In the government school I attended as a child, we were required to memorize and recite publicly an important document in the history of the United States of America. I was assigned the Gettysburg Address of 1863, that fantastic speech by Abraham Lincoln which helped start the long march of Americans of African descent toward freedom. Lincoln was appreciated in our home, not only for his courageous stand for human welfare, but for his family’s relationship with ours. I later learned to appreciate the martyred President of the United States for his profound appeals to the divine providence that compelled us to treasure human freedom.
Another Southern Baptist pastor, Bruce Webb of the Woodlands, Texas, and I once stood where Lincoln gave his famous speech. We were both deeply moved as we perceived the power and pathos of that moment in our nation’s history. With Lincoln, we mourned the many who lost their lives during that pivotal contest. As we walked the fields of Pennsylvania, I stopped to honor the names of several Yarnells (and Yarnalls) listed on the Pennsylvania state monument. But the memorial for the Louisiana branch of my family left me tearful. The nameless soldier represented on that Southern state’s statue wore no shoes and lay dying. My ancestors fought my ancestors; American flesh shed American blood.
America lost so much during the Civil War. But we also recovered something valuable, something lost through the depravity of slavery—freedom for all. After the battle, Lincoln went to Gettysburg and declared on behalf of our suffering nation that our freedom would not be forsaken: “we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” These words, reinforced by the powerful ideas of abolitionist Christians—that freedom belongs to the black human being as much as it belongs to the white human being—recalled Americans to remember whence we were born.
Fascinated by the lessons learned about the Civil War, and having grown up in a patriotic military family, I longed for more information about our nation’s moral roots. A descendant of Colonel Timothy Matlack, the scribe who engrossed the official copy of our nation’s Declaration of Independence of 1776, sent my father a copy of several pages taken from Matlack’s journal. The penman of our national independence had used the same hand to write about one of our ancestors, Peter Yarnell. Violating the pacifistic beliefs of his family’s church, Peter enlisted to serve in Washington’s army. After the war, dispossessed by his own people, Peter became a notorious sinner. Providentially, however, Peter was later converted to Christ while mocking a funeral sermon.
Timothy Matlack married Ellen, the daughter of a famous Quaker preacher, Mordecai Yarnell. Matlack’s life provides a fascinating picture of early America’s deep passion for freedom and independence: A neighbor of Benjamin Franklin and a political mover and shaker, Timothy helped replace the government of Pennsylvania so that that powerful colony could join the revolution. Then, on the fourth day of July in 1776, Matlack delivered the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence to the common people. During the war, Timothy penned the congressional certificate that appointed George Washington as general, then led troops to join Washington’s army as it crossed the Delaware. He also raised concerns about Benedict Arnold before that traitor was exposed. Finally, Matlack established a new denomination, the Society of Free Quakers, whose members included Betsy Ross. Their building is now a central part of the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
In 1783, four leaders from the Yarnell clan, including Peter, joined other Quakers in petitioning the new Congressof the United States to abolish the slave trade. “We conceive it our indispensable duty,” they informed Congress of their enslaved fellow human beings, “to revive the lamentable grievance of that oppressed people in your view as an interesting subject evidently claiming the serious attention of those who are entrusted with the powers of Government, as Guardians of the common rights of Mankind and advocates for liberty.” Alas, however, their political representatives ignored my ancestors’ appeal for “common rights” and “liberty.” The Constitution ratified in 1788 excluded many native Americans and diminished the humanity of the enslaved by accounting them “three fifths” of a person.
The Quakers of Philadelphia petitioned Congress to abolish the slave trade. Why? Because of a foundational theological principle that drove my ancestors to emigrate from Worcestershire, England, in the first place: human freedom. The colony whose capitol is “the city of brotherly love” was established by William Penn as a “Holy Experiment,” a haven for those persecuted by the “Christian” nationalists of their own day. My family came to these hallowed shores as refugees for liberty of conscience, and we were thankfully granted a place to live. Serious historians today recognize that the religious liberty these early dissenting Christians sought is our “first freedom,” the human right that developed from Christian theology and that helps guarantee all other human rights.
