DWIGHT EISENHOWER, NOV. 9, 1954, TO CONFERENCE ON
THE SPIRITUAL FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY:
Dr. Lowry said something about my having certain convictions
as to a God in Heaven and an Almighty power. Well, I don’t think
anyone needs a great deal of credit for believing what seems to me to
be obvious...Now it seems to me that this relationship between a
spiritual faith, a religious faith, and our form of government is so clearly
defined and so obvious that we should really not need to identify a
man as unusual because he recognizes it....Let us just come down to
modern times since the Reformation. Milton asserted that all men are
born equal, because each is born in the image of his God.
Our whole theory of government finally expressed in our
Declaration, you will recall, said-and remember the first part of the
Preamble of the Declaration was to give the reasons to mankind why
we had established such a government: “Man is endowed by his
Creator.” It did not assert that Americans had certain rights. “Man” is
endowed by his Creator-or “All Men”...So this connection is very, very
clear. And no matter what Democracy tries to do in the terms of
maximum individual liberty for an individual, in the economic and in
the intellectual and every other field, no matter what it tries to do in
providing a system of justice, and a system of responsibility-of public
servants to all the people-and identifying the people as the source of
political power in that government, when you come back to it, there is
just one thing: it is a concept, it is a subjective sort of thing, that a man
is worthwhile because he was born in the image of his God...
The challenges of today...are of two kinds, one from within...as
to the worth-whileness of this form of government...and on the other
side we are attacked by the Communists who in their own documents
state that capitalism-Democracy-carries within itself the seeds of its
own destruction...We are under tremendous attacks...
Fundamentally, Democracy is nothing in the world but a
spiritual conviction, a conviction that each of us is enormously valuable
because of a certain standing before our own God. Now, any group
that binds itself together to awaken all of us to these simple things...is,
to my mind, a dedicated, patriotic group that can well take the Bible in
one hand and the flag in the other, and march ahead.
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PRAYERS & PRESIDENTS
-Inspiring Faith from Leaders of the Past
by William J. Federer
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