I want to begin my comments tonight by asking you to envision the "good society," the perfect society. What is its character?
I suspect you envision a society which is not only prosperous, but just, populated by people who are not only happy, but moral.
The Society of Justice and Virtue is a universal aspiration of the human heart. But how can we achieve it?
Throughout history, many have believed that the best way to increase societal justice and individual virtue is to give absolute power to just and virtuous individuals. For instance, Plato suggested making philosophers kings.
But our American forebearers had a different idea. They believed that justice and virtue are not advanced by the empowerment of benevolent dictators, but by the empowerment of the people.
People are empowered when they are given the freedom and opportunity required to realize their highest calling. The society most characterized by justice and virtue, our Founding Fathers believed, would be that which respects what they considered to be every individual's inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
I believe that our Founding Fathers were right. My theme tonight is the justice and virtue of freedom. My goal will be to illustrate how freedom leads both to social justice and to expanded individual virtue.
My speech will not be political. Indeed, some will consider it heavy and academic. But as latter-day evangelicals who want justice and virtue to flourish in our land, it is imperative that we study the political philosophy of America's Founding Fathers: former-day evangelicals who possessed great religious faith and great political understanding. We will increase our wisdom by studying their's.
The Founder's Religious and Political Worldview
Before I continue, I want to call your attention to a book you will receive later this evening entitled The Theme is Freedom, by M. Stanton Evans. It is a history book which contrary to the standard history lesson taught in today's public schools establishes the rootedness of our Founders political philosophy not in the paganism of ancient Greece or Rome, but in their Judeo-Christian heritage. The book provides an accurate understanding, I believe, of our Founders' political thinking, which was quite different from many modern, secularized descriptions of their thought.
What was the political philosophy of America's Founding Fathers? They called themselves Democratic Republicans, and they built their political philosophy directly upon the foundation of their religious views.
They believed in God, a Supreme Being that created the world. They did not all conceive of God the same way, but they did all believe that God gave the world an objective nature as a function of His will, not of subjective human will, and that God called the objective nature of the world "good."
They also believed that God created humankind, called us "good," gave us the world to meet our needs and steward, and yet made us still subject to Creation's laws. No human being, the Founders believed, is above Nature's laws. Nor is any human above other humans. Philosopher or fool, king or commoner, we are equally the children of a Heavenly Father who loves every one of us.
God gave human beings a body and a mind, the Founders believed, and at the juncture of these two elements, God gave human beings a soul which includes free-will. In other words, the Founders believed that God made us material beings in part, but not machines. God made us conscious beings who are capable of perceiving the "self-evident" truths of objective reality, spiritual beings who possess a sense of personhood and can feel saved or condemned, and free-willed beings who while God might call the world "good" must still decide for ourselves what we will call it.
The Founders believed that we are fallen -- that we live in spiritual despair, act immorally, and build unjust societies -- because we willfully separate ourselves from God and try to be His equal instead of submitting ourselves to God through love. Unlike the innocent child, who looks at God's creation and affirms its goodness readily, we demand to judge God. We want God to prove His goodness, prove the goodness of His creation, prove the goodness of life to us before we will affirm them and love Him. Then, even as we make these demands, we close our eyes and stop up our ears to the self-evident proofs of God's goodness, from the beauty of stars to the sonority of our hearts. That is the nature of human fallenness, the Founders believed. By a vain act of will, we deny to ourselves the experience of salvation which each individual could easily enjoy simply by affirming the good that is all around us. In place of an affirming response to God that is the one true way to spiritual life, we substitute a striving after false idols -- pleasure, wealth, and power -- and in so doing, condemn our spiritual selves to death.
Yet the Founders believed we can be saved. They believed that by committing ourselves to love God with all of our heart, mind, and soul, and by loving our neighbors as ourselves, we could be sacramentally transformed into persons happy and good -- not perfect, by any stretch, but spiritually reborn. This saving, free-willed commitment to love God, love creation, love self and neighbor they called "faith" -- and faith, they believed, had the power to redeem the soul and even, to some measure, to redeem society.
