This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

[Video: This kid's too old to be Huck Finn. And I have no idea who that woman introducing this bit is. But 'Big River' is wonderful. From 1985 Tony Awards.]

"All right, then, I'll go to hell." — Huckleberry Finn

It was the Second Declaration of American Independence, as brilliant as the first one, though a lot shorter. And perhaps in need of more context.

Mark Twain's American hero, a very young boy in the midst of being raised in pre-Civil War Missouri, had already been through 30 chapters of adventures, mostly a flight down the Mississippi with his good friend Jim, a runaway slave.

Huck was, as he might have put it, horrible conflicted about what he was doing. He had come to love Jim like a brother, heard him talk about how much he missed his wife and children, who had been sold away from him. For the first time in his young life, Huck started to doubt all he had been told about how blacks were not entirely human and deserving of being kept in bondage.

But what little education Huck had received included teachings, often religious in nature, about how blacks were meant to be slaves and stealing was wrong and Huck was a double sinner for having stolen a slave. He thought that it was those dark deeds that were troubling him, making it impossible for him to even pray properly.

So he tried to clear his troubled conscience by writing a letter to Jim's owner, telling her where Jim was and how he could be retrieved. But that didn't make him feel any better. Because his own experience, and his own heart, told him that Jim wasn't property that needed to be returned. He was a man who needed his freedom.

So, with the brief expression of resolve noted above, he tore the letter up. Then he felt better.

That sentence is in the American tradition of declaring independence — "a masterful expression of the American mind," as John Adams said about the first one — because it explained how the individual is responsible for moral choices. They cannot just be copied from higher authority in a way that absolves a person from either the glory or the guilt.

This is exactly what we have seen in recent weeks as many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have questioned, or even ended, their association with an institution that, for many of them, has defined their lives.

Your Salt Lake Tribune, you've no doubt noticed, has been inundated with letters and op-ed columns from people who are about as conflicted about their church, its stand on the role of women and of the children of families headed by same-sex couples, as Huckleberry Finn was about how his whole culture treated black people. Everything he'd been taught said one thing. His heart said another.

It's not that rules, religious and civil, don't matter. They provide a frame of reference, the benefit of the experience of others, without which we'd be so confused and fragmented that nothing useful would ever get done.

As the first Declaration said, "Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

As organized religion continues to lose its grip on people, especially the young, the pretense that any human power structure, even one that claims to speak for God, has truth and morality locked up fools fewer and fewer people. So they are doing what people have always done, making up their own minds about what's right and what's wrong.

It's just that, increasingly, people are honest with themselves about what they are doing, what people have always done. How choosing to follow a set of principles taught to you by your society was and always will be a choice. Usually, it's the easiest choice and helps people live together and understand each other without the need to stop and examine every human action, or interaction, anew.

But when it's a choice to be a bigot or a terrorist it's wrong to let people get away with it by saying their surroundings, their religion, made them do it. Especially when a billion other people who nominally follow the same religion made very different choices.

As Twain also wrote, "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

Sometimes, you have to tear the letter up.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, keeps finding out that ideas he thought were original with him are actually really, really old. gpyle@sltrib.com