As America approaches its 250th birthday, we celebrate the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed with unalienable rights.
Jefferson’s original draft said these truths are “sacred and undeniable”; Ben Franklin suggested the change to “self-evident.” A child was about to be born, but some still question its paternity today.
So who is the “father” of these truths? The Bible? Or the so-called Enlightenment?
The Declaration begins by saying we are entitled to independence by the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” a phrase taken almost verbatim from Blackstone’s “Commentaries.” A devout Anglican, Blackstone spoke of the Law of Nature, which was dictated by God Himself, written into nature, and discoverable by human reason, and the Revealed Law, which is found only in the Holy Scriptures.
The concept that “all men are created equal” didn’t come from the French Revolution slogan, “liberty, equality, fraternity” (actually liberty, equality, fraternity or death). The French Revolution was nothing but a bloody coup staged by self-appointed thugs who represented nobody but themselves. These thugs launched a bloodbath to exterminate the aristocrats, and when they ran out of aristocrats to exterminate, they began exterminating each other (which I argue was the only good thing they ever did).
Nor did the “all men are created equal” concept come from pagan philosophy. As Joshua Berman says in “Created Equal”:
If there was one truth the ancients held to be self-evident it was that all men were not created equal. If we maintain today that, in fact, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, then it is because we have inherited as part of our cultural heritage notions of equality that were deeply entrenched in the ancient passages of the Pentateuch.
Besides our common ancestry in Adam and Eve and our common creation in the image of God, we are all equally subject to His law. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it,” Deuteronomy 1:17 says.
The biblical doctrine of creation also gives a solid basis for equality, unlike Darwinian evolution, which opens the door to racism. George William Hunter’s “A Civic Biology,” the textbook defended by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial, stated blatantly:
At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest race type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America....
I’m not saying evolutionists are racists; I am saying Darwinism does not provide a basis for combatting racism. Hitler based his notions of the Aryan master race on Darwinism. As he said in “Mein Kampf”:
If Nature doesn't wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, even less does she wish that a superior race should mix with an inferior one. In such a case, all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher type of being, might be rendered futile.
God has given us dominion over nonrational creatures because we are created in God’s image as rational beings, Augustine explained. But although we have dominion over other animals, we are equal among men, because God “did not intend that his rational creature[s], who [were] made in His image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation,—not man over man, but man over the beasts.”
The Judeo-Christian recognition of equality did not involve Marxist notions of wealth redistribution. “By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments,” Thomas Aquinas said.
And yet, we must recognize that, although the Declaration speaks about equality, many Americans at that time (including Jefferson) owned slaves, although many still expressed their opposition to it. Those who expressed opposition and either did or did not own slaves include John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Rush, Henry Laurens, Elias Boudinot, John Dickinson, Caesar Rodney, William Livingston, George Wythe, John Randolph of Roanoke, Charles Carroll, Richard Henry Lee, Luther Martin, George Mason, Joseph Reed, Noah Webster, John Witherspoon, Richard Bassett, James Monroe, William Few, Zephaniah Swift, and Rufus King, Patrick Henry, and James Madison. George Washington left instructions in his will regarding the freeing of his slaves.
We can only say in response that the Declaration sowed the seeds of equality. Bringing those seeds to fruition is an ongoing effort.
So the “sacred and undeniable” or “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal is firmly based on the Bible.
But what about “unalienable rights”? That’s a topic we’ll examine next week.
Colonel Eidsmoe serves as Professor of Constitutional Law for the Oak Brook College of Law & Government Policy (obcl.edu), as Senior Counsel for the Foundation for Moral Law (morallaw.org), and as Chairman of the Board of the Plymouth Rock Foundation (plymrock.org). He lives in rural Pike Road, Ala., and may be contacted for speaking engagements at [email protected].
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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