I use the limiting words "to some measure" regarding the redemption of society, because the Founders believed that God created us as individual persons and that spiritual salvation is, therefore, individual, not social. No earthly society, in their estimation, would ever equal Augustine's "City of God." But a society largely populated by people faithfully committed to loving God and neighbor would, the Founders believed, be a society characterized by a relatively high degree of individual morality and social justice. On earth, the perfect society is impossible, but a better society could be achieved.
That was the substance of the Founder's American Dream -- the dream that a better society could be founded upon these shores. Allow me to turn now to the political thinking of our forebearers, and how they believed such a society could be established.
I have mentioned that the Founders believed that there are objective, self-evident human goods. They also reasoned that there are objective and self-evident human rights. Life is an objective and self-evident human good, they believed, which God has given to us out of his love for us. What God has given to us, they reasoned, we must have a right to possess. Therefore, life must be a God-given, objective, and self-evident human right. The same holds true for liberty and for property. The God who created us, who loves us, gave us free-will. Therefore freedom must not only be a human good but also a human right. The God who created us, who loves us, gave us the world to fashion from it all we need for sustenance. Hence our possession of labor's fruit -- our property -- must not only be a human good but also a human right.
The Founders called these rights to life, liberty, and property "natural rights," and they believed that we possess these rights equally because we are equally creatures of God and equally loved by God. We may not be equal in size, shape, or appearance, in strength, speed, or intelligence, but we are fully equal in our God-given natural rights. Indeed, the just society, the Founders believed, is that society which respects the people's God-given rights and provides equal protections for each and every citizen to enjoy them.
Let me be clear about this. The Founders did not believe that all individuals would achieve the happiness which committing oneself to the love of God brings; or that all human beings would choose to live moral lives of love for their neighbors; or that all individuals would work hard with the goal of achieving prosperity. Accordingly, they did not believe that there would ever be equality of happiness, morality, or wealth in this world, or that such "equality of result" would even be desirable. The equal possession of money had nothing to do with social justice, the Founders believed. Rather, the justness of a society was to be measured by the degree to which it respects it's people's natural rights and enables them to achieve that just degree of happiness, moral reward, and prosperity to which their faith, moral actions and work correspondingly entitle them.
With equality defined not as material equality but as the equal possession of God-given natural rights, with the just society defined not as that which redistributes income but as that which equally protects natural rights, the Founders saw freedom as the defining characteristic of the just society. To their way of thinking, the just society must not compel citizens to act in specific, positive ways, but must simply circumscribe the negative actions of citizens which would infringe upon the equal and inalienable rights of other individuals. The Founders were hypocrites, we know. They gloried in their freedoms even as they denied freedom to others and justified it by defining away others' humanity. Yet, to fully understand the Founders' thinking, let us remain within their mindsets for yet a moment, instead of judging them from without.
Returning to where we left off, the Founders held not only that freedom is the foundation of just law, but that freedom leads also to the maximization of prosperity, happiness, and individual virtue in a society.
Prosperity, they believed, results when people work to produce what they want from the world. Give people the freedom to work, to possess what they create, and to exchange or dispose of such property as they choose, and most people will choose to work, leading to general prosperity. Try and restrict a people's free enterprise, their ownership of what they produce, or their right to exchange or dispose of their property as they see fit, and not only will poverty result, but you violate the freedom of enterprise which God Himself has given humankind as a fundamental natural right.
Happiness, the Founders believed, results when people make a true free-willed commitment to love God. Give human beings the freedom to love God and many will choose to love Him. Those who do will reap the joy of salvation. Try and coerce people to love God freely and the very effort will be oxymoronic. Meanwhile, you will violate the freedom of conscience which God Himself has given humankind as another natural right.
