life liberty and the pursuit of happiness

The Declaration deliberately enshrines into law the Gospel’s view of the Second Adam’s redeemed race.įourth, the Declaration asserts certain rights not merely as self-evident but as “unalienable”.

They intended this phrase as a restatement of the doctrine that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.” (And indeed, most of them were opposed to the continuation of slavery, though ending it was not within their power, and no country on Earth had yet done any such thing). They were American: Protestant Christians and heirs of the Glorious Revolution. Third, in this same sentence, the Declaration states as self-evident that “all men are created equal.” Had the Founders been French, this would have been an expression of Enlightenment humanism.īut they were not French. The left’s “rights” are their institutionalized, systematic violation. The Declaration’s concept of rights is a deliberate expression of God’s commandments. Such “rights” necessarily require that some other person give up their own rights, and in an undefined way, one that can only be bounded by covetousness and arbitrated by force. They believed in the dignity of man because nearly all of them believed him created in God’s image and they defined man’s rights as the flip-side of God’s commandments (e.g., I have a right not to be murdered, I have a right not to be robbed, etc.).īy contrast, the Founders expressly rejected the left’s concept of so-called positive rights (e.g., the “right” to a job, or to internet access, or to an abortion). The Founders, like Paul, asserted negative rights, which is to say, those rights which prevent others from infringing upon yours (or you from infringing theirs). Paul certainly speaks of his own rights, both civilly and ecclesiastically, and on matters far less important than, say, life. This bothers many Christians, who assert that we have no rights, only duties or responsibilities.īut this assertion is more pious-sounding than true.

Second, the Declaration expresses these as rights. In their defining statement, they asserted these truths as foundational. They saw God’s law as written on all men’s hearts, and the proofs of His Word and His truthfulness written upon the whole of Creation. Nearly all of the Founders were believers many of them were pastors. But they shouldn’t be, and this is why.įirst, the Declaration expresses these rights as self-evident. Many pastors today are openly uncomfortable, not just with this passage but with independence itself (which they wrongly believe to violate Romans 13, as I recently discussed in World Magazine’s Weekend Feature). In its most famous passage, America’s founding document asserts that “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.”

Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness