July 4 is a sacred holiday for all free people

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, we ought to remember what it’s really all about. Long time ago, in Philadelphia, a group of people came together and made a decision that they valued freedom so much that they were prepared to take on the most powerful, wealthiest empire in the world, the British Empire, tremendously courageous moment. And they were doing it for a moral purpose. And they got a very small group of people led by Thomas Jefferson, to write a document, the Declaration of Independence. And it said something very radical, that our rights come from our Creator, as they as Jefferson wrote, We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. On the fourth of July, we celebrate the fact that for the first time, humans said, we don’t get our rights from the king, or the Emperor, or the dictator, or the strong man, we get our rights from God. And then we loan the government power, but the power is ours. We’re only loaning it. The government itself doesn’t have the power. It relies on the people. And after they won the Revolutionary War, they wrote a constitution. And they re emphasized the centrality when they began the Constitution, by writing, we, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union. So our entire system said to the world, you don’t have to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. You don’t have to automatically bow to the king. You don’t have to accept that government gets to dominate you. In fact, your job every election, is to decide whether or not to keep our fair, the people who you have loaned power to you never give it to them. You loan it to them. And I think that’s what makes this Fourth of July so important. We’re in a world in turmoil. We have terrible problems, whether it’s in Gaza, or it is in Ukraine, or it’s in a variety of other places around the world. And yet there is a beacon of hope. That beacon is a declaration dependence, the belief that whether you’re in Somalia, or Cambodia, or wherever you happen to be, your rights come from God, not from the Americans. The Americans were just the people who discovered the principles. But the principle is universal. It belongs to all of us. And that’s why I think Fourth of July is a very important time, not just for the picnic, not just for the fireworks. But to remember, it was on that date that we declared, our rights come from God.