Moral action, the Founders believed, is that good action undertaken by choice. Give human beings the freedom to act morally and many will choose to do so, and then reap the spiritual, social and material rewards which moral action brings. Try and coerce people to act morally by free choice and again the effort will be oxymoronic, and again you will violate the natural right of freedom which God Himself has given us.
The Founders did not believe that a society of universal virtue could ever be realized in this world, but they did believe that freedom increases virtue. As mentioned, they saw justice as the essence of social virtue, and freedom, properly understood, as the foundation of justice. They held that the society which founded its social laws upon respect for the rights of its citizens would, by its example, encourage its citizens to respect one another also. Indeed, they believed that just laws are a grand moral guide to the people.
We have a problem in American education today. We teach our children about their rights and freedoms, but we do not teach them where their rights come from or how to use their freedom for spiritual happiness. Our failure to do so has given freedom a bad name. But freedom should not be scorned because we mis-use it. Freedom, the Founders believed, is a God-given good.
To make a final point about the Founders' political thinking, they believed governmental power must be limited. They believed that human fallenness makes social laws necessary, that the need to enforce such laws makes government necessary, and that in a world without government, the powerful would violate the rights of the weak. But they also believed that governments can become tools of the powerful, enabling the latter to violate others' rights even more severely.
Thus it was that the Founders warned against allowing governments to accrue power to themselves. As much as possible, power must be retained by the people. Those powers that must be ceded to government must be constitutionally limited, and ought to be separated between different branches of government and different levels of government so that the power of one might check the power of another. Moreover, even with all this, the Founders believed that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, lest the government created by the people to protect their natural rights become a weapon in the hands of the powerful against their natural rights.
To summarize the Founding Fathers' political philosophy, they believed that all human beings possess equal God-given rights to life, liberty, and property, and that the just society is that which protects the people's free exercise of these rights. They did not believe that a society of universal justice and virtue was achievable in this world, but they did believe that it was possible to increase social justice and expand the pervasiveness of individual virtue in a society. The road to maximum justice and virtue, the Founders believed, is the road of freedom properly protected and properly used. It is very important that we understand these political truths, the Founders believed, and establish a society which is free!
The Inalienable Right to Life
Have we done that? Have we established a free society which respects people's equal and inalienable rights? We have not!
It is bad enough that at the founding of this country our forebearers turned away from the obvious implications of their beliefs and constitutionally ratified the sin of slavery. But worse still is the fact that we today no longer honor the Founders' beliefs even in the breach. We have foresaken their faith in God-given equal and inalienable rights and have given fallen man power over whether we live or die, live free or as slaves, and can freely possess the fruit of our labor or must beg for mere subsistance.
Consider the right to life. The Founders believed that all human beings have a natural right to life. Given that human life begins at conception, abortion -- the destruction of another's life -- is a clear example of an unjust act which the just society must circumscribe. Speaking just for myself, I believe abortion is unjust and should be illegal!
But our society does not circumscribe abortion any longer. Unlike America's Founders, today's judicial elites do not recognize a natural right to life that belongs to every person simply as a function of being human. Increasingly, our legal philosophers acknowledge only positive rights -- rights which belong to people as a function of positive government decision-making -- and none other. Our legal system still protects a legal right to life for the fully born. But if, through a series of incremental steps, the Supreme Court rules that increasing numbers of already born persons may legally be killed, many Americans will not protest because a right which government alone gives, government can legitimately take away. Our positivistic culture accepts it as within the government's legitimate purview to determine who shall live and who shall die. They accept that individuals whom government no longer deems fully equal may, like sheep, be legally slaughtered.
There is a world of difference between this modern thinking and that of the Founders. The Founders appreciated the need for positive law in governing society, but they sought to found positive law upon natural law. Laws which trample upon the people's natural rights may be legal but are not just; and the Founders would have proclaimed any government which sets itself against the people's natural rights a despotism which justice-loving people must work to alter.
