Interfaith Insight - 2025
Permanent link for "Giving Thanks for Our National Heritage" by Douglas Kindschi, Sylvia and Richard Kaufman Founding Director, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, GVSU on November 18, 2025
As we enter this Thanksgiving Season, as well as the prelude to America’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we also cannot help but notice the increased focus on the Revolutionary War. PBS this week Sunday through Friday features the 12-hour Ken Burnspresentation of that war that marks the beginning of our existence as an independent nation.
Focusing on these same themes, the November issue of The Atlantic featured a special theme titled “The Unfinished Revolution” with 21 articles in five chapters and nearly 150 pages. Of special interest to me is the article “The Moral Foundation of America.” Author Dr. Elaine Pagels, now professor emerita, held an endowed chair as Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of over a dozen books, the most recently published earlier this year, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.”
The Kaufman Interfaith Institute was pleased to feature her last December along with two other internationally known scholars at its Triennial Interfaith Dialogue. In The Atlantic article she notes that for nearly all of human history rights were conferred by rulers.
“In the ancient empires of Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome,” she writes, “only those whom rulers regarded as their peers had value.” Furthermore, these rulers derived their rights and powers from the gods. Even ancient philosophers, for example Plato, argued that humans because of their differences in intelligence and physical strength are fit only for certain positions and rights in society, some to be rulers, others to be slaves.
Religious scriptures introduce a different understanding of human worth, as when the Bible in Genesis says that humans were “created in the image of God,” Pagels writes, “thus affirming the intrinsic value of all human beings — a fundamental theme for ‘peoples of the book’ Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.” She writes that even the great King David, when “he acted wrongly, the prophet Nathan rebuked him, seeking on behalf of the Lord, and ordered him to repent and reform. In that culture, moral law remained as binding for the king himself as for his subjects — David obeyed the prophet’s command.”
Pagels continues by showing how the Declaration of Independence, written nearly 250 years ago, regains the focus on human rights as “self-evident,” not given by rulers. She writes, “the Founding Fathers agreed that because these are innate rights, they can only be recognized, and not conferred, by human beings. Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power, from the consent of the governed.” These statements were aspirational and not at the time applicable to all citizens. “It took another war to extend those rights to Black Americans,” she notes, “and the work of protecting the rights defined by the Declaration is an ongoing project.”
Pagels concludes her essay with this aspirational thought: “The cruel and dangerous reversion to rule through fear and violence that we are seeing now was among their greatest concerns. But I have faith in their 1776 vision; I believe that the rights to life and liberty are the sacred inheritance of every human being. … Now is the time for those of us who love what the founders entrusted to us to pledge anew — to one another, to our children, and all who come after us — that we stand for their Declaration.”
Let us all give Thanks, celebrate the Declaration and appreciate the rights we have as humans, while we pledge anew and work to ensure that all “children of God” can experience them as our founders envisioned.
