Jerusalem Demsas
Jerusalem Demsas much relies on a 1964 line from Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888-1965) which describes happiness as a natural, not a God-given, right:
... In short, none of these spokesmen of the American cause thought of happiness as something a people were entitled simply to strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right. ...
The word God and the divine do not make an appearance at all in Schlesinger's very short The Lost Meaning of "The Pursuit of Happiness".
But Schlesinger does examine the words from the American Declaration of Independence as if they were indeed a sort of Holy Writ, and amusingly calls it vital to argue for the meaning of the word pursuit as practice, as a thing not simply chased but actually ready to hand and indeed graspable.
One of his authorities for this is the new and almighty OED of 1888ff., which tells him "it has borne both meanings since at least the sixteenth century".
This isn't the main thrust of Schlesinger's argument, which is that the revolutionary conception of the pursuit of happiness was far less idealized than it became, but it is revealing for what the progressive esteems, and for what he eschews.
On this Demsas is quite right to suggest that Micah 4:4 is what numerous colonists meant by happiness:
But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.
Nothing very fancy about that.
Meanwhile it simply never occurs to the modern, scientific Schlesinger to consult the dictionary used by all Americans for more than a century before his own time, including quite avidly by none other than Thomas Jefferson himself, Samuel Johnson's (1709-1784) Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which shows at least five shades of meaning for pursuit and pursue, including the two cited by Schlesinger.
And the pursuit of happiness itself is right in there, and Thomas Jefferson had most probably read it, and snipped away the parts that he didn't like just like he did with the miracles in the New Testament.
