An Exceptional Nation: The Form and Substance that Made America Last

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today on the Files, I'm going to bring to you a lecture on American excellence focused on the US Constitution and it's working out in the subsequent centuries to follow. That's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. around.

All right. Well, welcome back to the Files. I couldn't be more delighted than I am today to talk about the 250th anniversary of our great nation. I wanted to take a break here for the for this special event and bring to you a talk that I gave online to a group of international uh Portuguese um people who are very interested in the United States in our government. The reason they're interested is because of the longevity of our country. 250 years under one constitution is really quite unique and certainly unique for a democratic republic like we have here in the United States. And so uh this this this moment really requires some reflection I think on why that's the case.

And I believe it's twofold. Number one has to do with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. What a supremely important document. And I had a a copy of it on my wall here and I'll show that to you. And I took it down. I reread it uh today this morning. And uh what a document. This really is I don't talk about this in the lecture which we're about to show to you. But really this is the soil or foundation from which the US Constitution gets its moorings, gets its foundation, gets its potency.

And in the Declaration of Independence, which I want to talk a little bit about as a say prolamina or a preface to the talk, um there's really some important things to keep in mind here. This is the sort of intellectual context if you will, uh dispositional context of the founding of the United States of America. So in this document we have the declaration of the colonies to succeed or to leave Great Britain based upon a series of grievances. And so the bulk of the US um Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances. And so I, you know, I didn't count them all up, but I'd say there's 30 or so on here. might be a few more, a few less, but it's a pretty impressive list. But how do you have grievances when in fact you have leaders and those leaders make laws and you obey the laws? That's what the state is all about. And I think that our founding fathers understood the importance of obedience to the state.

They knew their ancient philosophy. They knew Socrates, for example, and Socrates love of the state and the importance of obedience to the state even unto death. Yeah, they were well-versed in ancient philosophy in the the importance of this philosophy for the founding of a of a of a western uh democracy, a constitutional republic like our own. And yet the grievances were adding up. And they were adding up to such a degree that there was a perceived irresolvable loss of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that our leaders in in in in in sort of the British Empire um were not living up to their leadership role.

And I'm, you know, I'm I'm uh I think that that becomes evident only because we have a standard to which we should be striving. And that standard is given to us right at the beginning of the declaration. It says um it says when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to declare the political uh uh bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's gods entitle A a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

So in other words, the laws of nature and of nature's God grant certain rights to individuals as they consolidate themselves into a nation. And when the grievances become so heavy as to be defacing or taking away those rights, then the people have a right, as it were, to rebel, to stand up, to separate, to succeed, and to establish a new form of government. They don't do this lightly. Like I said already, the philosophical underpinnings have a strong undercurrent, if you will, of obedience to the state. And yet these list of grievances is prodigious. So if you look at this thing, it's well, it's more than half of the Declaration of Independence.

It is got quite the list of grievances here. Now before I take a quick look at some of those grievances, I will say that the most famous sentences at the beginning of paragraph two. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and they and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. God is the guaranteer and the granter of our rights. It is not a king. It is not a legislature. It is not a choice of human beings to do so. It is a g free gift from God. And as long as kings and legislatures and governing bodies don't so deface the image of God in man.

They can go on ruling and we should be obedient to them. And I'm thinking here of Romans 13 and being obedient to the state both in terms of Paul's Christian convictions but also Socrates's convictions of being obedient to the state. When you have open rational discourse, when you have trial by jury of your peers, when you have these other things in place, you have no right to rebel. But the problem here that we see in the Declaration of Independence is that the king, the legislature in Britain usurped these natural rights, these god-given rights.

We see at the end of the second paragraph, the history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurppations and having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. And we see here right away that this declaration is going to be a litany of these things which breaks the back of these Christian and western influences towards obedience to the state that there does come a moment when a free people have the right to rebel because the state is truly being oppressive. And that's what Thomas Jefferson and these other writers do.

Now, this list of grievances, I I could in this introduction, we could spend half a day going through these and looking at historical matters that are associated with them. I'm going to just mention five T's that are easy for me to remember because of the T's. Troops, trade, taxes, trials, and tribes. Those are five T's on the grievances that that I think are pointed out that really begin to break the back of British rule over these colonies. Troops apparently are being protected both in terms of their housing. They're taking over houses of people who all own these houses and they are putting them out on the street. They're also murdering uh colonists and they're doing so with impunity. They're able to sort of have trials by people living over in Great Britain who don't have direct access to the facts of of the trials and they are in effect able to do whatever it is they want. So the troops are a serious problem.

