Defending the Declaration: How the Bible Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence.

FAR FROM being the great end of government, "the pursuit of happiness" is supposed to be one of those ideals, like "social progress" or perpetual world peace, upon which the conservative looks with suspicion. It was not merely a vain promise the Founders enshrined in our Declaration, so this criticism goes, but moral sanction for the unbridled voluptuaries of our day inflamed by ever more destructive appetites-"chasing their happiness out an upper-story window" (in the classic imagery of Malcolm Muggeridge), never mind who might happen to be standing below. Worse, argue Muggeridge and others, this hollow promise only tempts the inevitable failures in that pursuit to blame their empty lives on society, thus elevating the common malcontent to the moral status of the Dispossessed.

Of course the obvious reply-made partially in Gary Amos's Defending the Declaration-is that when Thomas Jefferson wrote those words he did not have in view the fevered political passions and monogrammed morality of the modern era.

We can pretty well guess, for instance, what would have happened had some social progressive of 1776 boldly set up a salacious "adult" display for the benefit of emotionally repressed colonists-arguing that this form of "free speech" was, after all, among the privileges for which the Founders had just pledged their sacred honor. Not only would the social visionary have had a little chat with a magistrate on the meaning of "speech"-not to mention "adulthood"-he'd probably have been put on display himself for a purgative beating in the village square. The idea that "the pursuit of happiness" might be invoked as justification for the worship of Tolerance over Justice, a motto for the abortion culture, was about as close to the Founders' designs as Monticello is to the Playboy Mansion.

One knows this, and yet it's quite another matter calmly to present all the historical evidence for inspection by the libertine angrily asserting his "Jeffersonian" mandate-a task Mr. Amos has done admirably.

First, he writes, the Declaration does not promise we will obtain happiness, merely that we're free to pursue it. An obvious enough point, but it's useful to learn that Jefferson had before him a copy of the Virginia Constitution and rejected its more utopian promise of "pursuing and obtaining

More to the point, Mr. Amos contends, by "happiness" the Declaration meant-and means still-that "sense of well-being and blessedness in [man's] earthly existence that comes with obeying the laws of his Creator." The Founders used "happiness" in the same sense in which they themselves and all good men had always pursued it: the classical and Christian sense of "right living" in accord with the self-evident truths written into man's nature. The sort of happiness, as Lincoln would later add, that a slave-owner lazing about the plantation while others earned his bread could never know. In fact it turns out-assuming Mr. Amos, an attorney and instructor at Virginia's CBN University, has his shades of meaning straight-that the Latin equivalent for happy is beatus as in the Beatitudes.

Such strong language as self-evident truths" ought to have persuaded the liberal sophist, providing his usual intellectual front for the libertine, to stay far away from the entire subject and concentrate on the more gratifying project of "updating" the Constitution. But dishonesty is a hard habit to shake, and so in Mr. Amos's footnotes we find the usual advocates of the broad interpretation, the allowance for changing values," making an equally eloquent case for honoring the original intent of our supposedly irreligious, relativistic Founders. As most undergraduates soon discover, modem scholarship has declared "self-evident" truths to mean, upon closer textual examination, truths relative to that less enlightened time. "Supreme Judge" signifies something closer to "world opinion." And "nature and nature's God" clearly refers to just plain Nature. Those tiresome religious references, we're assured by one liberal historian cited here, were just so much rhetorical decoration, impressive in its day but now best forgotten or stored away in America's "poetic attic."

Happily for us, as Mr. Amos proves in this small book, all the embarrassing old junk that liberals are furiously stuffing into the historical trunks was coveted, and used, by Jefferson himself. And so too, it turns out, by the philosopher assumed to have most influenced the Founders-John Locke. That name is revered by Enlightenment idolaters for the fearful beating he dealt the pious Sir Robert Filmer in his First Treatise on Government, settling for all time the issue of the divine right of kings. And yet the really significant thing about that great book, Mr. Amos observes, is that Locke did so not by refuting the Bible but by arguing from the Bible.

John Locke the sternly rationalist, anti-Christian hero is a fabrication, writes Mr. Amos, a "lie" put about by secular historians to downplay America's Judaeo-Christian lineage. Here, after all, was a man who followed his First Treatise with another work called The Reasonableness of Christianity, and believed innocently that the eternal moral truths were so obvious, so self-evident, that "none could be so brutish as to deny" them. And as for Jefferson, call him a naturalist or a deist or whatever, says Mr. Amos, but how many other Presidents spent their evenings in the White House clipping out favorite sayings of Christ to paste in a notebook, with the aim of keeping "clear moral judgment"?

A question persists, though. If the Founders were such devout Christians, why didn't they use more explicit language than vague terms like "Providence" and "Supreme Judge"?

For the same reason, answers Mr. Amos, that even the authors of the Mayflower Compact used no Christian references: because they were truly reverent men, not given to tossing about the name of their Maker. "While acknowledging God was considered every man's moral duty," he explains, "it was deemed inappropriate to use the divine name casually or with the appearance of too much familiarity." He might also have included the example of Theodore Roosevelt, who opposed using "In God We Trust" on our currency only because it was insufficiently reverent. A good lesson there, for the liberal historian as for everyone else.