The Declaration's Truth
The Declaration of Independence established a founding creed — that all people have God-given, unalienable rights — which Lincoln and MLK later invoked to expand freedom. But in today's secular age, the question is whether those principles can survive without the belief in a Creator that originally grounded them.
Writing from Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, John Adams predicted in a letter to his wife, Abigail, that the second day of July would “be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” The revolutionary leader from Quincy, Massachusetts, envisioned a national holiday celebrating the adoption of a congressional resolution proclaiming that the “United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” That resolution, written by Richard Henry Lee, was, in fact, the nation’s first declaration of independence from the British Crown. Yet the day that lives on in the American memory is not the second but the fourth of July, and the document remembered as our first national act is not Lee’s resolution but Thomas Jefferson’s declaration of the causes and justifications for our separation.
The purpose of Jefferson’s declaration was to offer reasons for an independence already proclaimed, and the reasons for the act, perhaps more than the act itself, have become part of our national identity. America, it has often been noted, is unique in its founding commitment to a political creed. That creed, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, reflects a general set of ideas that held sway over many of the men who were instrumental in forging the American Revolution, and, though contested, those ideas have ever been a mainstay of American political culture. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the familiar words of the Declaration proclaim, “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.” In the Declaration, these principles have the qualities of dogma. It is not so much an argument as an assertion. God creates men equal in dignity and rights. Governments exist to secure these rights. And when rulers fail in this sacred trust, it is the right — even duty — of the people to throw off the chains of tyranny.
And yet, as the English journalist and cultural critic G. K. Chesterton noted in the early twentieth century, the general disposition of modern men has been to “say something more like this: ‘We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,’ and so on.” While not following this script exactly, a prominent American historian, writing the same year as Chesterton, did suggest something quite similar. “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy in the Declaration is true or false,” Professor Carl Becker wrote in his seminal intellectual history of the Declaration, “is essentially a meaningless question.” Chesterton, however, thought that democracy had no basis “except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.” It was dangerous, he presciently warned, to tinker with this dogma by treating notions of natural rights and man’s place within a divinely constituted cosmos as essentially meaningless. “Men will more and more realize there is no meaning in democracy,” he suggested, “if there is no meaning in anything; and there is no meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of significance and an authority that is the author of our rights.”
Before his death at the close of World War II, Becker, as well, acknowledged that the “incredible cynicism and brutality of Adolf Hitler’s ambitions” had “forced men everywhere to re-appraise the validity of half-forgotten ideas, and enabled them once more to entertain convictions as to the substance of things not evident to the senses.” Against the backdrop of the world’s ascendent totalitarian ideologies, there was something persistent and enduring about the Declaration. It spoke to the permanent, immaterial things in human existence — sovereignty, justice, liberty, equality, dignity, and orders both human and divine. And when confronted with the atrocities and human rights abuses of the twentieth century, it seemed inadequate to describe the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration as a quaint and idiosyncratic relic of an unscientific age.
Still, the legacy of the Declaration’s political ideas has been contested through the country’s short history, and the principles laid out in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration have been the focal point of an enduring public debate about the meaning and purpose of the American experiment. Abraham Lincoln occupies a unique place in that debate, for it was Lincoln, perhaps more than any other American statesman, who made the Declaration the cornerstone of his political thought. “All this is not the result of accident,” the sixteenth president observed as he considered America’s growth and prosperity in the nineteenth century. “Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these are not the primary cause of our great prosperity.” The cause of American greatness, Lincoln thought, was the principle of “liberty to all” established in our founding document, and, alluding to an ancient Hebrew proverb, Lincoln gave his own interpretation of the central place of the Declaration in American politics:
The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple – not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised, or broken.
That we may so act, we must study, and understand the points of danger.
The immediate points of danger for Lincoln were revealed by Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which asserted, in part, that enslaved Africans and their descendants were not meant to share in the natural rights appealed to in the Declaration of Independence and that the right to own property in human beings was “distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”
In his celebrated debates with Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln later maintained, in contrast, that whoever “teaches that the negro has no share, humble though it may be, in the Declaration of Independence, is going back to the era of our liberty and independence, and, so far as in him lies, muzzling the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return [on the Fourth of July]. . . [while] blowing out the moral lights around us.” Five years after his debates with Douglas, Lincoln dated the birth of the United States with the Declaration of Independence. “Four score and seven years ago,” he began his short address at the dedication of a national war cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Five score years later, in a stinging historical rebuke to Taney’s interpretation of the Declaration, Martin Luther King Jr. stood atop the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and appealed to the promise of the Declaration. “In a sense we’ve come to the nation’s capital to cash a check,” King claimed in his most famous speech. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note is a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”’
In the early twenty-first century, however, we inhabit a world profoundly different from that of the founders — or even from Lincoln’s or King’s America. Ours is what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “secular age,” one in which the social imaginary no longer takes for granted that public life is “connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality.” Confidence that a moral order exists, known to reason, and that human dignity is derived from a transcendent source, has largely been displaced by the modern conviction that meaning is constructed rather than given. Politics largely operates within an immanent frame, self-enclosed and self-justifying. The American experiment now operates in an intellectual and moral universe that has lost the metaphysical grammar in which the Declaration was written.
This transformation raises a sobering question: Can a self-governing society sustain belief in the equality and dignity of the human person if it no longer believes in the Creator who endows them with their rights? The founders’ appeal to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” to the “Supreme Judge of the world,” and to “divine Providence” reflected their conviction that rights have authority only if they are rooted in a moral reality beyond the reach of human will. Once that reality is denied, rights become the products of consent or power, vulnerable to the same tides of opinion that grant them. Lincoln and King both understood this peril. Each, in his own time, re-anchored American politics in the transcendent truths of the Declaration, insisting that liberty without moral law becomes license. Their greatness lay in recovering the founding proposition that freedom depends upon a moral order not of our own making.
If Chesterton was right that “there is no meaning in democracy if there is no meaning in anything,” then the loss of transcendence threatens not merely the language but the very possibility of natural rights. At America’s sesquicentennial in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge insisted that “about the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.” The principles it proclaimed, he said, are final. “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress, can be made beyond these propositions,” Coolidge said.
The through-line in the American experiment has been a commitment to these propositions, a wrestling with their meaning and legacy for political life, and a determination that beyond the flux of history lie the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God — a creating, providential judge who is the true author and guarantor of our rights. As our nation celebrates the semiquincentennial of its founding creed, we face anew the question of whether a free people can long endure without a commitment to the truths that have anchored America’s experiment in republican self-government.
This essay is adapted from the introduction to American Soul: The Contested Legacy of the Declaration of Independence, ed. Justin Dyer (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
