Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics

Ask a hundred Americans what the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence says, and most will get as far as "all men are created equal" and then stop. That is a pity, because the sentence does not stop there, and the part they skip is the engine of the whole thing.

The sentence has a verb, a source and a consequence. The verb is "endowed." The source is "their Creator." The consequence is that the rights in question are "unalienable." Take out the source and the other two words lose their grip. This post is about that grip: why the Founders put a Creator at the base of American equality, what it would mean to remove him, and whether a purely secular foundation can do the same work.

I will state my thesis plainly, then define the terms and argue it. Equality in the Declaration is not a political preference that a majority adopted and a majority could drop. It is a claim about the nature of human beings and about where rights come from, and that makes it a claim about God, whether or not the person quoting it believes in him.

The text

Here is the passage, in the words of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776:

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.

Read it clause by clause.

"We hold these truths." The authors are not proposing a policy. They are stating truths, claims about what is so, which they say are "self-evident." Self-evident does not mean easy. It means that a person who understands the terms will see them without needing a proof from something more basic.

"That all men are created equal." Not "are equal" but "created equal." The word "created" is doing the work. A creature has a maker, and equality is a feature of how the makers' creatures stand to each other. It is not said that men are equal in talent, wealth, strength or virtue. They plainly are not. They are equal in standing: no one is born with a natural claim to rule another.

"That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Endowed means given. The giver is the Creator. And the gift is "unalienable," a word that means it cannot be transferred or taken, because the giver was not the government and so the government cannot take it back.

"That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The list is open, with "among these" showing that it is not exhaustive.

The very next sentence draws the political conclusion: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Government comes after the rights. It is hired to protect them. A government that violates them has failed at its only job.

Why the source matters: a question of who can revoke

Here is the point that a good deal of modern commentary misses. A right has a source, and the source determines who can revoke it.

Suppose rights come from the government. Then the government can change them. A legislature that grants a right can amend it. A king who confers a right can withdraw it. The right is only as strong as the next vote or the next decree.

Suppose rights come from a majority. Then the majority can vote them away from a minority. That is the logic of every tyranny of the many, and the Founders feared it as much as the tyranny of one. Madison spent much of Federalist No. 10 on exactly that danger.

Suppose rights come from nature, understood as whatever happens to be the case. Then it is hard to say why anyone ought to respect them. Nature is full of strong animals eating weak ones. Facts about what is do not by themselves tell you what ought to be.

Now suppose rights come from a Creator who made every person and gave each one a standing that no government conferred. Then no government can revoke it, because the government is not its author. The majority cannot vote it away, because the majority did not give it. And there is a reason to respect it even when it is inconvenient, because to violate it is to violate the one who made the person.

That is the argument of the Declaration, and it is why the sentence was written the way it was. Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (Query XVIII), put the point in the form of a question: can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? He answered it in the next breath with a warning about the nation's trembling when it reflects on its own injustice. A shorter, edited version of the passage is carved in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. The author of the Declaration thought that the Creator in the Declaration was a working part and not an ornament.

Where the idea came from: the image of God

The Founders did not invent the idea that every person has a standing that no earthly power confers. They inherited it.

Genesis 1:27, in the King James Version, says: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." The sentence is general. It does not say that God created the king in his image, or the priest, or the free citizen. It says that he created man, humankind, in his image.

The effect, over centuries, was to give every human being a worth that did not depend on rank, race, strength or usefulness. A slave and a king are equally made in God's image. A child and a philosopher are equally made in it. The doctrine is not a political program, and the Bible's own history includes much that falls short of it. But it set a standard that the later tradition kept pressing, and the standard is where "created equal" comes from.

The contrast: Aristotle and natural slavery

To see how much the doctrine mattered, look at the other great source of Western thought, which did not have it.

Aristotle, the most formidable mind of the ancient world, argued in the first book of the Politics that some people are slaves by nature. He held that there are those whose capacity for reason is such that they are fit only to be ruled, and that for them slavery is both just and beneficial. It was not a passing remark. It was part of his political theory, and it lasted. His argument was later invoked by some defenders of slavery, including Southern writers before the American Civil War.

I am not saying Aristotle was a villain. He was a genius who lived in a society built on slavery and who found it natural. The point is the contrast. If you start from reason and observation alone, without a doctrine that every person is made in God's image, it is not at all obvious that all persons are equal. A look around the Athenian marketplace would suggest the opposite. The idea that the slave and the master stand in the same relation to their Maker is not what the evidence of the senses shows. It is what the doctrine of Genesis teaches.

When the Declaration says "all men are created equal," it is on the Genesis side of that line, whether or not the reader notices.

Lincoln and the Declaration

The man who understood this best was Abraham Lincoln. His whole political career after 1854 was a defense of the proposition that the Declaration meant what it said.

In his speech at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, Lincoln argued against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and against the idea that the right of self-government meant a right to enslave. He went back to the Declaration as the foundation of the republic. In 1857, in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, he gave a speech at Springfield on June 26. Chief Justice Taney had written that the phrase "all men" in the Declaration did not include people of African descent, because the authors could not have meant it so. Lincoln answered that the authors meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society, one that was familiar to all, and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated. That is a close paraphrase, and the full text of the speech is in the Collected Works.

