The Founding Fathers on Rights and Responsibilities

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a short episode today. Some of you will like that. I know my audience is split. Half of you seem to like the long ones, half of you like the short ones.

Well, this one's for those who like the short ones. It is important, though. We're gonna talk about something that's a little different, something I'm really positive about. I love studying history, the founding fathers.

I mean, I am sitting in a location where Thomas Jefferson, George Washington likely walked at some point. But, of course, I am separated from them in time. And I like to study the world they inhabited because, honestly, the assumptions of that world are so different than the assumptions of today, metaphysically, ethically, especially.

Why the Founders Thought Differently About Rights

And one of the problems, one of the disintegrating problems in this country, why it's going to pot, it seems like, in some ways, and why people are at each other's throats is because we have founding documents that are not compatible.

The assumptions in those documents are not compatible with the country that we are inhabiting today. And so it's helpful to understand why that is. What did the founding fathers assume about things like rights, which is what we're talking about today, and what do we assume today, and what's the difference?

And not all of us assume, of course, the same thing. So navigating conversations, having communication is very important. But lately, this is why it's different, I've been doing a number of podcasts on different ministries and people and bringing logical principles, biblical principles, to bear on their ministries, looking at those ministries, and trying to ask hard questions about them.

And I'll be honest with you, I don't always like doing that. In fact, I almost never do. I don't think Jesus or Paul got up in the morning either. Think of Paul. Did he get up and say, man, I just can't wait, I'm gonna really slam those Corinthians.

I'm gonna correct them. No, I don't think so. You don't get that tone in his letter. And of course, if you did, I think it would be a pride if there was some kind of an assertion that I'm so superior and you're messing up.

And I wanna stay away from that, to be honest with you. I don't wanna ever enjoy that kind of thing, and I don't enjoy it. It's why I really go out of my way to try to, if I can, read with giving the benefit of the doubt.

I try, and I'm not saying I always hit the mark, but that is what I endeavor to do. Even with Jonathan Lehman recently, I do try to say, look, Lehman had some good things. Nine Marks had some really good things on ecclesiology, but their political stuff is just not good.

And so I endeavor to do that, but I don't always enjoy doing it. I really don't. And I wanna say that because I think, I saw a few comments from some people, I think one or two people who just seem to almost indicate that I get some kind of a buzz out of this.

I really like just critiquing, and I don't always like doing that, but it is necessary at times. I think it was necessary for Paul to correct the Corinthians, and I think it's necessary to do correction.

And especially when other people aren't doing that, when I don't see it as much, or there's an area. I mean, I get emails all the time from people, or text messages, John, can you look at this ministry, look at these people, can you give me information?

And a lot of the times, if I end up doing it, I have to do it from scratch, because there isn't anything else out there. So it is necessary for protecting the flock of God, protecting even our families from false ideas, from things that are erroneous, but you don't know why.

I get a lot of messages like that. John, this is bad, but I just can't put my finger on it. And so someone who can put their finger on it better is very helpful to the church. And that's why I'm not perfect, but I do try to do some of those things.

I do try to correct, I do try to ask hard questions, but I don't always like it. What I like is what I'm gonna do today. And that's why this is a little different. I love to study history. And so we're gonna talk about the founding fathers a little bit, and their concept of rights.

And I'll give you three reasons real quick, three examples of why this is relevant today. Number one, what's going on in California. I hope you're praying for the pastors over there. I don't think anyone got arrested yesterday, but some Calvary Chapel pastors and John MacArthur are, and I'm sure there's others who are deciding to meet despite Governor Newsom and their local municipalities regulations.

And they're saying, this is not in the jurisdiction of the government. We have the right to meet. And last night, if you wanna see it, you can go to Capstone Report. I kept thinking when I was reading this thread on Twitter that Capstone reported on, that I should be angry, but not sin.

And I wanna have that attitude. I don't wanna ever slop into the sin category on these things, but I'll be honest, I was angry because this wasn't the kind of mocking that's appropriate, mocking the prophets of Baal, mocking bad ideas.

