The following is excerpted from newly written material by Doug DeVos for Believe! 50th Anniversary Edition.
How do you feel about America’s founders? There are certainly lots of opinions out there. Many think you should hate them. Many others think you should love them. As is usually the case in life, reality is more complicated.
The founders were human, which means they were deeply flawed. They enslaved black people. They restricted the right to vote to landowners and didn’t even consider extending that right to women. None of us should overlook the founders’ sins or try to excuse them.
Still, we should recognize their accomplishments and understand the tremendous progress they unleashed. They created the first country in the world founded on the promise of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” for all. While they failed to live by those words, they created a country that has undeniably changed the world for the better, lifting up billions of people along the way.
How has America gotten so much right? The answer isn’t just the Declaration of Independence, with its lofty language and sweeping promises. The Constitution, which came eleven years later, is just as important.
Where the Declaration laid out America’s principles, the Constitution gave every generation a practical framework for applying those principles more fully. The Constitution’s very first words are about forming “a more perfect Union.” Ultimately, that means ending the injustices perpetuated by deeply imperfect people.
Isn’t this the story of America?
For 250 years, we’ve struggled to realize our country’s full potential, so that every American can avail themselves of their rights and fully participate in our national prosperity. It hasn’t been easy. Yet the determination and work we’ve done to break barriers has been more than worth the effort. As we’ve empowered more people, we’ve made America the freest, wealthiest, and most successful nation in human history!
But along the way, and especially in the past fifty years, a lot of people have started thinking that all our progress springs from a poisoned seed. They say that the evils of the founding define our country. So America has been evil ever since.
The problem with this view is the lack of perspective. History is complex. So are human beings. They can advocate true principles while utterly violating those principles through their actions. We shouldn’t accept those actions. But we shouldn’t throw out the principles, either.
The rejection of our country’s principles is an abdication of our duty as Americans. The proper response to evil is to say: Not on my watch. The generations before us stood in the breach and made America more perfect. It’s up to us to continue in that tradition and make America more perfect still. If not us, who? And if not now, when?
After reading this, you may still say: Doug, you’ve led a privileged life. America has been good to you. But it hasn’t been good to so many others. Why should I listen to you and not them? My response is simple: Don’t listen to me. Listen to Frederick Douglass.
America was not good to Frederick Douglass. He was born into slavery before the Civil War. He endured horrors that no human being should ever endure. While he escaped to freedom, he never experienced real racial equality, even as he successfully fought to end slavery once and for all. If anyone had a right to hate America, it was him.
Years later, Frederick Douglass posed a question: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer: The Fourth of July is everything, because America is built on “saving principles.” Douglass implored his fellow Americans of all races and creeds: “Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”
If a former slave like Frederick Douglass could say those words, if he could dedicate his life to making America live by the principles espoused by the founders, surely we can do the same.