Alas, the historical stage for a divine reckoning was set. A nation founded on the ideal of freedom, the ideal that bound the original colonies together as one, was denying freedom to some human beings in order to promote the wicked power of others. The nation whose Declaration of Independence claimed it had the constitutional right to oppose the tyranny of one petty Prince, George III, now recognized in its own written constitution the tyranny of many petty princes, the slaveholders. When the African American philosopher Frederick Douglass was asked to speak on Independence Day in 1852, he challenged America to repent of such hypocrisy. His famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” began, “Fellow-Citizens—Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”
“Political freedom” and “natural justice.” Douglass in 1852 knew natural theology as well as those Enlightenment theists and educated Christians who negotiated, signed, and defended the original Declaration of Independence in 1776. The founders of the United States of America recognized God in terms that depend primarily upon general revelation but corroborate written revelation. They understood that God created the world, that he continues to govern it, that he reveals some truths about himself to all human beings through the world he created, that he reveals how we should conduct ourselves in his world, and that he will judge our conduct in it. This is why the founders named him “Creator,” “Nature’s God,” and “the Supreme Judge of the world.”
While America was not established as a Christian nation, it certainly was established on general theological principles. Those principles, according to the Declaration of Independence, included claims about God, claims about human beings, and claims about human social conduct. God made truths about himself, about his human creatures, and about the moral and political conduct he expects of us “self-evident,” that is, through his revelation of himself in the world. God governs the progress of human history as our creator, our lawgiver, and our judge. First, God created “all men” to be “equal” and ordained their states to be “Free and Independent.” Second, God granted each of us “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Third, God allowed us to establish systems of government to “secure these rights.” Fourth, God allows us to “alter,” “abolish,” and “institute” new forms of government when the old ones repeatedly and egregiously abuse justice. And fifth, God will judge us in what we do with our governmental powers, now or later.
When Abraham Lincoln recalled the foundation of our nation “fourscore and seven years” later, on the smoking heap of Gettsyburg, where our ancestors spilt our ancestors’ blood, he understood these truths. Raised in a Calvinistic Baptist home, Lincoln himself adopted what one scholar calls a “biblical republicanism” that respects divine incomprehensibility and divine providence while advocating human freedom according to the tradition of America’s Declaration of Independence. Our nation’s sixteenth president, in other words, used the theology of our American founders to recall us to our founding principles, principles which are generally theological. Lincoln recognized that we had fallen into grave error and that our nation needed “a new birth.” In other words, “freedom” needed to be reestablished in our moral constitution, not only for the many who were franchised in our nation but for the many who were disenfranchised and brutalized.
Once, I had the opportunity to speak privately with James M. Dunn, “the firebrand Baptist who led the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty for nearly two decades.” He addressed our seminary class during the Conservative Resurgence, and as a conservative, I questioned his way of using Scripture. Dunn began his address by quoting Galatians 5:1, “For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Dunn and I agreed that the text primarily concerned our spiritual freedom from sin. However, over the years, as I have lived through various trials in church and state, I have come to appreciate what else Dunn was getting at but did not articulate.
You see, God created all human beings in his image, and God is free. We are thereby granted a nature that desires freedom, natural freedom. While natural freedom is the central theological ideal of the American character, it has fuller meanings than those the founders emphasized. On the one hand, we are created in God’s image, so we are granted some measure of his freedom. This is why we desire political freedom and economic freedom, the freedom to gather with others and the freedom to publish our opinions, and so on. These are “natural freedoms,” freedoms that belong to every human being simply by virtue of being human.
Sadly, our most ancient forebearers abused their freedom to fall into sin, and we all have followed in their path. Thankfully, God still wants to bless us with renewed freedom. He wants to give us that “spiritual freedom” which transcends natural freedom. God grants spiritual freedom through faith in Jesus as the Lord who arose from death to atone for our sins. One day, every tongue shall honor him for their natural freedom by bowing before him, and the redeemed shall enjoy him forever through their spiritual freedom. But for now, we all must learn to use our natural freedoms wisely and to protect them from every tyrant who would arise to abuse our freedoms or the freedoms of others. And for those of us who are Christians, we must be diligent to proclaim the eternal spiritual freedom of eternal life through faith in Jesus, the resurrected Lord of creation.
