History professor Tyson Reeder invites listeners to confront the nation’s imperfections and help move the Constitution closer to its founding ideals.
At BYU’s Constitution Day lecture, history professor Tyson Reeder examined the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the responsibility Americans have to carry their principles forward.
Reeder began with the Dunlap broadside, one of the first printed copies of the Declaration. While Americans now emphasize its promises of equality and unalienable rights, Reeder explained that the document initially served a practical purpose: declaring the colonies’ independence from Britain.
“Almost immediately, the Declaration of Independence starts to take on a life of its own,” Reeder said. Americans including Black minister Lemuel Haynes, women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton and abolitionist Frederick Douglass later applied the Declaration’s language to people excluded from its original promises.
“For Frederick Douglass, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution needed to be paired,” Reeder said. “And if you pair them properly, then they give hope. They give hope to the hopeless and hope to the nation for a brighter future.”
Reeder then addressed the Latter-day Saint belief that the Constitution was divinely inspired.
“The good things that are in the Constitution—those inspired principles—come from God,” Reeder said. “Those principles, institutions and processes that are meant to protect our rights and our liberties are inspired of God. But we still have to think carefully about what it means to have a divinely inspired Constitution.”
That belief, Reeder said, does not mean that every provision of the Constitution was inspired or that citizens have no responsibility to improve how it is interpreted and implemented.
“The Constitution is divinely inspired, but it needs to continue to have divine inspiration in its interpretation, in its amendments and in the ways that we implement it as a society,” he said. “We need to search deeply in the light of Christ to know how to best do that—to make sure that it continues to perpetuate, that we accentuate the good, the things that come from God, and let go of the things that do not.”
Reeder acknowledged that people sincerely seeking the good may disagree about what the Constitution requires.
“We can search diligently in the light of Christ for the good and still come out with different answers about the best direction for the country,” he said. “But if we are making a good-faith effort to improve our society and improve our Constitution, then we will be fulfilling the mandate that we be peacemakers.”
Rather than treating disagreement as evidence of bad intentions, Reeder encouraged listeners to study the Constitution’s difficult questions together.
“We may disagree with others who are likewise searching diligently in the light of Christ and coming to different conclusions,” he said. “We need to honor the Constitution by understanding its complexities and ambiguities and trying our best to sort those out in good faith with others who disagree with us.”
Reeder connected that responsibility to the scriptural command to study history, countries, kingdoms and laws “for the salvation of Zion.”
“Zion is not an organization. Zion is not a place. Zion is a people,” he said. “So I might take the liberty to read this as: learn all of this for the blessing of Heavenly Father’s children.”
Reeder concluded by returning to the individual responsibility to seek inspiration and improvement.
“We can search in the light of Christ to know how to better ourselves, better our families, better our communities, better our societies and better our nation,” he said. “And we can continue to bring forward this divinely inspired Constitution with our own divine inspiration.”
“What does God expect of nations,” he asked, “if not to bless His children?”
