Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam? Vol Xi: Notes on the Bearing of the Declaration of Independence

By Richard J. Rolwing

Each of the first four volumes of this series contain365 essays. Each subsequent volume contains about 36 essays. Volumes grow bigger as later essays grow longer. Rolwing examines nearly all the major writers on our Basic Charter, most of whom repudiate it. He focuses on their manifold criticisms and rejections, reveals their multiple distortions and misunderstandings, rebukes their self-contradictions and inconsistencies, and pities their general theo-phobia. He argues that while America was Founded almost completely by Protestant Christians (the only two deists were not even deists), what was Founded was formally only a philosophical product, not a faith based or Christian one, although the philosophy had been more Catholic than Protestant. Rolwing makes a great deal of American history, law, ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology easily accessible to the average reader. Each 5 minute essay can give you a high for the whole day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462809943

Richard J. Rolwing

Richard J. Rolwing, a retired theologian, taught philosophy, world religions, Christianity, and politics at small colleges and large universities. He was a supermarket manager, arbitrator, insurance agent, mortgage broker, stockbroker, registered financial planner, and executive VP for several corporations, which drilled oil/gas wells, marketed business equipment internationally, and bought and operated a gold mine in California. He has rehabbed dozens of homes all over his city, spoken before business groups all over his state, and lectured before professional groups all over the nation. He has published four volumes on the philosophy behind the US Constitution. A recent work was Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose.

Book preview

Was Frankenstein

Really Uncle Sam?

Vol XI

Notes on the Bearing of the

Declaration of Independence

by

Richard J. Rolwing

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR

THE STUDY OF THE DECLARATION

OF INDEPENDENCE

Copyright © 2009 by Richard J. Rolwing.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

The Hinge

Under God

The Amistad Case of 1841

Healthy Secularity

Deists

A Remnant

National Sovereignty

The Past

Citizenship

Critics

Attorney General

Arrogance

Massachusetts v. Rhode Island

Too Much

Groves v. Slaughter (1841)

The Scandal

John Leland, Founding Era⁴³

Zephaniah Swift Moore

Noah Webster (1785-1843)

Samuel Kendal

James Wilson

Treaties as Law

Imbedded On the Spot

What’s It All About, Alfie?

Robert Coram (1761-1796)

Joel Barlow (1754-1812)

Timothy Stone (1742-97)

Kentucky Constitutional Convention

Theodore Dwight

Americanus

James Kent

Samuel Williams

Americans Killed God?

Justice [Jacob] Rush

Ministers of God

Founding Faith

Benjamin Franklin

Sophists

Barack Obama

The Logic of Terror—and How To Resist It

World Readiness For World Government

The Love of God

Stupidity

Sam Adams

The Last Superstition

America’s Birth Was Not Non-Violent

The Sum and Substance

Greeks Bearing Gifts

Confederate Emancipation

Constituent Assembly

The Great Satan

Endnotes

The Hinge

On 10/16/08 the famous American columnist George Will wrote that some private citizens had built a new museum and visitor center at Gettysburg, Pa.

"In 1863, 11 major roads converged on Gettysburg, Pa. Which is why history did, too. The founding of the American nation was the hinge of world history: Popular sovereignty would have its day.

The collision of armies here [at Gettysburg] was the hinge of American history. The nation would long endure. Which is why 200 or so private citizens recently gathered here for a quiet celebration of their gift to the nation—a sparkling new Museum and Visitor Center that instructs and inspires.

My dictionary says a hinge is a 1) joint or a flexible piece on which a door, gate, lid, etc., turns or swings; 2) an articulated joint; 3) as a verb, it means a) to attach or furnish with hinges; b) to stand, hang, or turn; c) to depend on as for a decision or for validity; 4) that on which anything turns or depends; 5) the earth’s axis, or a cardinal point of the compass.

