Bob Hamp

“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…”

And so begins the primary thought in the Declaration of Independence.  The document on which the birth of our nation is founded.  Among the primary documents upon which our government is built we find another document entitled the Bill of Rights.  More recently an era in American history which has significantly shaped out thoughts is a period we refer to as the Civil Rights movement. 

While these documents and that era define our culture, a certain flaw in this focus must be considered.  The sentence preceding the phrase quoted from our Declaration of Independence mentions an ideology perhaps more important than rights in weaving the fabric of our culture, yet this concept seems to have been dropped into the abyss of our history.  The writers of this document, in explaining why this document is being written, state their intent and then they use a phrase to explain the motive behind taking the time to write our Declaration of Independence.  They explain they are communicating their intent because  ” a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires…” such forthright communication.  In other words, before they even mention the rights of people, they mention responsible behavior. 

Unfortunately, our culture is built almost entirely on the protection rights, and hardly at all on the development of responsibilty.  Every good parent knows that these two concepts are connected.  They are connected in this way.  Responsibility earns Rights.  In fact, rights without responsibility will produce entitlement and self-aggrandisement. 

Rights are earned by responsible behavior.  You pass a test, you earn the right to drive, you pass a board exam you earn the righ to practice medicine, or law, or any other profession.  Development of responsibility inherently opens up new rights.  It is a law of nature, and of society.  Where do we see this in our culture?  Unfortunately it is rare because our culture has so been developed around the defense of our rights instead of the promotion of responsibility.

We defend the right for a man to produce pornography, but never ask if it the responsible thing to do.  We allow men the right to plunder our national wealth through greed and manipulation, and these men say “I never did anything wrong!”  However, do they even consider the question “did I do what was right?”.  We can talk about “them”  but we must also look at how this foundational thought has woven its way into our own thought processes.  Do we ask the question, “is it OK for me to do this?”, or do we ask ourselves “what would be the right thing to do?”  Many things are permissible but they do not reflect the highesst good in a situation. 

One final thought. 

In every instance named above, in which our nation planted itself firmly in the defense of rights, it was a response to an injustice.  I believe our founding Fathers intended to build a nation on responsibility.  They wrote both the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, in response to pervasive oppression.  The Civil Rights movement was clearly a national response to an oppressive cultural norm.   In correcting these cuturally accepted wrongs we inadvertently launched a reactive and opposite culturally accepted wrong; the promotion of rights separate from responsibility.  Any time we build a foundation, a culture or a doctrine on the correction of a wrong, we run the danger of swinging the other direction to an equal but opposite danger. 

Is it too late to return to the active and intentional promotion of responsibility as the precursor to rights?  I am not referring to a legal return, I am referring to a cultural return.  Or has our preoccupation with rights, with or without responsibility, became so intertwined in our national thought that we cannot even see the imbalance?

Todays thought comes from an aside by Bill Johnson in his excellent teaching “Leading from the Heart”.  The best teaching on spiritual leadership that I have ever heard.