A Government of Laws, and Not of Men: Ordered Liberty Begins with a Governed Self

A Weekly Devotional from The Founders’ Quill: Reclaiming America’s Judeo-Christian Heritage through Spirit and Truth.

Ordered liberty • Government of Laws and not of Men

“You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.”— Galatians 5:13 (NIV)

When George Washington surrendered his military commission to Congress in December 1783, he did more than resign a position. He demonstrated a principle upon which free government depends: no man is greater than the authority to which he is rightly accountable.

We considered that remarkable moment in our last chapter. The victorious general possessed enormous influence. He had the loyalty of an army and the affection of a grateful people. History offered abundant examples of military heroes who turned victory into personal power. Washington chose another path. He laid his commission before the representatives of the people and went home.

But there is another side to that story.

It is relatively easy to admire Washington for governing himself. It is considerably harder to ask whether we are willing to do the same.

For twenty-six chapters, we have been recovering an inheritance. We have listened to the Founders, examined the ideas that shaped the American experiment, and considered the Judeo-Christian moral framework within which ordered liberty developed. We have also looked honestly at what happens when a culture begins severing liberty from virtue and rights from responsibility.

Eventually, however, history must become personal. The question cannot forever be, What did they believe? Nor can it forever be, What has happened to America? Sooner or later, the mirror must turn toward us. And when it does, the question becomes much more uncomfortable:

Who governs me?

A Government of Laws

An ordinary late-eighteenth-century American citizen stands quietly at the doorway of his modest home at dawn.

Seven years before Washington surrendered his commission, John Adams was thinking deeply about the kind of government Americans would need if independence were achieved. In his 1776 pamphlet Thoughts on Government, Adams wrote that a political constitution should seek “the happiness of society” and that good government depended upon laws capable of restraining the passions and protecting the common good.¹

That conviction found enduring expression in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, principally drafted by Adams. Its Declaration of Rights established separation of governmental powers so that the commonwealth might be “a government of laws and not of men.”²

The phrase is simple enough for a schoolchild to understand. And profound enough for a civilization to forget. A government of laws means that the ruler is not sovereign merely because he possesses power. His authority has boundaries. There are standards beyond his desires. The president does not become the law. Neither does the legislature. Neither does the judge. But neither does the citizen.

That final sentence may be the one our generation most needs to recover.

Americans have become very good at demanding limitations upon the power of other people. We are considerably less enthusiastic about limitations upon ourselves. We speak often of my rights, my choices, my happiness, my identity, my truth. The words vary according to the issue, but beneath much of modern culture lies a remarkably consistent assumption:

The individual self should possess final authority over the individual self.

No institution should tell me who I am. No tradition should tell me how I ought to live. No inherited moral order should restrict my choices. Increasingly, even the physical realities of the human body are treated as material to be subordinated to the desires of the autonomous self.

But common sense asks a question our culture rarely wants to entertain:

If everyone becomes his own highest authority, what remains capable of governing us?

Liberty Is Not the Absence of Restraint

This is where we have badly confused liberty with license. The Founders did not create a republic on the assumption that freedom meant doing whatever one pleased. They understood something far older: liberty survives only when human beings possess enough moral restraint to govern themselves.

John Adams expressed the principle forcefully in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”³ We encountered those words earlier in our journey, when considering the relationship between virtue and liberty. They deserve to be heard again now because their implications have become personal.

Why would a constitution require moral people?

Because limited government requires self-limited citizens.

If every appetite must be controlled externally, government must continually expand to control it. If promises mean nothing, contracts require greater enforcement. If families disintegrate, institutions must assume responsibilities once carried within the home. If conscience no longer restrains conduct, regulation and coercion inevitably attempt to fill the vacuum.

The more we lose the ability to govern ourselves, the more someone—or something—must govern us.

That is not a partisan observation.

It is common sense.

Self-government requires a governed self.

The Oldest Temptation

Yet the problem is older than America. It is older than modern politics. It is as old as Eden.

The serpent's temptation was not merely an invitation to eat forbidden fruit. At its heart was the promise of moral autonomy: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NIV). Humanity was tempted to seize the authority to determine for itself what was good and what was evil. We have been reaching for that fruit ever since.

Every generation finds new language for the same ancient rebellion. We prefer a God who affirms our desires to a God who commands our obedience. We welcome grace but resist authority. We want God's comfort without God's correction, His promises without His precepts, His blessings without His boundaries. And if we are Christians, we should be particularly careful before pointing an accusing finger toward the surrounding culture.

It is easy to condemn moral relativism in society while practicing a quieter version of it ourselves.

We can affirm the authority of Scripture until Scripture interferes with our money.

Our sexuality.

Our anger.

Our entertainment.

Our ambition.

Our forgiveness.

Our speech.

Our politics.

Our treatment of the person across the street—or across the aisle.

Then suddenly obedience becomes complicated. The problem of the sovereign self does not belong exclusively to secular America. It lives remarkably close to home.

The Christian Paradox of Freedom

This is why the New Testament's understanding of liberty sounds so strange to modern ears.

Paul tells the Galatians, “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free.”

There it is: freedom.

But Paul immediately places a boundary around it:

“Do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love” (Galatians 5:13, NIV).

Christian freedom is not freedom from all authority. It is freedom for the good.

We are liberated from the tyranny of sin so that we may become servants of righteousness. We are freed from slavery to appetite so that we may love God and neighbor. We discover that obedience to God does not diminish human flourishing; it makes genuine human flourishing possible.

