God and the Declaration

On September 5, 2025, Riley Barnes, during a hearing for his appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he quoted from Secretary of State Marco Rubio the view that “our rights come from God, our Creator, and not our laws or our governments.” In response, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia insisted that “[t]he notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes” and continued that Iran is “a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities.” Kaine, a Roman Catholic, received a reprimand from an American Catholic Bishop, Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester. Barron reminded Kaine that the principle that our rights come from God is found in the Declaration of Independence, and that the violation of this principle has a dark past: “Look at the great totalitarian systems of the 20th century: The denial of God conduced to the denial of God-given rights — and that, in turn, conduced to rights becoming eminently alienable whenever it served the purposes of the government.”

In other words, not only was the comparison to Iran simply wrong, but it was also evidence that Kaine had things exactly backwards. Iran is totalitarian specifically because the mullahs there do not uphold God-given rights. Kaine responded soon after that he agreed that our rights do come from God but that:

[u]nless protected by law, everyday people cannot rest secure that their critical rights will be protected. Claiming that all rights come from the Creator and not from laws or government leaves the door wide open for dictators to ignore the law and simply proclaim that they are doing God’s will.

While Kaine’s remarks alarmed many, the event was a useful reminder of the central role God plays in the political theology of the American republic, especially as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The core statement is:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Put simply, the role is as follows: God grants persons rights in their very nature, prior to the formation of any government. Those persons together consent to government as an instrument for the protection of those rights. That consent delegates some degree of personal authority to that government, but only on the condition that the government upholds its responsibilities. A failure to do so would justify the consenting persons to overturn that government, or, as the Declaration reads, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” Note that the idea of a natural right here entails a duty, a duty of each person to the other and their reputation after death, with the signers each pledging under Divine Providence, “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

A Difference of Emphasis or Disagreement over Foundations

The disagreement raised among Barnes, Kaine, and Barron was perhaps only over the emphasis. Barnes and Barron wanted to emphasize the source of natural rights, while Kaine wanted to emphasize the role of government in their protection. To deny the origin is to condemn humankind to permanent despotism. To ignore the role of government protection is to believe wrongly that persons and their natural societies are sufficient to defend them.

Yet, Kaine might have been giving voice to a view that to affirm that God gives persons rights is a kind of “Christian nationalism.” Since the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency in 2016, Christian nationalism has been an ideology attributed to politically active American Christians. Critics of Christian nationalism do not disagree over emphasis but over the very principle of God-given rights. They see the argument as a way of exempting religious bigotry from the role of government to protect minorities they believe American Christians threaten. For such critics, the comparison of the Declaration of Independence to Iran seems apt, as the invocation of the limits of government power to liberate minorities seems to apply to both. After all, for these critics, American Christians seem to want to limit the rights of LGBT people in the same way Iran does. Therefore, the principle of “God” stands in the way of this liberation, and such a principle should be discarded; those who invoke it, like Barnes, should not be appointed to positions of government.

The irony, of course, is that Christian nationalists in America do not like the Declaration of Independence, either. Christian nationalists have their origin in the ressourcement of “magisterial Protestantism,” or the early political theology of the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on figures like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and William Perkins, magisterial Protestants have sought an alternative to the more “radical” versions of Protestantism, especially the Baptist political theology that centers on religious liberty, which have settled into the mainstream of American evangelicalism. Not all magisterial Protestants are Christian nationalists, however. Scholars like Glenn Moots have extensively critiqued Christian nationalism. Why is that?

Christian nationalists like Stephen Wolfe and Timon Cline are a more radical set of magisterial Protestants who want a literal application of the political theology of seventeenth century Protestantism. To that end, they argue that the properly constructed regime depends on the paternal role of the Christian magistrate. This chief executive’s duties include the promotion of the Christian religion. To that end, the Christian magistrate should enforce religious orthodoxy wherever possible. The means for such enforcement would be the establishment of a state church, the enforcement of laws banning heresy and regulating religious instruction, and the promulgation of moral laws drawn from Christian Scripture. In this case, the comparison to Iran is apt.

If the only two options America faced in 2025 were either Christian nationalists or their critics, then we would be like the France that Alexis de Tocqueville described, where one must choose between the “spirit of religion” or the “spirit of liberty.” However, Tocqueville found in America these two spirits not as antagonists but as allies. The reason for this harkened to the prudence in the emerging American mind that came from years of experience witnessing religious conflicts at home and abroad and an abundance of education in republican government, both from political philosophers from Cicero to Algernon Sydney and from experience in republican self-government. What did Americans know then that we struggle to remember now?

The Natural Theology of the Declaration of Independence

The God of the Declaration of Independence is the subject not of Christian theology per se but of natural theology, that is, what one can say of God without appeal to a particular sectarian view. Rather, one only needs to appeal to reason. The need for natural theology stemmed from the already existing religious pluralism in America, especially when it came to those supporting independence from Great Britain. After all, the signers of the Declaration of Independence included Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Catholics, and deists. No single denomination could impose its own political theology, but fortunately, they did not have to. What was common to all of them? Their natural theology was more than enough to explain why the colonies had the right to declare their independence. Indeed, Bishop Barron is right to defend the proposition that God, our common Creator, endowed us with certain unalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American Catholics had much to gain from the defense of these rights, as colonial governments, especially in formerly Catholic Maryland, had suppressed the liberty of conscience for Catholics since the 1690s.

