John West spoke last night at a delightful gathering at Discovery Institute’s new home, Seattle’s historic Smith Tower (pictured above). His subject was his new book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul. The talk (and his book) was dedicated to Discovery Institute’s founder Bruce Chapman and West’s mentor in scholarship, Professor Harry Jaffa, whom I’d like to hear more about on some future occasion.
West discussed the meaning of human equality, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, when it’s obvious that individual humans are not all equally gifted with a range of strengths and capacities.
How Are Humans Equal?
Instead, we are equal in sharing the same creator or designer, the same capacity for reason (even if we neglect it), the same inclination to sin, and more. Those all have crucial implications for how we’re governed. A theme of West’s book is that science was weaponized in the past against the values of the Declaration. Darwinian evolution, for one, would make a hash of that very same equality. But more hopefully, newer and better science is pointing back to our founding values.
Today, Dr. West has an excellent and timely piece at the Daily Wire tackling the controversial question of America’s creed. What is it? The current Vice President of the United States, much in the news right now, has said forthrightly it is Christianity, just as straightforward as that. That would turn all non-Christian Americans, present and past — for example, one might think of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin — into second-class citizens. Others, in another view favored on the Carlsonian Right, say that only “heritage Americans” are true Americans.
I predict that these questions will be debated by Republicans, and perhaps by Democrats, as they choose a presidential nominee for 2028. I sure hope they will be.
A more historically authentic view, argued for in his article today and his book by John West, is that while science, faith, and culture all helped form the American creed, the creed itself is captured in the Declaration that Jefferson primarily was responsible for authoring. And on that, there is more hopeful news.
Faith, Culture, and Creed
As Dr. West reports, based on new polling by Discovery Institute, Americans ourselves are fairly united on the nobler side of the relevant issues:
Respondents were asked, “in your view, for someone to truly be an American, which attributes should they have?”
Six in 10 said that to truly be an American, someone should embrace “the ideas expressed by the Declaration of Independence” and “the form of government created by the Constitution.” Seven in 10 said that to be a true American, one “should agree with the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights.”
By contrast, only 3.2% of respondents said people “should be descended from an ancestor from Britain or Europe” to truly be an American, and only 16.8% thought that true Americans needed to “agree with Christianity.”
With minor variations, these overall results hold across all major demographics, including political ideology.
For example, 97% of self-identified Christian conservatives reject British/European ancestry as a requirement to be a true American, and 69% of Christian conservatives reject the idea that someone needs to agree with Christianity in order to be a true American.
These results reflect how deeply ingrained the creedal nation idea remains in the American psyche.
At a worrying time, that’s a relief to me to hear. The full survey results are here. Read the rest at “The Makings of Americans,” at the Daily Wire.