Oxygen of Freedom: The Inescapable Christian Influence on American Independence

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On this Fourth of July, we must never forget that American freedom did not evolve in a vacuum but is the fruit of a tree planted with Christian seeds. The secular left foolishly believes they can chop off these roots and still reap the same harvest.

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The late Christian philosopher Greg Bahnsen likened debating atheists over God’s existence to arguing about oxygen. He meant that atheists present “proofs” against God while relying on immaterial concepts like logic, reason, and morality — concepts that a materialistic outlook cannot account for.

Bahnsen called this inconsistency “living off borrowed capital.” In short, they’re debating “oxygen” while needing it to make their case against it.

We see the same paradoxical dynamic with the political left’s meltdown regarding certain states taking steps to teach schoolchildren the Ten Commandments or a Supreme Court justice advocating the country’s return to godliness. They oppose the very foundation that codified America’s commitment to civil rights and self-government, which, in the context of world history, are entirely foreign notions.

Put differently, instead of celebrating and cultivating the Christian culture that brought liberty to the Western world, leftist politicians and their toadies in the media engage in historical revisionism, trying to purge the “oxygen” that underpins the principles that made the American Experiment even possible.

So, as we celebrate this nation’s 248th birthday, it’s crucial to recognize just how much the secular left “borrows” from America’s early Christian consensus. They take for granted the constitutional limits placed on government and the freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly enshrined in our founding documents — precepts that only make sense when looking through a lens where each man and woman is born equal in the eyes of God.

Let’s get to it, then.

Before a committee was organized to draft the Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson as the primary author, let’s remember the events leading up to this momentous occasion. The English Parliament grew increasingly hostile to the 13 original colonies, particularly Massachusetts. They imposed aggressive legislation on the colonists, including the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, and eventually the Intolerable Acts, all of which either taxed the people illegally or violated their local sovereignty.

As Americans prepared for their resistance, they knew King George III would brand them as “traitors and rebels.” Their pleas to the English Parliament had already been ignored.

Thus, they had no choice but to petition to a Higher Power.

It was up to the young statesman Thomas Jefferson to artfully and methodically lay out Congress’s case against the British crown, citing nearly 30 “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

And cite he did, submitting these facts for a “candid world” to witness.

Here are a few:

“He [King George III] has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers…He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance…He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures… He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

What’s more, the King was found guilty in the eyes of the colonists for “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent,” and “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,” among other unacceptable encroachments.

To substantiate their legal separation from Great Britain, Jefferson invoked the “Supreme Judge of the World,” the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” self-evident truths, and “unalienable rights” bestowed by the Creator Himself.

We don’t realize just how deep the appeal to heaven was until we understand the rich history behind one of those phrases: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” As Professor Gary T. Amos notes in his book Defending the Declaration: How the Bible and Christianity Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence, top Christian thinkers had previously employed this expression in some fashion in the centuries prior.

For instance, the political philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), whose faith in Scripture is often minimized by the revisionist crowd, used the terms “law of nature,” “positive law of God,” and “revealed law of God” to affirm general and special revelation. Specifically, he applied these doctrines to challenge the claim that there was a “divine right to absolute power.”

Nearly 100 years later the brilliant Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) wrote that “no human laws should be suffered to contradict” both “the law of nature and the law of revelation.” Similar ideas about natural law and the one who rules over it are found in the works of John Calvin (1509-1564), Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600), and Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), a prominent English jurist who helped shape Jefferson’s ideas.

As Professor Amos explains, “Jefferson was not coining a new term or concocting a new idea,” but rather upholding a “long-established symmetry” between the God evident in nature, as described by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1, and the God of the Bible.

It was within this robust theological tradition that Jefferson crafted the legal justification for separation from England. He argued that whenever any civil government’s rule becomes capricious and despotic and defies God-given order, “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.”

On this Fourth of July, we must never forget that American independence did not evolve in a vacuum but is the fruit of a tree planted with Christian seeds. The left foolishly believes that they can chop off these roots and still reap the same harvest.

Yet that’s not how the process works. Without the original seeds, the harvest of liberty will wither.

Progressives are currently living off borrowed capital, but that capital is quickly drying up as the clown car that is secularism rampages through our country, upending all that is good and noble. The result is a moral wasteland where the true underpinning of freedom is lost.

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