These were Southern Baptists mocking John MacArthur because he would meet for church. He's not forcing people to meet with them. They just don't think it's a wise idea because it's like, I guess it's like snake handling.

It's taking these unnecessary risks because of COVID. John MacArthur may disagree with you on the risk of COVID, but he still has the right to meet according to the dictates of his conscience and the way he's interpreting scripture, which I think is correct.

He's coming to the conclusion God wants him to meet. Isn't that pretty basic to what a church is, the assembly gathered? But there's some people out there in the evangelical industrial complex that wanna really mock that and demean John MacArthur.

And that's sad to me. That's super sad to see that. And hopefully that's the attitude we have. We should pray for people like that, that their influence would not, they would not lead sheep astray and that they would repent.

But the reason there's this disagreement is because there's a different concept of rights. I guarantee you, the people who are mocking MacArthur think that government can do this. I'll give you an example of that.

Jonathan Lehman again, wrote an article saying that the government has the right to regulate churches, church worship because of COVID. Now, he's justified it by saying because the government has the role, the job, the responsibility, the duty to preserve life, right?

And so that's the role of government. Now, did you hear the error in that? It's not what he said, it's what he left out. The government's role is to preserve life by doing what? By protecting civil liberties, by making sure that someone does not infringe on your civil liberties.

So we'll take murder as an example of that. The government does have a job to punish murderers. And you can trace this right back to the divine command of the Lord. Does the government have the job of putting cameras in your house though, and making sure that you don't leave your toaster in the wall and plugged in?

Because that's a safety violation. I mean, the government can say, yeah, but our job is to preserve life and that could kill you. We would say that's 1984. You know, we're adults, we take calculated risks.

That's within our jurisdiction, not yours government. There's no right that's being violated because I left my toaster plugged in. And it's the same goes for seatbelts and other things. You see over time, the government has taken more and more of this control.

And now we're being told that healthcare is a right. Healthcare is not a right. Not according to what the founding fathers would have thought and not according to what the biblical principles are. The government does not have the job of making sure that everyone has equal access and equal quality of healthcare.

That's an egalitarian assumption. It's really, honestly, a lot of these guys are tracing themselves back to some kind of a Marxist thinking, a collectivism of some kind. And they're flipping rights on their heads.

And FDR, I probably did this more than anyone else, but instead of the Bill of Rights being a negative list of liberties that the government is not allowed to infringe upon your rights, now it's the government's job to ensure your rights.

So to ensure things like freedom from fear, freedom from want. So the government's job is to make sure that you don't go hungry and these kinds of things. And so that may sound really good, but is that biblically?

I wanna challenge you guys. Is that biblically what the role of government is? Government bears the sword. That's the job of government. To do what? To punish evil. Punish evil. To secure rights. So, I mean, this goes back to the beginning.

This goes back to eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Lex Talionis. This goes back to the case law of the Old Testament. And we take those principles and we apply those. And so without getting into everything, because I don't have time, that the founding fathers believed about biblical law and all these things, just suffice it to say, the Bible was the most commonly used book during the Constitutional Convention, quoted by the founders in their political debates.

They used the Bible all the time, sometimes for purposes of illustration, because that was the lingua franca at the time. But even when they weren't quoting the Bible, oftentimes the political philosophers that they liked to quote, were also heavily drawing on biblical principles.

And so even John Locke, I mean, you can't really escape that. William Blackstone. I mean, these guys, Montesquieu, these guys had, there were biblical principles at play in their political philosophy.

And so the founding fathers were very influenced by this. And it's not the kind of influence that you would, I think in a secular society today, we just think that there would be Bible quotations all over the place.

And there aren't necessarily, not with references. They just were so familiar with the Bible, they would just quote it without the references, oftentimes. It would just be, they'd take a phrase from the Bible and quote it, but they all were kind of on the same page.

