A 250-year-old creed and ‘the country that is waiting’

Last year, Walter Isaacson, anticipating our nation’s sesquicentennial, wrote a slim volume entitled “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.”

To wit: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is our founding creed. We are a creedal country bound not by blood or religion or race or language, but by fealty to a set of ideas. And now we are about to celebrate that creed’s 250th anniversary.

It does not matter where you came from or when you arrived. If you embraced the creed, you are an American. As a child of immigrants, I feel this particularly deeply.

When those words were written and endorsed by our founders, they were as revolutionary as they were aspirational.

What they meant is that every human on this planet was born with a set of fundamental rights, articulated by enlightenment thinkers, and that governments were instituted by men to guarantee and protect those rights. Rights could not be “granted” by a king who claimed a direct connection to God.

Despite the word Creator, many of the founders did not believe these rights came from God. Thomas Jefferson, a Deist — someone who believed a supreme being had set the universe in motion but did not intervene in human affairs — believed Jesus was a wise philosopher, not the son of God.

Clearly Jefferson, as a slaveholder, did not believe in some of the other words in the sentence he had written. He believed that Americans would have to evolve before those ideals could be wholly embraced.

There were certainly other Americans in our founding generation who did not believe those words either. Southerners fiercely defended slavery. British leaders mocked Americans for advancing such lofty ideals while holding hundreds of thousands of individuals in chains.

Two hundred fifty years later, that evolution has been gradual. Millions of Americans still don’t believe the races are equal or believe some cannot be fully American because they are not Christian, or heterosexual, or do not hold certain beliefs or voted for the wrong party. They are not “real Americans.”

Thus, as we mark this milestone, we Americans find ourselves riven by many divisions.

The institutions we have constructed over the past 250 years continue to provide our foundation, but the classic liberalism (freedom, democracy, free markets) that is at the heart of our experiment is under attack, as are the checks and balances that keep it strong. Too many Americans just shrug.

One must go back to the Clinton administration to find the last time a majority of Americans believed — for a sustained period — that America was on the right track (Cold War over, dot-com boom, a balanced federal budget). Today, pollsters tell us half of Americans think the other half is morally flawed.

Why? By many measures, America is thriving. The restless, manic energy that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about still drives us. Is it the pace of change? Social media? A decline in civics education? The lack of a common narrative? Politics as blood sport?

As Yoni Appelbaum noted, writing in The Atlantic, even an idea as anodyne as patriotism can provoke harsh reactions and divisions. So, where do we go from here? Perhaps, one place to start was recently articulated by the poet Bruce Springsteen:

“Well, I believe in critical patriotism. I believe that's the definition of a patriot, that you love your country so much that you are willing to look at it clearly, recognize its faults, encourage it to be a better place, and believe that you carry in your heart the country that is waiting.”

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.