Analyst’s note: Happy Constitution Day on this September 17th! Happy Constit.. what?
I know, I know, it's been so many decades since we meaningfully and unitedly observed what was once our second great national civic holiday (literally, Holy Day) that most of us have grown up utterly ignorant of it. It is true, however, that for a long part of our national history, our fathers' fathers DID hold this day sacred and honor it--as they did Independence Day--not merely with such hoorah, hoorah festivities as fireworks, bands, and parades, but also with those more civically edifying exercises, such as sermons, recitations, worship, speeches, debates, and discussions centered on their marvelous Constitution.
It was, of course, perfectly natural that generations of Americans more morally serious than ourselves observed Constitution Day on a par with Independence Day, since the organic intellectual, historic, and civic connection between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787 is (or, at least, was) so obvious to all citizens.
I am happy to see that, in recent years, Americans are beginning to revive and reinstitute public and private observances of Constitution Day. I believe nothing but good can come of the practice and that this reinstitution of an annual public obervance is a necessary, though by no means a sufficient, precursor to a return of Constitutional government and thus of Liberty under Law.
As a contribution to your Constitution Day observance, permit me, to urge you to honor this Holy Day best by taking out and reading the Constitution of 1787 with its amendments, perhaps even resolving to commit a portion of it to memory and beginning that intellectual and moral task TODAY! I honestly believe that, next to public and private prayer, there is no more appropriate, nor efficacious, manner in which we COULD honor this day.
Our fathers once unanimously held these five 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,
- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Code of the American Civic Religion, of course, is laid down in the Constitution of 1787 and its amendments.
Creed and Code stand in organic relationship, as well as in organic tension, with each other. The Creed is the reason for—and determines the many wondrous particulars of—the Code. Put another way, the Code is but the attempt of an uncommonly enlightened and morally serious polity to construct and adopt by Civic Covenant a fundamental Positive Law that accords with the dictates of Natural Law set forth at the Declaration’s second paragraph.
In recent decades, both Creed and Code have become increasingly foreign to the heirs of a once-free people. It is this estrangement—more than all proximate causes—that accounts for our unfreedom today. As Americans have become increasingly ignorant of and indifferent or hostile to some or all of the five tenets of the Creed of the American Civic Religion—or as they have sought to understand and embrace these tenets in novel rearrangements of the relationship of each to each other—, they have necessarily become more willing to shrug at their public servants’ ever more brazen violations of its Code. They have necessarily lost the clarity, the focus, the united force and determination to make their public servants obey the law.
Whether any or all of the recent encouraging developments in our civic culture actually leads to a renewal of free government in America will depend largely on the degree to which these developments lead to a re-knowal. Without such a re-knowal, we will not see a renewal.
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