It is the 249th birthday of the United States. And as the Americans begin to prepare for the great celebration of the semi -infantnial of our nation next year, it is worth forwarding it with the document whose promulgation marks our national birthday: the declaration of independence.
The statement is sometimes defended by right -wing liberations and left liberals equally as a hymn for individualism and a refutation of community of any kind. As An X user puts it On Thursday: “July 4 represents the triumph of American individualism over the tribalist collectivism of Europe.”
But this is anything but the case.
We will become the famous words of the cartoonist Thomas Jefferson about the “obvious” truths in a moment. But first consider most of the declaration text: A moving enumeration of specific complaints by American settlers against the British crown. In the words of the declaration: “The history of the current king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all with direct objects the establishment of an absolute tyranny about these states.”
One could read these words in a vacuum and conclude that the statement really began a revolution In the true meaning of the term: a seismic act of rebellion, by noble or fair, overthrow the established political order. And it is true, that could have been the subjective intention of Jefferson, a political and devotee liberal of the European Enlightenment.
But the statement also attracted many other signatories. And some of those signatories, such as the most conservative John Adams, took a more favorable vision of inherited traditions and customs of the incipient United States. These men thought that King Jorge III had viciated his rights as English under the glorious revolution of 1688 and the declaration of rights that approved Parliament the following year.
It is for this reason that Edmund Burke, the famous conservative British statesman better known for his strident opposition to the French RevolutionIt was known that it sympathized with the cause of the settlers. As my colleague of the Edmund Burke Foundation, Ofir Haivry, he argued in a American affairs trial 2020It is likely that these more conservative declaration signatories, such as Adams, shared Burke's own opinion that “Americans had an established national character and a political culture”; and “Americans in 1776 rebelled in an attempt to defend and restore these traditions.”
The American Foundation is complex; The founders themselves were intellectually heterodox. But it is enough to say that the Foundation was not a simplistic resignation of the “tribalist collectivism” of Great Britain. Of course, there is some truth for those who would emphasize the revolutionary nature of the Minute and soldiers of the Continental Army of George Washington. But a more solid general conception historically is that 1776 began a process to restore and improve the political order inherited from the settlers. The final result was the United States Constitution of 1787.
Next, consider the most famous line of the declaration: the proclamation that “we consider that these truths are evident, that all men are created the same, that their creator gives them with certain inalienable rights, which among them are life, freedom and the search for happiness.” We should take this claim to the letter: many of the signatories of the declaration did Hold so genuine and moral human equality to be evident.
But is it such an obvious claim for all, at all times, in all places and within all cultures?
The obvious answer is that it is not. Genuine moral human equality is certainly not evident for pastors of Islamic extremist goats that support the Taliban in Afghanistan. It has not been evident for any number of war lords of the sub -Saharan Africa of the last decades. Nor is it evident to the atheists of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, which brutally oppress Chinese ethnic minorities, like Xinjiang Muslims of Xinjiang.
Rather, the only reason Jefferson, and Locke in England a century earlier, could confirm such “evidence” is because they lived and thought within a certain general environment. And that medium is the biblical inheritance of Western civilization, and, specifically, the global transformation claim into Genesis 1:27Towards the beginning of the Bible, that “God created man in his image; in the image of God he created it.”
It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to see how the declaration of 1776, the 14th amendment of 1868, the Civil Rights Law of 1964, or any other American moral oda or legal coding of equality, would have been possible absent Biblical strong biblical what you have characterized our nation From the colonial era.
The political and biblical inheritance is too responsible for the modern United States that the revolution, liberal rationalism or hyperindividualism.
ADAMS Famous said That independence day “must be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shown, games, sports, weapons, bells, fires and illuminations from one end of this continent to another from this moment forward forever.” In fact, every year we should all celebrate this great nation that we are lucky to call home. But we don't confuse what we are really celebrating.
Josh Hammer's last book is “Israel and civilization: the fate of the Jewish nation and the destiny of the West. ” This article was produced in collaboration with the creators Syndicate. @Josh_hammer