History has seen innumerable formations of political groups, large and small. Over the history of the world, the founding of one more such was of no particular significance, except that America was founded as a nation based on, dependent on, or hinged on, both popular (human) sovereignty and divine sovereignty. It does no justice to historical political realities to say that America was founded on the consent of the governed, on the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, if you completely leave out of your statement that on which consent of the governed, and the authority resulting, was hinged, or depends, namely, the Divine Governor, Legislator, and Judge of the world, its very Creator.

The Declaration saw no opposition between God and man, between divine and human government. It was not a case of either/or. They could cooperate. Man can share or participate in God’s rule. It was never predetermined by God that any one human He chose, or any one form of rule He chose, was the only hinge possible or acceptable.

To some degree, popular sovereignty has always been operative, because even under the most slavish tyranny the people as a whole could always rebel if only by a sit-down hunger strike to death. Where they did not, they consented, however reluctantly, to the tyrant’s rule. Their consent was coerced, of course, but it was there. A slavish life was better than no life at all. Popular leaders have sometimes exclaimed, Give me liberty or give me death! but unless revolutions erupt, most `slaves’ have fundamentally consented to being living slaves instead of dead freemen. Revolutionaries fight back.

The Declaration articulated that revolutionary view of human existence. It did not discover it. Every justified revolution in history has implicitly proclaimed popular sovereignty. God did not even have to historically instruct mankind here, for, as the Declaration proclaims, it is self-evident to those who stop to look at it.

Our Creator has respected the intelligence and freedom of his human images or his vice-regents, as Muslims call us. In our very human reason and will He impressed a love of the true, the good, and the beautiful. God respects the principle of subsidiarity. What humans are capable of seeing, learning, figuring out, articulating, and managing themselves, God leaves to them, although not without, if besought, interior enlightenment and encouragement.

There is no reason to leave God out of the founding of America, either the historical onetime founding, or the always ongoing founding foundation that all subsequent generations reaffirm. America is not a building based on a single foundation beneath it in the ground. It is a social organization always operating from socially (rationally and volitionally) established principles. If those principles are discarded, the ship of state will soon sink. If an iceberg does not crash its sides, water pressure alone will. When spouses no longer love as they promised originally, unconditionally, the social organization of marriage flies apart, often violently.

In our founding, popular sovereignty under God, was clearly articulated, philosophically justified, divinely blessed, and politically incarnated. It was first then in clarity and full practice. It was not discovered by America. America expressed it in both word and deed. And certainly America never thought or intended to say that the consent of the governed was the conclusion of any philosophy that claimed that God is dead, that men are metaphysically autonomous, that they could morally consent to anything they chose, and that all they needed morally to separate from Britain was the desire to be on their own.

Yes, the founding of America was a hinge, a singular turning point, in world history, but not because it came about by a rebellion, nor because it claimed that successful rebels get to be the new rulers, but because it proclaimed a philosophical theology of politics which squared with what human beings had always known at least implicitly, brought it to the surface, and then implemented it in practice, actually in 13 states, and then in one national institution.

Yes, popular sovereignty was part of the founding, but far from the whole of it. If that was the whole of it, then it was only and purely a (humanly impoverished) political event, which is the way George Will, at least here, describes it. Even if nothing men do can be purely political, or economic, or legal, or domestic, or anything less, they can still conceive of it and talk about it as if it is only that. It is never only that. For if God exists, nothing happens without His involvement, and nothing can happen without His either approval and assistance or disapproval and lack of assistance. There is a theological dimension to everything human. Politics is no exception. Nor is law.

It is not necessary that every American agrees with this statement that God rules the world and America. They need only retain and rely on the radical distinction between good and evil in human conduct, which is not hard to do, and which, in fact, everyone does when someone else’s action bears on himself, however relativistic his theories might be about his own actions when they bear upon others.

But when you talk about the founding you are talking about the Declaration, and that is based on a philosophy summarily articulated from a millennial tradition. You may consider today’s Americans bereft of any such philosophy, but when you are looking at our historical beginnings, it is not any where near adequate to treat the founding as non-theological, much less non-moral. Will says the civil war was also the hinge of American history. The nation would long endure. Lincoln insisted that the confederates had not acted upon the principles of the Declaration, as they claimed, for they denied the preamble’s principle while they nevertheless claimed the conclusion was theirs. They had originally solemnly ratified a union based on popular consent, and now had repudiated that popular consent expressed in Lincoln’s honest election to the presidency. The civil war was about morality, theology, logic, politics, law, and slavery, the Declaration and the Constitution, the identity of America—if it long endured.

