America’s “religion” is liberty. The phrase is deliberately metaphorical. Liberty is not a theology, and America has no constitutional creed governing the individual’s relationship with God. Liberty occupies a uniquely high civic station because it protects the domain in which people form families, worship, follow conscience, speak, associate, own property, build institutions, raise children, pursue happiness, and determine the course of their own lives. It creates the political conditions under which the things people hold sacred can remain beyond the ordinary reach of political power.
Liberty also deserves definition because it is related to freedom without being identical to it. Freedom describes the capacity to act without restraint. Liberty is freedom secured within an order of rights, law, responsibility, and limited political authority. It concerns the rightful sphere in which a person may act and the institutional arrangements that preserve that sphere against arbitrary interference. A society organized around liberty therefore joins human agency with the equal rights of others and places government itself under rules governing the legitimate use of power. In the American system, liberty is both a condition enjoyed by the individual and a governing principle by which political authority is judged.
The founding placed that principle within an order that precedes government. The Declaration of Independence invokes the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” describes human beings as endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, identifies Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness among those rights, and states that governments are instituted to secure them through powers derived from the consent of the governed. The sequence is foundational. Human beings possess rights before government is created, and government receives authority for the purpose of securing those rights.
