“I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that ‘except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.”
(Franklin, quoted in James Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787)
It was June of 1787. Philadelphia’s summer heat pressed down on the delegates inside Independence Hall. Arguments dragged on. Compromise seemed distant. At last, Benjamin Franklin, frail and 81 years old, rose. A man known more for wit than for orthodoxy, Franklin was no conventional believer. Yet when the Convention teetered on the edge of collapse, he reminded the assembly that they had not once asked for divine help.
“I have lived, Sir, a long time,” Franklin said, “and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” Franklin’s words were not a sermon. They were a warning. That the enterprise before them required grounding in something deeper than clever debate or parchment promises.
That principle was written into the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson declared that people were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It was deliberate. A right that comes from government can be repealed by government. A right rooted beyond government cannot.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower echoed the same conviction nearly 170 years later. At the height of the Cold War, he approved adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. It was, he said, a way to reaffirm “the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future” and to strengthen “those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.” For Eisenhower, as for Franklin, liberty needed something more enduring than political authority.
The principle has been challenged again. When a modern political leader suggests that rights are whatever a government says they are, the warning bells sound. Expanding executive powers, testing the limits of the First Amendment, stretching the authority of federal agencies, pressing against the independence of courts—each step assumes that rights rest in government’s hands. That is the pattern of authoritarianism, whether in past regimes abroad or in present strains at home.
History shows the danger. The Soviet Union outlawed worship and silenced dissent because the state claimed the right to decide what liberties its people had. Nazi Germany revoked rights entirely for those it deemed unworthy of them. Wherever rights were treated as government-issued, government seized them back.
America has stumbled down similar paths. Slavery, segregation, and wartime internment all revealed moments when rights were treated as conditional. Each of those failures came when the country forgot the principle that rights exist before and beyond human authority. Each step toward repair has come when the nation remembered it.
The courts, too, wrestle with this tension. Some rulings have confined liberty to what is spelled out in the Constitution’s text. Yet the Ninth Amendment stands as a quiet guard, reminding that enumerating some rights does not deny others “retained by the people.” The debate over privacy, conscience, and free expression remains a struggle between two views: rights as permissions or rights as protections of something that predates the state itself.
In today’s climate, where leaders test the boundaries of power, the principle Franklin voiced remains a bulwark. For people of faith, it is rooted in the Creator. For those without faith, it can be grounded in natural law, human dignity, or reason itself. The safeguard is the same: liberty is not a favor of rulers. It is the condition under which rulers are allowed to govern.
Franklin’s faith was complicated, even doubtful at times. Yet when the future of the republic hung in balance, he insisted that the nation’s foundation required more than words on paper. Eisenhower said the same in his Cold War pledge. And now, when modern strains of authoritarianism rise, that reminder remains a touchstone. To forget it is to hand liberty back to the very power it was meant to restrain.
This is in response to several emails received after yesterday‘s post. We would encourage you to participate in discussions on these important issues using the Substack app as many good points were raised privately.