Australians are probably more familiar with the United States’ Declaration of Independence than we are with our own founding documents. And this would be true of the citizens of most countries.
The Declaration of Independence is genuinely world-famous. Many non-Americans recognise its best-known catchphrases, especially “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’s not just the lofty universality and poetic language of the Declaration that make it famous. The cultural power of the United States makes many uniquely American things familiar to people all over the world.
The cultural power of the United States makes many uniquely American things familiar to people all over the world.
And for much of their history, Americans have used their political, economic and military power to export the ideology of the Declaration.
What is that ideology? That’s always up for debate. Some, for example, see the multiple references to God and Christian-infused language in the text and argue that the founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation.
Others point out that the principal author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, wanted a “wall of separation” between church and state. The document mentions the Creator in vague terms, avoiding any explicit reference to Christianity.
Putting that debate aside, there is no doubt that the Declaration of Independence is itself a sacred document in American life. And Americans will go to extraordinary lengths to try to fit it to their own politics rather than contradict it.
The same goes for the United States Constitution, another document sacred to Americans. There are few political arguments in America that don’t end with somebody brandishing the Constitution.
There are few political arguments in America that don’t end with somebody brandishing the Constitution.
It helps that the US Constitution is one of the world’s shortest and most readable constitutions. Before amendments, it comes to about 4,500 words, compared to more than 14,000 words for Australia.
(The world’s longest national constitution belongs to the world’s largest democracy, India, with 146,385 words. But it is mystifyingly dwarfed by the constitution of the state of Alabama, at 369,380 words.)
The US Constitution has been central to the nation’s most important political battles. Most Americans are familiar with its concepts, or at least they believe they are. One of The Onion’s most accurate headlines was “Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.”
It’s not the same in Australia, although Australia’s Constitution borrows a lot from its American counterpart. Few Australians other than lawyers and judges have ever tried to read our Constitution.
The most famous cultural depiction of our Constitution is from the movie The Castle, when bumbling solicitor Dennis Denuto appeals to “the vibe” of it.
You can’t really blame us when you compare the language of the American and Australian documents. The US Constitution begins with the phrase “We the people”, a beautifully concise rallying cry for popular sovereignty.
Australia’s Constitution begins with “WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:”
And it gets less readable from there.
This is not to diminish the importance of Australia’s Constitution. As Rosalind Dixon and William Partlett argue in The People’s Guide to the Australian Constitution, the Constitution has given Australians a vital mix of stability and flexibility that has strengthened our democracy.
But it isn’t a sacred document to us in the same way the US Constitution is to Americans. Even when Australians vehemently reject changes to the Constitution (witness the recent Voice referendum), the sanctity of the Constitution itself rarely gets invoked in popular debate.
And Australia doesn’t even have an equivalent of the Declaration of Independence, because we didn’t have to fight Britain to secede. Even after Australia became independent, we were still functionally part of the British Empire until after the Second World War.
The Declaration of Independence did not just found the United States. It founded a unique political culture based on sacred — yet secular — documents.
Indeed, many Australians were sceptical of the whole idea of Federation. If you managed to read that paragraph from the Constitution, you may have noticed that Western Australia wasn’t mentioned. That was because Western Australia still hadn’t agreed to join at the time it was originally written.
The Declaration of Independence did not just found the United States. It founded a unique political culture based on sacred — yet secular — documents. A culture where the most important political symbols are words.
As any serious reader of religious texts knows, words, no matter how sacred, need to be interpreted, and can be interpreted in different ways. America’s sacred documents have made a country whose founding ideals will be debated endlessly.
And sometimes, just as in religions, people are prepared to fight and die for their interpretations of the sacred texts.
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