Click here to read an article about The Liberty Pyramid in the September 2021 edition of American Family Association's "Journal Magazine"

This idea that "liberty is a gift of God but the responsibility of men" summarizes The Liberty Pyramid and the establishment of America's constitutional republic.

Our forefathers expressed this principle in two of our founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. In the second paragraph of the Declaration, they laid out five self-evident truths. In the second truth, they explained that our rights -- one of which is liberty -- were endowed by our Creator, which was their way of saying, "Liberty is a gift of God." But, what follows is our responsibility to protect and sustain liberty. They wrote in the fourth truth, "That to secure these rights (i.e. liberty), governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." In other words, while liberty is a gift of God, He has left the responsibility to protect and sustain it to us.

In the Preamble of the Constitution, the Framers wrote, "We the people... in order to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity... do ordain and establish this Constitution..." Having already acknowledged in the Declaration that liberty is an endowment by God to all people, the Founders established a form of government -- a Christian constitutional federal republic -- to protect and sustain liberty. Once again, liberty is a gift of God but the responsibility of men.

Liberty is not a gift of government. Government exists to protect our liberty, not to prohibit it. However, the form of government that our Founders established is so unique and unprecedented that it requires several supports to sustain it. Those supports are explained in The Liberty Pyramid.