Some pre-4th thoughts on the fundamentals of America:
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) – This Saturday is the 4th of July, the day when people will gather all over the United States of America to celebrate Independence. Fireworks will light up the sky, families will gather and we will all pause to remember those who gave their lives so that the promises set forth in that Declaration of Independence could inform a new Nation. Their courageous Declaration, signed on this date proclaimed:
“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 – that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”
The Declaration of Independence was the birth certificate of the United States of America. The words are still memorized by schoolchildren and can bring a tear to the oldest American eye with little effort. The principles they communicate have informed our history as a free people and inspired our neighbors in other parts of the world to stand up against all forms of tyranny. As we reflect upon the text this weekend we need to remember that our forebears were not declaring their independence from Divine Providence. Rather, they were trusting in the primacy of the Governance of God over their own lives and their noble undertaking.
Created equal and endowed by their Creator – this is central; because if we are not created equal and if our rights are not endowed by God – and thus irrevocable by human action – then we are not at all equal, and we have no rights save those a tyrant chooses to allow. If our Declaration had said, “We hold these opinions to be valid, that all men are equal, that they are allowed by Nature to have certain Rights”, it would have been an absurd statement…nothing men would be willing to die for. Might as well have Washington and Co. fold up the tents and go home…but if we are fighting to secure what God gave us, then no sacrifice is too great, and nor argument can be made against us and only force could compel us to give in.
People can quibble about whether or not America is a Christian nation – but that 99% or better of the men who shed their blood to found the nation were Christian cannot be disputed. And these Christian heroes gave their lives not for an abstraction thought up by some clever intellectual cobweb spinner, but for the concrete reality that God gave them certain things which others were trying to take away. So it was then, and so it is today – and so it will always be, until the End.
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