Reclaiming Our Birthright, Our Heritage, and Our Inheritance
As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, commentators have noticed a striking apathy among Americans, especially compared to the enthusiasm that greeted the Bicentennial in 1976.
One reason is that, as New College Professor Casey Wheatland recently argued, “Americans no longer feel we are one people.” The deterioration of a unifying culture, the embarrassment many feel at even thinking that all public business should be conducted in English, and the decline of a hearty public Christianity all play a part. As Wheatland added, Americans are “so divided along political fault lines that openly displaying patriotic symbols can be seen as a partisan act.” If you see a suburban house with an American flag flying outside and a minivan in the driveway, and if you notice that the family leaves every Sunday morning to attend church, you can make a good guess about who Dad and Mom are voting for.
Our present cultural disintegration is far afield from what John Jay described in Federalist 2: “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government.” Though some might think this a series of rhetorical overstatements strung together for a purely partisan purpose, it wasn’t.
In the founding era, America was one of the most ethnically, linguistically, and religiously cohesive countries of the time. It was predominantly British-descended, English-speaking, and Protestant Christian, bound by common legal traditions and the experience of the Revolution. As Timon Cline once pointed out, “Commentators on all sides of the ratification debate recognized that America was a Protestant nation fit only to be ruled by Protestants.” Think about this the next time you hear a pastor or public theologian claim that evangelicals have turned politics into an idol.
The regime the founders established, however, has met hard times. Determining precisely when that happened is one of the fixations of the intellectual Right. Was it the Age of Jackson and populist pushback, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson and the early progressives, FDR’s kingly-like reign, or the rise of the New Left? Or some combination thereof?
Some even point the finger squarely at the Declaration of Independence itself for unleashing modern liberalism, ironically a mirror image of the Left’s blaming the Declaration for solidifying the 1619 slavocracy. This group contends that secular Enlightenment metaphysics supposedly contained in the Declaration was a time bomb that exploded in the 20th century, ushering in a host of ills that eventually became key planks of the modern Democratic Party.
But this is a false step similar to those who draw a straight line from the publication of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses to drag queen story hour. If the Declaration were really the culprit, we’d expect the problems to stay mostly confined to North America. But they haven’t.
Decline hasn’t just affected America in recent decades—it’s global in scale. Nearly every country in the world seems to be locked into a similar downward trajectory, as attested by plummeting birth rates, the free availability of drugs, porn, and gambling, declining public services, out-of-control immigration, and political elites who proudly ignore the wishes of their constituents. Perhaps America exported its problems abroad, but that ignores why other countries would agree to open their borders to these dangers—and it overlooks why the same thing is happening to America’s adversaries.
Instead, as those who see the importance of having gratitude for our forebears and passing along the inheritance we received to our posterity—even if that inheritance isn’t what it once was—we must reject the temptation to cast aside the Declaration. Both the specific people and their folkways and the universal principles enunciated in the second paragraph are part of the Declaration’s teaching. And they are part of our heritage.
The God of Nature
Others might also wonder whether the Declaration undermines biblical revelation. But the Declaration was not deism in paper form. It was produced not by one man but by a committee that was, according to Jefferson, attempting to channel the common sense of the American mind. The Declaration’s natural theology sprang from the soil of a Christian culture in the colonies, which in turn sprang from the ancient Christian cultures in Western Europe.
Professor George Anastaplo pointed out that the Declaration features four references to God, which link his attributes—“Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge,” “Divine Providence”—to the separation of powers that would be marked out in the Constitution. Contrary to some scholars, its opening reference to “Nature’s God” is not evidence of hardened deism. This view is rebutted later in the Declaration, which closes by relying on “Divine Providence,” an odd conclusion for a supposedly deist document.
The founding generation and their heirs recognized the compatibility between the Declaration’s natural theology and the Bible.
In a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration, John Quincy Adams told his audience, after recounting Israel’s entry into the Promised Land under Joshua, “Fellow citizens, the Ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence.”
