July 3, 2024
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
The Real Meaning of July 4th and the Heresy of Lincolnian
Interpretation
Friends,
A headline in a news
story caught my attention the other day. It reads: “Louisiana now requires
the 10 Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. It’s not the only terrifying
state law.” The column appears in The
Independent, July 1, 2024, and is by one Gustaf Kilander.
Notice that the author uses the word “terrifying”
to characterize the public display of one of, arguably, the bedrock documents
that shaped the formation of the American nation and the thinking of its
Framers. Indeed, to read the debates leading to the adoption of the
Constitution is to plainly understand how deeply influenced the Framers were by
not only the Ten Commandments, but by the weight of Christian and Western tradition.
(See Elliott’s Debates,
a compilation of the debates over the new Constitution).
A
brief survey of the writings of such distinguished historians and researchers
as Barry Alan Shain, Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, and George W. Carey, plus
a detailed reading of the commentaries and writings of those men who
established the nation, give the lie to the claim that those men assembled in
1787 sought to outlaw individual state religious tests or establishments.
They
did not.
Many
of the original thirteen states had
religious establishments and tests, including Massachusetts
(Congregationalist), Virginia (Anglican/Episcopal), and North Carolina (requiring
office holders to be Protestants, and after 1835 up until the War Between the
States, only Christians). The US Constitution clearly acknowledged this, and only
forbade the establishment of a “national” church. But even then, the Framers
assumed that the new nation would reflect its Christian roots, going so far as
providing for paid chaplains in the Northwest Territories at the same time they
were formulating the Constitution.
Yet,
this fundamental misunderstanding characterizes much of modern American
thinking, both on the part of liberals AND conservatives.
And
thus this 4th of July, I think it helpful to look once again at the
1776 declaration, which preceded the Constitution by eleven years, what exactly
it is and what it is not. For far too many Americans confuse the two documents.
We
celebrate July 4th each year as the anniversary of America’s declaration
of independence from Great Britain. The day we set aside commemorates when representatives
from the thirteen colonies took a momentous step that they knew might land them
on the scaffold or suspended by the hangman’s noose. They were protesting
that their traditional rights as Englishmen had been violated, and that those
violations had forced them into a supreme act of rebellion.
For
many Americans the Declaration of Independence is a fundamental text that tells
the world who we are as a people. It is a distillation of American belief
and purpose. Pundits and commentators, left and right, never cease
reminding us that America is a new nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Almost
as important as a symbol of modern American belief is
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is not incorrect to see a
link between these two documents, as Lincoln intentionally placed his short
peroration in the context of a particular reading of the Declaration. Lincoln bases his concept of the creation of
the American nation in philosophical principles he sees enunciated
in 1776, and in particular on an emphasis on the idea of “equality.”
The
problem is that this interpretation, which forms the philosophical base of both
the dominant “movement conservatism” today - neoconservatism - and the
neo-Marxist multicultural Left, is basically false.
Lincoln’s
opens his address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth …”
There is a critical problem with this assertion. It was not the Declaration
that “created” the new nation; the Declaration was a statement of thirteen
colonies, announcing their respective independence from the mother country,
binding themselves together in a military and political alliance. It was
the Constitution, drafted eleven years later (1787), after the successful
conclusion of the War for Independence, that established a new nation. And, as
any number of historians and scholars have pointed out, the American Framers
never intended to cobble together a nation based on the proposition that “all
men are created equal.”
The
Framers of the Constitution were horrified by “egalitarianism” and “democracy,”
and they made it clear that what they were establishing
was a stratified republic, in which most of the “rights” were left to the
respective states (with their own particular arrangements), and in which
serious restrictions and limitations on voting and participation in government
were considered fundamental. A review of The Federalist Papers confirms
this thinking; and a survey of the correspondence and the debates over the
Constitution add support to this anti-egalitarianism.
Obviously,
then, Lincoln could not found his “new nation” on the US Constitution; it was
too aristocratic and decentralized, with non-enumerated powers maintained by
the states, including the implicit right to secede. Indeed, slavery was
explicitly sanctioned, even if most of the Framers believed that as an
institution it would die a natural death, if left on its own. Lincoln thus went
back to the Declaration of Independence and invested in it a meaning that
supported his statist and wartime intentions. But even then, he verbally abused
the language of the Declaration, interpreting the words in a form that its
Signers never intended.
Although
those authors employed the phrase “all men are created equal,” and certainly
that is why Lincoln made direct reference to it, a careful analysis of the
Declaration does not confirm the sense that Lincoln invests in those few words.
Contextually, the 1776 authors at Philadelphia were asserting their
historic — and equal — rights as Englishmen before the
Crown, which had, they believed, been violated and usurped by the
British government, and it was to parliament that the Declaration was
primarily directed.
The
Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally,
“created equal” to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created
with no less or no more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential
before God. But this, egregiously, is not what most contemporary writers mean
today when they talk of “equality.”
Rather,
from a traditionally Christian viewpoint, each of us is born into this world
with different levels of intelligence, with different areas of expertise;
physically, some are stronger or heavier, others are slight and smaller; some
learn foreign languages and write beautiful prose; others become fantastic
athletes or scientists. Social customs and traditions, property holding, and
individual initiative — each of these factors further discriminate as
we continue in life.
None
of this means that we are any less or more valued in the judgment of God, Who
judges us based on our own, very unique capabilities. God measures us by
ourselves, by our own maximum possibilities and potential, not by
those of anyone else — that is, whether we use our own, individual
talents to the very fullest (recall the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of
St. Matthew).
The
Founders and, then after them, the Framers understood this, as their writings
and speeches clearly indicate. Lincoln’s “new nation” would have certainly
struck them as radical and revolutionary, a veritable “heresy.” Even more
disturbing for them would be the specter of modern-day neoconservatives — that
is, those who dominate the conservative movement and claim to rigorously defend
the Constitutional republic against the abuses of the “woke” multiculturalist
left — enshrining Lincoln’s address as a basic symbol of American
political and social order.
They
would have understood the radicalism implicit in such a pronouncement; they
would have seen Lincoln’s interpretation as a contradiction not only of the meaning of the Declaration, but also an
undermining of the fundamental document of the American nation, the
Constitution of 1787; and they would have understood in Lincoln’s language the
content of a Christian and millennialist heresy, heralding a transformed
nation where the Federal government would become the father and mother and
absolute master of us all, and where a weaponized Executive and its judicial
arm could engage in fanatical “lawfare” against any opponent of its goal of
totalitarian control.
Thus,
as we commemorate the declaring of American independence 248 years ago, we
should lament the mythology about it created in 1863, and recall the generation
of 1787, a generation of noble men who comprehended fully well that a country
based on egalitarianism is a nation where true liberties are imperiled.
This nation is dying a painful
death because it has ignored and rejected what our forefathers brought forth.
