Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the new book Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul, by John G. West, which explores the enduring truths of the Declaration of Independence as America celebrates its 250th birthday this year.
“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” observed English writer G. K. Chesterton after visiting the United States in 1921. “That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.”
Many Americans are apt to miss the full significance of Chesterton’s observation. Throughout human history, nations have defined themselves primarily by ethnicity, geography, or religion. Although Americans do have some of those traditional ties, America has defined herself since July 4, 1776 largely by a commitment to a common set of ideas expressed by the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration encapsulates those ideas in 55 words that have become some of the most famous in the English language: “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.”
From the founding of America onward, the Declaration’s propositions provided a justification for human rights, limited government, and equal treatment under the law to countless people around the globe. Those propositions also established a standard by which future Americans could judge the actions of themselves and their nation.
A Sacred Status
Over the years, the Declaration has assumed a sacred status in America’s civic life. In other countries, people showed their patriotism by making pilgrimages to see the tombs of their leaders. In the Soviet Union and communist China, people went to pay their respects to the embalmed bodies of Lenin and Mao. In America, millions of citizens made a pilgrimage to view a piece of parchment.
Starting in the 1840s, the Declaration was put on nearly permanent public display, usually in the nation’s capital. In 1876, the Declaration returned temporarily to Independence Hall in Philadelphia during that city’s celebration of the nation’s centennial.
Near the end of the 1940s, more than three million Americans flocked to see Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration put on display in the “Freedom Train,” a patriotic exhibit that traversed the country on rails.
In 1952, the official copy of the Declaration was moved from the Library of Congress to be displayed with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the Rotunda of the National Archives, a soaring building that looks like a Greek Temple. The Declaration has been housed there ever since. Since the opening of that display, millions of Americans have viewed the now much-faded document in person. My own first glimpse of the Declaration came during a visit to the Rotunda with my parents and sisters in a pre-bicentennial trip in 1975. My last glimpse of the document came when my wife and I took our young adult children to see the Declaration in 2023.
“All Men Are Created Equal”
The Declaration has remained ingrained in the popular imagination thanks to America’s news media, its politicians, and its entertainers. Since 1776, the phrase “all men are created equal” has appeared in American newspapers more than 280,000 times. American presidents as varied in their politics as Calvin Coolidge and Barack Obama have extolled the Declaration.
Notwithstanding its continuing prominence in American culture, the Declaration has also provoked fierce opposition over the years — so much so that if its signers came back from the dead for a visit today, they might find large parts of America’s governmental system unrecognizable.
At the time it was written, the Declaration drew support for its ideas from the Bible, philosophy, and even natural science. But within a few decades, new ideas came to the forefront in America that led to a frontal assault on the Declaration’s vision of equality, liberty, unalienable rights, and limited government under God. As we shall see, much of this assault was waged in the name of “science,” especially Darwinian biology.
According to many of the Declaration’s critics, science now proved unequivocally that humans were not equal. Nor were they created by God or endowed by Him with unalienable rights. Humans evolved through an unguided process, and any rights they possessed were said to have been invented by those who had sufficient power to enforce them. These rights lasted only so long as those in power were willing to grant them. Moreover, because humans were fundamentally unequal, the superior should not be required to gain the consent of the inferior. The masses should be ruled instead by elites who knew best, in the name of science.
Ignorance and Ambivalence
The steady drumbeat of criticisms against the truths expressed in the Declaration has taken its toll. As America celebrates the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, many Americans are ignorant of its meaning or ambivalent about its teachings. To be sure, according to a national survey commissioned for the writing of this book, eight in ten Americans still affirm the truth of the Declaration’s propositions about life, liberty, and equality; however, fewer than four in ten Americans accept the Declaration’s view of the source of our rights. Fewer still accept its understanding of the purposes and limits of government.
Moreover, many among America’s elites — on both left and right — seem to have turned against the Declaration and the American Founding. According to left-wing journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the ideals of the Declaration were a “lie” because the Founders didn’t apply them to enslaved blacks. According to right-wing political writer Curtis Yarvin (a self-proclaimed “radical monarchist”), the American Revolution is a story “in which evil triumphed over good” and the idea that humans are born or created equal has been soundly refuted by science. Indeed, “it’s hard to imagine a more thoroughly falsified scientific hypothesis.”
Yarvin is an unrepentant atheist, but some Christians harbor their own reservations about the Declaration. Catholic thinker Patrick Deneen writes dismissively of “calls to devotion to the abstractions of the Declaration and the Constitution,” arguing that both documents were informed by “Enlightenment and liberal philosophies that… posited the existence of radically autonomous human beings in the ‘state of nature.’” Evangelical Christian thinker Vishal Mangalwadi believes the Declaration embodied a “fundamental mistake” that led to the French Revolution’s “reign of terror.”
Despite the growing chorus of dissenters, I believe the Declaration’s principles remain acutely relevant for today — if we are willing to heed them. But before we can follow the Declaration, we must first understand it. And to do that, we need to rescue the Declaration from the accumulated debris piled atop it by those who want to bury its truths.
Benjamin Franklin’s Warning
In my new book Endowed by Our Creator, I invite readers to join me on a journey through the past and present and into the future. We will investigate the original meaning of the Declaration of Independence and consider how its propositions drew support from both the Bible and the science of its day. We will uncover how Darwinism and similar ideologies were employed to undermine the Declaration in the name of science, overturning its teaching on equality, subverting its understanding of liberty, and justifying the creation of a technocratic state that regulates us from cradle to grave. Finally, we will look at how new discoveries in science are actually pointing us back to the hallowed truths expressed by the Declaration — and why this matters.
More than a decade after the Declaration, America’s Founders implemented their vision of good government by drafting the Constitution of 1787. Afterward, Elizabeth Powel of Philadelphia reportedly asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government had been established. “A republic,” he replied, and famously added a warning: “if you can keep it.”
Back to the Future
Two and a half centuries after the Declaration, Franklin’s warning is perhaps more pertinent than ever. Many of us look at the current political and social landscape and we fear for the future of America. Our constitutional system is under stress. The ties of faith, family, and culture that used to bind us are fraying. So what can we do?
When a wrong turn has been made, sometimes going back is the best way forward.
If we want to restore America to health, we need to relearn the creed that helped make America great in the first place.
New survey data from John West and Discovery Institute underscore the urgency of Endowed by Our Creator, reporting “How Americans View the American Founding.” For a 75-page document on that, please go here for the free download now.