Actually the degree to which slavery was eliminated by the Union’s victory and the Civil War Amendments was pitiful. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name shows that it continued even up to WWII in the south, because of southern contempt for blacks and northern unconcern for them. To that extent, the war was more about politics, the Constitution, than the Declaration.

Under God

In the 2008 presidential campaign it was reported that in an earlier political campaign Sarah Palin was asked if she objected to the under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Because she answered that what was good enough for the founding fathers was good enough for her, she was then accused of claiming that the founding fathers created the Pledge of Allegiance. But she had been asked, and responded about, only its phrase under God. And she was correct, for George Washington had used the very phrase, and, of course, the conviction, if not the exact phrase, of under God, was the major theme of the Declaration. In fact, that phrase sums up the Declaration.

The major theme or point of the Declaration was that all men have certain rights which are inalienable because they come from God, and not from the King of England or any other government. The King had been acting otherwise. THAT WAS NOT RIGHT. For the Declaration, it was a case of God or one’s king. The answer was self-evident if you stop to think about it, and are open to the truth. Who determines how human relations should be? Who originates human beings and their relationality? Rulers may have a say but they come in long after the case began.

It is simply taken for granted by so many liberal thinkers of today that our founding was totally secularistic, and that the Declaration’s philosophy replaced God with consent of the governed or replaced religious conviction with sociology, religious theory with the social compact. That is why liberals can be so aghast as any politician speaking as if God is relevant to or for this nation’s government.

They are ignorant of the Founding or deliberately ignore the facts about it. They might read Derek H. Davis’s Religion and the Continental Congress; Contributions to Original Intent. "Sam Adams declared from the steps of the State House in Philadelphia in 1776 that `the hand of heaven appears to have led us on to be perhaps humble instruments and means in the great providential dispensation which is completing.’ Elbridge Gerry agreed that `the hand of Heaven seems to have directed every occurrence.’¹ The Continental Congress produced a steady stream of documents, declarations, and manifestos invoking Heaven in their cause, invoking God, Nature’s God, Lord of Hosts, His Goodness, Providence, Creator of all, Greater Governor of the World, Supreme Judge of the Universe, Supreme Disposer of all events, (and even) Jesus Christ, Holy Ghost, and Free Protestant Colonies.²

Waldman’s Founding Faith notes that the Articles of Confederation included, It hath pleased the Great Governor of the World.³ Waldman then quotes Davis, So powerful were the religious influences on the independence movement that it becomes possible to say that those in the Continental Congress who made the political decision to separate from Great Britain did so only because they fully believed [or were convinced by reason] with the majority of the American people that such a monumental act was their religious duty. Davis was careful here to not say Christian duty. However, that is an indulgent interpretation. It is probably more true that Davis spoke loosely without meaning to distinguish them. Whatever, he spoke truly. The problem is that no matter how often 18th century thinkers refer to natural religion, modern scholars go right on by without noticing it.

In a recent solicitation from Liberty Counsel to donate to its efforts to counteract the ACLU, one page included, under the title of Abandoning the Nation’s Founding Philosophy, a statement by a U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, whom it called an ACLU Member, The state may not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God and attribute to that God our religious freedom.

First, Jews do not acknowledge any Judeo-Christian God. It is only Christians who claim continuity and identity of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the God of the Christian Scriptures. Jews have far less problem acknowledging Judeo-Christian morality. The Founders would have had far less problem with such language although they did not speak that way. They spoke more of the general principles of Christian morality.

