The pursuit of happiness is an odd phrase in our contemporary culture. We link happiness with pleasure. Buying a new car makes us happy. Being in love fills us with happiness. We are happy when things are going well and sad when they are not.
Then there is the matter of joy, a spiritual experience having little or nothing to do with happiness. As Alamo-girl so succintly put it: "...Christian joy which requires only Him - and cannot be diminished at all by poverty, murder, persecutions, injustices, sickness or death."
There is, in truth, no pursuit of joy. It comes as a gift from God, as the dew in the morning and is available to us for as long as we choose to accept it.
Happiness of the sort guaranteed by our Constitution is a pursuit that can only occur when the citizenry is unfettered by opressive dictates of government.
Our current jargon might define the sort of happiness spoken of in our Constitution as self-fulfillment or self-actualization. The Constitution, after all, guarantees the freedom of individuals to pursue their lives (happiness) without undue government interference.
Once again, a piece of Constitutional wallpaper resounds with powerful intent. The pursuit of happiness limits the government from interference in the normal activities of the citizenry. The primacy of individual freedom is upheld by the happiness clause.
Government today has forsaken the Constitution's admonition that the citizenry be allowed to pursue happiness. Modern officialdom prefers that citizens pursue (legally enforcable versions of) the common good. The rights of the individual have been supplanted by the rights of society as defined by the government.
The government tells us to eat cake if we want to be happy. Just be sure to grant our overlords unlimited access to our labor, our property, our wealth and our sentiments.
"Pursuit of happiness" is a Creator endowed inalienable right in the Declaration of Independence. I suspect some people confuse that right to freedom as you have described it - as if it meant Christian joy which as you say is another matter altogether, a gift from God.
I wish the inalienable rights laid out in the DofI had been clarified in the Constitution but at least the courts seem to take the Constitution as flowing from the DofI.
“Happiness of the sort guaranteed by our Constitution is a pursuit that can only occur when the citizenry is unfettered by oppressive dictates of government.”
You make an important distinction between Christian Joy and a societal pursuit of happiness. Well done, Amos.