The Founders willingness to confront power and proclaim that might does not make right has been a bulwark against injustice in our society. But it is a bulwark that is being undermined today, one shovel of earth at time, as the legal positivists dig at the philosophical grounding of our social order. Slowly, gradually, the positivists are attacking the way we think about life, and they are having impact. Human embryos are now harvested for research. Soon, the terminally ill may be euthanized for organs. Instead of each and every human life being deemed precious, our society increasingly views only "high-quality" lives as having value: hence, the breadth of support for assisted suicide. Instead of considering every human life as an infinitely meaningful end in itself, our society increasingly tolerates people being used merely as a means to another's end. Whose ends? Whoever is politically powerful enough to bend positive law to his or her will. In today's America, social justice no longer means the protection of every individual's inalienable rights. Today, thanks in part to positivist organizations like the ACLU, social justice means whatever the politically powerful declare it to mean!
This change in American political philosophy, from believing both in God-given and in positive rights to believing only in positive rights, has influenced not only our conception of social justice but also the prevalence of individual virtue in our society. Moral virtue was about loving your neighbor as yourself. But since modern political philosophy no longer declares human life to have intrinsic value, the incidence of murder is rising. Why should anyone be surprised? Murder as the law defines it may be illegal, but there is nothing which is objectively wrong according to positivism; and there is nothing, not even human life, which is objectively good.
Believing life to be worthless, many of our children today destroy themselves with drugs or kill each other meaninglessly. We have all heard stories of senseless killings where one teenager is murdered by another over a pair of shoes. In Jersey City, we have had teenagers murder teenagers right in front of police officers. This reveals that these young people are internalizing values which not only cheapen others' lives, but also cheapen their own lives. To murder another in direct sight of a police officer is to declare that no life has any value -- not even your own -- and that it therefore does not matter that you will spend the rest of your life in jail.
We shudder at the nihilism of American society today because we have internalized something of the religious worldview of our forebearers. But it is time that we clearly understand the values which modern philosophy and jurisprudence are teaching to our children.
Earlier this year, the body of a new born baby was found in the netting of a Jersey City Sewerage Treatment Facility. That case is being investigated as a murder. But can anyone be surprised that a mother gave birth to a baby and considered it acceptable to throw it down a sewer, when in this State today it is legal for a woman to bring a 9-month old, fully-developed and healthy child to within a single inch of being born, and then decide to kill it?
A society cannot force individuals to value human life. Individuals have free-will. No one can take that away. You can by brutish force move a hand, but you cannot move a heart by force. It is the example a society sets for its people -- through its respect or lack of respect for human life -- that most effectively influences hearts.
Until such time as our society recommits itself to respect for natural rights, including the natural right to life, social power will continue to triumph in America over social justice, and individual ego will continue to triumph over virtue. Only when our society recommits itself to the principle that all human life deserves respect and equal legal protection will there be a renewed flowering of virtue in our land.
The Inalienable Right to Liberty
Let me now turn to the natural right of liberty. One aspect of liberty is religious freedom. Our Founders believed that we have an inalienable right to conceive of God as we choose, and to teach our children our religious values. They were aided in their political implementation of this belief by the fact that the different Protestant denominations of that era considered each other to be different religions. Because each denomination viewed itself as a minority in a sea of diverse faiths, each desired government protection of religious freedom lest a different denomination become politically ascendant and persecute all others. I speak here as a Protestant myself.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, this sense of differentness among Protestant denominations began to fade. Meanwhile, immigration to America by Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe began to surge. Protestants began to see themselves as a unified "we," a grand majority of the American people, and many were offended by the differentness of the new immigrants, whom they saw as a distinct, unappealing "they." Ultimately, the Protestant majority determined to expand the role of government from merely protecting the human right of religious freedom to becoming an instrument for what they considered the positive socialization of immigrants. What did the dominant class of Protestants consider positive socialization? Why, to make Catholic and Jewish immigrants into good Protestants, like themselves! Government would no longer be limited to the negative role of preventing sinful men from violating the natural rights of the people. Now, the elite of society would use government as a positive tool, in their good hands as they imagined it, to save the less enlightened.
