Declaration Day

The United States just celebrated the Fourth of July two days ago. Cookouts and squirt-gun wars, sparklers and fireworks are all traditions that cannot be missed. Yet as with the Christmas tree and the Thanksgiving turkey, it is the meaning behind the celebration and the traditions that we strive to keep in mind always.

So what did we celebrate on the Fourth of July? What we carry with us through the rest of the year, once the fireworks are gone and the grills put away, is different for each person. I want to suggest that what we didn’t celebrate is every bit as important as what we did.

Liberty. Revolution. The Bill of Rights. Patriotism. The United States of America. These are all big Fourth-of-July words. Yet if you look at the date we chose to mark our national holiday, it is curious that not all of these words fit. Especially not the last.

We celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution or even the unity of the United States. This date has nothing to do with the Bill of Rights or our current form of government. In fact, when the Declaration was signed, no one knew if the 13 colonies would become 13 independent nations, or one unified nation. We celebrate the day that the colonies said, ‘We will rule ourselves. We will make our own rules. The government serves us. We do not serve the government.”

It is a wonderfully ironic twist in history that the Declaration we celebrate on the Fourth of July was penned by a man whose political ideas lost out. In the subsequent political struggle that determined how our nation would be run, from Articles of Confederation to the Constitution to the Bill of Rights and deciding how those should be interpreted and put into practice, Thomas Jefferson’s ideals of a limited federal government and laborer ownership of business and land can hardly be seen today. We celebrate this man’s elegant prose, but do not come close to understanding his ideals.

Yet through the corruption and bickering, pride and bigotry, power-mongering and oppression that have riddle our history, one thing remains. We have the power to shape our government. It serves the people, we do not serve it. We can, if we want to, rip the Constitution to shreds and write a new one. We can make new laws and abolish old ones. We can overturn Supreme Court rulings and impeach presidents. We the people have this power, if only we choose to use it.

I don’t trust my government, and I don’t think that anyone should. To do so betrays the American ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence, which we celebrated on the Fourth of July. If we sit back and let the government do whatever it wants, be betray everything our freedoms were built on. I do not celebrate the formation of a nation, but the spirit of a people and the power of a (as of yet not fully realized) ideal. I do not celebrate our government or our country, but the ideals that started it.

I think that Jesus would do the same. He did not give His allegiance to any government but rather to a set of ideals and values, a way of living that benefited all around him. When the government was wrong, He did what was right. He taught us to think about what is best for others and how we would want to be treated. He helped us find our independence on a personal level. I think He would agree with the principals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: to know your life is secure from harm, freedom to live with dignity, and the ability to own the means to provide for yourself and your family.

Life, liberty and property were the original core values written about by John Locke. The Declaration edited them because the rich guys didn’t want all their poor workers thinking they should own land, too. Our nation has been messed up from the start, and it is still full of problems. But on the Declaration of Independence Day and through the year I hope you will join me in remembering that we have a right and responsibility to change government and make it better.