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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 4. The Roots of the American Creed in the Philosophy of Enlightenment - 5. The Roots in Christianity
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Chapter i. American Ideals 9
‘Wf-evident truths”: ^^All men are created equal and from that eqml
creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the
preservation of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”^®
Liberty, in a sense, was easiest to reach. It is a vague ideal: everything
turns around whose liberty is preserved, to what extent and in what direc-
tion. In society liberty for one may mean the suppression of liberty for
others. The result of competition will be determined by who got a head
start and who is handicapped. In America as everywhere else—^and some-
times, perhaps, on the average, a little more ruthlessly—^liberty often
provided an opportunity for the stronger to rob the weaker. Against this,
the equalitarianism in the Creed has been persistently revolting. The
struggle is far from ended. The reason why American liberty was not
more dangerous to equality was, of course, the open frontier and the free
land. When opportunity became bounded in the last generation, the inher-
ent conflict between equality and liberty flared up. Equality is slowly
winning. The New Deal during the ^thirties was a landslide.®
5. The Roots in Christianity
If the European philosophy of Enlightenment was one of the ideological
roots of the American Creed, another equally important one was Christian-
ity, particularly as it took the form in the colonies of various lower class
Protestant sects, split off from the Anglican Church.^ “Democracy was
envisaged in religious terms long before it assumed a political termi-
nology.”
It is true that modern history has relegated to the category of the pious
patriotic myths the popular belief that all the colonies had been founded
to get religious liberty, which could not be had in the Old World. Some
of the colonies were commercial adventures and the settlers came to them,
and even to the religious colonies later, to improve their economic status.
It is also true that the churches in the early colonial times did not always
exactly represent the idea of democratic government in America but most
often a harsher tyranny over people’s souls and behavior than either King
or Parliament ever cared to wield.
But the myth itself is a social reality with important effects. It was strong
• New Dealers, like most American liberals today, pronounce liberty before equality. But
they do so in the eighteenth century Jeffersonian sense, not in the American businessman’s
sense. The “four freedoms” of Franklin D. Roosevelt are liberties, but they are liberties to
get equality, not liberties of the stronger to infringe on the weaker. In this sense, equality
is logically derivable from liberty, just as liberty is from equality: if there is real liberty
for all there will be equal opportunity and equal justice for all, and there will even be
social equality limited only by minor biological inequalities.
® While the Protestant sects emphasized the elements of the American Creed, it should
not be forgotten that there was an older trait of humanitarianism and equalitarianism in the
creed of the Medieval Church.
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