And they understood this was the world they lived in. It was very influenced by Christianity. If you don't understand that, you won't understand the founding fathers. So I'll have to say, I disagree with Jonathan Lehman.

I don't think that's the role of government. That is a blank check to give to government if you say their only purpose is to preserve life. You get all the socialist programs, you get the nanny state, government will justify anything they do on preservation of life, elongation of life, better quality of life, et cetera.

That is not good because there is no borders. There's no boundary other than, I guess, some arbitrary thing that you come up with but not rooted in something transcendent. One other example of why this is important.

I remember years ago, I had heard a preacher who I consider to be conservative theologically, but opened up the sermon with declaration of independence, all men created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and then went off to talk about how the sexual revolution, people claim their rights and how horrible this was and kind of mixed concepts of rights.

And that we shouldn't be about our rights, we shouldn't be so concerned with those things. That's not a Christian understanding. Christians give up their rights. Jesus gave up his rights. The problem with this line of thinking is that that wouldn't be what Jefferson was thinking.

That wasn't his concept of rights. In fact, the reason you don't wanna give up your rights, your actual rights, is for the protection of other people. If you give them up, you're setting a precedent to give them up for others.

And don't think that someone like John MacArthur doesn't have that going through his head. And when he takes a stand, it's not just him taking a stand. He's defending the institution of the church in the United States of America, and specifically in California and Los Angeles.

It's bigger than that. Defending rights is defending principles that ought not to be infringed. So I want us to understand. I want us to understand. Let's do it. Let's start. We are going to talk about the Declaration of Independence first.

The Declaration of Independence and Inalienable Rights

And I'm gonna read for you some familiar lines, and then I'm gonna talk about what is the Declaration of Independence? Thomas Jefferson obviously wrote it. And he said, "'We hold these truths to be self-evident in the preamble, "'that all men are created equal, "'that they are endowed by the 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, "'deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, "'whenever any form of government "'becomes destructive of these ends, "'it is the right of the people to abolish, "'alter or abolish and institute new government, "'laying its foundation on such principles "'and organizing its powers in such form "'as to them shall seem most likely "'to affect their safety and happiness.'".

So oftentimes when you hear this quoted, you just hear that first sentence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, say that's what America's about. And you read into those terms what you think they mean.

And I'm gonna show you that they probably don't mean what you think they mean. But this is the beginning. Now, this is more of a poetic flourish. This isn't the meat of the document. A preamble isn't as important as what comes next.

But I will say this, it is important. I'm not dismissing it. I'm just saying that it's interesting that this is the section that so many remember, that so many go back to, and I'm gonna explain why. Here's another part of the declaration.

When a long chain of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty. I'm gonna read that again.

It is their right, it is their duty. Rights and responsibilities, rights and duties, they are wedded together. If you don't understand anything else of what I'm about to say, I want you to see this. It is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.

So what is a right? We're gonna see this more, but it's a duty. They're the same thing. They're two sides of the same coin. You have the right to pursue the things God has called you to pursue. You have the right to provide for your family, right?

Pursuit of happiness is what that would be. You have the right to defend yourself. That's why we have a Second Amendment. Look at the Bill of Rights. What are rights? There are things that the government, the government can't infringe on these things because these are things that you have the duty to accomplish yourself.

It's your responsibility to be a man of good character and to love others. Government can't force you to love anyone. Let's look at some other quotes. I'll explain this more. Basis for natural rights.

The evidence of this natural right, like that of our right to life, liberty, and use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness. Further explaining what pursuit of happiness means there. Is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man.

We do not claim these under the charter of kings or legislatures, but under the king of kings. Messianic language used there, king of kings. That is the basis for a natural rights. And can liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God.

We are answerable for them to God. This is Thomas Jefferson speaking here on both these quotes. And this is why there is an oath of office in the constitution. It's part of the world they inhabited. We are responsible to God for how we use the resources that he's given us.

We have a right to use those resources in such a way that he has called us to use them. And government cannot infringe on those things, but we will stand before him. We will be responsible because he's the one that's ultimately given to us these rights.