Trade is another problem. It says here for cutting off trade with all parts of the world. One of the problems is they don't really want the colonists to have the pursuit of happiness or the liberty to go ahead and trade with whomver they want. The king and the legislature want it all to go through them so that they can in fact levy and and and raise taxes and do other things with regards to this trade. So they have ultimate authority over these things. So we have trade being a problem. Of course we know taxes are a problem for imposing taxes on us without our consent for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury.

So here we have trials as another problem. These trials are being done by other Brits, people. They're they're they're actually taking people for trial to the UK and to Britain in order to um to have these trials. So, we have troops wandering around doing whatever they want to do. we have trade being cut off or having to go through the the the the British government without fair compensation or fair realization of of our own ability to make trade deals. We have taxes being imposed which is directly related to that that seems to be excessive.

And then we have trials that are mock trials really. they don't really uh get at the bottom or the root of these things. And and then we of course the last T that I'll mention here is the one of the tribes, the Indian tribes. The British are using the Indian tribes to cause dissension and to cause chaos throughout the colonies. says that right at the end of the grievances, he has excited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers. The merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an indistinguishable destruction for all ages, sexes, and conditions. So we have here the troops, the trade, the taxes, the trials, the tribes.

All of these things are breaking the back of British rule and the right to rule over the colonies. And so we get the declaration right there from that point. Now once again, it's bookended by belief in God and that this is the right to which they have to to rebel. Um we see that in the last paragraph. We therefore the representatives of the United States of America and General Congress assemble appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions. do in the name and by the authority of the good people of uh the colonies solemnly uh publish and declare that the United Colonies are and the rights ought to be free and independent states.

And so we see right there at the end of it after all of these grievances that the supreme judge of the world is the one that gives them the right in light of all these griev grievances to re to establish a new form of governance to break away from British rule. And at the very end it says, "And for the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence are mutually pledged to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our honor."

And so we see here right at the end that it is divine providence that will unite us, hold us together, that will make our lives dependent upon one another, our fortunes and our ability to gain property and wealth dependent upon one another and our good honor. All of that is at stake as we band together to break away from the British tyranny. Okay. Well, that's the Declaration of Independence in a nutshell. We kind of did a blitzkrieg through it, but you can see that God's mentioned four different times here.

two at the beginning, two at the end as a foundational component for why it is we have the right to step away from British rule and to establish a new form of government, a government of free people who are in a sense exercising authority over themselves. Now, it's going to take another 11 or 12 years for that to work itself out into a definitive plan. Second Continental Congress, we are going to get the US Constitution and that document will become world famous and have a kind of longevity that has not been seen in history and will be become the sort of working out of the Declaration of Independence in the years to come.

Well, that's what I'm going to be talking about next in this brief lecture. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that you will join me in celebrating 250 years. Let me just close before we go to that talk. I was digging around in my grandmother's um belongings which are in a in a in a in a chest in my dad's house and I came across this black book called I am an American.

what every citizen should know. What an amazing book. This book is um his book is about 50 years old, maybe a little older. Actually, it is older. It's 1940 says the copyright. So, we're looking at um you know, if my mathematics is correct, 60 plus 26 is 86 years old. But my grandmother had this and it has within it the Declaration of Independence complete, US Constitution complete, the Bill of Rights complete. But right at the beginning, I'm going to just share one last thing with you before we get started on that lecture. And that is a something called the American Creed. This is stuff that everybody had to be familiar with in the old days when becoming an American citizen.

Let me read this to you. This is written by William Tyler Page. I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed. A democracy in a republic, a sovereign nation of many sovereign states, a perfect union, one and inseparable established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for the for which American patriots sacrifice their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies. This is at the very beginning of this book, and uh I I'll probably revisit this book along the way. What an amazing discovery in the uh in the personal possessions of my grandmother.

a lesson to us all. I hope you enjoy this talk, forthcoming talk on American excellence 250 years on. All right. Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Dr. Shimenez. It is such an honor to be with you here and to get this invitation. Thank you also, Nina, for your willingness to translate and uh Dr. Langa as well as obviously for the introduction earlier which I didn't understand very much. This evening I want to talk about American excellence and the movement from being just good to great. As you may know the United States has the longest active lived constitution in the world at 237 years in counting.

In the same time frame, France has had 10 constitutions. The Dominican Republic has had 32, Venezuela has had 26, and Haiti has had 24. I asked Chat GPT, "How many has Brazil had?" And it told me 30, it told me seven in the last 237 years. The life expectancy of a constitution in the world over the last 200 years is 19 years only. And so the question is why has the US constitution lasted so long and has been thriving for so long? I want to make an argument that it has two parts. One is formal and one is substantial.

