Virtue, "Happiness," and the Declaration of Independence

Here is a semi-brief meditation on the Declaration. I thought I'd link it to celebrate July 4th.

The chapter is from Daniel Palm (ed.), On Faith and Free Government (1997).

The chapter ends with this:

"Modern Christians may legitimately recognize that a vocabulary rich with Christian commitments and concepts is not as alien to the American political scene as they may believe. Still, this is not to say that modern Christians can simply pick up where things were left. In addition to facing residual hostility among anti-Christian elites, Christians -- particularly evangelical Christians -- must face and own up to a century in which their world view was narrowed and crabbed by anti-intellectualism, cultural withdrawal, and a continuing lack of intellectual seriousness. Furthermore, a century or more of revivalism, popular Pelagianism, and the concomitant success of Anabaptist ecclesiologies expressing little more than baptized versions of individual autonomy, are serious obstacles to a wider, more serious public engagement on the part of Christians. If the Christian vocabulary of the founding has been ignored, it has as much to do with Christian neglect as it does with secularist exorcism."