Citizen Soldier is dedicated to teaching how history, law, logic, and mathematics prove that the ideas that create America's freedom and prosperity - America's Founding Principles - are God's moral rules found in Judeo-Christian Scripture. A big job, to be sure, but to help you quickly see where we are coming from, we summarize these ideas in the blue boxes below. The white boxes give you examples of where these ideas appear in our founding documents, the writings of the Founding Fathers, and the scholarly writings that influenced our founding. We link you to resources where you can learn more, and invite you to explore our site, especially our Freedom 101 and Project Mainspring links. Thanks, keep an open mind. If just believing our Founders were devout men is a hurdle, walk through this Library of Congress Exhibit: "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic." Freedom comes from God's moral rules - The Founders based American independence and freedom on "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" - God's rules of right and wrong found in the Torah and the Bible. The phrase is a quote from Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which is, in turn, based on 800 years of Christian thought dating from the Gregorian Reform. God's moral rules are summarized in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17). The First Paragraph of the Declaration of Independence When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and eqaul Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation. The First Sentence of the Declaration's Second Paragraph 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 . . . . Moral rules create political freedom - because they declare that all men are created equal. The Bible teaches that men must treat each other as equals because all men are equal in the eyes of God. Aquinas said the purpose of the law is to call men to virtue, and because all men are competent to call others to virtue, all are competent to make law. Thus, no one may use the law to do to another what he would not want done to himself. This idea is expanded on in Bastiat's The Law. Moral rules create economic freedom - because they protect each person's property from being taken by either government or other citizens. God gave man private property rights before the fall when He gave man dominion over the earth. (Gen. 1:26). God's relation to His creation is the paradigm for man's relation to God's creation. Thus, man's dominion over earthly things is a way in which man resembles God. Property is therefore more than just the ownership of things, it includes rights in the work of one's hands and mind. (Pope John XXII, early 1300s) The Preamble of the Constitution We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty . . . . Article I Section 8 of the Constitution General Welfare and Enumerated Powers The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; [the specific enumerated powers follow] < - - - - - - - - - - - > The Constitution twice repeats the idea that the powers of government may not be used to advance the welfare of specific groups; once in the preamble and once in Article I Section 8, just before the actual powers given to the federal government are listed precisely. The idea is captured in what is called the general welfare clause. The men who wrote the Constitution believed the general welfare clause was an overarching limit on how the powers granted to government could be exercised. Since the government was formed to secure the rights of all, the general welfare could only be served if government's exercise of its power protected the rights of all. The right most protected by the clause is the right to property. At bottom, the clause means government may not take the property of one man for the benefit of another, only for the benefit of all, as by providing for the common defense and the court system. This understanding of the meaning of the "general welfare" held sway up until 1867, when Congress voted the first gifts of money - taxed away from some citizens - to other private citizens. With the rise of the Progressive Movement in the late 19th Century, many Americans forgot that government's purpose was to protect our rights. Instead, government was viewed as a tool do do "good," good being defined by the party in power. By 1937, the original understanding of the general welfare clause was completely lost. In the case of Helvering v. Davis that year, the Supreme Court upheld the biggest case of legalized theft in American history, F.D.R.'s Social Security program. The Court calimed the general welfare clause was not a limitation, but a grant of power to Congress to tax and spend. The evidence is irrefutable the Founders would not have agreed. In 1794, during debate on a bill that would appropriate $15,000 for French refugees from San Domingo, James Madison, the Father of the Constitution and then a representative from Virginia said: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." Moral rules create prosperity because they are efficient - In a world of scarcity, where man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow (Genesis 3:19), God's moral rules create prosperity by allowing men to cooperate and live together in peace, and by establishing the following ideas and institutions: 1) Personal responsibility - each man is responsible to provide for his own welfare by making the most of his God-given talents to produce something that others desire and are willing to trade for. 2) Private property - the reward for assuming personal responsibility. That which one earns or produces by using his God-given talents. 3) Voluntary exchange - the means of creating wealth. Where God's moral rules are obeyed and enforced, the only way to get ahead is by meeting the needs of others - producing something they value and are willing to trade for. 4) Private charity - God's moral rules command man to demonstrate his love for his neighbor by giving of what he has, not by transfers coerced with the force of government, but as each man is led in his own heart. (2 Corinthians 9:12) Moral rules create the Rule of Law - The Rule of Law is the idea that makes freedom possible. The Rule of Law means all citizens, both those who exercise the power of government and those who do not, are bound by the same absolute principles of right and wrong. The Rule of Law broke the ability of Kings to exercise power at will. The Rule developed as the Judeo-Christian ideas that all men are created equal, God's moral law applies to all, and every citizen is accountable to obey God's moral law became widely accepted in European political thought in the centuries between the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence You can read the part of the Commentaries from which the quotation at left is taken here. (The page is part of our Programmed text on the Declaration of Indpendence.) Commentaries on the Laws of England (Ideological Origin of the Declaration) Sir William Blackstone Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these . . . . And herein it is that human laws have their greatest force and