Freedom Under God… – Sunday, July 05, 1953
There are many theories of government, many political persuasions, many systems of social orders, many philosophies and speculations as to the place and importance of people. But whatever the theories, whatever the allegiance, whatever the ideologies, this blessed freedom we have had has come because the Founding Fathers recognized, first, a living God as the supreme factor and force in the universe and in the affairs of men and nations, and second, man as an immortal child of God, responsible to Him in matters of conscience and responsible as brothers one to another.
Anyone who would eliminate the Lord God from the foundations of freedom or from any social system would in fact be eliminating the very foundations of his own freedom—whether he knows it or not. No matter what a person may think or suppose he thinks of Divine Providence, freedom is founded on the fact that God lives, that His commandments are real and incumbent upon us, that man is more than another order of animal, that he is a child of God whom his eternal Father made in his own image, that he was given dominion over all the earth, that he is of prime importance in the divine plan and purpose, and that he has been endowed with free agency and other God-given rights and responsibilities which no man can justly set aside.
If the right of freedom were not God-given, if we were answerable only to ourselves, only to society, freedom would have little assurance of survival.
The Founding Fathers knew this and acknowledged it; and the agnostic who avowedly knows it not, nevertheless, has his free agency as a gift from God whom he thinks he knows not. The fatherhood of God and the free agency of man which God has given, are the foundation of freedom.
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July 05, 1953
Broadcast Number 1,246