The emphasis the Declaration places on creation is important because the only way to explain the existence of things is to ultimately refer to a Creator. Those who argue that such an explanation isn’t necessary are unreasonable, as they try to avoid a question best addressed by reason. Those who claim that creation is irrational must explain how people can understand it rationally, for example through moral and scientific inquiry. Furthermore, the existence of God, for reasonable people, accounts for the ongoing nature of creation, since persons, being created, cannot account for their existence by themselves. Put differently, no individual being can create anything; at most, a being can transform one object into another. However, nothing about this transformation sustains the continued existence of the transformed object. The object exists independently. For example, the artist may have painted a picture, but she is only the “efficient cause” insofar as she applied paint to the canvas. She does not, however, sustain the very existence of the painting. If she did, the painting would cease to be a painting or to exist at all upon her death. Yet, she can still apply her reason, that is her artistic method, to the canvas to produce the painting. Therefore, in applying her reason, she participates in the divine creation without being the Creator.

The Political Significance of Our Creation

Hence, we already have two established natural theological principles that God is a creator and that his creation is rational. Persons are also created, and each person possesses reason, although perhaps to varying degrees. When a person applies reason to political things, she notices a few things.

First, persons use their reason to know what is good for them, and that reason directs the will to secure those goods. Sometimes, choosing those goods produces conflict, especially when resources are limited. The problem surfaces in even the smallest of human societies, the family, and grows more difficult to manage as families form communities. This lesson was not merely academic for many Americans, as they were moving outward and experiencing this problem as their communities grew. When John Locke wrote about the state of nature in his Second Treatise of Government, he was, in a way, plagiarizing the experiences of American colonists.

Second, resolving these disputes requires a common set of rules, not just laws, but also who makes laws and through what processes; that is, a constitution. American colonists were fortunate to have inherited the English constitutional tradition but also with the American twist of writing these rules down. The English could rely on a long inheritance of rules taken for granted, only occasionally writing down resolutions of major disputes such as in the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights. The New World had no such inheritance. They were starting anew, and they could count on the English constitutional tradition only as a starting point, as the crown was an ocean away. Therefore, colonists began the American tradition of writing their rules down, starting with the Mayflower Compact for New England and the Articles, Laws and Orders, Divine, Politics, and Martial for the Colony in Virginia. For the colonists, the government could never be thought to come first, as they produced the records that showed its creation!

They knew from their experience what they had and had not authorized, and the combination of education in the English tradition and experience with self-government also affirmed that there were certain rights that could not be transferred to government. These are the “inalienable” rights in that they could not be rendered “alien” from the person. Whereas a community can alienate the right to punish from individual persons by handing that rule over to an executive, no community can alienate the right to exercise conscience. For example, if a person seeks baptism, she could not send her local constable to have the water sprinkled on his head (or his body full immersed) on her behalf. That is something only she could do, and these inalienable rights were among the most essential for government to protect, as they constitute the most important rights a person has.

Third, the source of these rights must be God because only God precedes persons. Government does not. Government does extend entitlements such as pensions and healthcare, but these are extensions of granted authority from the people who consented to form such a government. Much of the misunderstanding of rights stems from their confusion with entitlements. As governments gain greater control over entitlements, those in government come to see rights as government entitlements, too. This confusion had seeped into Kaine’s reasoning, leading him to understand rights as coming from government. Because he sees government as necessary for protecting minorities, he sees the government as the source of minority rights, rather than as a constituted body necessary for the preservation of rights anterior to government itself. However, minority rights are not the product of government merely because the government protects them. This gets the order precisely backwards.

Finally, each person’s reason is limited and subject to bias. The limitation is in what a person can know and understand. Even in government, we see legislators divide up into committees and sub-committees with gaggles of legislative aides necessary to learn as much as possible to legislate on different aspects of public affairs. The bias stems from each person’s self-interest. Self-interest is not inherently wrong, but no person, if she is a citizen, is more deserving of having a say in government than other citizens. Hence, those in government must deliberate how best to legislate by settling those interests through an appeal to the expertise they have developed in their areas of legislative specialization.

The best way to ensure this process aligns with the moral law is not to impose religious discipline on government and the citizens but to free religious institutions to spread spiritual instruction to the citizenry. That was how America was able to bring the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty together as allies. Otherwise, religious institutions become clients of the government, as Christian nationalists then and now would have it, giving the false appearance that the government has control over even God.

Stuck with God

Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen put it best when he preached:

…if the State or the Dictator is the creator of rights, then the State or the Dictator can dispossess men of their rights. That is why in those countries where God is most denied, man is most tyrannized, and where religion is most persecuted, man is most enslaved. It is only because we are dependent on God that we are independent as persons from the total will of any man on earth.

But what is important for this essay is that Sheen even said it. The American government did not sponsor him, and he was here condemning totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union. Sheen was a bishop of a free Church in a free country, and he knew that the blessings of liberty had so greatly improved the welfare of his fellow Irish Catholics who had escaped the tyranny of the English in his homeland. When he spoke of dependence on God, he spoke not just for his own Church but also for the Protestant and Jewish Americans who bore witness to the horrors of governments that had subdued or annihilated their churches and synagogues. Therefore, to paraphrase the great Peter A. Lawler, Americans remain stuck with God, and that is a good thing.

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