That's the founding fathers understanding of rights. And when people say that the constitution itself is godless, bring that up. Why is there an oath of office? Why even take an oath if there's nothing after this?

There's no system of rewards and punishments that will make sure that on your honor, you have not violated the oath that you're taking. Why did they do it on a Bible? There's a reason. There's a reason.

There's a Christian foundation, a Christian understanding. And notice what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that the constitution is Christian. The declaration of independence is Christian. I'm not saying that.

That would be inappropriate as a historian to say that, but I can say that they're influenced by Christian ideas because of the world that these men inhabited. What does pursuit of happiness mean then?

Does God, God wants you to be happy, right? And this might be one of the reasons that we've lost an understanding of rights, because we've also modified our understanding of God. If God just wants you to be happy, and he's just so upset about inequities and how you're just not doing as well as other people and other demographics, and this is who God is, then we're gonna have a different understanding of happiness and we're gonna take that understanding to founding documents.

Property, Conscience, and the English Constitutional Tradition

Let me give you some contemporary examples of pursuit of happiness being used or what it would mean. 1774, the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, that the inhabitants of the English colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution and the several charters or compacts have the following rights, that they are entitled to life, liberty and property and that they have never ceded to any sovereign power or whatever a right to dispose of either without their consent.

Now, there's two things I want you to notice. Number one is life, liberty and property, right? Which is, that's a parallel with life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. When you look at pursuit of happiness, you're looking at the property and the ability and means to use that property according to how you wanna use it, according to your own choice.

That's what pursuit of happiness means. It's not whatever makes you emotionally happy. It's resources, it's land, it's these kinds of things and being able to organize those things according to the way you want to organize them.

Now, here's the second thing I want you to notice though, is these are rights guaranteed under the what? The American constitution? No, the English constitution. These aren't new ideas. And I may talk about this a little later, but it's not like the United States of America was formed in a vacuum.

It is an extension of British common law. And we need to understand that, I think. And the reason we need to understand that is because there is an idea out there that you can just, that America's all about equality and you can take America and you can put it anywhere in the world and it'll just work.

These people that formed the United States were operating under Christian assumptions. Even if they weren't Christians in the sense of having a relationship with Christ, they had a Christian moral framework.

And they were also part of a similar culture, even though there was some diversity in the 13 colonies. You can reach George Washington's first inaugural or his farewell address rather, and he talks about this, but they have the same language, same culture, same religion in general.

And those are the things that allowed and created the founding documents, the system that was in place at that time. So it's not like you can just export it anywhere, necessarily, but anyway, pursuit of happiness.

Another passage I wanna read is from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776. Contemporary with Thomas Jefferson, who was in Virginia, Jefferson was a Southerner. This is the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

It says, that religion or the duty which we owe to our creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. And therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.

So where do you get happiness then? Like the happiness that we think of it as, even in the sense of things working together right, people getting along. Well, this isn't something that the government can compel.

It says it right here. These are things that are directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. So we live in a world now that doesn't understand what the world of the founders understood, which is that self-government is required to maintain happiness, liberty, et cetera, that people cannot be compelled by force to love each other.

Today we're trying to do that. Today, because people aren't loving each other as much as they ought to, the government's coming in, the government's forcing it. Why are we told to wear a mask? It's love of neighbor.

Government's compelling you to love. It's not the government's job. And that's part of the problem. So pursuit of happiness does not mean what we think of today. It's not emotional pleasure. It is pursuing industry, using.

In fact, this next quote, I'm gonna read from Thomas Jefferson. I think it explains it even more. He says, our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisition of our industry, to honor and confidence from fellow citizens.

What must we give to secure such rewards? Faithfulness to our benign religion, and what is common to the various forms, honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and love of man. So we should have, listen to the equality here.

We should have an equal right, not to an equal starting point, not to an equal outcome. Our equality, according to Jefferson, in this particular passage, comes from the use of our own faculties. We shouldn't have anyone tell us what to do with our stuff.