In a letter of April 6, 1859, to Henry Pierce and others, Lincoln wrote that the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society, and that the Declaration's truths were an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times. He added that it was a rebuke and a stumbling block to the harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

Then, on November 19, 1863, at Gettysburg, in a speech of about 270 words, he said that the nation was "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and that it would have "a new birth of freedom" under God. He dated the nation from 1776, and not from 1787. He treated the Declaration, not the Constitution, as the founding act, and the Constitution as the structure built to carry it out.

What matters for my argument is how Lincoln defended the proposition. He did not say that equality was a poll result or a convention. He said it was a truth. He said that the founders had put it in the Declaration as a standard for the future, so that those who came after could measure the nation against it. Frederick Douglass, speaking at Rochester on July 5, 1852, had made the same appeal in the opposite direction, holding the nation to its own words by showing how far it was from them. Both men treated the sentence as a moral claim that stood above the law of the day, which could be used to judge the law. That is what a claim about a Creator allows. A claim about a majority does not.

The strongest objection: secular grounds work just as well

Here is the best objection, and I want to state it fairly. A thoughtful nonbeliever says: I agree that all people are equal in dignity. I do not need a Creator to get there. I can get there from reason, as Kant did, by arguing that persons are rational beings who set their own ends and must therefore never be treated merely as means. Or I can get there from a fair procedure, as the philosophers of the social contract did, by asking what rules rational people would agree to behind a veil of ignorance about their own place in society. Or I can get there from the capacity to suffer, or from the plain moral intuition that cruelty is wrong. A great many secular people hold equal dignity as firmly as any believer, and some defend it more bravely. To say that equality needs God is to insult them.

That is a respectable objection, and I have no wish to insult anyone. Let me answer it in order.

1. I agree that nonbelievers can hold the belief, and hold it sincerely. The claim is not about who believes what. It is about what justifies the belief and what can sustain it over generations.
2. The Kantian route needs a ground that is shared by all humans equally. Kant grounds dignity in rational agency. But rational agency comes in degrees, and some human beings, infants, the severely disabled, the very old, have less of it or none. If dignity tracks the capacity, then some humans have less of it. Kant's followers have wrestled with this for two centuries. The doctrine of the image of God has no such problem, because it grounds dignity in the relation to the Creator and not in any trait that varies.
3. The contract route gives you what the parties agree to, and no more. If equality is the result of a hypothetical agreement, then it rests on the premises of the parties. Change the premises and the result changes. The Founders wanted rights that did not depend on a deal.
4. The intuition route is honest but weak. Moral intuitions are real, but they differ between persons and across centuries. The intuitions of Aristotle's Athens did not include the equal worth of the slave. If equality rests only on a widespread feeling, it rests on something that can fade.
5. The historical record is not neutral. The idea of equal worth arose and spread in cultures shaped by the biblical doctrine, and was argued for in those terms by the men who ended slavery in the English-speaking world. It is possible that it can stand on secular legs once it is there. It is a different thing to show that it would have appeared without the inheritance.

Does that settle it? Not for everyone. A secular person can reply that the history proves little about the logic, and he may be right about that. I am not asking the nonbeliever to agree to the theology. I am saying that when the Declaration says "created," it means what it says, and that those who want to keep the conclusion should understand what held it up.

What follows

Let me draw the consequences out in numbers.

1. If rights are given by a Creator, then no government is their source, and no government can honestly claim to be generous when it respects them. It is only doing its duty.
2. If rights are unalienable, then they are not up for a vote. That is why the Bill of Rights is written as a list of things the majority may not do.
3. If all are created equal, then any system that ranks persons by birth, race or class is in contradiction with the founding principle. That is what Lincoln and Douglass argued, and it is what the civil-rights movement argued a century later.
4. If the claim is about God, then the people who rely on it have a stake in a culture that still believes in some version of it. That is the connection between the Declaration and the question of faith in public life, and it is why the argument over religion is never just an argument about religion.

I do not suggest that a person must hold a particular creed to be a good American. I suggest that a country built on the sentence "all men are created equal" has an interest in understanding what that sentence is built on. An argument we do not understand is an argument we cannot defend.

Where to read more

On this blog, the same idea is worked out from several sides. The relationship between Washington's view of religion and the republic is in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The two intellectual inheritances that stand behind the Declaration are in Jerusalem and Athens, the two cities every free society still lives in. The question of whether a nonbeliever can defend these ideas is in Can a conservative who doesn't believe still defend the faith of the West?. A case in which the Court decided who counts as a person, and what the Declaration's critics got wrong, is in Dred Scott, Roe and the danger of a Court deciding who counts as a person. And the biblical language the colonists used for liberty is in Thomas Paine, a deist, argued for independence from the Book of Samuel. You can read the Declaration in full at the site's Constitution page and the men who signed it on the founders page.

The case in brief

1. The Declaration says men are "endowed by their Creator" with "unalienable Rights," and the source determines who can revoke them: a government can repeal what it grants, but it cannot repeal what it did not give.
2. The idea of equal standing comes from the biblical claim in Genesis 1:27 that every person is made in the image of God.
3. Aristotle, the greatest reasoner of the ancient world, defended natural slavery, which shows that equal dignity does not follow obviously from observation and reason alone.
4. Lincoln defended the Declaration against Dred Scott and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and at Gettysburg dated the nation from 1776 and its proposition of equality.
5. Secular grounds for equality, from Kant and the social contract, are serious but struggle to explain why all humans are equal rather than some more than others, so the nation has a stake in understanding what it rests on.

What you can do: read the Declaration's second paragraph aloud, then ask your family which word in it would be hardest to defend without the word "Creator."