VICTOR JOECKS: Preserving liberty: The rarity of freedom

This well-known rhetorical flourish at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence needs closer consideration.

“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,” it states.

Look through history and you’ll find little evidence that most people experienced these self-evident truths. Until the West led the way in abolishing it, slavery was an accepted historical institution. At times during the Roman Empire, a third of the population may have been slaves. Genghis Khan caused the deaths of around 40 million people. After the fall of Constantinople, the victorious Ottoman forces raped the city’s women and girls and sold tens of thousands as slaves.

Travel the globe today, and these unalienable rights would be foreign to billions. The Chinese government uses facial recognition cameras and DNA collection to track and control its population. Since 2019, Muslim terrorists have slaughtered more than 20,000 Nigerian Christians. In Afghanistan, the Taliban requires women in public to be silent and to cover themselves. Europeans have been arrested for political speech authorities don’t approve of.

“ISIS enshrines a theology of rape,” The New York Times reported in 2015. “Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.”

This sobering reality should make you grateful to God to be an American — and aware of how rare liberty is. It’s easy to forget this because we’ve grown up in freedom.

But because liberty is a historic anomaly, it behooves us to consider why we are free when others aren’t. It’s inadequate to attribute this to our current military might and material wealth. Those are the results of liberty, not the cause. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t written by men of a powerful nation, but by patriots in one hoping to survive.

We began as a nation of settlers seeking religious liberty and opportunity. Another unique thing about America is how our Founding Fathers built on a foundation laid over the centuries by Cicero, William Blackstone and John Locke. You can trace a line from the Magna Carta to the founding of America. It wasn’t just a few dozen men in a Philadelphia hall debating ideas either. The arguments in Common Sense — a 47-page pamphlet — helped sway the public to back the American Revolution. In 1776, the U.S. population was 2.5 million. Common Sense sold around 500,000 copies.

The country wasn’t just built on the ideas of secular thinkers. America had such deep Christian roots that it’s hard for most modern Americans to even imagine it.

The Bible was the book most frequently cited during the founding era. Pastors preached sermons using Bible passages to support the American Revolution. The widely read New England Primer taught students the ABCs with Biblical rhymes such as “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all” and “Heaven to find, the Bible mind.” Massachusetts established public schools to thwart that “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.”

An appreciation of Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values isn’t determined by skin color. But it should be obvious that many cultures around the world are incompatible with the beliefs that have produced our liberty. That reality should inform U.S. immigration policy, and it’s one reason why illegal immigration is such a serious issue. In too large a number, even legal immigrants who want to assimilate can cause the melting pot to boil over.

Unchecked immigration isn’t the only threat to the foundations of America’s freedom. Next week, I’ll look at why virtue is necessary to maintain liberty.