The 250th anniversary of American independence seems to me a good enough occasion to correct the Declaration of Independence.
The recent Netflix documentary of Thomas Jefferson has finally provided me with the proof I need to show you, my dear readers, how we have all gotten profoundly wrong the most profoundly important sentence in the most profoundly important document in American history.
After the preamble, we are treated with these soaring words, “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…”
This final version was the result of Ben Franklin’s objection to Jefferson’s first version, which was this: “We hold these rights to be sacred and undeniable.” The documentary on Jefferson shows a close-up of the first version where the words sacred and undeniable are clearly written and then crossed out with the words self-evident written above.
The final version of the Declaration of Independence makes no sense at all. The truth that we are endowed by our Creator with rights may be true or false, but it is absolutely not self-evidently true. It is only true if the religious belief it rests upon is true. It is not and it has never been self-evidently true. It is self-evidently true, for example, that a bachelor is an unmarried man, but it is not self-evidently true that our rights are endowed by our Creator. That is true only if the religious belief that God created us equally in the image of God is true. America is, thus, founded not on a secular or rational truth. America is founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs about our creation by God.
I know why Franklin wanted to edit Jefferson’s spiritual democracy. He wanted a secular democracy. The problem with this is that in a secular democracy, our rights come from the state and can be revoked by the state. In a religiously based democracy, our rights come from God and, therefore, no state authority can revoke them. Our beliefs stand guard against the abuses of our nation.
This is the theory that our rights come from God through the state, which is created by the consent of the governed to protect the dignity of all its citizens who are all made in the image of God. The state, in this view of rights, is always subject to critique based on its success or failure to respect the God-given freedoms of its citizens. This critique is why we can judge the democratically elected Hitler government of Germany as immoral, illegitimate and sinful. We are judged not on the purity of our democratic processes, but on the actual result of our efforts to secure freedom for all.
In our great American spiritual democracy, our rights do not derive from the beliefs of any one religion. They derive from a nonsectarian national religious belief that our rights are secured by our being created in the image of God.
Even though all Americans do not believe this, it is the reason why the rights of all Americans are secure. They are beyond the perversions of reason or the vagaries of political power. These rights are not achievements. They are endowments from God. How that God is variously conceived and worshipped by religions, or even if that God is worshipped at all, is of no concern to the state. What is of concern is that neither unaided human reason nor the whims of the government are sufficient to establish and guarantee freedom. Only a national belief that we are created beings can do the job.
The rights that created America are the result of a spiritual/political leap of faith that grounds our rights in a formative national religious belief that we are all made in the image of God. From this belief has grown an exceedingly great and tolerant nation where people with different faiths and no faith at all have flourished. Our national sin of slavery was eventually wiped away by religious abolitionists who understood that the creation meant all people, not just white men.
I have sympathy for Jefferson. His original version of the Declaration of Independence was submitted to withering editing by a committee of five men, each with their own beliefs and egos. They were living proof of the old joke that a zebra is a horse created by a committee.
The words on that yellowing paper, the words Jefferson wanted to open the Declaration of Independence, contain no contradictions. They are made of whole cloth, and they are woven on the loom of faith and freedom. When Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…” I wonder if he realized that every single word he wrote was perfect.
God bless America.