A Republic Cannot Remain Free When Its People Forget What Makes Them Free

By C. J. Garbo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

There is a danger to the American republic far more consequential than the outcome of any election, the ambitions of any political party, or the failures of any administration. It is the gradual deterioration of the moral and intellectual character upon which self-government depends.

America’s greatest vulnerability may not be that its government has become too powerful, but that its people have become too accustomed to surrendering the responsibilities that make liberty possible.

One of the most profound observations in the Declaration of Independence appears in a passage that deserves far more attention than it receives:

“All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

The Founders understood something enduring about human nature. People do not necessarily resist the gradual erosion of their freedoms. They accommodate it. They rationalize it. They become accustomed to conditions their predecessors would have considered intolerable.

And perhaps most dangerously, they eventually mistake that accommodation for peace.

The Declaration was not merely an indictment of British tyranny. It was an extraordinary statement about the relationship between human dignity, moral authority, and legitimate government.

Its central proposition was revolutionary: Human rights do not originate with government. They exist before government, and government’s legitimacy rests upon its obligation to protect them.

The Declaration identifies their source as our Creator.

This distinction is indispensable.

If rights are inherent in the human person, government must respect boundaries it did not establish. If rights are merely privileges conferred by political authority, their continued existence ultimately depends upon the judgment of those who govern.

The former establishes the moral limits of government. The latter risks making government the final arbiter of human freedom.

America’s founding generation was neither religiously nor philosophically uniform. Its members disagreed about theology, church-state relations, and the proper expression of faith in public life. Yet the Declaration articulated a principle that transcended those differences: legitimate political authority is subordinate to a moral order greater than itself.

That conviction helped distinguish the American experiment from governments that claimed authority through hereditary privilege, conquest, or the presumed supremacy of the state.

We should therefore be deeply concerned when our national understanding of liberty becomes increasingly detached from the moral principles that gave it meaning.

The problem is not that every American must profess the same religious beliefs. Religious liberty, including the freedom of conscience, is itself essential to our constitutional inheritance.

The problem emerges when we confuse freedom from government-imposed religion with the notion that faith and transcendent moral truth have no legitimate place in our understanding of citizenship, public virtue, or national identity.

A government prohibited from establishing religion is not a society obligated to forget God.

George Washington recognized the relationship between public morality and the preservation of republican government. In his Farewell Address, he described religion and morality as indispensable supports of political prosperity. John Adams later warned that the Constitution was designed for a moral and religious people, because constitutional restraints alone could not overcome human passions unrestrained by conscience.

These were not casual observations. They reflected a fundamental understanding that no constitutional arrangement, however ingenious, could indefinitely compensate for a people unwilling to exercise self-restraint, pursue truth, honor their obligations, and place principle above personal advantage.

The Constitution can distribute power. It cannot manufacture virtue.

The Bill of Rights can prohibit certain abuses. It cannot compel citizens to value the liberties it protects.

Elections can replace political leaders. They cannot guarantee that voters will exercise discernment, reject deception, or resist the temptation to exchange enduring principles for immediate political gratification.

That responsibility belongs to us.

And herein lies a troubling characteristic of contemporary American political culture.

Too often, political loyalty has become a substitute for independent judgment. Citizens who should be scrutinizing government instead defend its conduct according to which party exercises power. Actions considered intolerable under one administration become acceptable under another. Constitutional principles are invoked when politically convenient and neglected when politically costly.

We have allowed the question of whether government possesses legitimate authority to become secondary to whether its actions advance our preferred political outcomes.

This is not principled citizenship. It is conditional allegiance to principle.

The danger transcends ideology. No political party possesses a monopoly on virtue, and none is immune from the corrupting influence of power. Indeed, the willingness to challenge misconduct among those with whom we agree may be among the clearest measures of our commitment to constitutional government.

A republic cannot remain healthy when its citizens demand accountability only from their opponents.

Nor can it survive intellectually when disagreement becomes synonymous with disloyalty, when persuasion gives way to contempt, or when people surrender their judgment to political personalities, institutions, or carefully constructed narratives.

The American Founders entrusted ordinary citizens with an extraordinary responsibility: to govern themselves.

That responsibility presupposes something more demanding than the periodic exercise of voting rights.

It requires an informed conscience, intellectual humility, moral courage, and a willingness to distinguish truth from convenience.

It requires citizens capable of acknowledging facts that challenge their convictions and defending the rights of those with whom they profoundly disagree.

Most importantly, it requires understanding that freedom and responsibility are inseparable.

For Christians, these obligations carry an additional spiritual significance. The biblical understanding of human dignity, moral accountability, and the limitations of earthly authority provides a compelling foundation for confronting injustice, resisting the idolatry of political power, and recognizing that no government deserves the ultimate allegiance owed to God.

But Christians must also apply those principles to themselves.

Faith loses its moral credibility when it becomes an instrument for excusing dishonesty, cruelty, corruption, or abuses of authority merely because the perpetrators advance causes we favor.

The defense of virtue must begin with its practice.

We should also resist the temptation to romanticize America’s past. The nation that declared all men created equal tolerated slavery and denied generations of Americans the full enjoyment of the liberties it proclaimed. Its history contains both remarkable achievements and serious betrayals of its founding ideals.

Yet those contradictions underscore the enduring importance of the Declaration’s moral claims. The principles of equality and inherent rights provided a standard by which Americans could challenge injustice and demand that the republic become more faithful to its own promises.

Our task is not to pretend that previous generations perfectly embodied those principles. It is to ensure that we do not abandon them ourselves.

Restoring the moral foundation of American liberty cannot be accomplished through legislation alone, nor through the election of a particular leader. Government cannot command genuine faith, produce an honest conscience, or legislate the personal character upon which republican institutions ultimately depend.

That restoration must begin in our homes, churches, schools, communities, and personal conduct.

We must teach our children why rights exist, where governmental authority ends, and why liberty requires discipline. We must recover the ability to reason carefully, disagree honorably, and recognize that political power is never an acceptable substitute for moral truth.

We must become citizens who demand constitutional fidelity from our allies as readily as from our adversaries.

And we must rediscover the courage to question familiar institutions and inherited assumptions without confusing skepticism with cynicism or dissent with disloyalty.

The Declaration’s warning about humanity’s willingness to endure familiar evils was never an invitation to recklessness or revolution over ordinary political disagreements. Its authors explicitly counseled prudence and recognized that governments should not be overturned for temporary or minor grievances.

Their deeper insight concerns the danger of habituation: the human tendency to accept an accumulating departure from principle simply because each successive compromise appears manageable.

A people need not lose all their liberties at once to lose the character necessary to preserve them.

They need only grow sufficiently indifferent to the distinction between rights and privileges, between truth and political convenience, between faithful citizenship and unquestioning obedience.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, Americans face a question more fundamental than which party should govern.

Are we still willing to accept the moral responsibilities that make self-government possible?

Because the preservation of this republic ultimately depends upon something no election can guarantee and no government can bestow: a people sufficiently principled to recognize the limits of power, sufficiently discerning to resist manipulation, and sufficiently courageous to defend liberty even when doing so demands personal sacrifice.

We inherited a republic founded upon the conviction that our rights come from a Creator rather than a government.

Whether we preserve that inheritance will depend upon our willingness to live as though that distinction still matters.

A free people cannot remain free indefinitely when they surrender the conscience to discern what is right, the independence to think for themselves, and the courage to act upon what they know to be true.

A constitutional conservative and political commentator, Garbo writes on government accountability, civil liberties, public policy, and the proper balance between public safety and the rights protected by the Constitution.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.