Thus was founded the modern public school system in America as a tool to "Americanize" -- in other words, to "Protestantize" -- Catholic and Jewish immigrants. And thus ended a period of greater respect for religious freedom on these shores. Once a country committed to religious pluralism -- to the the non-establishment of a State religion -- America became, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a country increasingly committed to Protestantism as an establishment of religion. In the past, public funds had always been used to support schools. But in those former times, such funds were made available to church-run schools of varying denominations. Now public funds would become restricted to government-run schools only -- schools which would teach strictly Protestant dogma.
Times change. As Catholic and Jewish immigration continued, Protestant political dominance declined. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a secular and relativist moral philosophy gained dominance at our elite universities. The foremost philosopher of education in America became the positivist John Dewey, a latter-day Rousseau who believed that traditional values reflect corrupt influences, and that to combat this, schools should teach children to decide what is right or wrong for themselves. This would provide a "democratic" values education to our children, more in keeping with our democratic society, Dewey said. Yet when he spoke about democratizing values instruction, Dewey wasn't saying he wanted society to respect the right of all parents to teach their children their values. Rather, what he wanted was that all children be taught his so-called "democratic" value that all values are equal. Dewey was a moral relativist, and an ardent proponent of the government education monopoly. He wanted moral relativism taught by a dictatorial system. And Dewey triumphed. The America that had once been committed to a non-establishment of religion (in other words, to religious pluralism), but had later become committed to Protestantism as its established religion, then became, after Dewey, committed to moral relativism as its established religion. That is where America stands today.
In New Jersey alone, the State will spend approximately $10 billion this year teaching our children that all values are equal. You may want to teach your children the moral value that sex outside of marriage is wrong. But if you send your child to the government school system, a teacher -- who represents to your child the authoritative judgement of the State -- will undermine what you say at home by telling your child that she must decide for herself what is right for her.
Anyone who has ever had a teenage child, or has ever even spoken to a teenager, knows full well that a teenager will decide for himself what he believes is right, no matter what a parent says. All we who believe in religious freedom want, all we who believe in the separation of church and state want, is to be able to educate our children without the State undermining us. We want to be able to choose our children's schools -- public or private, secular or religious -- so that we can have the values that we believe in taught to our children, not undermined, in the hope that when our children are tempted to do wrong and are at risk of potentially destroying their lives, they will give our counsel a second thought. Indeed, we believe parents possess a human right -- a human right which the just government is bound to respect -- to be able to direct the moral education of their children.
How ironic it is that those of us who are Protestant Christians are now reaping what we have sown. We had said that we wanted to expand the role of government for what we considered "good." But in retrospect, with the shoe of political power now on another's foot, it is obvious to us that the "good" we wanted to serve was not justice as the Founders conceived of it -- not the good of respect for others' God-given freedom of conscience -- but was rather what we considered good for ourselves regardless of its impact upon others. From our pride followed the fall that has led to the immorality of our present age. We said let us expand the power of government in order to sow good, but we sowed an unjust diminution of religious freedom, and we are now reaping the whirlwind: a government establishment of the secular religion of moral relativism.
This is not much talked about today, but in the latter nineteenth century there was an effort made by America's Protestant elites to ban private education and home-schooling altogether. It was not an effort to expand opportunity: government education had already been made universally available to children. It was an outright bid by political elites to absolutize their control of the socialization of America's children. The United States Supreme Court rejected that grab for power and ruled that "children are not mere creatures of the state," rather are given by God to their parents, giving parents a prior right over the state to determine the appropriate education of their children. That was one decision which the Supreme Court got right and made consistent with the thinking of our Founding Fathers. And yet, it's clearly being denied in modern public policy.
