Will We Heed Founding Fathers’ Call of Unity?

Posted in: News By House Divided on July 5, 2024

Once upon a time, there was no United States of America. There were 13 disparate colonies that were ethnically and culturally diverse. Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics and beyond, they also held to different beliefs.

Politicians are fond of saying diversity is our strength but diversity without unity is a weakness. As Abraham Lincoln warned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

From the beginning, the Founding Fathers saw our diversity as a fact and a potential problem. America’s traditional motto is E pluribus unum, which is Latin for “Out of many, one.” Yet today America has more E pluribus and less unum than at any time since the Civil War.

What could reunite us?

On July 4, 2012, President Barack Obama spoke during a Naturalization Ceremony to a group prepared to take the oath of citizenship. 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…”

Obama closed saying, “Even though we haven’t always looked the same or spoken the same language, as Americans, we’ve done big things together … We believe our diversity, when joined together by a common set of ideals, makes us stronger…”

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

On July 4, 1776, America was founded upon a common set of theological ideals. These principles are contained in the Declaration of Independence that 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…”

The Declaration was not less than “an expression of the American mind” as Thomas Jefferson believed it was much more: it was an expression of Americans’ faith. This document was at once their declaration of independence from Great Britain and their declaration of dependence upon God. The shared faith in the Creator revealed in the Declaration was the spiritual glue that united this country.

Americans speak of human rights, but where does the notion of human rights come from if there is no Creator? The idea that nature endowed mankind with inalienable rights and corresponding moral obligations is absurd, as Russian philosopher Solovyov sarcastically expressed:

“Man is descended from apes; therefore, we must love each other.”

Ironically, it was the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who understood the concept of human rights asserted in the Declaration does not have its origins in nature but in religion: “Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even further 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…” British author G.K. Chesterton agreed, “America is the only nation founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence… (which) … does by inference condemn atheism since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.”

Lincoln understood the Declaration’s enduring importance saying, “These communities, by their representatives in Old Independence Hall, said to the world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’…[T]hey erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children … that their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew that battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land…”

During another season of crisis, 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…”

America is in crisis, a crisis of faith. Will we heed Lincoln’s call and come back to the God of our sacred principles?

Heaven only knows.