Benjamin Franklin would greet the country’s 239th birthday with profound shock, if his comment “at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787” is any indication. A lady had “queried [him] as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. ‘Well, doctor, what have we got: a republic or a monarchy?’”
Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
How does one “keep” a “republic” — or, more essentially, keep the freedom that a republic supposedly protects? The Founding Fathers were not only unanimous but insistent and explicit about the requirements for such a feat. Yet Americans have spurned their stipulations for over a century and a half now. Hence, the incredulity of Franklin and the other Founders that the United States still survives. And though we can debate whether it remains a republic, for sure it’s no longer free.
Indeed, Franklin predicted our slide into totalitarianism. “[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” he observed. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Patrick Henry also praised virtue, along with “morality and religion,” as “the great pillars of all government and of social life …” So did John Adams: “[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.”
Why? What renders virtue, morality and religion — by which the Founders meant biblical Christianity — so indispensable to political freedom? Why are they its prerequisites? And what does their eviction from modern America portend for us?
Sam Adams hinted at one reason liberty depends on Christian virtue and morality while the Continental Congress was signing the Declaration of Independence. “We have this day restored the Sovereign, to whom alone men ought to be obedient,” Adams said. “He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom of thought, and dignity of self-direction which He bestowed on them.”………
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