My trauma in D.C.

As I toured Washington, D.C. several year ago, I was struck that our government buildings are dominated by towering marble pillars. These symbols of strength and permanence provide a sense of security to visitors of the nation’s power center. They whisper to us that our liberties are safe, protected by forces greater and more durable than we are.

I like pillars.

Beyond those architectural symbols I found myself in the visitors’ balcony of the U.S. Senate chambers. From there, I peered downward at one of the most powerful governing bodies in the world.

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The Senate, in coordination with the House and other government branches, sets the legal structure under which we are allowed—or forbidden—to work, raise families, worship, play, speak out.

As I gazed down at this renowned assembly, I was stunned by what I saw. Seated at the 100 mahogany desks on the Senate floor were people—men and women. There were no pillar-like icons of strength and stability positioned at those desks, no god-like figures emanating truth and goodness.

My freedom and yours, I realized, were in the hands of mere humans who, while having a rich capacity for goodwill, also exhibit a time-proven tendency toward greed, deceit and injustice.

I had entered those historic chambers anticipating something awe-inspiring and transcendent. All I found were tarnished humans like, well, me.

The secure feeling I had from all those mammoth pillars abruptly collapsed like the toppled column of an ancient Greek ruin.

Restlessly searching about the room, I eventually found the reassurance for which I longed. Etched into the marble walls were the simple words “In God We Trust.”

Later, I read similar words engraved at the Jefferson Memorial. “God who gave us life gave us liberty,” Jefferson is quoted. “Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

I came to realize I was in good company in my anxiety over entrusting our freedoms to the mixed intentions of men.

In the Declaration of Independence—referred to by Martin Luther King as one of the “wells of democracy dug deep by the founding fathers”—Jefferson asserted that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” That determinative concept is biblically derived, from the first chapter of Genesis.

Though he was steeped in Enlightenment rationalism, Jefferson’s political thinking reflected an essentially biblical world view. The same was true of most of the other founders as reflected in our official graffiti. Biblical references are found engraved in the walls of government buildings throughout our nation’s capital.

Sadly some of the founders, including Jefferson himself, betrayed the principles of liberty by participating in the millennia-old, inherited practice of slavery.

In less than a century from America’s founding, however, that tragic institution was obliterated by the sheer potency of the very principles the founders themselves propounded.

It is indeed fortunate that, as Jefferson asserted, it is not man but the Creator who constitutes the towering and unshakable pillar of human liberty.

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Originally published by St Louis Suburban Journals

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