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The Founders' First Principles
As the July 4th holiday concludes and the summer wanes, we want to take a step back and remember the foundations our country was built on. Where did it all begin? How do we approach modern issues with the right perspective?
To answer these questions, we will be presenting a series of short articles like this one. We'll cover the first principles of America laid out by our founding fathers and bring in modern examples.
Freedom of Religion
Let's begin with the recent Supreme Court decision on the Christian postal worker who refused to work on Sundays for religious reasons. In case you didn't hear, the case was resolved in favor of the postal worker. This is because we've had the freedom of religion secured in our country's foundation from the very beginning.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Among the most inestimable of our blessings is that ... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable in His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support .... The rights of conscience we never submitted (to government). We are answerable for them to our God."
This is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, where the authors acknowledge a Creator who endows us with unalienable rights. It's especially visible in the Bill of Rights, where we read that congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
Without the freedom of religion, society crumbles. Our moral grounding is in our faith in God. The founding fathers understood that. They knew that without protection, this moral grounding would be quickly swept away. In "Rediscovering the Ideas of Liberty," W. David Stedman puts it this way:
America's Founders acknowledged religious influence as a vital support for the kind of Constitutional government they were forming. They realized, as Adams wrote, that a strong, free society depends on a level of virtue among the people and that virtue is rooted in religious convictions which, in turn, are meaningful only in an environment of Constitutionally-guaranteed religious freedom. What they did not want was government officials possessing the power to establish a national religion or interfering with their God-given right to freedom of worship. They feared that government might become a threat to religious freedom.
Let us never take for granted this right to worship God freely in the manner we see fit. It's a unique blessing granted to us that we live in a country where this right is protected even today.
References:
Stedman, W. D. & Lewis, L. (1995). Rediscovering the Ideas of Liberty. W. David Stedman Associates – Publications Division.
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