The Responsibility of the Citizen: Responsible Citizenship - Freedom Requires More Than an Opinion

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

An ordinary late-eighteenth-century American citizen seated at a simple wooden writing desk or table in the warm light of early morning.

We have spent the last several weeks moving outward in widening circles. We began with the government of the self, moved into the home, considered what we are passing to the next generation, and then stepped across the property line to rediscover the duties of a neighbor. Each step has carried us a little farther into the life of the republic, but each has also kept the same uncomfortable question before us: What responsibility belongs to me?

Now we must widen the circle again.

The neighbor who lives across the fence is also a citizen. So are we. We belong not merely to families and neighborhoods but to a political community in which laws are made, representatives are chosen, taxes are collected, juries are assembled, public institutions are maintained, disagreements must somehow be resolved, and one generation eventually hands the entire enterprise to another.

The American experiment gives ordinary citizens extraordinary authority. We elect those who govern us. We may criticize them, petition them, organize against them, replace them, and challenge their actions through constitutional means. We possess freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and conscience that give the individual citizen enormous room in which to act.

But authority always carries responsibility.

Perhaps that is what we have too easily forgotten. We spend considerable energy asking what our government is doing, what politicians are doing, what political parties are doing, and what is happening to our country. Those are legitimate questions. Yet self-government eventually turns the question around.

What are the citizens doing?

A Republic Requires Something From Us

In April 1776, months before independence was declared, John Adams wrote to Mercy Otis Warren about the kind of character republican government would require. Adams understood that establishing a republic involved more than replacing one set of rulers with another. A government resting upon the people would depend upon something within the people themselves.

“Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private,” Adams wrote, adding that “public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”¹ He believed there must be in the people what he called a “positive Passion for the public good,” strong enough that private interests would sometimes yield when they collided with the rights and welfare of society.¹

Adams was setting a demanding standard, and he knew it. Later in the same letter, he wondered whether Americans actually possessed enough of that virtue to sustain the cause they had undertaken. His concern was not merely whether Americans had sufficient power or intelligence to secure liberty. He worried whether they possessed sufficient character.

That question has not expired.

A republic cannot survive indefinitely if every citizen approaches public life asking only, What do I get? Rights matter profoundly, but a society composed entirely of people demanding their rights while ignoring their duties will eventually consume the very institutions protecting those rights.

Scripture approaches the matter from an even deeper direction. Paul instructed the Christians at Philippi: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” (Philippians 2:3–4 NIV).

Paul was not writing a manual of republican government. He was describing the character of people transformed by Christ. Yet imagine what happens when people possessing that character enter public life. They do not cease caring about their legitimate interests, but neither are their own interests the only ones they can see. They become capable of asking what protects justice, preserves liberty, strengthens families and communities, honors the dignity of their neighbors, and leaves something worth inheriting to generations they will never meet.

Self-government requires more than the right to have an opinion; it requires the character to carry responsibility for the common good.

From Citizens to Spectators

There may never have been a time when Americans had easier access to political information. News arrives continuously. Speeches can be watched instantly. Legislative debates, court decisions, government documents, polling, commentary, and analysis are available from devices we carry in our pockets. Almost anyone can express an opinion publicly within seconds.

Yet access to political information has created an interesting illusion. We can spend enormous amounts of time consuming politics while doing very little that could properly be called citizenship.

Politics can become entertainment. There are teams to cheer, personalities to follow, victories to celebrate, defeats to mourn, commentators to watch, opponents to ridicule, and controversies waiting every morning to reignite our outrage. We can spend hours watching people discuss the republic while slowly becoming spectators of the republic ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with following national events. Citizens should understand what their government is doing. But knowing everything about the latest controversy in Washington while knowing almost nothing about our own city, county, school district, neighborhood, church, or community is an odd expression of self-government.

Watching political commentary is not the same thing as practicing citizenship. Posting an angry response is not civic engagement. Sharing something that confirms what we already believe requires very little of us. Citizenship becomes real when it begins costing something—time, attention, service, study, patience, responsibility, or sometimes the humility to discover that something we confidently believed was wrong.

