At the Declaration Foundation, we hold that what Lincoln referred to as the “sentiments” of the Declaration are the principles of the American republic. As president of the Declaration Foundation, I am frequently asked to distill the thought of the Declaration as I understand it.
Before I make the attempt here, I’d like to point out a wonderful, and I believe providential, twist in the history of the Declaration. In the 18th Century, the Declarationists were almost all Protestants. Catholic Europe, lined up with the Ancien Regime, was tentative at best, and hostile at worst. But the wise Tocqueville, a French Catholic aristocrat, urged France, Catholics, and Europe to accept the “Novus Ordo Seclorum.” It took time, but gradually the old world began to take his advice, and to understand that the American Republic might indeed be the fulfillment of what was best in the old.
In our day, to complete this circle, Pope John Paul II had to tell President Clinton’s Ambassador to the Vatican that, “the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation, native born and immigrant, makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic.” He spoke with similar directness to the current Methodist occupant of the White House regarding the question of stem cell research, apparently to little effect. We are now in the remarkable situation of having the National Council of Catholic Bishops taking a much more pro-declarationist line than the President of the United States.
Such are the ways of providence. And we can learn from this story that we should always strive to keep the truths of the Declaration alive in our own minds and hearts, and to preach them to the world. For we never know when such bread, cast upon the waters, will come back to us in the moment we need most to hear it.
Here, then, is my own brief restatement of the teaching of the Declaration.
• All men are created equal. Hence, they have equal natural rights as a gift of the creator.
• Our duty to seek and follow the will of the creator is prior to all government. Accordingly, so is the liberty of religious conscience.
• The authority of the creator as prior to all civil society and human authority must be respected for liberty to endure.
• There is a natural right to life, prior to all positive law, including the Constitution.
• There is a natural right to acquire, secure and use property for safety and happiness.
• Men have a right and a duty to form governments to secure their rights, and to assist one another in striving for happiness.
• Governments are made legitimate by the consent of the free and equal persons who form and sustain them. Governmental powers are always to be understood as a delegation from the persons who compact to form the political community.
• To enjoy the right of political self-government, men must be capable of personal self-government — the virtue of self-control. A people without decency cannot be secure in its liberty.
• The institutions by which the life of liberty is fostered, especially the marriage-based, two-parent family, the churches, and other associations aiming at the good life, are to be protected and cherished.
• The vocation of citizenship in a free republic is noble and honorable. Public service, especially in the defense of the rule of law, merits praise and respect.
• The right to self-government entails the right to arms by which tyranny can be resisted and new government established when necessary.
• Governments may fail in many ways and still be tolerated. Peace is a precious good, and the people may be well-advised to be patient with occasional governmental abuse to avoid rashly unleashing the season of popular passion and violence that will accompany any change in the fundamental form of government.
• But the worst failures, tending irrevocably to excessive concentration of power, consolidating the branches and depriving the people of liberty, or withdrawing the protection of the laws from the people, constitute tyranny or anarchy, and may and sometimes should be resisted, even to the point of rebellion, as our Founders declared.
• Free speech and a free press are both required for the practice of responsible liberty, as necessary means by which the people can act together to govern themselves according to the laws of nature and of nature's God.
• All persons have a right to equal treatment under the laws without regard to race, creed or ethnicity.
• It is the duty of the people, individually and in their associations, private and public, to declare the principles of self-government, including the fundamental American creed that our liberties come as a gift of the Creator.
• Personal religious belief is not a requirement for American citizenship, but acknowledgment of our national belief that human equality and rights come from an authority beyond human will is a moral duty of citizenship. Its rejection constitutes a denial of natural rights and human equality, and is inconsistent with ordered liberty.
The Declaration Foundation has among its leaders Catholics, like Dr. Keyes and myself, evangelicals, an Anglican and a Jew. We stand on the common American Ground of the Declaration. And we confidently restate Declaration Principles as acceptable and edifying to all men and women of good will.
(Dr. Ferrier is president of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles.)