The Declaration’s references to God did not identify its God with the God of the Bible, nor did it distinguish them either. Formally, the nation had a founding philosophy, which included a philosophical theology, a reason-based theology, but it did not identify that with any Judeo-Christian philosophy. It would be difficult to establish and lay out anything called a Judeo-Christian philosophy. Liberty Counsel is confused, as no doubt Judge Thompson was. He just presumed that if an American spoke of God, he really meant the Judeo-Christian God. Any reference to God or religion always means the Biblical God and Biblical religion. That judgment is simple ignorance.

The Amistad Case of 1841

About 50 natives had been kidnapped from Africa, transported to Cuba, housed in a trading post for ten days, from whence two Spaniards purchased them as slaves, and embarked with them toward another Caribbean port. The slaves rose up and killed the captain, took over the ship, and headed back to Africa, but ended up near Long Island needing supplies, where some New Yorkers captured some of them on land and an American naval boat captured the ship and hauled in it for salvage.

Cuba was never perturbed, but the Spanish owners, their Spanish minister in America, and the US attorney general all got involved, protesting in two lower courts that everything and everyone on the ship should be restored to the owners of the ship and let go on their way, with the Africans re-enslaved to them. John Quincy Adams was one lawyer on behalf of the Negroes, but his contributions to the final Supreme Court arguments were not included in the transcripts of the trial, the reporter said, because he had not yet or never provided them to him, and/or they were actually not germane. The movie Amistad made him out to be the big cheese defending the liberty of the Africans.

We have the long arguments of both sides, with an attorney named Baldwin speaking on behalf of the negroes. Spain had a treaty with the U.S. from 1795, but in 1818, then again 1835, and 1838 had abolished and outlawed the slave trade, even declaring that slaves introduced into their territories automatically became free. Unfortunately, other laws and treaties made before 1818 had not been amended to fit with the abolitions, so they could be cited by Spanish and American officials. Cuban officials connived to fairly well ignore the laws, because they were paid by slavers for issuing documents verifying slave sales. The lower state court had said to take 1/3 salvage and deliver the Negroes over to the U.S. Government for it to send them back home to Africa.

Attorney Baldwin claimed that this case "involves considerations deeply affecting our national character in the eyes of the whole civilized world, as well as questions of power on the part of the U.S… It presents for the first time the question whether the government which was established for the promotion of JUSTICE, which was founded on the great principles of the revolution, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, can, consistently with the genius of our institutions, become a party to proceedings for the enslavement of human beings cast upon our shores and found in the condition of free men within the limits of a free and sovereign state?"

As to the question of returning escaped slaves (Constitution IV, 2) Baldwin said that only applied to fugitives from a sister state. Nothing authorized the United States or commanded it to give extra territorial force to a law about former slaves.

At any rate only states need turn over fugitives, not the Federal government. "The Constitution confers on the Federal government no power to establish or legalize the institution of slavery. It recognizes a compact between the states but imposes no duty and confers no powers. Nor may a state give up a slave to a foreign country because that is a national concern…

"Nor did the people of the United States, whose government is based on the great principles of the Revolution, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, confer upon the federal, executive, or judicial tribunals the power of making our nation accessories to such atrocious violations of human rights."

Baldwin asked, Is there any principle of international law, or law of comity [between them] which requires [a nation] to give effect to slave trade laws of a foreign nation? All applicable legal writers in international law say `no.’ He cites an English case that declared that which is called comitas inter communitates cannot prevail in any case where it violates the law of our own country, the law of nature, or the law of God.

Founding era lawyers, respectful of British common law precedents, and their philosophical background, did not hesitate in court to both lay the Declaration of Independence on the table, appeal to the natural law, and relate it to the law of God. Did they only do that when their legal case was weak? Was it merely a form of talking louder or pounding the table? No doubt it could have often been that in English history and early America, but it was not necessarily that. American lawyers were all natural lawyers at the time, and even if they were not philosophically adept enough to fully explicate natural law and its proximate relation to the facts of some case, they were not consciously snowballing or doing worse when they called upon their immutable laws of justice. They were convinced that their American legal system was designed to reflect such.

