Political scientist John West had a fascinating conversation with Steve Hayward at Power Line about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, now heating up as we approach its 250th anniversary. Some think the creedal text of a creedal nation has been displaced in centrality by other things, or perhaps that its outlook was wrong to begin with.
They’ve been saying the latter since the 19th century when Confederate VP Alexander Stephens (pictured above) declared in the notorious Cornerstone Speech that modern science, as of 1861, had disproved human equality, making slavery a science-based practice. As West points out, when Charles Darwin’s books made it to post-Civil War America, they would be embraced by Southerners who held fast to Stephens’s thinking.
As Hayward says, among the literature on the Declaration, West’s recent book Endowed by Our Creator, a “three-act play,” is unique in explicating why you can’t fully grasp the Founders’ intentions without knowing what they understood about science. In fact, even non-Christian Founders such as Benjamin Franklin thought about the evidence for intelligent design. Franklin studied it — what was then called natural theology — as part of his private liturgy. The Declaration’s reference to a “Creator” is, then, no mere “window dressing,” but vital to the doctrine of our “unalienable rights.”
With all this in mind, it’s troubling that figures on both the political left and right — including VP J. D. Vance — seem to have lost sight of what it means for the United States to be a creedal nation. “I like Vice President Vance,” says Dr. West, “but he needs to be a little more discerning.” Agreed. Listen to the conversation here.