In the end the document was passed after various things had been taken out -- chief of which was the section in which Jefferson made a scathing indictment of slavery. Franklin and Adams and the other two men absolutely agreed with Jefferson on this, but South Carolina absolutely, adamantly refused to vote if that was left in, so this passage was taken out. Interesting, isn’t it, that Jefferson -- who bought slaves, who owned slaves, who worked slaves, who made money out of slaves, who bred slaves, and did other things with slaves, which we won’t mention -- he wrote this scathing indictment of slavery, but then Jefferson was a man of monumental contradictions. So the vote was taken and unanimously the thirteen colonies made their Declaration of Independence.
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Included in that Declaration of Independence was a critical statement, and it is this: That our Creator has endowed us, His creatures, with certain inalienable rights. Now we’ve got to understand what that meant in the mind of Jefferson. Jefferson was not a member of a church. He was never a professing Christian. Interestingly enough, he did read his New Testament in the original language every morning, but it was his own version of the New Testament from which he had excised all statements concerning the miraculous. The reason for that is he was a Deist. A Deist believes in a Creator God who is no longer involved in His creation; therefore, any idea of a miraculous divine intervention is totally ruled out by the Deist. So Jefferson, when he spoke about a Creator God, was thinking in terms of a God who created the world, who set it in motion, but was no longer actively involved in it.
So the world had to be run by human beings without divine intervention. However, this is what he said: that the Creator had endowed His creatures with certain inalienable rights, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I understand that in one of the original drafts that Jefferson wrote, before he went to Franklin and Adams, he didn’t say “the pursuit of happiness.” He said “the pursuit of possessions, and that’s a rather interesting thing that comes of enlightenment thinking.
Now, I’m very interested in this point. I think it phenomenal that this country had in its foundational document a statement concerning the Creator and His relationship to His creatures. I think it’s absolutely fascinating that this nation -- right from the very beginning -- believed that the Creator has communicated to these creatures that they have “certain inalienable rights” including the pursuit of happiness, and if that is the case, that raises a huge question in my mind. Why are there so many unhappy people? Why are there so many unhappy people in America where we have unprecedented opportunities to pursue happiness? That is a profoundly significant question, and I’d like to address it with you this morning.