Baldwin said the French, Spanish, and British treaties are inoperative on slaves because only municipal laws treat of them. The U.S. could doubtfully say of any such treaty, "It is to be remembered that the government of the United States is based on the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence by the Congress of 1776; `that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…"

Here it is 65 years after the Declaration and it still has not been forgotten. Even though it is only an attorney, and not the court itself in its decision and opinion, which claims three times in this case that our [Constitution’s] government is based on the principles promulgated in the Declaration, no opposing attorney has any quarrel with the claim or questions whether the claim, or fact, or truth of the claim, is relevant, Neither does the brief opinion explaining the court’s ultimate decision, have any problem with such claims.

Baldwin said that the convention which framed the federal constitution, though it recognized slavery as existing in regard to persons held at labor by the laws of states which tolerated it, were careful to exclude from that instrument every expression that might be construed into an admission that there could be property in human beings.

In a N.Y. case a judge had said that while Congress was authorized to regulate commerce, persons are not the subjects of commerce. If they were, no state could prohibit slaves as articles of commerce. He spoke of the revolution in which the great principles of liberty proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence were vindicated by our fathers. (That term, `vindicated’, is a polyvalent one.) So Baldwin argued that no treaty obliges us to treat people as property. Several treaties purposefully omit the subject. Nor is there any provision in any treaty for delivery even of pirates apprehended.

The Constitution inserted `fugitives from service’ precisely because the law of comity [part of the natural law] between states required restoration of only property.

Baldwin quotes the natural law scholar Vatel: In the interpretation of treaties, we should construe words as used customarily, as suitable to the subject, and to the legitimate powers of the contracting parties, as most conformable to the declared principles of government, as will not lead to injustice to others, or in any way violate the laws of nature. He argued that the claimants in this case were at war with all of these principles of interpretation.

He said that the US signed an 1814 Treaty with Britain declaring the slave trade to be piracy and promising to work to abolish it as traffic irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and justice. It surely was the influence of the Declaration of Independence’s principles rather than the Federal Constitution which pushed America to sign such a treaty, just as it had to have been the original motivation for the Constitution to have permitted the outlawing of the slave trade to America as of 1808.

Vatel had said that even if the treaty obliged us to violate the immutable laws of justice, it can not really oblige us.

The law of nature and the law of nations obliges us to do justice to Africans as any treaty might oblige us. This is the traditional teaching of Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and many of their disciples, that unjust laws do not bind, because they are not true laws. It is the very teaching of the Declaration that Americans are no longer obliged to obey the laws of King George because they were unjust, and so he has forfeited his authority over Americans, whatever may be his authority over the rest of his empire.

Baldwin said, In a case like this where it is admitted that the Africans were recently imported and never domiciled in Cuba and so owe no allegiance to its laws, their rights are to be determined by that law which is of universal obligation, the law of nature.

His argument about a man’s domicile was based on the very same principles of the Declaration, consent of the governed, even though he relied on the matter from the law of nations. A man’s domicile of origin [national home] is his place of birth until he voluntarily changes it by manifesting an intention to change it and carries it into execution by acquiring another domicile. No proof exists that these Negroes did that. "As it is the will or intention of the party which alone determines what is the real place of domicile which he has chosen, it follows that the former domicile is not abandoned by residence in another if that residence be not voluntarily chosen. Those who are in exile or in prison, as they are never presumed to have abandoned all hope of return, retain their former domicile. He gives three legal case references.

As Baldwin argues, Neither the law of nature nor the law of nations authorizes the slave trade… a traffic so abhorrent to the feelings of the whole civilized world. As to the pretense of their purchase in Cuba, Baldwin insists that Good faith forms the first duty of every community. And of every contract or compact, we may add. The morality of honest dealing and good faith underlay the original consent of the governed that is expressed in the Declaration itself, just as it did in their original consent of the to-be-governed.

I have written about the theoretical philosophy upon which the American nation is formally based. Here I add that it is also simultaneously based on a practical philosophy, the morality of good faith, or as Aristotle might say, friendship.

