The Real Meaning of July 4th and the Heresy of Lincolnian Interpretation
A headline in a news story caught my attention the other day. It reads: “Louisiana now requires the 10 Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. It’s not the only terrifying state law.” The column appears in The Independent, July 1, 2024, and is by one Gustaf Kilander.
Notice that the author uses the word “terrifying” to characterize the public display of one of, arguably, the bedrock documents that shaped the formation of the American nation and the thinking of its Framers. Indeed, to read the debates leading to the adoption of the Constitution is to plainly understand how deeply influenced the Framers were by not only the Ten Commandments, but by the weight of Christian and Western tradition. (See Elliott’s Debates, a compilation of the debates over the new Constitution).
A brief survey of the writings of such distinguished historians and researchers as Barry Alan Shain, Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, and George W. Carey, plus a detailed reading of the commentaries and writings of those men who established the nation, give the lie to the claim that those men assembled in 1787 sought to outlaw individual state religious tests or establishments.
They did not.
Many of the original thirteen states had religious establishments and tests, including Massachusetts (Congregationalist), Virginia (Anglican/Episcopal), and North Carolina (requiring office holders to be Protestants, and after 1835 up until the War Between the States, only Christians). The US Constitution clearly acknowledged this, and only forbade the establishment of a “national” church. But even then, the Framers assumed that the new nation would reflect its Christian roots, going so far as providing for paid chaplains in the Northwest Territories at the same time they were formulating the Constitution.
Yet, this fundamental misunderstanding characterizes much of modern American thinking, both on the part of liberals AND conservatives.
And thus this 4th of July, I think it helpful to look once again at the 1776 declaration, which preceded the Constitution by eleven years, what exactly it is and what it is not. For far too many Americans confuse the two documents.
We celebrate July 4th each year as the anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. The day we set aside commemorates when representatives from the thirteen colonies took a momentous step that they knew might land them on the scaffold or suspended by the hangman’s noose. They w
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