A spectator asks what happened. A citizen eventually asks, What is mine to do?

Opinion Is Not Yet Judgment

Freedom of opinion is indispensable to a free society. Citizens must be permitted to think, speak, question, argue, persuade, dissent, and criticize those who govern them. But the possession of an opinion does not automatically make that opinion wise, informed, or true.

A republic requires something more demanding than opinion. It requires judgment.

Judgment asks questions that opinion can avoid. Why do I believe this? What evidence supports it? Have I heard the strongest argument from the other side, or merely the weakest version presented by people who already agree with me? Am I repeating something because I know it is true or because I want it to be true? What principle am I defending? What might this decision cost my neighbor? What unintended consequences might follow from what I am demanding?

And perhaps one of the most revealing questions is this: Would I apply the same principle if the political parties were reversed?

That question can expose us quickly. If an action becomes intolerable when committed by someone we oppose but excusable when committed by someone we support, we may not be defending a principle at all. We may simply be defending a tribe.

Christians should be particularly resistant to that temptation. Paul told believers not to be conformed to the pattern of the world but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds so that they could “test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2 NIV). Christian discernment cannot consist merely of repeating whatever our preferred political community tells us. Our first allegiance belongs elsewhere.

That means truth must matter more to us than winning an argument. Character must matter even when the person lacking it is useful to our cause. Falsehood does not become acceptable because it advances an outcome we desire. A rumor does not become responsible speech because it damages someone we dislike.

If we want truthful leaders while rewarding dishonesty whenever it serves our purposes, the mirror has caught us again.

The Constitution Cannot Replace Character

The Founders were not naïve about human nature. The Constitution itself reflects a sober understanding that power must be restrained because people cannot safely be trusted with unlimited authority. Power is divided. Institutions check one another. Elections make officeholders accountable. Constitutional boundaries limit what government may do.

Federalist No. 55 captured the balance particularly well. The essay acknowledged “a degree of depravity in mankind” requiring distrust, but also insisted that human beings possess qualities worthy of “esteem and confidence.” Republican government, it concluded, presupposes those better qualities “in a higher degree than any other form.”²

That is a remarkable insight. The American constitutional order was constructed to account for human weakness, but it was never expected to make virtue unnecessary.

The Constitution can check vice, but it cannot replace virtue.

George Washington expressed a similar conviction at the beginning of the new government. In his First Inaugural Address on April 30, 1789, he spoke of national policy being grounded in “the pure and immutable principles of private morality.” He then described the preservation of liberty and the future of republican government as an experiment “entrusted to the hands of the American people.”³

Entrusted.

There is a great difference between receiving something as a possession and receiving it as a trust. A possession invites us to ask what we can do with it. A trust requires us to ask what responsibility accompanies it.

Liberty is both.

We possess freedom, but we also hold it in trust for people who come after us. The citizen therefore cannot think only about what government will give him today. He must consider what kind of republic his habits, choices, votes, speech, service, and example are helping to leave behind.

Practicing Citizenship

Once we understand citizenship as stewardship, ordinary responsibilities begin to look different. Voting matters, but responsible citizenship begins before entering the voting booth. It requires enough humility to learn before speaking, enough patience to read beyond a headline, and enough integrity to distinguish verified information from rumor even when the rumor favors the conclusion we already want.

It means learning how government actually works rather than imagining that every problem belongs to the president or Congress. Many decisions affecting daily life are made much closer to home. Local boards, councils, commissions, courts, schools, and community institutions require citizens willing to understand them and occasionally serve within them.

Citizenship also includes quieter obligations. Serving on a jury may interrupt our schedule, but a system of justice by one's peers cannot function if everyone considers jury service somebody else's responsibility. Paying what we legitimately owe, obeying just laws, participating in community life, supporting worthwhile institutions, communicating with representatives, and preserving constitutional means of disagreement are not glamorous acts. They are the ordinary maintenance of self-government.