The formal part is the written constitution or the social contract. The substantial part has to do with its people and three characteristics that they all have. The first is a common anthropology. Human beings are created in the image of God and yet they are fallen. Politically the state has real authority but that authority must be limited, accountable and decentralized and religiously the people must be moral and decent but they must also strive after true religion. I will try to explain these as I go along and I will do it in four parts. So in part one, we'll take a quick look at the US Constitution.

It has a simplicity and a genius to it that we'll take a quick look at. In part two, we'll look at the synthesis of faith and reason. That is the substantial part of the American experiment. The relationship between Athens and Jerusalem gives Americans their soul. In the third part, we're going to be just taking a quick look at American history and show how it developed into a better and better nation. And in the final part, the close, I will talk about the American spirit and why it is so attractive to immigrants from all across the world. the uh let's start with part one, the formal genius of the American Constitution. I want to focus in on four things that it does that make it special. The first one is that the Constitution gives the government enumerated powers.

The federal government only has the power that the people give to it. These are talked about in the constitution in articles 1, two, and three. I visited Washington DC last week and I got a chance to visit the Capitol building and have a tour from one of the congressmen. He was the congressman from Arkansas. His name is Bruce Westerman. He was very proud to say that the first branch of government mentioned in the constitution is the legislative branch. So in article one of the constitution, the people grant the legislative branch 18 powers. They can do no more than those 18 things. The same thing happens with the executive branch and the judicial branch in articles 2 and three.

If those powers are not mentioned in the constitution, then they go to the states or they go to the people. Most other governments, dare I say all of them, the government starts with all the power and then it grants people certain rights. So part of the genius of the US Constitution is that the the rights the the powers are given in the upward direction from the people of the people for the people by the people as Lincoln said in a famous speech.

The second thing that it does is it separates the powers and has two levels of government. When you visit Washington DC, you can go to the White House, which is the executive branch. You can go to the Capitol building, which is the legislative branch, or you can go to the Supreme Court, which is the judicial branch. So, in the horizontal direction, the powers are divided in three ways. In the vertical direction you have the federal government and then you have the state governments. So the power is limited for each branch and they are uh uh um they balance each other out. James Madison said in federalist paper number 51, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.

The same thing was true of the Hebrew people. Yes, they didn't need a king, but they chose one anyway. And so it seems that human depravity and human fallenness requires government. And the founders of the US Constitution did not assume that it would have good rulers. They would be tempted at many times by this power. And so they pitted ambition against ambition at the highest offices in the government. So we have the enumerated powers and then we have them separated.

We also have the third thing and that is the bill of rights and the judicial review process. And so you have these first 10 amendments which we call the bill of rights and you have the power of the judicial branch which will stop the executive and the legislative if it steps over the rights of the people. Not many countries have such a strong judicial branch. The American government has had a very strong judicial branch for over 200 years. If you believe the government or the police or your government officials have gone too far, you can take them to court and ultimately you could take it to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court.

And they are there to protect your rights. The fourth and final thing about the formal constitution is that it is very difficult to amend. You need twothirds of both the house and the senate to agree on an amendment. And even if they agree to amend the constitution, it has to go back to all 50 states. And at least 38 of those states have to agree. The US Constitution has only been amended 27 times in 237 years. I consider that one of the great strengths of the American system is that it doesn't change very easily.

Just a side note, um, one of the scary things about the environment today is how political leaders are talking about trying to radically change the constitution. So the question as we move into part uh, two and three is how has this formal system lasted so long? There have been multiple or several examples of constitutions very much like ours that have not lasted very long. The there's among the examples two stand out. Um Liberia had a constitution almost identical to the United States. It wobbled for many years and then in 1980 there was a coup and it was destroyed. After World War I, VHimar Germany had a constitutional republic very much like ours.

And yet they were, you know, Hitler declared a state of emergency and legal legally took over the country. So why is it that the American one seems to flourish? I want to argue in part two that it has to do with the soul or substance of the American people. America is downstream of two great cities, Athens and Jerusalem. Athens gave us a respect for reason and Jerusalem gave us a respect for revelation. So the American mind is a marriage of these two things faith and reason. Let me talk a little bit about Athens and what it contributed. The first thing Athens contributed to my mind is open rational discourse.

Plato's dialogues are a testimony to the power of open free communication. You know, just this past year, a man I greatly respected named Charlie Kirk did the exact same thing. He went into universities for open rational communication. And one of the things that Athens taught to us in the west was that free speech is w we we should be willing to die for. The second thing that the Greeks believed were the transcendental beliefs that truth, beauty, and goodness were not just made up in the human mind, but they are real things that matter to human beings.

