FROM THE ARCHIVES: SOUL MEN:

Bored on the Fourth of July (Peter Lawler on July 4, 2011, Big Think)

[T]oday we're celebrating by sharing our allegiance to truths we hold to be self-evident. We are, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, "a nation with the soul of a church." Churches are held together by common belief in particular dogmas. We're held together by common belief in the principles set forth, Chesterton wrote, with "dogmatic lucidity" in the Declaration.

The not-so-silent Calvin Coolidge wrote that those principles are restful because they're final. We believe that no progress can be made beyond them--just as we believe that our progress comes from more faithfully and consistently actng in accordance with them. The Fourth of July, in that light, should be a day of rest for the same reason every Sunday should be. We need to take a break from our incessant activity to remind ourselves of the foundation that makes our free and restless prosperity possible.

So we can criticize the authors and signers of the Declaration for not acting in full accordance with their principles. Jefferson knew that all human beings--including those imported from Africa to be slaves--we're created equal and had inalienable rights. But he didn't always act according to what he knew.

But we remember that it was the Abolitionists, from the very beginning, who talked up more than other Americans the stirring words of the Declaration as the foundation of their liberationist cause. So did our first strong proponents of the rights of women. And the southern slaveholders ended up openly denying the Declaration's truth, saying that Jefferson didn't know what he was talking about. It was in the context of the spilling of a huge amount of blood for a new birth of freedom that Lincoln rededicated us to the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal.

[originally posted: 7/04/11]

Posted by oj at July 4, 2014 5:55 AM
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