A Hope Worth Having

As I watched a video of a man being shouted down while trying to speak on a college campus, he said something that really piqued my interest.  Speaking of the professors who encourage the behavior, he said, “They say, ‘that’s how you change the world,’ and it is how you change the world, but it’s certainly not how you make it better.  You make it worse.” 

In this season of protest and upheaval, there is something to be said for taking to the streets and having your voice heard.  But if one is to be honest, the shouting down of opposing views and the closing of venues for expression by threats and force and riot, is indeed worse.

The U.S. constitution is a real piece of work. You can almost see in it the understanding of the principle that “two steps forward and one step back” is still progress. I think it understands that we must be willing to accept sacrifice. We must not abridge the rights of the vast majority of Americans because of the abuses of a few, and so we are willing to let Nazis march in our streets so that we all may march in our streets.  We understand that criminal activity by a very few comes with the presence of guns in our society (criminal activity that is aggressively pursued and prosecuted) so that all of us may still have the opportunity and right to defend ourselves.

But the constitution is not for the unserious.  As I so often like to remind us of the words of John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

We must hold fast to a moral standard to which we can point when we are asked “what do you mean you have these rights?” We must be able to point to the line in our Declaration of Independence that so beautifully proclaims, “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.” That, right there, is something to which can appeal: deriving our rights from something outside of and greater than us.

Sadly, it has somehow gone awry.  When we ask now “from where do you get your right to Life?” the answer is rather, “we decide for ourselves who lives and dies.” When asked about the source of our “Liberty,” we are told “We decide who has the liberty to speak. We decide where these people [insert name of your most-hated group] may go and what they may do.” And the “Pursuit of Happiness?” How about, “Our happiness is our own creation; we define our own truth, so no one has the right to contradict us in pursuing that which makes us happy.”

The irony of course is that those who have taken and twisted the intent of the founders – who denigrate and denounce them as “rich, oppressive, white men” – don’t seem to realize they are denouncing the very men who created the system of government under which they are free to denounce the founders (and those in office now) in the first place.

We live in a schizophrenic world – a world that cannot make sense.  A world whose ideas themselves commit suicide in their contradictions.  And yet we press on, because so many of us have hope. It is so clear, though, that the object of our hope is as important as the hope itself.  To have hope in the ever-shifting whims of our humanity – a humanity that fights for the lives and rights of some with one hand while depriving the same of others with the other – is sheer foolishness. But to have hope in the one who loves all – who has created all; both man and woman, black and white, rich and poor; in his own image and of equal value – this is a hope that is worth having.