GUEST COLUMN: Rediscovering the American idea

This Fourth of July we celebrate America's 244th birthday. Not quite a Sestercentennial but close. If you were to have taken a poll back in 1776 you would be hard pressed to find many around the globe who would have thought that this fledgling upstart of a nation would have made it to 244 candles on its birthday cake. Historically, it is remarkable. No nation had tried self-government on this scale. No country had begun its existence with a philosophical claim or the adoption of a creed, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. After all, that's one of the reasons America is exceptional.

So while we rightfully celebrate our bold experiment, there is some trouble on the horizon and we better get in front of it. Recent surveys show that American pride is the lowest it has been in decades. And 40% of Americans under the age of 35 believe that the First Amendment is dangerous. If that wasn't enough, now statues of Washington, Lincoln and Grant are being torn down or defaced.

Don't get me wrong, we should be having deep and important conversations about our past, present and future, but the lexicon is narrowing; dissent is being relegated to the far corners of the quad and a cancel culture has emerged that demands total obedience or else. Why? An erosion of gratitude for the uniqueness of America, a waning appreciation that America, even with its flaws is a force for good, for freedom, for liberty.

Simply put, America is the greatest vessel for the advancement of human dignity in the history of the world. However that view is increasingly forgotten and ignored in our classrooms. The squeezing out of civics education over the last few decades has had a disastrous effect. Civics education is as important as ever because understanding our foundation gives us greater confidence that we can survive disagreements, even be strengthened by them. Lincoln famously noted, well before his presidency, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be the author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide."

So let's start our Independence Day celebrations with a greater sense of gratitude for our founding. Let's celebrate the bold declaration our Founders made that became our country's mission statement. After all, they announced to the world, at great risk, that essentially everyone who came before them had the order of things backward. They proclaimed to the world that we are all born with certain rights and those rights predate government, in fact, they come from God -- not a king or a queen or any temporal authority. Government is simply our shared project to protect those rights. This was revolutionary at the time and a war was fought over it. People gave their lives for that idea and have ever since. Countless lives have also been committed to the great cause of a fuller realization of those freedoms for more people. The work for a more perfect union continues to this day. But none of that would be possible without the words of the Declaration of Independence.

Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan: Freedom isn't passed through the bloodstream. The maintenance of those freedoms proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guarded by our Constitution takes work. On this Independence Day, I am hopeful that we can have deeper conversations about our shared values, our shared creed, why the American experiment is so exceptional, and recommit ourselves and our educational institutions to civics education. We need more of it, now more than ever.

Eric Schmitt is the attorney general of the State of Missouri.