efficacy; for, with regard to such points as are not indifferent, human laws are only declaratory of, and act in subordintation to, the former. To instance in the case of murder: this is expressly forbidden by the divine, and demonstrably by the natural law: and, from these prohibitions, arises the true unlawfulness of this crime. Those human laws that annex a punishment to it do not at all increase its moral guilt, or superadd any fresh obligation, in foro conscientiae, [in the court of conscience] to abstain from its perpetration. Nay, if any human law should allow or enjoin us to commit it, we are bound to transgress that human law, or else we must offend both the natural and the divine. The Second Paragraph of the Declaration 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 -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men . . . . The Preamble of the Constitution We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty . . . . Moral rules limit government - Since God is the source of man's rights not government, the only function of government is to protect man's rights. Government protects man's rights by obeying and enforcing God's moral rules. The authority to protect the rights of citizens gives government the authority to produce the public goods of national defence, police protection, and the courts. Every other good, unless expressly authorized for government to produce by the Constitution, can and should be produced by the private market. The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness - Since man can only be truly happy if he follows God's rules, the Right to Pursue Happiness means the right to be free from a government that commands or allows what God forbids, or that forbids what God commands or allows. Commentaries on the Laws of England (Ideological Origin of the Declaration) Sir William Blackstone Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being . . . . And consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker's will . . . . This will of his Maker is called the law of nature . . . . But if the discovery of these first principles of the law of nature depended only upon the due exertion of right reason, and could not otherwise be obtained than by a chain of metaphysical disquisitions, mankind would have wanted some inducement to have quickened their inquiries, and the greater part of the world would have rested content in mental indolence, and ignorance its inseparable companion. As, therefore, the Creator is a being not only of infinite power, and wisdom, but also of infinite goodness, he has been pleased so to contrive the constitution and frame of humanity, that we should want no other prompter to inquire after and pursue the rule of right, but only our own self-love, that universal principle of action. For he has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former; and, if the former by punctually obeyed, it cannot but induce the latter. In consequence of which mutual connection of justice and human felicity, he has not perplexed the law of nature with a multitude of abstracted rules and precepts, referring merely to the fitness or unfitness of things, as some have vainly surmised, but has graciously reduced the rule of obedience to this one paternal precept, "that man should pursue his won true and substantial happiness" . . . . This law of nature, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original. Commentaries on the Laws of England (Ideological Origin of the Declaration) Sir William Blackstone These are the eternal immutable laws of good and evil, to which the Creator himself, in all his dispensations, conforms; and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions, Such, among others, are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due; to which three general precepts Justinian has reduced the whole doctrine of law . . . . This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law; for the several articles into which it is branched in our systems, amount to no more than demonstrating that this or that action tends to man's real happiness, and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature; or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destructive of man's real happiness, and therefore that the law of nature forbids it. Freedom of conscience, not of action - Since God does not force man to believe in Him, government may not compel citizens to believe in God. But this freedom does not include a license to act in any way one desires. Each person is accountable to obey God's moral rules for how to treat others contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments, regardless of whether one believes in God or not. Separation of church and state - means 1) the federal government may not establish one Christian denomination as the nation's official religion, and 2) God's rules are above those made by man's government. Government must obey and enforce God's rules if its actions are to be legitimate. Since the effectiveness of government depends on the citizens' understanding of and compliance with the moral rules, there can be no limit on the ability of citizens, whether in government or without, to speak about God. This is not to say that government can force man to believe in God. God Himself does not force man to believe. It does mean that government can force man to act in accordance with the rules that make it possible for people to live and work together peacefully. The state's means of enforcement range from simple ostracism (an extra legal reputational constraint) all the way to capital punishment. The state's choice of penalty is a matter of balancing the cost to society of the infraction with the traditional goals of the criminal law: Restitution for victims Protection of society from repeat offenders Punishment, and Deterrence Note that rehabilitation was never considered to be within the capacity of the law. And so we are back to our beginning, because the ideas that make it possible for men to live and work together in peace are God's moral rules in the Bible. Each of these rules, don't murder, don't steal, etc., exists to protect a right of man, the right to life, right to property, etc. We are "free" only as long as our rights are not infringed by others, acting either for themselves or in the name of the state. But since God's rules exist to protect man's rights, we cannot disregard His rules without infringing upon the rights, and therefore the liberty, of our fellow men. So God's rules both create human "freedom," and establish its limits. The First Amendment to the Constitution Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . . The Declaration of Independence When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and eqaul Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them . . . . . . . [T]o secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Ideological Origin of the Declaration) Sir William Blackstone Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these . . . . "Freedom" - means the ability to have and enjoy one's God-given rights! It is the condition that exists when man's laws conform to God's laws.