President Calvin Coolidge’s address in 1926 on the 150^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is reflected on by Leon Kass in the 1 July op-ed section of The Wall Street Journal. His presentation is extremely significant in our times, when crude efforts are being made by some either to dismiss the Declaration or else to remove it from the set of the three key charters defining America’s identity; i.e., the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

A central point made by President Coolidge is that America’s freedom rests, ultimately, on its religious foundations. Not that this principle was first enunciated by Coolidge; of course not. Rather, the President was saying what many Christian preachers have said all along – indeed, still say. The truth is that freedom, which is a natural human right, can only be defended, in the final analysis, by truly religious premisses, gleaned from the Sacred Scriptures; and from reason illumined by Revelation.

We have found President Coolidge’s thoughts in, for example, the famed journal of Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled our great nation as it was emerging (1835). The same thoughts date back to the 17^th- and 18^th-century preachers and writers, including Connecticut’s own Thomas Hooker. Thus, noted President Coolidge, these early religious leaders "preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man," and they "justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit."

For President Coolidge, as for our Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence – in Mr. Kass’s analysis – "is a great spiritual document" (italics added). Hence, said the President, "equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man… are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions … Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish" (italics added). Coolidge, the op-ed piece adds, was convinced that "the Declaration’s principles are final, not to be discarded in the name of progress."

Progress? Isn’t the dismissal of the Declaration a backward step – in fact, a leap into the past?

Moreover (and this is where the op-ed piece in the WSJ excels), Coolidge’s concluding comments are highly instructive as well as relevant today:

"We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration [of Independence]. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first …"

Hence, President Coolidge argued: we of today must be "like-minded," and must decline to let ourselves "sink into a pagan materialism." Furthermore, we must "cultivate the reverence for the things that are holy," striving always to follow "the spiritual and moral leadership" that our forefathers here manifested.

Coolidge, Mr. Kass admits, was not a religious zealot, and he greatly valued our concern about the establishment of a specific religious Creed. But he also realized quite well that America’s free institutions and economic prosperity ultimately "rest on cultural grounds, which in turn rest on religious foundations."

To which we all can say, "Amen."