Our Supreme Court declared that all parents have a natural right to guide the education of their children, yet unless American parents are able to afford privately educating their children after paying half of their income in taxes, this human right is, for all practical purposes, denied to them. The power to tax is the power to destroy. If tax rates were 100% of income, there is not one American who would be able to afford a private education for his or her children. Government taxation would destroy that right for all of us. Presently, the total take of the average American's income by all levels of government is over 40%. At this high level of taxation, government has not destroyed the de facto ability of all Americans to educate their children privately, but it has effectively destroyed the freedom of most Americans to afford private schooling for our children. We have a natural right which the Supreme Court has claimed to recognize, but which can only be practically exercised in America by parents of financial means. The practicable exercise of an inalienable right by the rich alone is not what justice is about!
Our elected officials are not Gods over us. Their just role is to respect and equally protect the human rights which God has given to every one of us -- the poor, the most powerless, the most humble amongst us -- the same as the rich! Those of us who want our government to respect our natural right to guide the education of our children are not asking for the government to pay for the education of our children. All we want is for the government to leave us enough of our own money, after taxes, that we ourselves can afford to pay for the education of our children in non-government schools if we choose.
Legislation endeavoring to help us do this has been passed by Congress, but has been blocked by President Clinton. The specific legislation of which I speak would provide for the creation of Education Savings Accounts wherein after-tax monies could be deposited and allowed to grow tax-free if used to fund education expenses.
This same goal could also be accomplished by instituting a universal tax credit that could be taken by anyone who pays for the education of a child. Up to a reasonable level of spending per child, anyone -- a relative, a friend, a wealthy individual or a corporation, not just a parent -- who covered the education costs of a child would get their money back in the form of a tax credit (not just a deduction) that reduced their tax liability by one full dollar for every dollar spent on education expenses. Such tax credits would provide ample education funding for the children of poor families as well as for the children of rich families, while leaving the control of every child's education in his or her parents' hands, as justice demands.
Here, at the State level of government, we could also take a step towards expanding religious freedom by funding education vouchers with a pre-rebate of life-time sales taxes. Even families on welfare pay sales taxes. Over the average life-time of an individual, huge amounts of sales taxes are paid to the State, easily covering the up-front cost of a small education voucher.
What would happen to the prevalence of individual virtue in America if our government were suddenly to respect the human right of parents to direct the moral education of their children? It would soar! Some parents would continue to enroll their children in schools that teach moral relativism. But most parents would, by their free choice, enroll their children in schools that teach not only right and wrong, but also why things are right or wrong. Indeed, I believe parents would enroll their children in schools that also teach great spiritual truths, such as love being the key to salvation.
Individual moral virtue is declining in America today, our families are breaking apart, our children are killing one another. Our society may choose to mock people of faith for believing in moral absolutes. But in the end, society's skepticism does not diminish truth. God is not mocked. That which society sows, it reaps. The moral relativism our government is sowing is reaping the nihilism we see today, and no amount of policing will reverse our nation's moral decline as long as relativism remains America's established state religion.
The Inalienable Right to Property
In addition to an inalienable right to life, and an inalienable right to liberty, our Founders believed that God gave every man and woman an inalienable right to work and to possess the fruit of their labor. Tragically, just like those nineteenth-century Christians who gave away our birth-right of religious freedom, there are many Christians today who seem intent upon giving government increased power over what we can work for and who we can buy from. This represents an attack upon the God-given rights of our people.
It is theft to steal another's labor. It is theft to make another man a slave. It is theft to purchase the production of slave labor. Indeed, the just government ought to embargo the production of slave labor.
But a man who is willing to work for low wages is not a slave if he works by choice. One can justly refuse to work for low wages. One can justly refuse to buy from someone who works for low wages. But one cannot justly forbid someone else to work for low wages, or justly forbid someone to buy the production of free, but low-wage labor.