In other words, we should not have anyone steal from us, murder. I would say even probably some forms of taxation would fall into this category. I think an income tax would be in violation of what Thomas Jefferson's talking about here.

So their concept of rights, much different. Thomas Jefferson also said this, no man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another. This is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

Every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society. And this is all the law should enforce on him. So what is he saying here? He's saying that no man, so no government should infringe on your rights.

No man should infringe on your rights either to do what you want to do with your stuff, to live your life as you see fit, in general. So this is where the government can compel force when you are infringing on someone else's rights.

You don't have a right to do that. So there are lines, and Thomas Jefferson is giving us some of these lines, but rights and responsibilities go together. Again, that is the point. You have a right because you have responsibilities to do certain things.

Your responsibility to use, to invest your faculties, to have an outcome that is preferable. You do not have a right to steal from someone else. And so that's because you're taking away something that is their responsibility to manage that piece of property or whatever you stole from them.

And so rights and responsibility are kind of tethered together. And you'll see this with some of the other founders. George Washington, the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former by inculcating the practice of the latter.

Founding fathers thought that religion was important because it guaranteed moral duty, guaranteed virtue. And again, happiness. Look what happiness is used here again. And that's how you get happiness.

So these things are inseparably connected. There's no taking happiness and putting it over here and saying you can do whatever you want with your body and you don't have any responsibility to anyone else.

That's not what happiness is. Not according to George Washington. So much for the modern understanding of what rights are. Rights are connected to responsibilities, to duties. You have a moral duty and human happiness go hand in hand.

So different than the way we think today. Here's some quotes from John Adams. Human passions unbridled by morality and religion would break the strongest cords of our constitutions as a whale goes through a net.

So human passions unbridled by morality and religion. We need morality and religion. That's what John Adams is saying. And again, he follows it up here. This is another quote. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. You think the constitution's breaking down today because of this? The Bill of Rights? Those rights that are guaranteed in the constitution only work in a country which takes responsibility seriously.

And religion is that force that compels us to take responsibility seriously because it brings upon us an outside duty not coming from the government. When religion breaks down, so does freedom. We're watching it, guys.

We're watching it happen. And I will say this. We're watching it happen in the church. That's the sad part of all this. Benjamin Franklin, I believe there is one supreme, most perfect being. I believe he is pleased and delights in the happiness of those he has created.

And since without virtue, man can have no happiness in this world, I firmly believe he delights to see me virtuous. He is pleased and delights in happiness, right? There's that word again, the happiness of those he has created.

But without virtue, you cannot have happiness. Don't tell me you're happy when you're sleeping around, you're sinning against God, and you have a right to do that. It's not, don't import the Declaration of Independence and say that you have a right to do it because you have a right to pursue happiness.

No, you don't. You don't have that right. Rights and responsibilities go together. George Mason, happiness and prosperity are now within our reach, but to attain and preserve them must depend upon our own wisdom and virtue.

Virtue again, wisdom and virtue. You want happiness, you want prosperity, that's what you need. That no free government or the blessing of liberty can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by a frequent reoccurrence to fundamental principles.

Not gonna have liberty, you're not gonna have freedom if you don't have these other necessary ingredients. Here's the point. The founding fathers understood rights and responsibilities to be two sides of the same coin.

You don't have a right to do something if you don't have a responsibility to do that thing. And the government is not to infringe on those things, on those rights that you have, because they would be taking you away from responsibilities that have been given to you, not to government, but to you.

It's a jurisdictional question. So it's not the government's job to compel you to go worship, it's your right to go worship. It's not the government's job, and when I say compel, I mean force. It's not the government's job to force you to protect your family, right?

That's your job. If there's a domestic or foreign threat, though, that threatens a whole entire community, a lot of the founders believed that was your duty to protect the community, that was guaranteeing your rights.

