Look to our founding principles to help guide decision on voting

There’s a great deal of soul around these days.

It might take a few thousand years of history to summarize the various theories of what the soul is or even if it exists, so to avoid that pitfall, I will revert to the standard dictionary definition from Merriam-Webster: “the essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life.”

Halloween, the secular holiday of trick and treating is Oct. 31. The religious celebrations follow. Nov. 1 is All Saints’ Day and Nov. 2 is All Souls’ Day, a time to remember those who have died, especially one’s relatives.

If these are not enough, the presidential candidates have adopted slogans that fit the holidays as a way to trigger our memories as we get ready to vote.

Former Vice President Joe Biden left the campaign gate with the theme of restoring the soul of America. President Donald Trump’s campaign theme while not using the word soul nonetheless described a previous time in our history when we thought things were better, “Make America Great Again.”

America has sometimes been described in religious terms.

In the first chapter of his 1922 book, “What I Saw in America,” essayist G.K. Chesterton wrote that were are “the only nation in the world founded on a creed.”

Later, American church historian Sidney Mead took up that theme of America having a collective soul he called “civil religion,” and argued that we are a nation with a creed which is embodied in our founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence, our U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Based on the idea that there are religious principles in our founding documents, what might restore our soul mean today?

Here are the words to the Preamble to our Constitution, our “creed” in other words:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Constitutional scholars sometimes refer to the six principles of our preamble as popular sovereignty, rule of law, judicial review, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.

Abraham Lincoln expressed this creed best in a few words spoken at Gettysburg that we are a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Our Constitution describes how government is to be organized and the Bill of Rights what the government owes us. But to survive we owe the government at a minimum voting for leaders to represent us, to uphold the principles and rules by which we are to govern ourselves.

I can’t tell you who to vote for in the coming presidential election. That is your obligation. But it is your duty to weigh the candidates by well they live or fail to live by the six principles of our Constitution.

Here are six questions about how well or not candidates seek to live by our founding principles.

• Does the candidate seek to serve all the people and not just a party or segment?

• Has the candidate sought to abide by the laws of the land?

• Does the candidate believe in fair and equal justice?

• Has the candidate exhibited the ability to work with other governmental branches?

• Is the candidate willing to accept checks on his own power?

• And does the candidate show the ability to share power with others?