Sermons

July 1, 2007
We Hold These Truths

We Hold These Truths
a sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From Mortimer J. Adler, We Hold These Truths: Understanding the Ideas and Ideals of the Constitution, 1987, Collier Books/MacMillan Publishing, New York NY:
"Most Americans, I fear, do not know or appreciate the fact that citizenship is the primary political office under a constitutional government. In a republic, the citizens are the ruling class. They are the permanent and principle rulers. All other offices that are set up by the constitution are secondary."

2. From Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, 2006, Random House, New York, NY:
"Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, [the Founders] created a nation in which religion should not be singled out for special help or particular harm... This victory over excessive religious influence and excessive secularism is often lost in the clatter of contemporary cultural and political strife... Faith and freedom are inextricably linked: It is not for priests or pastors or kings to compel belief, for to do so would trespass on our God-given liberty of mind and heart."

THE SERMON
The late American educator and author, Mortimer Adler, reminded us that citizenship is the highest office in our government. All other offices – president for instance, or chief justice of the Supreme Court – are the instruments by which we, the people, govern ourselves. The government of the United States resides in us, “we, the people.” What resides in Washington D.C. is merely the administration of the government. We recognize this fact when, after a presidential election, we say that we have changed one administration for another. When the administration changes, the government does not change. That’s because the principle rulers of our nation, the citizens, are the permanent rulers, whereas the administration of the government is only temporary.
This point is important, even if it is difficult to remember in a day and age in which the president (George W. Bush) says that the laws don’t apply to him – that he can use “signing statements” to claim that laws mean something other than what Congress intended; that he can authorize illegal wiretapping in violation of the law; that he can kidnap and hold suspects indefinitely without trial, without charge, and without access to counsel; that he can approve torture contrary to international law and the laws of the U.S., thus causing dozens of deaths; and that he has the right to hide the tortured prisoners from the International Red Cross – that he has the right, apparently, to ignore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights simply because he is the president.
In this day and age when the president claims “Unitary Executive Theory” giving himself unlimited powers, it is difficult to remember that in our system of government the president is not a dictator, but actually works for the citizens and is limited by the Constitution. On this Independence Day weekend we must be reminded that the citizens are the ruling class! “Citizen’ is the highest office under the U.S. Constitution. All other offices are secondary.
Now you may disagree with my analysis of what the president has been up to; I think he has been quite clear in his statements about the unlimited power he believes he has – and in a free nation and this free church we may disagree with one another. You may think the minister is full of hot air, and you could be right!
Yet I hope we would all agree that the citizen is paramount in a democratic republic such as ours. The administration in Washington, D.C. is not the ruler; the president is not the ruler; corporations are not meant to be the rulers, either. Under our Constitution the citizens are meant to be the real rulers of the nation.
This brings to mind the slogan, “My country right or wrong!” It was first stated as a toast by Stephen Decatur, who actually said, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, but right or wrong, our country!” And yet I prefer the reply that came from Carl Schurz, who was a Union Army general in the American Civil War, and later served as U.S. Senator from Missouri, and then as Secretary of the Interior. Schurz said, “My country right or wrong: When right to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right!”
As patriots we love our country, and when the administration is leading the country in the wrong direction, we need the humility to admit it, and the courage to put it right again! As citizens we have the duty to do so.
In an 1859 speech on “The True Americanism,” Schurz said of the United States, “It should not swagger about among the nations of the world with a chip on its shoulder, shaking its fist in everybody’s face... It should be slow to take offense. In its dealings with others it should have scrupulous regard, not only for their rights, but also for their self-respect. With all its latent resources for war, it should be the great power of peace in the world... It should seek to influence mankind, not by heavy artillery, but by good example and wise counsel. It should see its highest glory, not in battles won, but in wars prevented. It should be so invariably just and fair, so trustworthy, so good tempered, so conciliatory, that other nations would instinctively turn to it as their mutual friend and the natural adjuster of their differences, thus making it the greatest preserver of the world’s peace... Is this not good Americanism? It is surely today the Americanism of those who love their country most. And I fervently hope it will be and forever remain the Americanism of our children and our children’s children.”
I think Carl Schurz, a German immigrant, understood patriotism and Americanism better than most Americans do today. And on this Independence Day weekend, we ponder again the question of patriotism, and our duty as citizens to set the administration of our nation on the right path when we find it on the wrong one.

Jefferson and liberty:
Adopted on July 4, 1776, our Declaration of Independence declared, “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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that when any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to abolish it, and to institute new government...”
These words were written by Thomas Jefferson. We sometimes take particular pride in the fact that, toward the end of his life, Jefferson declared himself to be a Unitarian. He said that he believed that Unitarianism would soon become the general religion of the United States, and that he even believed that there was not a young man then alive who would not die a Unitarian! His optimism was excessive!
And Jefferson also said that, because there was not a Unitarian church close enough for him to join, he would be a Unitarian by himself. And so, although he never officially joined, we claim him as a Unitarian.
But let us be cautious in our pride. Jefferson, who wrote so brilliantly about liberty, was a slaveholder all his life. He never freed his slaves. John Adams and Abigail Adams, in their correspondence with one another, remarked about the Virginians who spoke so eloquently of liberty and freedom, and yet owned slaves. And we know that George Washington, who for his entire lifetime derived his great wealth and comfort from his ownership of other human beings, at least freed his slaves in his will. But Jefferson never even did that! Jefferson understood slavery as the issue that could potentially tear the nation apart. And yet he could not bring himself to examine his participation in the injustice of slavery.
Perhaps we should not judge Jefferson by the standards of our time. We may need to understand him in the context of his own time, a Southern gentleman of the 18th and 19th centuries. And we may not be completely innocent. Many of the New England churches, especially those on the coast, benefitted from the contributions of ship owners who shipped Southern cotton, tobacco, and rice, and, until the slave trade was banned in 1808, slaves. I don’t know about this church, but it is possible that, at least indirectly, the people who established this church may have benefitted from slave labor. So let us not be smug.

