Love for Our Democracy and Faith Can Unite Us

Posted in: News By House Divided on October 28, 2024

On Nov. 5, Americans will cast their votes for president of the United States. Sadly, whoever wins this election will not preside over a united country. Indeed, it seems impossible that politics could unify our nation.

What could unite us?

On July 4, 2012, President Barack Obama spoke from the White House during a naturalization ceremony. The president began with a greeting: “Happy Fourth of July. What a perfect way to celebrate America’s birthday — the world’s oldest democracy with some of our newest citizens…. I couldn’t be prouder to be among the first to greet you as ‘my fellow Americans.’”

In closing, Obama said, Americans are those “bound together not simply by ethnicity or bloodlines, but by fidelity to a set of ideas. … We believe our diversity, when joined together by a common set of ideals, makes us stronger.”

It’s true — when joined together by a common set of ideals, diversity makes America stronger!

On July 4, 1776, the United States of America was founded upon a common set of theological ideals. These principles are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the founders’ beliefs concerning the origins of all human life and all human rights:

“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…”

These words expressed a unanimous statement of faith among the signers of the Declaration. Fidelity to these ideals was the spiritual glue that once bound together the people of this nation.

The Declaration remains compelling for its statement that humanity has a Creator; we are not a molecular accident, we are not lucky mud. No, we were created on purpose for a purpose. We were made by Someone for Someone.

Even the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche understood the concept of human rights asserted in the Declaration does not have its origins in nature but in religion, saying:

“Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the ‘equality of souls before God.’ This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

More than any public figure of his generation, Abraham Lincoln grasped the peril threatening the existence of the Republic, if a sizable number of Americans were ever to renounce the principles upon which the nation was founded, ominously warning: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Before the Civil War erupted, Lincoln cried out to the nation, saying, “Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the Declaration of Independence, let me entreat you to come back to the sacred principles in that immortal emblem of Humanity…”

Lincoln understood that slavery resulted from a violation of the “sacred principles,” where one person — in the exercise of their right to the pursuit of happiness — believed it was permissible to deprive another person of their right to liberty. The same dehumanizing spirit is the leading cause of our current division, where one person, in their pursuit of happiness, believes they are at liberty to deprive an unborn person of their inalienable right to life.

The precepts that once united Americans are now at the heart of what separates us. No longer joined together by a common set of ideals, our diversity divides us and makes America weaker. The possibility for unity remains, but only as Americans heed Lincoln’s call and come back to God, whose sacred principles are embodied in that immortal emblem of humanity.

Will we?