There was a website, and I couldn't find it, I wish I could find it, but there was a website I remember seeing years ago that had gone through the Constitution, and then specifically the Bill of Rights, and it had put Bible verses, a lot of them case laws, by each of them, showing that, okay, here's the biblical kind of parallels.

And when I read scripture, I have this same idea in my mind, that when God implements the nation of Israel and the case laws that were to govern the nation of Israel, it actually is very similar to the assumptions that the founding fathers used when they came at these very same questions.

Man is evil, man must be restrained because he's evil. He likes to take other people's stuff. He likes to infringe on other people's rights. So there must be some kind of a way to compel man to not do those things, to threaten man, to put some kind of deterrent there.

And so there's all kinds of deterrents and very harsh penalties for certain things in the Old Testament case law. In the American system, if you wanna call it that, there's a lot of checks and balances to keep men from having too much power and tyranny breaking out because of that, because men tend to like to accumulate power.

You look at the fundamental things that are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. A lot of these things are things that God has, responsibilities God has given to men and women to, I mean, how can you exercise discernment?

How can you exercise worship of God if you don't have freedom of speech? If you don't have freedom to protect yourself, how are you going to protect your family and provide for them? If you can't, due process is another part of this.

You shouldn't be just arbitrarily jailed or punished for something. There is a procedure, a civil procedure that you should be going through. And of course, you see these kinds of things in the wisdom that God put in place when he put the regulations on the nation of Israel that he did.

But there's a freedom of industry. You are still given private property and you are still supposed to behave in such a way that you are obeying God, but you're not compelled by force by the government that you have to do a certain thing with your private property.

Even the gleaning laws, right? There are a system of welfare. Their system of welfare was gleaning laws and you could sell yourself into slavery, right? That wasn't compelled. It wasn't compelled by God that the government's going to come in and force you.

That was something you were supposed to do though. And so I think a careful study of the Old Testament case law, the principles in scripture for government is going to render something similar to what the founding fathers set up.

It won't be the same in every context, it won't. But you're going to have a lot of the same assumptions at play. And the main problem, even if you disagree with a lot of what I've said, hopefully you at least see this.

The main problem today is responsibilities and rights are two different things. We have a right for the government to make us happy, to provide for us, to do things that, responsibilities that God has actually given to other parties.

Government can now regulate worship. Tell you whether you can sing or not. Apparently that's loving your neighbor. But again, founders wouldn't have thought the government can compel anyone to love. The founders would have said that's up to, that would be up to the ecclesiastical authorities to make those decisions.

It's not the government's role to do that. It's not the government's role to provide for your family. That's your role. And so I really do think that's one of the reasons things are breaking down so much right now is we have a fundamental misunderstanding.

And it's sad to me when I see Christians, not understanding these things so fundamentally, buying into big government, modern state assumptions when that's not the heritage that's been bequeathed to them.

That is not the understanding that this country was set up under. It's not the understanding that they would have gleaned from a careful biblical examination of these topics. But it is the understanding that they have today and they got it from somewhere else.

And so I want you to just be aware of that. When you're watching some of these debates, and there's gonna be more as we move forward, think with me about rights and responsibilities and whether or not those two things are tethered together.

And when someone is demanding their rights, are they talking about a right to do something that they are responsible before God to do? That's the question you should be asking. Or are they talking about something else?

Is it a right to violate someone else's rights? We're seeing a lot of that today. We have a right to an abortion. That's a right to violate someone else's rights. We have a right to someone else's money because, well, they were born into a more rich family than I was born into and it's not fair.

Well, that's a right to violate someone else's rights. Founding fathers would have said that's absurd. That's not equality, but we call it equality. Everything is turned on its head. Good is evil, evil is good.

So anyway, that was more conceptual. I hope you didn't get lost in some of the abstractions there but it's important that we understand some of these things and I'll try to put some resources. If you just wanna understand the founding fathers better, I'm gonna put some resources in the info section on this video and you can go check that out.

So anyway, hope you enjoyed it. God bless, have a good day.