intensely close relationship with the Bible—a relationship recognized at the very beginning when the settlers hailed America as a “Promised Land,” a “Land of Milk and Honey.”
However, we who worship the Creator that has endowed us with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness need to remember there are people—at home and abroad—who worship that other god, the god of human reason. They are true believers who will never abandon striving to subordinate our God–given rights to some fashionable collectivist vision of the “common good.”
After the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the participants had given America. “A republic, ma’am,” Franklin replied, “… if you can keep it.”
Pray we have the courage, the wisdom, the vision and, last but not least, the charity to keep it—and not merely for our sakes, but for the sake of the entire world. GPH✠
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