ECHOES OF EXCEPTIONALISM: The Dignity That Makes Argument Possible

History loves fireworks and grand displays. But the work that keeps a republic alive often occurs in the heat of disagreement, with little fanfare by tired men and women who stay in the room when leaving would be easier.

Two hundred and thirty-nine years ago, this week, in late August 1787, Philadelphia was thick with humidity and frustration. The Constitutional Convention had been sitting since May. Those attending described brutal tempers and harsh debate causing several delegates to openly prepare to go home rather than complete the work before them.

Rhode Island didn’t send a soul to the convention. Many considered it folly, for they were trying to do what no one had ever accomplished: design a government that would constrain its own power in obedience to a moral truth about the dignity of the human person.

England had limits on government, but the limits were the product of tradition and Parliament, not a written constitution supreme over both. That is why we see the steady erosion of free speech in Great Britain today. The scope of “free” speech is whatever Parliament, in the present moment, will tolerate.

The delegates gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were attempting something much more difficult. They meant to design a government answerable to a standard older and higher than the state itself. Most thought it could not be done. Seventy-four were appointed. Fifty-five came for at least one day. Daily attendance was often under thirty. The largest sitting, in mid-June, was forty-five.

On ordinary August days, the Republic was being framed by a room that would not fill a modern jury pool.

The delegates did not spend their hours proclaiming their own greatness or the weakness of those who opposed them. They did not attempt to provoke fear or hope in those back home in order to win applause or support. Rather, they argued, line by line, about each word of the Constitution.

How much power should the President hold? Should we have a President at all? How should judges be chosen? How should power be separated between the three branches of government in order to protect liberty by sacrificing efficiency for restraint? How much power should the federal government have over the states?

They fought hard. Yet they attacked proposals more than persons. Their arguments did not rest on assigning false motivations, attacking identity, or challenging the credentials of the speaker. They understood that fruitful debate requires listening as seriously as speaking, and that a republic is strengthened when a man offers a rebuttal to an argument rather than a renunciation of the one who made it.

No one tried to destroy James Madison because votes went against him. No one tried to silence Roger Sherman for stubbornness. Alexander Hamilton was abrasive but still heard. Disagreement was the price of liberty, not proof the other man had forfeited his place among the living.

The spirit of argument was possible only because the delegates shared a deeper conviction: that government possesses no moral authority to dominate the individual, because every person bears an inherent dignity granted by God.

That shared belief in the inherent dignity of the person made genuine argument possible. It gave them a common moral horizon even when their proposals collided.

It also exposes the tragedy they could not resolve: the truth they affirmed was not applied to the enslaved, a contradiction that would demand a terrible reckoning less than a century later.

The delegates did not resolve slavery because they had not yet escaped the factionalism that protected it, and because the government they were designing had not yet enshrined the very moral truth that made their cooperation possible. Although several states had already begun the process of abolition, without a constitutional structure to defend the dignity of the individual, the country as a whole could not yet liberate the enslaved. The terrible price paid in the Civil War shows that the divine truth about Mankind was stronger than the compromise that denied it.

This truth is deeply embedded in the Gospel itself. Scripture teaches that every person bears the image of God, and that our faith should rest on His goodness and on the free exercise of liberty in relationship with Him—not on the power of the State. When faith is displaced from God and vested instead in government, politics becomes nothing more than a struggle for power.

This is why some today seek both to erase faith from the public square and to deconstruct the constitutional design that protects liberty. If the state becomes the object of hope, then the Constitution becomes an obstacle, those who question the State become heretics, and the individual becomes a problem to be managed.

Without moral truth—without the recognition of the God-given dignity of the individual—there is no answer to tyranny at all. Here, the serious questions of a society disappear, rights become fungible, and the only thing left is the efficient management of people.

Efficiency is exactly what the Framers feared. Tyrannies are always efficient in the sense that they swiftly execute the orders of the tyrant. They can act swiftly because they do not need to respect rights or people.

A government built to protect liberty must be deliberately inefficient – slowed by divided powers, checked by competing branches, and constrained by a judicial adherence to the Constitution. The inefficiency is not a flaw but a safeguard. Most often when our government is inefficient, it is because it is purposely designed to be so.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia so eloquently put it in his famous testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2011, Americans must “learn to love the separation of powers, which means learning to love the gridlock.”

The gridlock, he continued, is what “the Framers believed would be the main protection of minorities – the main protection. If a bill is about to pass that really comes down hard on some minority and they think it’s terribly unfair, it doesn't take much to throw a monkey wrench into this complex system. So, Americans should appreciate that and they should learn to love the gridlock. It’s there for a reason – so that the legislation that gets out will be good legislation.”

Efficiency in the absence of moral truth is simply power without restraint.

This is the heart of American exceptionalism: that for nearly 240 years a Constitution built on moral truth has restrained power, protected liberty, and endured every storm set against it. It survives because it rests on something deeper than politics – the conviction that the individual person is not the servant of the state but the creation of God. And because that truth is eternal, the Constitution remains under constant assault from ideas that deny it – ideologies that treat the person as material, movements that seek to erase the separation of powers or erase minority protections through embracing majoritarian decisions, theories that promise liberation through the concentration of authority. These ideas must be refuted, boldly so, because they threaten the very structure that guards the dignity of the person. But in refuting ideas, we do not cancel persons. We reject falsehood without erasing those who hold it.

For a republic cannot endure by silencing its citizens; it endures by defending the truth that makes citizens free.