Many Americans spent last weekend celebrating the signing of a document that declared our country’s transition from a group of colonies into a group of sovereign states. The document did not begin a revolution. It declared the intent and guiding principles of a revolution already underway.
On July 4, 1776, Washington already had an army in the field. However, the birth of the American revolution took place before that of the Continental Army. It began as an idea, a new way of seeing the relationship between citizens and the institution of government.
In declaring our status as an independent nation, the document was a bit premature. That would have to be won on the field of battle. The Declaration of Independence outlined what we were fighting to build and why we felt it necessary to do go to such lengths.
No matter what you learned in school, the American revolution wasn’t primarily about taxes. They were a symptom, not the disease. The schism that launched the war had to do with the source of individual rights and the relationship between those rights and the government.
The first three words of our Constitution, We the People, address that issue. They mean our rights are given to us by God—not the king acting by divine right—not by edict from Parliament—but directly from God as Creator. Government’s job, said the Revolutionaries was to secure and to protect those rights, period. In America, the people are sovereign. The government gets its rights and duties from us, not the other way around.
When people talk about first amendment rights or second amendment rights they usually sound as though they believe that the amendments to the Constitution somehow granted those rights. That is a false idea. The amendments didn’t grant the rights, they were written to defend those rights against abuse by the government. Government of the people, for the people, and by the people is what we should be celebrating this weekend.
Someone will say to me, “But that’s not how it works anymore. Washington runs every thing.” I would not debate that statement, there’s too much truth in it. I will say that if things are not as they should be, the Declaration of Independence has in its text the remedy.
Maranatha
Comments