Even the defense in this case appealed to an argument analogous to the consent of the governed or the voluntary will of people. They cited that a ship or vessel on the high seas in time of peace engaged in lawful voyage is according to the law of nations under the exclusive jurisdiction of the state to which the flag belongs, as much so as if constituting a part of its own domain. The Amistad was no longer flying the Spanish flag. It is a matter of choice which flag is flown.

Chief Justice Joseph Story decided liberty for the Negroes, saying that they were never lawful slaves but kidnapped natives of Africa. Spain had abolished the trade and said slaves now introduced in its territories were free. The purchase was a fiction. So neither are the Negroes pirates or robbers by the law of nations, the law of Spain, or by any treaties with Spain. Fraud will vitiate any, even the most solemn transactions, and an asserted title to property founded upon it is utterly void. That is as clear in the law of nations as in municipal laws. No treaty binds frauds.

If they are free, the treaty with Spain does not apply and the US must respect the rights of both the negroes and the Spanish subjects—a conflict that must be decided upon the eternal principles of justice and international law.

Give the Spaniards back the ship and let the Africans go free.

Healthy Secularity

New York Times Mideast reporter Judith Miller’s 1996 God Has Ninety-Nine Names; Reporting from a Militant Middle East is a 1996 study of about ten nations in the Mideast. All of them are mixtures of militant, moderate, and would-be secular Muslims, many Muslims sects, many ethnic groups, together with corrupt businessmen, tyrannical rulers, and never-ending resorts by most groups to violence to grab and keep power. Europe had seen many wars in its history, but its history has never been constant secret savagery. Her book should convince any reader that earthly life is a real vale of tears.

We once quoted a scholar who said something to the effect that every significant act, event, or writing in European history over the past 500 years involved the issue of the relation between religion and politics or church and state. Something like that could surely be said of the entire 1300 year history of Islam. However, it should not surprise us. Politics is concerned with the most comprehensive project for our temporal existence, and religion is concerned with the most comprehensive project for some future no-longer-temporal existence.

In her chapter on Syria, Miller traces the state’s origins to the early civil wars among Muslims during the first four Caliphs following Mohammed. By way of blood and of bloodshed, Damascus of Syria became Islam’s capital in 661 AD.

"Under Muawiyah, Islam’s fifth Caliph and the first head of the Umayyad empire, Islam flourished, expanding from Spain to India. Muawiyah departed from [the 2nd caliph] Umar’s ruling creed by surrounding himself with Syrian Christian advisers and taking a Christian wife, ingratiating himself with the people he had conquered.

The dynasty became associated, as did Syria itself, with another landmark in Islamic history. By including non-Muslims in key positions in court, by introducing tolerant `innovations’ opposed by religious conservatives, and by appointing his frivolous son to succeed him as caliph, thus introducing the principle of hereditary rule that has been followed ever since by Muslim dynasties, Muawiyah secularized Islam and transformed the theocratic caliphate into a temporal sovereignty," according to Hitti’s 1959 Short History of Syria]. While Islamic doctrine would continue to insist that there was no separation between politics and religion, between the temporal and the spiritual in general, the two realms had indeed been effectively separated and would remain so throughout the world of Islam. [Miller cites other scholars who agree on the de facto separation but not completely on its date of emergence.]

Generations of future Islamic `fundamentalists’ would never forgive Muawiyah or the Umayyads for this violation of political tawhid, the `oneness’ of church and state, a cardinal principle of Islam.⁴

If politics is a branch of ethics and ethics rests upon a metaphysics or world-view, then a religion or faith necessarily affects politics. The trick is to not confuse religion and politics, not identify them, not let the mother reabsorb her offspring, and not let the offspring repudiate its parent.

Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 Jesus of Nazareth addresses this issue in responding to the famous Jewish scholar Rabbi Neusner’s response to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, A Rabbi Talks With Jesus. The Rabbi fears that Jesus’s teaching asked Jews to abandon their parents, their Sabbath, and their nation, which is contrary to the Torah, the heart of Hebrew Scripture, believed [by the Rabbi, Jesus, and Christians] to be from God.

