UNDERSTANDING CONSTITUTION PARTY PHILOSOPHY
Just as the Founding Fathers acknowledged and appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions and placed a firm reliance on the protection of pine Providence in the Declaration of Independence, so too do members of the Constitution Party acknowledge the living God and appeal to Him for mercy, aid, comfort, guidance and protection in our efforts to restore and preserve the blessings of liberty that they secured. This sentiment seems foreign to many as our citizenry progressively embraces a secular worldview and becomes further and further separated from an understanding of our nation’s history and heritage of liberty. However, we need look no further than the Declaration of Independence to discover that acknowledgement of our Creator is central to American liberty and not a violation of, but rather the foundation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God
Not only did our founding fathers have a Biblical worldview, they rested our nation’s entire philosophy of liberty and the Constitution on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Here is how those terms are defined in Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, the only law book in the Colonies at the time of the American Revolution:
Blackstone explained how God equipped man to discover and obey the law of nature. First, God gave man reason, the ability, we might say, to determine causes and effects. So, for example, we might observe that acts like murder and theft produce bad consequences, and so conclude that these acts are bad. Second, Blackstone said, God made man in such a way that man cannot be truly happy unless he follows God's law. Thus, our own self-interest, our own desire to be happy, tends to make us do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong. This inner drive to obtain happiness by doing what is right both stimulates our logical reasoning to discover what is right and depends on our ability to employ logic to determine the right path in any given situation.
But, Blackstone said, our ability to reason logically is not "as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect, unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, [or] unimpaired by disease or intemperance . . . ." Because man's "reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error," Blackstone observed that God had not left the discovery of His natural law to man's reasoning powers alone. Rather, "in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason," God has been pleased, "to discover and enforce [His] laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered what we call the revealed or pine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures." So the second pillar on which the Founders based our freedom and independence - "the Laws of Nature's God" - is the Bible.