Have the Hosts at MSNOW Never Read the Declaration of Independence?
The most central idea undergirding the entire American project is alien to the liberals at MS-NOW: that our rights are granted by God.
There’s an amazing video making the rounds on social media in which a host on MS-NOW tried to sneeringly mock Congressman Mike Johnson for daring to suggest that “our rights do not derive from government; they come from our creator.”
I usually hate to join a pile on when a person has made a mistake of this kind. But the gaffe didn’t just reveal a shocking level of ignorance; it combined that ignorance seamlessly with the sneering contempt that characterizes today’s Left. After all, the thought the host found so worthy of snide mockery is literally the belief that underwrites the entire American project.
“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,” reads the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. This was the most fundamental belief from which every other freedom stemmed: Our Founding Fathers believed our rights were granted by God and thus inalienable. It was the government’s job to protect those sacred rights, not grant them.
This idea is also crucial to the story of the Jews in America, as I explore at great length in my new book The Jews and the Left, which comes out in a few weeks. In President George Washington’s famous letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790, the President invokes this fundamental concept to make sure Jews understood that things would be different here.
Washington’s famous letter was written after a trip he made to Rhode Island, which had been the last of the 13 states to ratify the Constitution. “Now that Rhode Island had reknit the old ties, he would go there, meet the leaders, see the people and make it plain that he no longer kept in his heart the resentments the petty spokesman of the little State had aroused,” writes Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman.
At his arrival, the President was greeted by the town clergy, among them Moses Seixas, president of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, who would later become the cashier of the Bank of Rhode Island. Along with the other members of the local clergy, Seixas had written a letter to the President, and the letters were read aloud at a ceremonial breakfast. (Also read to the President was a letter written by another local Jew, one Mr. Jacob Isaacks, who claimed to be able to distill “by a very simple apparatus” sweet water from ocean water. Alas, he could not.)
When the President returned to Philadelphia, he sat down to reply to three of the addresses, among them Seixas’s. Both Seixas’s letter and the President’s were published in the newspaper.
“Sir,” began Seixas’s address, “Permit the children of the stock of Abraham, to approach you, with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits—and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.”
“Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the almighty disposer of all events) behold a government erected by the MAJESTY OF THE PEOPLE—a government, which to bigotry gives no sanction—to persecution no assistance; but generously affording to ALL liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship: Deeming every one of whatever nation, tongue or language, equal parts of the great governmental machine,” wrote Seixas.
Seixas was laying out the contract that the fledgling country had made with its citizens, including those belonging to religious minorities. With words that would become famous when the President repeated them back in his own letter, Seixas offered up to the President a summary of the unique compact America had granted its Jews: to give “bigotry no sanction—persecution no assistance.”
Yet Seixas ended his letter thanking not the President but God, who imbued us with the rights that the United States government would commit to protecting.
The federal union is “the work of the great God, who ruleth in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth,” wrote Seixas, and thus, “For all the blessings of civil and religious liberty, which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the ancient of days, the great preserver of men, beseeching him that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised land, may graciously conduct you thro all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life.”
Seixas’ message was clear: The government of the United States didn’t create equal rights—God did.
Seixas didn’t invent this distinction, of course; he was referencing that central organizing principle written in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson.
That’s why some believe that it was Jefferson who actually wrote Washington’s response to the Jews of Newport, or at least he added a significant line to it.
Washington’s letter quotes Seixas’s verbatim, expanding on the theme Seixas laid out—most crucially, the distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” wrote President Washington. “For 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.”
This distinction between religious tolerance and religious freedom was critical. It was the difference between rights given by government (tolerance) and rights granted by God (freedom). And it defined what it means to be an American: It means zealously protecting our rights as a gift of God rather than the result of the sufferance of our neighbors or government.
Of course, it takes a person of a different faith to even arrive at such an idea, and while the distinction was not invented for the Jews, Jews would become a symbol for the high ideals this country was founded on.
Putting a bow on the idea, Washington wrote the words that came to symbolize what so many Jews had come to hope for since setting foot on American shores some 100 years earlier, that this was to be our promised land, after millennia of persecution. The words Washington wrote never fail to bring tears to my eyes as I read them: “May the children of the stock of Abraham”—again, borrowing from Seixas—”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 figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
I remember reading years ago that a fundamental difference between Left and Right is that the Left views politics as the ultimate value, the source of meaning and goal of power, while the Right is generally more grounded in religious values, family and friendship.
I have yet to hear a single example of a Conservative family member rejecting anyone on the basis of political differences. It's always the other way around.
There is no doubt that the Hebraic Idea of a God who is just is far and away the most influential idea in Western intellectual history, in the absence of which our liberal ideals and institutions could never have been established nor long maintained. Nor is there any doubt that the Bible is the primary document of our whole culture and civilization.
These two truths need to be explored in our schools and colleges, keeping in mind that a culture--any culture--that is not transmitted from one generation to the next will quickly disappear.