“When people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves…” –Pr 29:18
 
 *One day last week on the Tonight Show Jay Leno did a “man on the street” interview with several people where he asked a series of questions about the 4th of July, like, What do we celebrate on July 4th? How many original colonies were there? What country did we gain our independence from?
 
 Nobody had a clue, until at the end of the segment when, after he queried a middle-aged man, his wife and their teenage son – and each one could only giggle nervously and plead ignorance – Leno motioned for the grandfather to come to the mike. I’m happy to report that the old guy was able to answer every question correctly, restoring my faith in the American education system. Well, almost.
 
 Now, I’m confident that most of us are well acquainted with the basic facts surrounding the birth of this marvelous nation. We appreciate our freedom and are eager to understand how, since it is denied to so many, it came to be our legacy.
 
 With this in mind, allow me to pose a question that you may not have considered about this freedom that at was finally won for us, at great cost, in 1783: Who taught our forefathers about it? What moved those patriots to be willing to give their lives to be free? Where did the belief come from that men somehow ought to be free, that among our “unalienable rights” is…”liberty”?
 
 Some might say that the concept of individual freedom originated with the American Revolution or, if not there, probably with Enlightenment figures like John Locke.
 
 In actuality, as Rodney Stark points out in his classic work The Victory of Reason, Locke and others built on a foundation laid by the teachings of the Bible. It’s in Genesis, for instance, where we learn that all men are created in the image of God, which means that inequality in the most important sense does not exist. It was this doctrine of the supreme value of every man, according to Stark, that shaped Western ideas about democracy and equality. Hence, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that,  ”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…”
 
 Then, too, the Bible contributed to the concept of freedom through its teaching about governance. Jesus said, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and give to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). There are limits, he explained, to a king’s rightful authority over his people.
 
 Sadly, it’s not just the historical facts about the American Revolution that are no longer taught in our schools. The truth that many of the principles on which Western culture is hinged originated in the Bible is ignored as well. In its stead, young people are indoctrinated to understand that freedom resulted from putting as much distance between us and the Bible as possible.
 
 I don’t know what effect people’s ignorance of the number of original Colonies, etc. has on our nation – surely it’s not a good one - but today’s proverb leaves no doubt that to deny God’s role in our history is calamitous. Distancing ourselves from what God has said leaves us without a solid foundation for believing that all people should be free, thus jeopardizing our own freedom, or as the proverb has it, leaving us “stumbling all over ourselves.”