As 4th of July weekend approaches, I feel that it's important to revisit the founding of the great republic that we call the United States of America. There are plenty of revisionist historians who would like to twist historical facts to make it fit with their ideology or agenda, kind of like how the person of Jesus is distorted based on personal convenience. Some believe that the United States was founded on secular atheistic principles, citing the establishment clause of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights as proof that the Founding Fathers advocated for a radical separation of church and state. Other revisionists claim that the founding of the country is rooted in oppression, racism, and slavery. The truth is that the founding of America is, at bottom, Catholic. That may be shocking to those who see the United States as a Protestant nation. In one sense, that's true; in terms of population, Protestant Americans outnumber Catholic Americans. However, it is false in another sense. When analyzing the great founding documents, we can see that America is informed by Catholic philosophical and theological principles, especially natural law and the consent of the governed.
Natural Law
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote,
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.
There is a lot to unpack here, but let's start with Jefferson's point about self-evident truths. He assumes in this contention that there are indeed objective, self-evident truths that can be found. Obviously, truth cannot be found in an empirical way, so Jefferson is referring to the use of guided reason to attain truth. This neatly summarizes the crux of the moral philosophy of the Catholic intellectual tradition. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, "the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law." The eternal law refers to God Himself. God, by His very nature, simply is unconditioned goodness itself, and as such, He is the eternal law. The natural law is our participation in the eternal law as rational creatures. Through reason, we can know that there is a right and wrong, and that we ought to do good and avoid evil in life. We can also examine ourselves and know that we have a telos, or purpose. For instance, we all have equal worth because of our shared human dignity, which is the first truth mentioned by Jefferson in the Declaration.
However, natural law is grounded not in human reason, but in God, which is why I stated earlier that we can reach truth through guided reason. The concept of equal dignity among humans can be reached through reason, but it is also a revealed truth found in the Bible. Genesis 1:27 says, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him." The only way to justify the claim that all people have equal worth is to appeal to the idea that we are all made in God's image. Any other defense is purely arbitrary. For example, if we say that consciousness makes us inherently valuable, then should we kill those in comas or those with mental disabilities? If we say that the mere fact of our being human is sufficient, then isn't this just prejudicial towards one's own group and against other living creatures? Clearly, the answer to both of these preposterous questions is no, but we can only say "no" if we base our defense on the biblical idea of the image of God.
Natural law also reveals to us that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings, to deprive them unjustly of their liberty, or to seize their property. These are rights natural to the human person, and as such, it is unjust to deprive innocent people of these rights. This is grounded in the very essence of humanity given to us by God, not in government or the will of the majority. America was founded on the existence of unchangeable truth, which can be known through the natural law. However, the only ground for truth and for our inalienable rights is the monotheistic God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Consent of the Governed
Another Catholic concept found in the Declaration of Independence is the consent of the governed. Jefferson writes that "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." While this may sound like an invention of the modern Enlightenment era, the concept that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed can be traced to the Catholic Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is also accurate to say that the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, were exposed to these Catholic political theories, and that they drew inspiration from these Catholic thinkers.
In the 16th century, Cardinal St. Robert Bellarmine defended the Catholic faith and Thomistic thought against dissenters on all sides. One of the debates in which he was engaged was the political disagreement on where the right of governmental rulers come from. Protestant thinkers like Robert Filmer contended that monarchs received their absolute power through divine right, and that God had uniquely appointed certain individuals as kings. Bellarmine vehemently disagreed, and he drew from the rich Catholic intellectual tradition to inform his own political theory. In his work On Civil Government, Bellarmine argued that all human beings are born free and equal, and that "[t]here is no reason why amongst equals one should rule rather than another." As such, God does not divinely appoint certain men as rulers, so the people themselves must decide what kind of government they ought to have, and who ought to rule over them. To Bellarmine, we are meant to live in society, and this entails that we need someone (or a group of people) to protect the common good:
"Men must be governed by some one, lest they be willing to perish. It is impossible for men to live together without some one to care for the common good. Society must have power to protect and preserve itself."
However, the rulers and the form of government we have must arise from the people themselves, since there is no human being who is divinely chosen to rule. Hence, Bellarmine's theory of the consent of the governed has roots in the ancient natural law theory defended by Aquinas, especially as it regards the nature of the human person. If every human being is equal because of the image of God we possess, then there is no reason for one system of government to be preferred necessarily. Therefore, it is up to the people to give power to the government they think will best protect their God-given rights.
America as the Climax of the Story
The United States of America is the culmination of over 2,000 years of Western philosophy and political theory. Beginning with the ancient Jewish idea of the image of God and Aristotle's early iteration of the natural law in the form of virtue ethics, the steady march towards the climax of the story that is America passed through the Catholic medieval philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Robert Bellarmine. Finally, when the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, and the Pilgrims began to conduct themselves according to the principles of self-government and rule of law, they were unwittingly employing ideas from the Catholic intellectual tradition, Separatist Puritans though they were.
Finally, the Founding Fathers crafted a new nation out of this intellectual tradition, with a government arising from the consent of the governed, and a country that protects the rights of man given by nature's God (a clear reference to the natural law). While contemporary Protestant thinkers were defending the divine right of kings and distancing themselves from natural law theory, the mostly Protestant founders of our nation were creating something distinctly Catholic in principle. Not only are there clear similarities between Jefferson's Declaration and George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights to St. Robert Bellarmine's political works, but we know that Jefferson was directly exposed to Bellarmine through Robert Filmer's work Patriarcha, a defense of the divine right of kings. The book was focused on directly refuting Bellarmine's consent of the governed and the natural law, and Jefferson owned a copy of the book, which he annotated heavily.
Whether you are Catholic, Protestant, or whatever else, don't be afraid to celebrate these roots of the founding. Ideas like the natural law, equal rights, and consent of the governed are the very concepts that keep us free, and any American from any background can appreciate them. On this 245th birthday of the United States, thank God for the ideas our founders implemented into the national fabric, and be thankful for our popular sovereignty, self-government, and protection of natural rights. Happy Independence Day!
Comments