In the sermon on the Mount, for Benedict, Jesus offered a new version of the Torah, for universal application. Benedict quotes a Hebrew text from Zechariah (9:9-10) promising a king to Israel that will be triumphant but a king whose rule does not depend on political and military might… his kingdom [will be] universal (p.81). Karl Elliger’s Das Alte Testament Deutsch, (24/25, p. 151), says, through all the fog we do glimpse with surprising distinctness the figure of the one who has really brought the whole world the peace that passes all understanding. He has done so in filial obedience: by renouncing violence and accepting suffering…

We are not trying to advocate faith in Jesus of Nazareth here, but only want to expose some symmetry between the Pope’s view of Christianity and the American Declaration of Independence. The precise issue here at this point is the renunciation of violence to obtain and maintain rule, which, undoubtedly, implies some acceptance of suffering.

We do not imply that the American Revolution renounced violence; in fact the Declaration justified violence for self-defense—to actually regain that limited and justified self-rule colonists had always had (and now felt that complete self-rule was deserved). But they never, as far as we know, explicitly claimed that the revolution was to establish the kingdom of God or Christ. Their political, legal, and military actions were not efforts to defend some Protestant churches from attacks by other Protestant churches or the Catholic church, or even to defend Christianity from attacks by unbelievers. The Revolution was not a religious war even if the developed state constitutions established one degree or another of Protestant Christianity. It was about the morality of justice, a secular philosophical issue, thought not divorced from God and His moral law.

We need not recall how much of Jewish hope and desire during the time of Roman imperium contained ideas of a political messiah. Benedict says, While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework [over 600 laws] for war and peace, for just politics and daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus’s teaching. The Sermon on the Mount cannot serve as a foundation for a state and a social order (p. 114). Traditionally, for Muslims, the Koran can and does.

Benedict says Christianity is a universal communion of devoted discipleship with Jesus that transcends nationality and ethnicity. "The absence of the whole social dimension in Jesus’s preaching, which Neusner discerningly critiques from a Jewish perspective, includes, but also conceals, an epoch-making event in world history that has not occurred as such in any other culture. The concrete political and social order is released from the directly sacred realm, from theocratic legislation, and is transferred to the freedom of man, whom Jesus has established in God’s will and taught thereby to see the right and the good (p. 118)." (Emphasis added.) Then Benedict connects this release with Paul’s emphasis upon Christians’ freedom (even from the Law).

In our day, Benedict reflects, of course, this freedom has been totally wrenched away from any godly perspective or from communion with Jesus. Freedom for universality and so for the legitimate secularity of the state has been transformed into an absolute secularism, for which forgetfulness of God and exclusive concern with success seem to have become guiding principles (119). Yet he also says, that political theologies [of which there were many developed in the last century], of whatever sort, theologize one particular political formula in a way that contradicts the novelty and breadth of Jesus’s message (122).

The Declaration of Independence was God-based. Congress added a third and fourth appeal to God on top of Jefferson’s two. But it restricted itself to the philosophical realm, not relying on any historical religion’s faith-claims. It was not a church, or a faith-based, statement, but one relying on only created human reason’s province. In that sense it was secular. The Constitution was even more so by its exercise, not only of the Declaration’s general theoretical principles, but by its practical exercise of human freedom in relying on the study of the history of law and politics to devise every single piece of the fundamental law of the Constitution. Our two founding documents, at least in general, exemplify the very conclusion which Benedict drew from the Sermon on the Mount, that Christians were free to proclaim and act upon the basis of popular sovereignty in the affairs of politics and law. God has not, and Jesus has not, determined from Heaven either the forms of governments, the types of their laws, or the persons of governors.⁵ Christians need not look for laws in either of their Scriptures to declare as binding socially or to constitutionalize as fundamental politically. (The Ten Commandments are general enough to be relevant everywhere since they formulate major dimensions of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.)

We have boasted that the message of the Declaration of Independence was both of ancient lineage, even as old as the human race itself, and yet was revolutionary in the 18th century, at least insofar as it was a political proclamation giving birth to a new