WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Unpacking the Constitution: The Thesis Statement of America

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

Going through the Declaration of Independence to understand the ethic behind the American Constitution. 

The Constitution is not simply a compilation of legal gobbledygook. It's something we can all understand, and we should, in order to grasp what it means to be American. Welcome to unpacking the Constitution. I'm Lauren Bixler, and I hope to take you line by line through the Constitution and come out of it with the tools to navigate everyday life as a citizen. Last episode, we traced the American ethic from the earliest pilgrim settlers to colonial America. These people were very faith and community-centered, which then set the stage for a Republican government, because, as we explained, a republic requires strong communities driven by good values, which was the norm for a good portion of early American society. So moving from the American ethic, we kind of continue to learn about the thesis statement of America through the Declaration. of independence as it sets the future stage for the Constitution.

Now some of you may be asking, when will we get to the Constitution? And we're getting there. But we need to understand how truly radical the American founding was for its time. So let's get into the Declaration. It begins with when in the course of human events, immediately the founders set themselves apart as historians. They are conscious of what history has shown. about liberty, law, values, faith, virtue, morality, all these things that form the American

ethic, as we've previously talked about, they're very conscious of this when they're making the decision to separate themselves from England. Moving down in the paragraph, they use the phrases, assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them. To kind of make that line a little clear, we as people can assume powers that are entitled to us because of the law of nature, natural law, and divine law, the law of nature's God. So not only are the founders, historians, but they recognize the powers that we have accessible to us are made possible and are understandable and as they say self-evident because it is rooted in nature and it is rooted in divine law, natural law, and divine

law. They go on to say 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. Here is the the pith of the declaration. Not only are these truths, as they say, self-evident, so truths that we can come to realize through studying and understanding the natural law and the divine law, but from that we can know that we are all created equal. And they say all men, which we come to know as all humankind or mankind, are created equal. So we're set equal before the law, every single person and we are created with rights that cannot be taken away, and these are rights by our creator,

as they say. And from here, the government derives its power. The people are the center. And as the founders say a line later, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. It is not the government that gives people rights. it is the people who are created equal with rights that cannot be taken away due to natural law and divine law that give the government power. And since the consent of the governed is at the center, people have the right to distance themselves from unjust government. This point is essential to the American founding,

and it's essential for framing the Constitution because it reminds us that the government is an instant. for the protection of men's rights, but it derives its power from the consent of the governed. To close off this idea, the declaration says that when a government falls into despotism, it is the people's right and rather their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security. This language very much hits on the point of how the people check the government and how the government ought to be checked. And these checks and balances are something we will explore in the next episode with the Articles of Confederation.

I'm Lauren Bixler and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.