Over the past several months, I have written a series of articles exploring the relationship between natural law principles and the American Founding. In those pieces, I have engaged a range of books and scholarly articles in an effort to answer a simple but contentious question: are we, in fact, a nation founded on Christian and broader Western philosophical principles? My sustained conclusion is yes: the intellectual and moral architecture of our founding is deeply rooted in Christian thought and the natural law tradition of the West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A reader recently wrote to ask whether I could distill those arguments into a single, concise reflection\u2014especially in light of repeated claims by progressive legislators that America is a purely secular country, separated from religious influence by \u201cimpermeable\u201d walls between church and state. What follows is my brief response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the heart of the matter lies natural law. By natural law, I mean this: a law imprinted on the hearts of all people, made known through the faculties of reason (philosophy) and revelation (biblical teaching). It is not a sectarian code imposed from the outside, but a moral order accessible to any honest mind, and fully illuminated by Scripture. This is the tradition that shaped Western political thought long before 1776, and it is plainly visible in our founding documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consider the Declaration of Independence. It appeals explicitly to \u201cthe separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God entitle\u201d a people and goes on to affirm that \u201call men are created equal\u201d and \u201cendowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,\u201d among which are \u201cLife, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\u201d These are not secular phrases. The very grammar of the Declaration assumes a Creator, assumes a moral order (the Laws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God), and grounds human equality and rights in that transcendent source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other words, the liberal notion\u2014properly understood\u2014of human beings as equal and free rests, in the American tradition, on a theological foundation. Human dignity is not merely asserted; it is explained. We are equal because we are created. We possess rights because they are conferred by God, not manufactured by the state. The American experiment in ordered liberty is, from the beginning, an experiment conducted under a higher law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is precisely what today\u2019s secularists wish to deny. They insist that we are a secular republic whose founding principles can be fully understood without reference to God, revelation, or natural law. To them, any public acknowledgment of God amounts to an assault on the \u201cwall of separation\u201d between church and state. But that wall, as they describe it, is neither what the Founders erected nor what our earliest national documents reflect. The Founders did not construct a naked public square; they built a political order that assumes a moral universe in which God is real, human beings bear His image, and governments are accountable to standards they did not invent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Constitution, of course, is our supreme positive law. The Declaration of Independence is not \u201cbinding law\u201d in the same way. I am not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar, and I make no claim to be one. But my research has led me to an important point that many legal historians and constitutional scholars acknowledge while the Declaration is not itself a source of enforceable legal rules, courts\u2014and especially individual Justices\u2014have repeatedly treated it as a foundational statement of political theory and natural rights that informs how we interpret the Constitution and other sources of law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We can see this most clearly in the development of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Many historians and constitutional commentators describe that clause as \u201cperfecting\u201d or constitutionalizing the Declaration\u2019s claim that \u201call men are created equal.\u201d The Declaration first articulated equality as a political and theological truth. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, transformed that truth into an enforceable constitutional norm. In modern doctrine, the Supreme Court uses equal protection to invalidate certain forms of discrimination\u2014especially racial classifications\u2014thus giving legal teeth to a principle of equality the Declaration proclaimed but did not itself make operative in courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Court\u2019s relationship to the Declaration has not always been noble. In Dred Scott v. Sandford<\/em> (1857), Chief Justice Roger Taney notoriously confronted the Declaration\u2019s \u201call men are created equal\u201d language only to argue that it did not apply to Black Americans. He claimed it was \u201ctoo clear\u201d that the enslaved African race \u201cwere not intended to be included\u201d among the people embraced by the Declaration and thus could not be citizens. In that single move, the Court used the language of the Declaration itself to strip an entire class of human beings of political membership and protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But history did not end with Dred Scott<\/em>. Later decisions\u2014such as the Slaughter\u2011House Cases<\/em> (1873), United States v. Wong Kim Ark<\/em> (1898), Meyer v. Nebraska<\/em> (1923), Pierce v. Society of Sisters<\/em> (1925), and ultimately Brown v. Board of Education<\/em> (1954)\u2014are widely understood as moving constitutional law back toward the Declaration\u2019s universalist promises. Even when the Declaration is quoted only sparingly, these opinions reflect a broader understanding of citizenship, liberty, and equality that aligns far more closely with the Declaration\u2019s insistence on \u201cunalienable Rights\u201d and the equal moral worth of every person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scholars who survey this jurisprudence often describe the Declaration as a kind of constitutional lodestar. It does not function as a statute; it functions as a compass. Its assertions about natural rights and human equality help guide the Court\u2019s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s guarantees of citizenship, due process, and equal protection. In that way, the Declaration continues to exert quiet but real influence, pushing American law away from the cramped vision of humanity endorsed in Dred Scott<\/em> and toward a constitutional order more faithful to the truths proclaimed on July 4, 1776.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So where does this leave the current debate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n When modern politicians and commentators insist that America is a purely secular nation, with an \u201cimpermeable\u201d wall between church and state, they are not merely offering a prudential suggestion about religious neutrality. They are attempting to rewrite our intellectual genealogy. They want the benefits of our inherited language\u2014rights, equality, freedom\u2014without acknowledging the theological and philosophical roots that make those ideas coherent and durable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not arguing for a theocracy. Nor am I claiming that one must be a Christian to be a good citizen or to understand justice. What I am arguing is simpler and, I believe, historically undeniable: the American Founding took place within a Christian moral universe; it appropriated and refined Western natural law philosophy; and it grounded our most cherished political principles in a vision of humanity as created by God and ordered to a higher good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why the Declaration speaks unapologetically of a Creator, why it invokes \u201cthe Laws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God,\u201d and why it treats rights as \u201cunalienable\u201d\u2014beyond the reach of mere majorities. That is why the post\u2011Civil War amendments consciously echo its language of equality and personhood. And that is why, over time, our better judicial decisions have tended to move back toward the truths our Founders recognized, though not always lived out perfectly <\/p>\n\n\n\n Those are my thoughts on the subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, we are\u2014at our best\u2014a Christian country, founded by people steeped in Christian and Western philosophical principles, who believed that law and liberty are not human inventions, but gifts entrusted to us by \u201cNature\u2019s God.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past several months, I have written a series of articles exploring the relationship between natural law principles and the American Founding. 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