(Dr. Keyes is founder and chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles.)
Throughout human history, self-government by the people has been almost non-existent. Ours is the first great nation to sustain an experiment in this kind of self-government over the course of centuries. Our Founders understood that the effort to establish a government based on the consent of the governed was exceptional and difficult.
Because of the success of the experiment, we have had a tendency to take it for granted. But to live under a regime that respects the rights and dignity of all, where we each have some share of participation in the decisions that shape the destiny of our community and our future, is a blessing, an extraordinary blessing. It will be a fatal mistake if we continue to take it for granted.
Our complacency has opened the door to a preoccupation with material interests. But when a material understanding of freedom is substituted for the real, moral understanding, we become subject to manipulation. Whoever can give and withhold those material benefits becomes the master of our fate.
And such manipulation has been the goal of much government activity over the course of the last fifty years – to make government the arbiter of our material advantages, the manipulator rather than the representative of the people of this country.
But manipulative government cannot co-exist with a citizenry educated in the principles of liberty, a citizenry that remembers that government serves the people, not the other way around. Tyranny cannot defeat a citizenry conscious of its independent moral ground, and aware that a free people’s identity and authority do not come from the government.
Our would-be masters prefer that we think our rights come from them, and that we never notice how absurd this is. After all, if our rights come from the Bill of Rights, we didn’t have any rights until that document was ratified, and the Revolutionary War was fought by men without any right to independence at all.
The absurdities of such views are detected only by those who have a rudimentary understanding of the simple logic of liberty. This is why the education of every American citizen must include a serious treatment of the American founding. Our young people must understand the implications of the central words of the Declaration:
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.
Our liberty is secure as long as we understand that no one can claim authority to rule us without our leave, because our dignity comes from the hand of a power greater than any human power. And that is the power and the authority of the Creator, God.
That wonderful, clear, simple premise has been the basis of every successful struggle for justice in the course of our history. It can defeat the most determined sophistries of power hungry politicians, because even people who claim that power is everything must give way before the absolute power of God.
National understanding of this argument is the heritage that we are losing, and in losing it we unfit ourselves both for self-government and for our defense against enemies of liberty, foreign and domestic. Our appeal to universal standards of justice in the war against terror, and our confident resistance to the aggressive ambition of domestic government power, alike depend on our moral character as a free people. How tragic and ironical if it is our children, brought up to believe in phony relativism, who lead the rejection of any independent ground for judging between right and wrong.
A return to real civic education is a return to education for real freedom. Our goal should be to create a generation of young citizens jealous of their liberty for all the right reasons, and ready to stare down any government authority that does not respect their God-given rights. A free people is not a docile, pliable, passive people. As a free people, we are ready to act on what we believe to be right, even in the face of human authority, because we stand on the ground provided to us not by human power, but by Almighty God. We must educate our children to take their place as members of such a free people.
Surely a nation that has the courage to defeat a global terrorist network can summon the courage to insist that its schools teach this basic argument to the free citizens of tomorrow.