Less than a century after Adams’s speech, President Calvin Coolidge argued in a speech commemorating the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration:
No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event.
This is the very synthesis that tends to get overshadowed in the modern “creed versus culture” debate. Just as one God brought one people to the land of milk and honey, a foretaste of the eschatological promised land, another people, thousands of years later, united by common traditions and ways of life, appealed to the “Creator” and the universal standards of justice He instituted in declaring independence from the British Empire.
The real debate is not about either creed or culture—it’s about the proper balance between the universal and the particular.
In fact, the Declaration’s teachings and the modern “creedal view” should be seen as distinct. The latter is essentially a 2-D cardboard cutout of the Declaration’s political theory, lacking a foundation of thick cultural forms and offering a truncated presentation of its theoretical matter. Nathan Pinkoski rightly argues in a Modern Age symposium that the modern idea of “creedalism degenerates into schoolmarm monitoring of our beliefs according to the moment’s prevailing fashions.” Much of what passes for modern civics is not a return to our foundations in order to make citizens, but a test of our adherence to the catechism of the modern regime.
And even if you rightly understand the Declaration’s political theory—for example, sorting out the material, formal, efficient, and final causes of the original American regime—theory needs men to put it into practice. Aristotle taught that contemplation is the highest virtue as it relates to the divine, as Colin Redemer recently pointed out, but politics is first in the order of being, as it makes the life of the mind possible. The Founders clearly understood that principles alone would not be enough: a people who appeal to heaven must have the tenacity, grit, and martial virtue to win independence for themselves.
As the Declaration’s conclusion teaches, an appeal to principles alone is insufficient. The men of the Revolutionary era, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” mutually pledged “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” And these men upheld their pledge. In a historical piece for The Daily Signal, I noted that of the 56 men who signed the Declaration, “12 fought in battles as members of state militias, five were captured and imprisoned during the Revolutionary War, 17 lost property as a result of British raids, and five lost their fortunes in helping fund the Continental Army and state militias battle the redcoats.” These were men of steel and honor.
A Golden Age If We Want It
Fortunately, exhibiting the virtues of character the founders displayed today doesn’t require the demands of war. It instead requires getting involved in your local community. Get to know your neighbors, attend local political meetings, city council meetings, and public events in the cities and towns where you live. Become involved with the local Rotary or 4-H clubs. Work to build a network of men at your church who pray together, read Scripture, and complete tasks together, as Chase Davis implores in his new book, Offensive Christianity. Thriving local networks are the key to weathering the onslaught of propaganda and recovering self-government in America.
We do not need cynicism, detached intellectualism, or ironic distance. And as we prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July, we certainly do not need to hear about how the Constitution is “deeply flawed,” as Michael Lind argued at UnHerd as part of its “America 250” series.
Instead, we need unapologetic displays of patriotism and celebrations of the American way of life and our political principles. Even with bad Supreme Court decisions, an ever-radicalizing Left, and a questionable war of choice in Iran, we must continuously resist the temptation to throw up our hands and retreat to private life for the rest of our lives. George Washington, after all, stepped away from his Virginia homestead on three separate occasions to serve his country.
Generations of American Christians have worked to preserve our inheritance and have willingly sacrificed for our country. “If we are to recur to the Declaration successfully,” historian Wilfred McClay contends, “we will have to entertain once again its assumptions about there being a natural order of things, an order of inherent virtues and ends.” Today, we must look to the founders’ steely courage, their manly resolve, their prudence and foresight—which are perfected by grace—and channel them toward the end of good government for the good of the American citizen.
Recovering our inheritance will take nothing less than a firm reliance on the twin pillars of American vitality—the laws of nature and nature’s God—combined with the courage to act. For if we draw on the best of our traditions, then America’s decline can be a thing of the past. And our future can be one where national greatness—strong families, high-trust communities, and forward-looking uses of tech—can continue to bloom.