The issue of free choice is critical here. My father worked for five dollars a day during the Great Depression. Five dollars a day got you farther in America back then, just as it does today in many under-developed parts of the world. But even way back then, five dollars a day was not a lot of money. Still, my father was not a slave. He was simply a man who believed he had a moral obligation to help care for his family, and a natural right to do so. So he willingly worked for what he could get. Had any man tried to stop him from working, that man would have taken food off of his table. There is no injustice in working for low wages. But there is injustice in trying to prevent a man from working to feed his family.
The human right to possess and to freely exchange the fruit of one's labor is so fundamental a cornerstone of social justice that the Founder's believed no other human right was secure without it: not the right to life, not the right to liberty. We have an inalienable right to life, but our right to life is not secure if have not secured the right to sustain our lives through work. Our right to liberty is similarly insecure when the the government uses its power to effectively destroy our fundamental freedoms, as we have just seen in regard to religious freedom. We have property in our rights, James Madison wrote, only to the extent that we have a right to our property.
When contemporary protectionists speak of levying massive tariff taxes upon imports from overseas, what they are intending is to prevent Americans from freely exchanging their labor with other human beings. This violates a God-given human right even as it holds back prosperity in America and throughout the world.
When I was in college, I supported an organization called Bread For The World. Its aim was to increase government funding for the emergency provision of food to famine-struck areas while also encouraging free trade so that America, and all the people of the world, might prosper together. I am still committed to these goals today, because I believe a human being in China, a human being in Mexico, and a human being in Somalia have as much of a God-given human right as I do to freely exchange their labor for the sustenance of their families.
As Christians, we ought to appreciate that a society may make the free exchange of labor between people illegal, but no society can ever make the free exchange of labor between people wrong. Laws improperly circumscribing the God-given rights of a people are built upon injustice, and provide poor moral guidance to the people.
What would be the impact upon America's moral culture if our society were properly to recognize the human right of people to freely exchange their labor? It would be profound. If our government recognized that the human right to freely exchange one's labor extends to all people everywhere, its moral example would help our people see that all human beings, no matter their national heritage, are our brothers and sisters. Racism in America would decline. The example of our government declaring that all work, even low-wage work, has dignity would also discourage the self-destructive excuse-making of some as to why they stay out of the labor force. We would see a stronger American economy, and a lower rate of unemployment, and these factors would produce increases in the market value of labor with a concommitant rise in self-esteem by many people. If morality is about loving one's neighbor as oneself, helping people to love themselves -- even if only as a function of their greater economic success -- would have the impact of helping them to love others as well.
Conclusion
I have just touched on a few examples of how our natural rights are being wrongly circumscribed by unjust public policies today. We are far from the ideal of the just society that the Founders envisioned: the society founded upon the Natural Law of Freedom, dedicated to the equal protection of its people's God-given rights to life, liberty, and property.
America's Founding Fathers betrayed their own faith in many principles of justice, but many people in our age are foresaking the Founder's faith in these principles altogether.
Whenever Americans such as the abolitionists, the suffragettes, or the heros of the Civil Rights Movement have called this nation back to faith in the prinicples of our Founding, justice in America has advanced. Whenever we, the people, have failed to demand that our government respect our God-given natural rights, injustice has advanced.
Our Founding Fathers believed that justice was an inherent characteristic of the good society. They also believed that justice, by its example, encourages moral virtue.
They knew that the justice of freedom is not enough to save us spiritually, but they also knew that individual misuses of freedom do not justify governmental attacks upon freedom.
I have tried to illustrate today how it is that the Founders saw freedom as being the foundation of justice. I obviously believe that the Founders were right.
My hope for all of you gathered here tonight is that you will further study our Founding Fathers' political teaching, and similarly agree with its wisdom.
Let us know the truths they taught, and let us establish a society which is free!