(* Pending)
“Our neighbors and those in our daily lives, taught us that God loved us equally. And that America stood for it that same ideal, even though it had failed to live up to it. Despite this failure, our Christian duty was to still love our country, even as we objected to its evident shortcomings. This was more than a belief. It was a way of life.
As I matured, I began to see that the theories of my young adulthood were destructive and self- defeating. After recognizing that I was adrift. What I realized more than anything else, is that I needed to regain common sense and judgment and what I had jettisoned. I had rejected my country, my birthright as a citizen, and I had nothing to show for it. Perhaps that is the ultimate destination of nihilistic ideologies. The wholesomeness of my childhood had been replaced with an emptiness, cynicism and despair. I was faced with a simple fact that there was no greater truth than what my nuns and my grandparents had taught me. We are all children of God and rightful heirs to our nation’s legacy of civic equality. We were duty bound to live up to obligations of the equal citizenship, to which we were entitled by birth. On the morning of April 16th 1970. After returning from a riot, I stood outside the chapel at Holy Cross, and ask God to take hate out of my heart. I use this background to set the stage for my later and more in depth encounter with the Declaration of Independence in the mid 1980s. At that time, having run agencies and seeing how the federal government actually worked, I became deeply interested in The Declaration of Independence. I had hoped it would bring some clarity to the cacophonous world in which I found myself studying the founding. Studying the founding, however, thought more like a return to familiar ground, the ground of my upbringing.
The Declaration captured what I had been taught to venerate as a child, but had cynically rejected as a young man. All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. And so declaring the Declaration of Independence did not propose to have discovered anything new. Its truths were self evident. They were beyond dispute. They were a priori in the society of my youth, and by the School, home and in the culture they were given. And as I rediscovered, the God given principles of the Declaration, and our founding, I eventually returned to the church, which had been teaching the same truths for millennia, that the Declaration set forth self evident truths was no accident. The Founders quite frankly, didn’t have the time or the mandate to reinvent the wheel or the world. Between April and July 1776. The fervor for the for Independence was palpable throughout the colonies. The colonies, their counties and towns and even trade associations. Were drafting their own declarations of independence. The late historian Pauline Maier estimated that there were 90 such declarations during this time frame, though not all were specifically denoted as such. …
Time and again, the Declaration of Independence remained our national North Star. Or as Pauline Mayer describes it, our American Scripture. We did not surrender our inheritance as equal men endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. Neither slavery nor Jim Crow defeated us. We recognize it’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared decades ago that the magnificent Words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
The history of our nation is our shared struggle to live up to that promise. It is a slow, arduous battle, but we have yet to fail. Today, there’s a notable pessimism about the state of our country, and cynicism about our founders. There are some who would even cancel at founders. We are all aware of those who assert, much like garrison, that America is a racist and irredeemable nation. But there are many more of us, I think, who feel that America is not so broken, as it is adrift at sea. Some of you come from my generation, you remember reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the Fourth of July celebrations, and the shared belief that our nation was destined for greatness. Others of you are younger, you lived in the twilight of that life or feel nostalgia for a world that you’ve missed, or you don’t remember that all. In all cases, we sense among as an American spirit we cannot quite capture. We sense amidst the noise and din telling us that truth does not exist, that there is something true, something transcendent, something solid, something that pulls us together, rather than divides us.
As I said, my wife and I this summer, were inspired when we saw in the RV parks, the people who still hold these values and who still believe, as they flew proudly so many flags in the RV parks, I lay no claim to the answer or to the gospel. But this I do know for whatever it is worth, the Declaration of Independence has weathered every storm for 245 years. It birthed the great nation, it abolished the sin of slavery, and it endeavored to address its effects. While we have failed the Declaration, time and again and the ideals of the Declaration, time and again, I know of no time when the ideals have failed us. Ultimately, the Declaration and doors because it articulates truth, it was not a grand philosophy contrived by clever academics. It came from antecedent and shared values. unlike so many of the theories of more recent vintage. As Lincoln taught us, the Declaration reflects the noble understanding of the justice of the Creator, to his creatures, and the enlightened belief that nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded, and in bruited by its fellows. The Declaration simply recounts what the church has taught for millennia, and what we once universally accepted as a given, all men are created, and all men are created equal. No force on earth can take away what God has given us.
Thus, I leave you with this thought. The Declaration of Independence may or may not be the American Scripture, as Pauline Maier’s book is entitled, but establishes a moral ideal that we as citizens are duty bound to uphold and sustain. We may fall short. But our imperfection does not relieve us of our obligation. My nuns and my grandparents lived out their sacred vocation in a time of Stark racial animus, and did so with pride with dignity and with honor. May we find it within ourselves to emulate them. ” …….
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Rest in the Vine: "The Declaration of Independence" by Justice Clarence Thomas
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