David McElroy

Where do rights come from? That’s a foundational question for anyone who advocates individual freedom. If “unalienable rights” exist, every action that would conflict with them should be legally constrained. If rights don’t exist, they’re merely pragmatic rules of a game that can be changed at someone’s whim.

On this day in the United States, we celebrate the pronouncement by the Founding Fathers that the 13 colonies were joining together to declare political independence of Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in the history of classical liberal thought, because it not only asserted a right to break away from the controlling political entity binding those people at the time, but it laid out the philosophical case for why people had the right to be free. (Read the text and think about what it’s really saying. It’s quite well-written, even if your history or civics teachers bored you to death with it at the time.)

When it comes to the question of rights, the text says the following:

“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.”

Thomas Jefferson’s original wording said, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and it was Benjamin Franklin who suggested the change to “self-evident.” To me, that says that they, too, were struggling to figure out how to explain something that they understood intuitively. (I’m not going to get into the issue of their personal contradictions because of their failure to see women and those of other races as equal, but let’s acknowledge that that blind spot was huge.)

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How can a dog be lost in the middle of an urban area — and disappear without a trace, never to be seen again? That’s what happened when Munchkin escaped from a vet clinic where she was being boarded five years ago. We’ll never know the truth about what happened to her.

Munchkin was the runt of a five-puppy litter. At the right, you can see her on the fireplace mantle at my house when she was tiny. She was the only female among the five puppies born on a chain to the dog I now have named Lucy. (You can read Lucy’s story from a few weeks ago if you missed it.)

As my ex-wife and I tried to find homes for the puppies, everyone talked about how beautiful she was, but they ended up taking one of the male puppies. By the time the other four were gone, it had been too long. We were too attached to Munchkin to let her go.

No other animal of mine ever had such a flippant name, but we never intended to keep her. Since she was the runt, Melissa nicknamed her Munchkin at one point. By the time we kept her, the name had stuck.

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I know this is hard for some people to believe, but Jesus isn’t an American. He doesn’t spout patriotic words, and He doesn’t pledge allegiance to any flag.

Sadly, many U.S. churches are confused about this issue. As a result, this Sunday will be another confusing day when many American church-goers will be hit with a message that is unbiblical in every way.

When I was growing up, I accepted this odd mixture of Christian religion and civic religion without paying much attention to it. I was a patriotic little kid, so I was happy to see various patriotic songs in the Baptist Hymnal on the backs of the pews where I sat every week. I was happy to see a U.S. flag on stage areas much of the time (sometimes flanked by the weird notion of a “Christian flag“).

As I’ve thought about the implications of this odd mixture of patriotism and Christianity, it makes me sick. The U.S. flag has no place as part of a church, just as the flags of various other civic nations have no place in churches, either. If you have loyalties to a government or a state of some kind, that’s your business, but it has no place being given a place of honor in God’s house.

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