Ideas Have Consequences

In his Inaugural Address, our new president said this: “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit, to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed from generation to generation: the God-given promise that we are all equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers wrote this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….”

Thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence was published, the French people rose up in revolt against an unjust government under the banner of “Equality, Liberty, Brotherhood.” The French Revolution was a direct offspring of the Enlightenment and had strong atheistic roots. Hence the proclamation of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity had to be the product of an idea separate from God and not the truths declared by the American founders because many of the intellectuals behind the French Revolution rejected the very idea of God.

Built on a set of noble human ideals, the French Revolution bred reaction which led to the struggle over who would wield the power to enforce the “noble” ideas. And that struggle was the father of the guillotine, the Gulag and the Nazi extermination camps.

America was built on the solid foundation of several “self-evident truths” all of which had their origin with God and not with man. So when the new president speaks about the precious gift of a noble idea of equality, freedom and happiness, where does he stand: In Paris or in Philadelphia? Ideas are from the mind of man; according to the Bible, Truth is a revelation from God. If the foundation of the United States had been built on a set of ideas invented by men, then other men with other ideas could wrench those ideas away with the power of the sword and enforce those ideas through the power of the state. The history of man, and particularly the history of the twentieth century, has been an ongoing battle between the truths of 1776 and the ideas of 1789.

Yes, the president does mention God in his Inaugural, but he structures his sentence to suggest that the “God-given promise that we are all equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness” is a generations old idea, albeit, a “noble idea.”
Many argue today that God is a necessary invention of man; man needs the idea of God in order to pursue “noble ideas.” However, this notion turns the biblical narrative on its head: In the Bible, God is the creator and man is the creature created in God’s own image. “God” created by man is the atheist’s conceit. To the atheist the claim for the existence of God is an insult to the nobility of man’s rational nature and needs to be put to rest once and for all.

So, does the new president stand in the great tradition of 1776 or has the noble appeal of 1789 caught hold of his imagination? It would be nice to know because the real meaning of his words will tell us much about where he wants to lead America.