An inheritance of liberty

One of the delights of The Rest Is History is that Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook remind us that history is, before anything else, the story of people. Listening recently to their series on the American Revolution, I was struck by one observation: schoolchildren often know far more about the French Revolution than the American one.

That is hardly surprising. One gave us the storming of the Bastille, the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. The other seems, at first glance, almost disappointingly restrained: earnest gentlemen in wigs arguing about constitutions, representation and liberty.

Yet perhaps that is precisely why, 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, it deserves another look.

I was born an American citizen, yet I have spent almost my entire life elsewhere. Perhaps that distance has made me less interested in America as a nation than in the questions its founding continues to raise about liberty, power and responsible citizenship.

Perhaps that is also why I find myself reading these revolutions through the lenses of culture and theology. Political revolutions seldom emerge in isolation. They are the fruit of deeper convictions about the human person, authority, freedom and the common good.

For me, the most interesting question is not simply why one revolution unfolded differently from another. What kind of civilisation forms free citizens – and what kind of citizens sustain a free civilisation? Great anniversaries invite us to do more than celebrate. They invite us to revisit old conversations. Among historians, theologians and Christian thinkers, one question has never entirely gone away: How biblical was the American Revolution?

If the American Revolution was merely another child of the Enlightenment, it belongs comfortably beside the French Revolution as one more triumph of reason over throne and altar. If, however, it also drew deeply from the moral imagination of the Bible, then the two revolutions, though born in the same remarkable century, were never quite travelling towards the same destination.

The past is rarely a morality play. Both revolutions longed for liberty. Both challenged inherited authority. Both transformed the modern world. The more interesting question is why they ultimately produced such different political cultures.

The educational initiative Socrates in the City frequently returns to a compelling insight: Western civilisation emerged from a long conversation between Jerusalem and Athens before the Enlightenment added its own indispensable voice.

Jerusalem proclaimed that every human being is created in the image of God and that rulers themselves stand beneath a higher law. Athens taught that liberty depends upon virtue and that republics require citizens of character. The Enlightenment refined these inheritances through the language of natural rights and constitutional government. The American Revolution was remarkable not because it invented these ideas, but because it attempted to hold them together.

The founding fathers were not saints. They were men of extraordinary gifts and extraordinary contradictions. Their failures are well known. Yet they recognised that no human being could safely be trusted with unlimited power. Government itself therefore had to be restrained.

The founding fathers were not saints. They were men of extraordinary gifts and extraordinary contradictions- Alessandra Dee Crespo

That conviction found perhaps its finest embodiment in George Washington. Having led the colonies to victory, he voluntarily surrendered power and later stepped aside after two presidential terms. In an age accustomed to rulers who accumulated authority, Washington demonstrated that the greatness of a republic is measured as much by the willingness to relinquish power as by the willingness to exercise it.

His quiet example throws another revolutionary figure into sharper relief. Maximilien Robespierre sincerely sought liberty and virtue, yet increasingly entrusted political power with the task of creating virtue itself. The contrast is instructive.

Sooner or later, every conversation about liberty seems to arrive at the doorstep of an old Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville. Born into the shadow of the French Revolution, he crossed the Atlantic to understand the young American republic. Few observers were better placed to reflect on why two revolutions born in the same century should leave behind such different political inheritances.

He concluded that America’s strength lay not only in its Constitution but in what he called the “habits of the heart”. Laws could restrain power. Only citizens could cultivate the virtues upon which liberty ultimately depends. The United States itself would later come within a breath of destroying the republic the Founders had created. At that moment, Abraham Lincoln appealed not to fear but to “the better angels of our nature”. He understood that constitutions alone cannot preserve a free people.

Malta, too, knows something about fragile inheritances. A ħajt tas-sejjieħ does not collapse overnight. One stone loosens, then another, while the wall still appears to stand. So it is with civic life. Trust, honesty, restraint, and concern for the common good are not automatically preserved. Each generation must patiently rebuild them. The founders did not leave the world a finished republic. They left something far more demanding: An inheritance.

For two and a half centuries, generation after generation has been asked to stand up and be counted. Some answered that call on battlefields; others in courtrooms, polling stations, schools, churches, voluntary organisations and countless acts of quiet public service. They understood that citizenship is more than the enjoyment of rights. It is the acceptance of responsibilities.

Our generation has been asked to stand up and be counted as well. Every generation must choose which voices it will heed: those that appeal to our better angels, or those that flatter our worst instincts. The question is not whether we admire those who came before us.

The question is whether we still possess enough civic courage, honesty and generosity to prove worthy of what they entrusted to us – and whether we shall hand that inheritance, enriched rather than diminished, to those who come after us. Every generation receives the same quiet summons. To stand up.To be counted. To hand on to the next generation not only the freedoms we inherited, but also the habits of heart that alone can sustain them.

Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of America’s 250th anniversary. The question was never simply what kind of civilisation forms free citizens. It is whether we are prepared to become the kind of citizens who sustain a free civilisation.

Perhaps that is where free citizens are quietly formed – and where every generation learns to become a faithful steward of the inheritance it has received.

Alessandra Dee Crespo is the Chancellor of the Church’s Court of Appeals.