Jesus put the matter even more plainly: “If you love me, keep my commands” (John 14:15, NIV).

There is no contradiction between love and obedience in the Christian life. Nor is there ultimately a contradiction between righteous restraint and liberty. A train is most “free” when it remains upon the rails for which it was designed. Remove the rails in the name of liberation and it does not become more free. It becomes incapable of reaching its destination.

Human beings are no different.

We were created by God and for God. His moral order is not an arbitrary prison constructed to prevent our happiness. It describes the rails upon which human flourishing was designed to travel.

When Every Boundary Becomes Oppression

Our culture increasingly teaches us to regard boundaries themselves with suspicion.

Marriage has boundaries.

Sexuality has boundaries.

Parenthood has responsibilities.

Citizenship has duties.

Speech carries consequences.

Freedom of religion includes the responsibility to live according to conscience.

Human life possesses dignity that places moral limits upon what the strong may do to the weak.

Male and female are not merely oppressive categories imposed upon an otherwise undefined humanity, but realities bound up with our embodied existence.

We can argue endlessly over individual controversies, and there will certainly be difficult cases requiring wisdom, compassion, and careful judgment. But underneath many of our cultural battles lies a more fundamental question:

Does anything exist that the individual does not have the authority to redefine?

If the answer is no, then liberty has quietly become sovereignty. And human beings were never designed to carry the weight of sovereignty.

We cannot create truth.

We cannot create morality.

We cannot create human nature.

We cannot grant ourselves dignity.

We receive these things.

The Declaration of Independence understood rights in precisely this way. Human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”⁴ Rights are secure precisely because they are not inventions of the state—or inventions of the self.

That is a very different conception of freedom from the one increasingly offered to us.

Before We Rebuild America

It would be tempting to stop here and ask what must change in Washington, in our schools, in our courts, in our universities, in Hollywood, or in the media.

Those are legitimate questions. But they are not the first question.

The first question is closer.

What must change in me?

If America needs a recovery of moral conscience, then someone must begin living conscientiously.

If our families need strengthening, someone must become more faithful at home.

If our children need moral formation, someone must teach them.

If our churches need courage, someone must stop being ashamed of the truth.

If our communities need responsibility, someone must accept responsibility.

If our public discourse needs honesty, someone must refuse to repeat the convenient lie.

If our nation needs citizens capable of self-government, then we must become people capable of governing ourselves.

This is where reclaiming our heritage ceases to be an intellectual exercise.

History can tell us what was built.

History can show us what has been lost.

History can warn us what happens when the foundations crumble.

But history cannot repent for us.

History cannot pray for us.

History cannot discipline our appetites.

History cannot raise our children.

History cannot forgive our neighbor.

History cannot open our Bible tomorrow morning.

History cannot make us courageous.

Those things belong to us.

And perhaps this is where the recovery of a civilization actually begins—not with millions of people doing something spectacular, but with ordinary men and women doing ordinary things faithfully because they once again understand that they live beneath the authority of God.

Who Governs You?

Washington laid down his sword. Adams insisted upon a government of laws. The American constitutional system divided power because the Founders understood that human beings could not safely be trusted with unlimited authority. Perhaps we should apply their wisdom closer to home.

Why would unlimited authority be dangerous in a king but harmless in me?

Why should presidents submit to law while my appetites submit to nothing?

Why should judges recognize constitutional boundaries while I resent every moral boundary God places around my life?

Why should Washington surrender his power while I insist upon keeping mine?

There is the mirror.

And there is the beginning of renewal.

Before we can reclaim a culture of ordered liberty, we must recover the ordered soul.

Before we can rebuild institutions, we must rebuild character.

Before we ask whether America is still one nation under God, perhaps each of us must first ask whether we are still living under God.

The work ahead will require more than remembering. It will require becoming. So begin somewhere concrete.

Choose one place in your life where you already know what is right but have resisted doing it. Do not begin with Congress. Do not begin with your neighbor. Do not begin with the people you believe are destroying the culture.

Begin with the person in the mirror.

Bring that one place beneath the authority of Christ.

Tell the truth.

Keep the promise.

Forgive the offense.

Turn away from the habit.

Honor your marriage.

Teach your child.

Open the Scriptures.

Return to worship.

Serve your neighbor.

Do the next faithful thing.

Then do it again tomorrow.

A civilization is not restored in a day. Neither is a human soul formed in one. But both must begin somewhere.

For twenty-six chapters we have asked what kind of inheritance the Founders left us.

Perhaps it is time to begin asking a different question:

What kind of people must we become if we intend to preserve it?

And the first question on that road is the simplest—and perhaps the hardest—of all:

Who governs you?

Spirit & Truth,

Thom H. Paine

Notes

1. John Adams, Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1776).

2. Massachusetts Constitution, pt. 1, art. XXX (1780). The article establishes separation among legislative, executive, and judicial powers so that the commonwealth may be “a government of laws and not of men.”

3. John Adams, “To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,” October 11, 1798, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 9 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), 229.

4. United States Continental Congress, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

   
   

Bibliography

Adams, John. Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies. Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1776.

Adams, John. “To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts.” October 11, 1798. In The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. Vol. 9. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854.

Massachusetts. Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1780.

United States Continental Congress. The Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 4, 1776.

The Founders’ Quill seeks to recover the spiritual and moral foundations that shaped the American experiment in ordered liberty. By returning to Scripture, history, and the wisdom of those who came before us, we are invited not merely to admire our inheritance but to become people capable of preserving it.