Are you ready for a pause from political analysis and the punditry concerning the Presidential election? I certainly am. I am ready for the celebration of Thanksgiving — and so is the United States of America.

Many households are filled with the smells associated with the pies and side dishes which will accompany the Thanksgiving Feast. Last minute shopping for the celebration has brought neighbors to stores throughout the week and prompted early closure of many businesses.

There is something so very good about Thanksgiving — and we all seem to know it intuitively. This richly diverse nation reaffirms its reliance upon God as the source of its liberties.

A Profoundly Religious Core

Though Thanksgiving is referred to as a secular holiday, it is NOT a secularist holiday. Secularism as an ideology seeks to exclude religious influence and the values informed by religious faith from our common life together. That is profoundly at odds with the American idea.

Thanksgiving has a profoundly religious core. So too does the American experiment in ordered liberty.

The Declaration of Independence, the birth certificate of our nation, proclaimed: “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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.”

The words are memorized by schoolchildren and still bring a tear to the oldest American eye with little effort.

Trusting in Divine Providence

The principles the Declaration communicates have informed our history as a free people and inspired our neighbors in other parts of the world to stand up against all forms of tyranny. Our forebears were not declaring their independence from divine providence; they were trusting in the primacy of the governance of God over their own lives and their noble undertaking.

At the core of the American founder’s vision of a good society was a bedrock belief in the need for a common morality upon which this virtuous and free society could be built.

They sought independence from a monarchy which had become tyrannical, precisely because it had forgotten the implications of the primacy of Divine Providence.

The principles set forth in that Declaration were a rallying cry which called forth extraordinary sacrifice from ordinary men and women. They were rooted in something much greater than politics. That is why those principles became a measuring stick against which all governments of men would be measured in the future.

The Real Truth of God-Granted Rights

The founders of this Nation believed there were objective truths to be held — and that those truths are self-evident.

Those truths include the existence of unalienable rights which are given to all men and women by a Creator: rights to life and liberty, including religious liberty, the first freedom. They believed that those truths and rights can be discerned by all men and women because they are revealed by the Natural Law, which is written on all human hearts and is a participation in God’s eternal law.

Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration, Charles Carroll of Carrolton, cousin of the Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore, was the only Catholic signer. At the time of his signing it was illegal for Catholics to hold public office or to vote in Maryland. Yet, he still pledged with all of the signatories, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

He knew the importance of the vision of freedom, rights and liberty which that Declaration proclaimed in those three profoundly simple but supremely powerful words: “We hold these truths.”

At the core of the American founder’s vision of a good society was a bedrock belief in the need for a common morality upon which this virtuous and free society could be built. The classical vision of happiness was yoked to an understanding of the moral life which affirmed that human persons flourish living virtuously.

The founders’ ideas were the fruit of the Jewish and Christian vision of the human person, the family and a just social order which informed Western civilization.

A question asked by Thomas Jefferson cries out for an answer this Thanksgiving: “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

No matter how diverse the American founders were in their religious convictions, or even a lack thereof, they all affirmed those self-evident truths the Declaration proclaimed and recognized that the unalienable rights which flowed from them were given not by civil government but endowed by the Creator. The implication is obvious; they could not be taken away by civil government either.

Our Task and Invitation: Rediscover Freedom

The whole Christian Church, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, has a shared vital task in this hour. She must point the way to the recovery of authentic human freedom in a world weighted down and deluded by a multitude of counterfeits and competing claims.

That way brings us back to three mountains recounted in the Holy Bible:

The one named Sinai where the Ten Commandments were given to the Servant of God Moses.

The one where the Incarnate Word gave us the summary of the path to happiness or beatitude.

And the one called Golgotha, where the Son of God broke the back of the devil, paid the penalty for sin, defeated death and began creation anew.

Our mission involves proclaiming a New Way, the “more excellent way” that St Paul writes of in his letter to the Corinthians, the way of love. (1 Cor. 12 and 13) That is the way to authentic human freedom, flourishing and beatitude or happiness. The Church proclaims the words of her founder, Jesus Christ — that all men and women can indeed “know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32)

The celebration of Thanksgiving is an invitation to rediscover freedom.