The Grand Bargain: A Deal with the Ultimate Sovereign
A deal each citizen makes whether they know it or not
Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, a Grand Bargain was formed. The people of the 13 colonies in America decided tyranny wasn’t for them and published a letter explaining why. The signers of that letter knew what they were risking: their names marked their death warrant.
This was the Declaration of Independence, of course.
In it, the colonies declared separation from Great Britain and its tyrannical King, listing specific grievances, including laws imposed without consent, bribed judges, murders, harassment, plundering of their seas, the burning of towns, the hiring of mercenaries and the forced enlistment of colonists to attack their neighbors.
In essence, the King changed the rules at will and ignored the welfare of the colonists.
It was a very bad relationship.
But who’s to say it wasn’t the right relationship? The king had more experience. More resources. Maybe it was just “tough love”? After all, in the typical arrangement between ruler and ruled, the sovereign knew best and needed to use the hammer at times.
Here’s the twist: The Declaration didn’t just reject the king—it rejected the very idea that any human ruler was the supreme authority. The Declaration declared God the sovereign. No one else.
A New Way of Thinking About Government
The Declaration stated that certain rights are granted not by rulers, but are inherent in the “Laws of Nature” and of “Nature’s God” and because of that wrote:
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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It wasn’t just because things were bad, but because their God given rights were being taken away. This belief demanded a new government—one that didn’t grant rights but protected them.
This was the Enlightenment period—an era when many acknowledged moral order as coming from divine truth, including the Christian understanding of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Along with a country, a nation of enlightened people was born—not a political party, a cause or a ruler.
These enlightened people built a man-made structure known as the Democratic Republic of the United States of America. A place to freely exercise God given rights, to own your ideas, one that put on its coin “Mind your business” (a message to its government) and one in which the local governments had the most influence to prevent a far-off tyrannical government ruling over citizens. No government, local or otherwise, was meant to micromanage the thoughts, actions, or allegiances of its citizens. The government’s job was to maintain the structure, mind its business and allow citizens to exercise their God given rights.
The Declaration of Independence and the government it birthed is what gave the opportunity for its citizens to do exceptional things. That’s what makes the country exceptional, not perfect.
America’s Birth Scar: Slavery
And yet, slavery remained—the scar from America’s birth.
It was something identified very early as something morally incompatible with the nation’s founding ideals.
In 1790, Benjamin Franklin, then president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, petitioned Congress for the abolishment of slavery:
Your memorialists...earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject of slavery; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people...
That you will promote mercy and justice toward this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men.
His request was denied.
Franklin responded with a brilliant satire in the Federal Gazette, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade.” In it, he mocked pro-slavery arguments by placing them in the mouth of a fictional Muslim who defended enslaving Christians:
But they are a race of barbarians…They neither have letters, nor are likely to have any…Is it not lawful to enslave men who are inferior to us in understanding?
Franklin was exposing the absurd and evil logic of slavery.
And such evil persisted until after the Civil War when the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freed enslaved people in Confederate states. True national abolition came with the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865. On June 19, 1866, the people in Texas were told about the emancipation proclamation, a holiday celebrated ever since and is now a federally recognized holiday known as Juneteenth.
For all that has been done, there is much more to do. For it is the role of enlightened citizens to be on watch and make the necessary changes to allow for God given rights to be freely exercised by all citizens.
The Grand Bargain Continues
The founders knew the job wasn’t finished. The pleading for change began at the nation’s birth and continues today. It is the responsibility of enlightened citizens to ensure the structure continues to allow all people to freely exercise God given rights. That means nurturing a personal relationship with God.
If you remove God from man, it will surely be replaced by a government, a cause or a person. This new god will dictate every right and wrong through levers and pullies seen and unseen, enslaving its citizens.
Our individual spiritual relationship with God is part of the deal struck in 1776, not just with the colonists but with each generation and citizen since. I have a role to play. Whether realized or not, every citizen of the United States of America has a role to play in the Grand Bargain.
Peace.