A Nation Like No Other Read Online Free PDF

colonists, but they were keenly aware these rights were hard-won, unevenly applied, and if history was any guide, impermanent.
    In Britain, natural rights were assumed to be an integral part of the unwritten English constitution. Beginning with the Magna Carta (Great Charter) in 1215, Britain had slowly and steadily limited the government’s powers and expanded the rights of its citizens. At Runnymede, in return for monetary payments from his barons, King John conceded that the barons had certain rights that he would not violate—an early step toward recognizing the principle of no taxation without representation. The Stuarts rolled back many of those ancient liberties, but the ensuing English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, as well as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, revived Britain’s tradition of gradually limiting monarchical power.
    By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a new doctrine was forming out of the British Common Law and the essays of political thinkers who chipped away at the legitimacy of absolute monarchs by proposing that citizens held permanent rights transcending those of governments. Though emerging in Britain, this new model reached full bloom first in the Scottish Enlightenment and then in the American colonies, where the reach of government was weaker and the lure of freedom was stronger.
Americans increasingly believed they had the right to resist oppressive government, even if it was as powerful as the British Empire. This transformation from a government-centric model to a citizen-centric model was an intellectual revolution that formed the philosophical basis of the American Revolution that followed.

A NATION WITH THE SOUL OF A CHURCH
    The Founders were undeniably religious, and their faith found expression in the Declaration’s assertion that man’s unalienable rights come from God. As John Adams declared in 1813, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were . . . the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and . . . that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system.” 4
    However, most of the Founders’ religiosity broke with the traditional bounds of Christian thought in Europe. They were particularly critical of the trappings of official, state-sponsored religion across the old continent and especially in England. Although the Glorious Revolution had resulted in a measure of tolerance for religious dissent in Britain, the Church of England remained a privileged, state-sponsored faith, and religious minorities faced various forms of official discrimination, causing hundreds of thousands of Scottish and Scotts-Irish Presbyterians to migrate to America.
    By the time of America’s founding, by contrast, religious pluralism was flourishing in the colonies, which provided a welcome home for religious refugees. In America, citizens were free to select the church they attended without government interference. As a result of this “American voluntarism,” the colonies’ churches enjoyed much higher attendance rates and more committed congregations than was the case on the continent.
    Freedom of religion, absent the stifling bureaucracy and hierarchy that characterized Europe’s official churches, democratized the practice
of faith in the American colonies, giving rise to a vibrant, pluralistic religious community. A British bureaucrat observed that the colonies had “no distinctions of Bishops, Priests or Deacons, no Rule or Order, no Dean Chapters or Archdeacons. All were Priests and nothing more.” 5 With God as the only recognized higher authority, the individual was made directly accountable to Him. America’s flourishing religious tradition stood in stark contrast to Europe’s rigid,