Editor’s note: This is the sixth and final piece in a series exploring the ideas behind America’s founding. Each piece accompanies a master class on the Declaration of Independence from Utah Valley University’s Center for Constitutional Studies. The classes are free and open to the public. Read more about and access the classes here.
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As we head into the July 4 weekend and our celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we wrap up this series of essays and reflect on what good government secures for its citizens: the pursuit of happiness.
The most important principle of the Declaration of Independence is that government is not the most important thing in life.
The phrase, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” suggests that government is no doubt indispensable. Without well-ordered government, our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be in constant peril, and safety would be something enjoyed only by the strong.
More from the Center for Constitutional Studies’ masterclass series:
- Opinion: A look at the document that jump-started our nation
- Opinion: The room where it was written
- Opinion: The Declaration of Independence — choosing natural rights and human equality
- Opinion: Why America is worth celebrating
- Opinion: The civic virtue of everyday citizens
But government, per the declaration, exists to furnish the safety and freedom essential for a people to direct their efforts to more important things. It enables a free people to pursue happiness; it does not bestow it upon them. The state is not assigned the task of providing for a citizen’s every need nor with the responsibility for saving the citizen’s soul. The declaration announces a more modest aim for government and a greater role for voluntary associations.
Perhaps the most poignant synopsis of this view of government as a support to the activities of a free people is found in George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Rhode Island in 1790.
“Happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support … May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid,” Washington wrote.
As Washington’s letter suggests, the American Founding departed from empires, ancient republics and modern nation-states in conferring the “immunities of citizenship” and respecting “liberty of conscience” without regard to religious sect.
A generation later, Alexis de Tocqueville would marvel at this American combination of the “spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom” holding it up as a model of successful democracy for Europeans.
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American confidence in a free civil society rested first and most importantly on the acceptance by a critical mass of the assumption that saving faith cannot be produced by coercion.
It rested, secondly, upon the related claim that true religion will not only survive but flourish in an environment of political liberty. It is not accidental that the American Founding is bookended by religious revivals in the form of the First and Second Great Awakenings. And that religious revival in America was paradoxically accompanied by the gradual disestablishment of churches in the states between the 1770s and the 1830s.
The growth and extension of religious liberty in America was not driven by religious and moral skepticism, but by confidence in the power of belief. Saving faith, Americans concluded in the course of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is better secured by freedom than by state power.
Following this logic, the declaration moved the sacred and the holy from the plane of coercive authority to the plane of freedom. This was an elevation, not a diminution of religious life. In the political philosophy of the declaration — the most important things, the things most essential to human happiness — are placed within the realm of human conscience rather than force.
If government can safely relinquish its control over religious doctrine, it can also surely afford to relinquish central direction of economic resources, as outlined in Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” first published in 1776. In both cases, an increased confidence in the capacity of people to make these important decisions through free association drove a reduction in state power.
The same is true of civil society more generally, which is now marked by voluntary associations. The increase in civil liberty no more diminishes the vibrancy of religion and virtue than the free market diminishes economic prosperity.
The mistake in both cases is thinking of government as the origin of these goods, rather than simply the environment in which they’re pursued. This Fourth of July, let’s celebrate the religious and economic freedoms that good government makes possible.
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