Fulfilling the promise of America:
Let us, instead, be dedicated to the values of our nation, the best values that we have spoken of, and sometimes lived up to, even if we have not always fulfilled the promise of our nation. We said that “all men are created equal,” and yet in the early days of the republic, men without property could not vote, women could not vote, African-Americans could not vote, slaves could not vote, Native American Indians – the “First Nations” – could not vote. Many of our Founding Fathers feared that “mob rule’ would result if men who did not own property were allowed to vote.
It was during the time of Andrew Jackson and “Jacksonian Democracy” that voting rights were expanded to all adult white males. But Jackson was also an Indian fighter, and he ignored the Supreme Court when he removed the Cherokee Nation from their homes and sent them westward on the “Trail of Tears.”
Abraham Lincoln knew that we had not lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence – we had not lived up to the statement that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights...” Lincoln knew that we had not allowed the slave to exercise those inalienable rights. He rightly opposed slavery – but even Lincoln did not advocate complete equality for African Americans.
After the Civil War some black and white Americans spoke eloquently for the rights of all men, regardless of color. But it took another 100 years to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Think of the struggle waged by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others, and their attempt to call America back to its founding principles as stated in the Declaration of Independence.
And it took decades to give women the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did not live long enough to vote.
I’ve been talking about inalienable rights largely in terms of the right to vote. The right to vote is critical, I believe, but of course the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” cover much more than that.
And there is still much to do to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We still have not achieved justice, many people believe, for the First Nations of our land. And we are in the midst of a passionate debate about people who are sometimes referred to as “undocumented workers,” and by others are called “illegal aliens.”
And we face another threat – the power of corporations that have all of the rights of “citizens” but apparently none of the limitations. With massive wealth, they are able to purchase “free speech” on the airwaves to such an extent that they have far more power to influence the outcome of elections than real citizens have. Now the Supreme Court, with newly appointed members, has decided that purchased speech is “free speech” and cannot be limited.
The promises of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal, and possess certain inalienable rights – are difficult promises to fulfill. Yet this is the promise of our American faith. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We have, simply because we are human beings, the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As citizens, we are the rulers of our nation.
We believe today that these promises are not just for white male property owners, as they were at the time of the early American republic. These are promises for all women and men. It is our hope that in time such rights will be seen as the natural rights of all people the world over. In the meantime, we still have work to do to fulfill these promises right here in our own land.

The laws of nature and nature’s God:
One last thought. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” entitled people to these inalienable rights.
Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Adams, all believed in God. The folks on the Religious Right are correct when they remind us of this fact. At the same time, they were not fundamentalist or even orthodox Christians. They were all deists, dissenters, or religious liberals of one sort or another, by the standards of most Americans of their time. A few, like Patrick Henry, were fairly orthodox; a few, like Thomas Paine, were so radical as to be anti-Christian. We have mentioned that Jefferson, a deist, declared himself to be a Unitarian. John Adams was a member of a church that became clearly Unitarian during his lifetime, and he is buried in that church, the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Quincy, Massachusetts – as is his wife, First Lady Abigail Adams, and his son, President John Quincy Adams, and his wife, First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams. Two presidents and two first ladies all buried in a Unitarian Universalist Church – and no other church in the United States can say that.
Likewise, Washington, Franklin and Madison also held deist views. They believed in God. But they often preferred terms like “providence,” or the term Jefferson used in the Declaration, “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” That is not a biblical phrase; it is a deist phrase.
The Founders were not as secular as some on the left like to think, and they were not as orthodox as some on the right like to think. As a group its fair to say that they did believe that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” had endowed us with inalienable rights. They thought religious faith was important, that it gave us morals and ethics, and that these things were necessary for good government.
But they did not want a test of faith to be required to hold political office. The Constitution makes this clear. They did not want a national religion – the Bill of Rights makes that clear. And, as the Treaty of Tripoli clearly states – it was negotiated during the Washington administration, signed by President John Adams, and ratified without controversy by the Senate in 1797 – they did not intend the United States to be a Christian nation. Rather, they wanted our nation to be a land of religious liberty and tolerance.
And while they mentioned “the laws of nature and nature’s God” and the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, they left God completely out of the Constitution.
In one of the last letters of his life, Jefferson wrote of America’s hard-won freedom from kings who used church and state together to reign over others, acting as if only monarchs could draw strength from God. On June 24, 1826, he wrote, “All eyes are open, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
For the Founding Fathers, God’s grace was universal, not limited to royal blood.
We owe a great debt to our Founders. They were not gods. They were not perfect. They believed in liberty, but many kept slaves. They believed in virtue, mut most lived very complex private lives. All believed in the general idea of religion as a force for stability, but most had unconventional faiths.
George Washington refused to kneel to pray, and was not known to take communion – in fact, when a clergyman admonished Washington for not taking communion, Washington responded by ceasing to attend church. Still, he explained the American victory in the Revolution as “the hand of Providence,” going on at great length about how God had defeated the British Empire.
These complex and self-contradictory people laid the groundwork for much good. We hold these truths to be self evident! We have many promises to live up to. May we have the wisdom to fulfill the promise of the Founders, to achieve the blessings of liberty, justice and peace; and may we have the strength to pass on these blessings to future generations.
Amen.