At Liberty to Sacrifice

            The Founding Fathers worried that the democracy they put together would not stand for long; they knew that many factors went into a successful republic, such as subdued factions, restrained partisanship, a public that cared for its own liberty, and civic virtue among the democracy’s citizens.  This last factor demonstrates that it is not just heroes, the giants on whose shoulders we stand, who must promote Americanism through service and sacrifice; to survive, these values must also be fostered by ordinary citizens, people caught in mundane times and unspectacular lives, who choose to serve their country.  This service includes voting and staying informed of a politician’s behavior, but it also includes voluntary service for the community’s greater good.  The sheer proportion of philanthropy in the United States that is volunteered legitimizes the nation’s love of freedom; given the free choice to be outstanding citizens or merely satisfactory ones, many Americans select the former.  The American commitment to community promotes our nation and culture by making people look beyond themselves and by exercising constitutional freedoms.

            A democracy requires that its citizens aim for the common good and not merely their own; otherwise, the government will never be able to function to anyone’s benefit, except perhaps to the benefit of the most powerful faction of the citizenry.  The constitution protects us against this through federalism and the separation of powers, and many voters look to benefit the nation for the practical reason of preventing the threat named above, but others truly seek to help the whole nation because they believe that it is the morally right thing to do.  This last reason for a citizen to work for the common good rather than (and sometimes against) their own individual good is a knife honed on a whetting stone of volunteered service.  Anyone who travels to an unwelcoming community for a mission trip, anyone who spends a morning sorting mountains of potatoes for the poor, and anyone who attends a weekly meeting at an important community institution knows what it means to give up something for another’s sake.  Thus, the Americans who volunteer their time, effort, and/or finances for their neighbors’ sake can make a sound judgment of which national policies to advocate for the common good; their civic virtue can easily translate into better decisions for American democracy.

Constitutional freedoms, like muscles, risk a state of atrophy if they are not used.  Several freedoms specified in the constitution, such as the freedom of assembly and the freedom of religion, are crucial to many of the voluntary acts of sacrifice through community service that Americans perform on a daily basis.  Volunteers of all sorts, be they religious or secular, donors of time or of money, and helping the environment or the disadvantaged, need to organize themselves in order to get their work done.  Naturally, when people organize something, at least some of them need to assemble; hence, volunteer service uses the freedom of assembly even though the assembly is not for a political purpose.  After all, a government seeking to abridge this freedom would not care what the assembly’s purpose is for (though the citizens under that government would not be happy to see a charity harassed for holding an organizational meeting).  Many service groups in the United States are religiously oriented; the people in them are motivated by faith to sacrifice for others.  Spiritual charities such as these could be threatened by a government seeking to impose one religious belief; but one reason why that government would have difficulty winning popular support is that it would stymie philanthropic institutions of any religion that is not state-sponsored.

As George Washington said in his Farewell Address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports…A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity…’Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”  This is in part because, as Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, “While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.”  To define morality, virtue, and religion as community service and a spirit of volunteerism would be to confine them; still, the countless hours of service rendered by Americans do qualify as necessary in forming the morality and virtue that Washington and Lincoln found to be so important for our democracy’s survival.  The civic virtue that our Founders craved for their new nation is fostered well by the humble sacrifice of time, sweat, energy, and money that ordinary Americans contribute to their communities, and others, on a regular basis.  So long as the people of the United States recognize their moral need to look beyond their own interests, two results are secure: a spirit of volunteerism that is uniquely strong in the nation, and a democratic attitude of seeking to work for the benefit of the whole.