These are things that should attract us to the good, the beautiful, and the true. The third thing that Athens contributed to us today is a belief that the state should be like your mother. If your mother tells you to do something, you should probably do it. There is a there there's a a writing that that Plato wrote called Cto. And in this writing, Socrates makes an argument for the state. His young disciple Crito says, "You've been convicted and put in jail. Why don't you run away?" And c and and Socrates teaches young crito that the state has given him everything good in his life.

I had my day in court and the state decided that I was guilty and that I should die and that young crito is what I will do. And so you can see that in the Greek mind the state has a great significance and is something to be taken quite seriously. So in this little writing this by the way this writing is very difficult for students in my classrooms because they think Socrates should run away. But Socrates says the state is so important that I must be obedient even if it asks for my life. Now that's Athens. Those are three things I think Athens contributes to this discussion.

Obviously, Jerusalem or the Bible contributes a high view of the human person. In Genesis 1:27, we are made in the image of God. Of course, by Genesis 3, it tells the story of Adam and Eve and how we fell away from God. This is confirmed, of course, in Romans 3:23. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And I believe that this understanding of the human person as in the image of God, but also fallen defines the anthropology of the American people. There's also a political orientation that Jerusalem and the Bible contribute to us.

We use this saying in American politics all the time. God, family, and country. And this is appropriate because we find it in the Bible. God created us. He put us into families. He told us in Genesis chapter 2 to leave our fathers and mothers and cling to our wives. And then he designated government as ruling the people. The order matters here to Americans. It's not country first, it's God first. Nevertheless, the government should be obeyed. According to Romans 13, God creates governments to restrain evil. Governments are not perfect, but they are there to be obeyed in Christian obedience. But that has limitations. In Acts 5 29, we see that we should obey God rather than men.

And so Caesar gets the money and God gets our soul and the soul is the most enduring of all of these things. Now in western history the combination of Athens and Jerusalem had to synthesize. We see this in Augustine for example in his famous book the city of God. As you know the great Roman Empire was supposed to never die. And the Christian Augustine was examining that that momentous event and asking the question where where do we go from here? Human beings according to Augustine should be seeking after the kingdom of God. But it requires government in this world in order for us to get there. The famous theologian Thomas Aquinus added one more thing. Thomas Aquinus talked about natural law and revealed law.

Both natural law and revealed law should point the people toward God. And the only way that we can hope for justice in this world if is if both the state and the church point us towards God. He called this the highest good. By the time we get to John Lockach, who's an Englishman in the enlightenment, all of this is consolidated into a simple principle. The natural rights of every person made in the image of God are life, liberty, and property. Yes. And Thomas Jefferson changed property to happiness. Life, liberty, and happiness. They're still very similar because much of our happiness is bound up in the things we own.

All of these principles were rooted in the American university which was starting at the same time. So you have Harvard and Yale and Princeton all starting up really during the enlightenment period and they were all built to train Christian ministers because the early Americans understood that the Christian faith is the great integrator of all these truths. There was a Frenchman who came to the United States in 1831 named Toqueville. He was trying to find out why is America prospering so much.

And his answer he gave in a book called democracy in America. He said that the constitution is sustained because of the habits of the heart of its people. And Toqueville argues that Christianity is what binds that heart together. So we've made it into the early 1800s in America. That first period of time from 1800 to 1850 was an age of rapid expansion. We went from 5 million people on the east coast to 23 million people all the way to the west coast. Along the way, we created the steamboat, the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad. So many great inventions happened as we had this westward expansion. Never before in human history have we seen so much invention over such a short period of time.

the um as you guys probably know in 1861 things slowed down because we had the greatest war in American history called the Civil War. In order to get our nation founded, we had to have this perfect document, but we had to make some tough decisions in order for the country to move forward. Clearly, the founders understood that the language of the Constitution needed to be pure and needed to guide us into the future.

But that meant that they had to accept things they really didn't want to accept, like slavery. And the Civil War was the great reckoning of this fundamental truth. 625,000 people, soldiers, died during that war. More Americans died in that war than in all the wars combined up until Vietnam. Lincoln called the Civil War the National Repentance. We repented with our blood. And in the Gettysburg address after the Civil War, Lincoln reggrounded the country in the declaration's claim that all men are created equal. This is a quote from Lincoln in that address. This nation under God shall have a new birth in freedom. So we had three amendments to the Constitution right after the Civil War.

