We don’t often think of the Magna Carta. It is, after all, an ancient legal agreement written in Latin dealing with kings and barons in a far-off land. Our founding fathers, though, thought a lot about it, using that legal framework as a justification for our own independence.
The Magna Carta was signed on June 15, 1215, marking a revolutionary shift in the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. As a document written by flawed men, the Magna Carta was not perfect… but it represented a giant leap forward.
It was heavily inspired by the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. Notably, the government was no longer considered to be above the law. More significantly, the Magna Carta acknowledged that citizens possessed inherent rights as individuals, pre-existing the whims of monarchs and rulers.
When the Magna Carta was signed, it is unlikely that King John and those feudal barons imagined their 3,500 Latin words would be influencing life for eight centuries on an as-yet-undiscovered continent.
And yet, no aspect of life as we know it in these United States would exist without the Magna Carta. While subjects of the crown, Englishmen nonetheless viewed themselves as free men because of the Great Charter signed five centuries earlier in the Runnymede Meadows along the River Thames west of London. Its principles were tightly woven into the fabric of legal and political thought that the colonists brought with them to North America.
When our Declaration of Independence cited King George’s violations of our rights, it was drawing on the details of the events surrounding the genesis of the Magna Carta. Every honest Englishman in the 18th Century would have recognized the American colonists’ grievances as echoes of A.D. 1215.
Indeed, Americans’ frustrations in the 1760s and 1770s over “taxation without representation” would have resonated with those 13th-century barons, who had also been the subject of the crown’s arbitrary levies. From due process to jury trials, the Magna Carta’s limitations on royal power were transferred directly through the Declaration of Independence into our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
What was dimly glimpsed in 1215 was more fully fleshed out in 1776. We are still doing so, by God’s grace.
The preamble of our own nation’s charter, the Constitution, has urged us to pursue a “more perfect union.” That is, one in which the government is strictly limited, the rights of citizens are respected, and the liberty given to us as the children of God is sacrosanct.