Responsible citizenship also requires us to know how to lose. In a republic, our preferred candidate will sometimes lose an election. Our argument will sometimes fail. A law we opposed may pass; a policy we supported may be rejected. Constitutional government assumes that citizens can endure political disappointment without concluding that everyone who disagrees with them has become an enemy.

Likewise, responsible citizenship requires enough moral independence to hold people we support to standards similar to those we demand of people we oppose. No political leader deserves the surrender of our conscience. No party is entitled to redefine right and wrong for us. If our principles change whenever power changes hands, they were never principles.

This is where citizenship returns once more to self-government. The person incapable of governing his own passions will eventually carry those passions into politics. Anger, fear, greed, pride, resentment, tribal loyalty, and the hunger for power do not become virtues merely because they enter a voting booth.

The republic ultimately receives the character its citizens bring into it.

Salt and Light

Jesus told His followers, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13–14 NIV). Neither image suggests withdrawal. Salt enters what it preserves. Light shines where darkness exists. Yet neither image suggests domination either. Salt serves its purpose by being salt, and light fulfills its purpose by shining.

That offers Christians a better vision of citizenship than either political obsession or cultural retreat.

We participate because our neighbors matter. We tell the truth because truth matters. We vote because stewardship matters. We serve because communities matter. We defend religious liberty not only when our own religion needs protection but because conscience matters. We protect the rights of people with whom we disagree because rights cease to be rights when they belong only to those currently holding power.

We speak when conscience requires courage and listen when wisdom requires humility. We oppose what is wrong without allowing hatred to consume us. We refuse to surrender biblical conviction for political acceptance, but we also refuse to baptize every political preference as though it came directly from Scripture.

And when our side is wrong, we say so.

That may be one of the simplest tests of whether conviction still governs us more than tribe.

Entrusted to Our Hands

Americans spend enormous amounts of time asking what kind of government we have. We evaluate presidents, legislators, judges, governors, mayors, agencies, parties, and institutions. In a nation of self-government, those evaluations are necessary.

But there is another question that precedes them.

What kind of citizens does our government have?

Every election eventually ends. Every officeholder eventually leaves. Every political controversy, no matter how consuming it feels today, will eventually give way to another. But the responsibilities of citizenship remain because the republic does not finally rest in the hands of one president, one Congress, one court, or one political party.

Washington's words at the beginning of the constitutional government remain striking. The experiment was “entrusted to the hands of the American people.”³

Those hands are now ours.

We cannot control what every other citizen does with that trust. We cannot guarantee the character of those who seek office or the wisdom of every decision government makes. But after thirty-two chapters of looking outward and then repeatedly being turned back toward the mirror, perhaps we have learned where renewal must begin.

It begins with the responsibilities actually within our reach.

Learn. Think. Discern. Serve. Participate. Tell the truth. Protect liberty. Practice virtue. Love your neighbor. Govern yourself. Then ask the question self-government eventually requires each of us to answer:

If every American practiced citizenship the way I do, would the republic be stronger or weaker?

Spirit & Truth

Thom H. Paine

Notes

1. John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, April 16, 1776, in Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, vol. 1 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917), 222–23. Adams wrote that “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private” and described public virtue as “the only Foundation of Republics.”

2. James Madison, The Federalist No. 55, February 13, 1788. The essay balances recognition of “a degree of depravity in mankind” with the contention that republican government necessarily depends upon better qualities of human character.

3. George Washington, “First Inaugural Address,” April 30, 1789. Washington connected the new government's prospects with “the pure and immutable principles of private morality” and described the preservation of republican liberty as an experiment “entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

   
   

Bibliography

Adams, John. Letter to Mercy Otis Warren, April 16, 1776. In Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren. Vol. 1. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist. No. 55. New York, 1788.

Washington, George. “First Inaugural Address.” April 30, 1789. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.

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.