We had the abolishment of slavery, the 14th amendment, which was equal protection under the law, and the vote was extended to all uh African-American males. It took the 19th amendment in 1920 to add all the women into the voting ranks. America had repeatedly failed to live to its own rules. One of the things that has always made America great is that it's self-correcting. This is very similar, by the way, to the Christian principle that I'm already right with God, but I'm not perfect yet. So the project of the country is to grow into its ideals just like the project of the Christian is to grow into your faith. We are already seen by God in positive light but we still need to grow into a creature worthy of God.

I think we see that after World War II with things like um the Marshall Plan. The countries that we just defeated, Japan, Germany, Italy, we ended up supporting financially and with innovation to help them move forward. Never before in human history has a country taken its enemies and helped them rise again. I don't think you can underestimate the significance of this event. In the 1950s and 1960s, we had the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King used two things to lead this movement. One was the Declaration of Independence and the other was Thomas Aquinus's natural law. Martin Luther King was asking America to live up to its ideals and once again America self-corrected the direction it was headed and lived up to its ideals.

You will you will recall in 1969 Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. There was another astronaut named Buzz Aldrin who went to my high school. I think it was 500 million people who watched the mo the lunar landing. That was 15th of the entire population on the planet. Ronald Reagan told Gorbachov to tear that wall down in 1987. Two years later, they tore the wall down.

The 20th century ended with many moral and political vindications of the American experiment. So what we've seen so far is that we have this form called the US Constitution and we have this substance which is faith and reason and integration and then we have 237 years where we are trying to work it out and get better as we go. It's just like the human person. We're not as good as we want to be but hopefully we can improve and get better. We must be doing something right because so many people want to come here. By my statistics, we have 53 million people in America who are not born here.

This is by far the largest immigrant population in the world. Our major universities throughout the country are the envy of the world. We have more than 500 Nobel laureates associated with these universities. The United States ranks number one in nine different measures regarding innovation. United States genuinely has religious liberty, the very first freedom. I think that due process is one of the shining achievements of America that any person, immigrant or citizen, can appeal to the the uh the courts to maintain their rights. American songs occupy 90% of the top songs on the charts around the world. Hollywood, Nashville, and everything in the middle um are are attractive to people around the world. Underneath it all, there is the American spirit. I'm going to share with you just in closing really five different aspects of the American spirit that make it so amazing. America. The American spirit is the spirit of the settler, not the immigrant.

People who come to America and they want to be true Americans. They want to build something for themselves. Nobody wants a free handout. They just want the opportunity to build and to create a life. The goal of the American spirit is not to consume, but to build. The second element of the American spirit I want to focus on is we are winners not losers. The American way is to bounce back from adversity. And I believe this is rooted in the Bible. Friday gave us a terrible death but Sunday gave us a resurrection. And American greatness is forged in failure but eventual success. My son is in the army and he's a green beret.

I asked him, "Is America does America have the greatest army in the world?" And he looked at me and he says, "Yes, Dad." And I said, "Why is that?" And he said, "Because our army is full of free men and women, and that means that if you want the job done, get the free men to do it. We are inventors, not copers. I lived in China for four years and they are really good at copying and yet they're only copying all the American stuff." I see it in the marketplaces all over China. We invent things like um the iPhone.

We strive to be creators just like God is our creator. We are also the entertainers, not the entertained. We love to tell the story. We don't wait for the world to tell the story. And of course that thing I mentioned earlier, God, family, and country in that order, those things matter to the American spirit. A people who love their country first will eventually lose it. But if you love God and love your family and then love your country, you will save it. John Adams wrote this in a 1798 article. He said our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other people.

So I think we can make the deduction that if America loses its moral and religious center, it will lose its country. So I've tried to make the case here that America stands on some great shoulders. It stands on the Greco Roman shoulders. It stands on the Judeo-Christian shoulders. It stands on the English and the Scottish shoulders. The people who got off the boat on the Mayflower and the many boats sense had this kind of heart shaped by these these shoulders that they were standing on. And as long as these moral habits survive, the country will thrive. So my message for my brothers and sisters outside of the country of the United States is not to try to copy America.

I could give you many examples of people who have tried to copy it and failed. My message for you is come to America and help us to keep it alive. There is a battle right now for the American soul. Most of that is coming from Europe and Canada and headed south. My wish is that we would get some reinforcements from the south that would come here and help us to save America.

And this is what really excites me about the partnership that we have with Dr. Jimenez with other folks from Brazil because we believe in your passion. We believe in your conviction. We believe that you guys have something that we once had in spades. So the American story is a Christian story. I just ask you guys to help us to keep telling it. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about.

I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.

Turn it around.