The Principle
The Declaration of Independence (1776) is the founding document of the American republic, and its most celebrated passage - "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" - condenses into a single sentence a political theology derived from the biblical doctrine of the imago Dei, mediated through the natural law tradition of Locke, Pufendorf, and the Reformed Protestant theological culture of colonial America. Jefferson was a Deist who compiled a rationalistic edition of the Gospels, but the Declaration's claims about Creator-endowed rights are inseparable from the biblical and theological tradition he inherited and reworked.
Biblical Foundation
Genesis 1:27 - "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" - is the ultimate source of the Declaration's claim that all men are "created equal." The imago Dei establishes the equal dignity of all human beings before God, regardless of birth, wealth, or political status. This equality is not a product of civil society or political arrangement but a fact of creation - which is why Jefferson could call it "self-evident." Deuteronomy 10:17 - "For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords... He regards not persons" - expresses the same divine impartiality that grounds human equality. Romans 2:11 - "For there is no respect of persons with God" - provides the Pauline version of this principle. The Declaration's appeal to "the Supreme Judge of the world" invokes the covenantal God of the Hebrew Bible who holds rulers and peoples accountable, evoking the Deuteronomic covenant's sanctions against those who violate their obligations. The appeal to "Divine Providence" at the Declaration's conclusion reflects the Reformed Calvinist tradition of covenant theology, in which historical events are understood as divine providential governance.
Historical Transmission
Jefferson drew primarily on Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689), which itself drew on Pufendorf's natural law synthesis rooted in Genesis 1:26 and Romans 2:15. The chain of influence runs from Paul through Aquinas through Pufendorf through Locke to Jefferson - a genealogy whose biblical roots have been obscured by the Enlightenment philosophical vocabulary that is atheir medium. The Calvinist covenantal tradition was equally important in shaping the American political mind: John Witherspoon, Jefferson's teacher at Princeton and the only ordained minister to sign the Declaration, brought a directly Calvinist political theology to the founding generation. The Scottish Enlightenment's common sense philosophy, which formed the intellectual atmosphere of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), synthesised Reformed theology with Enlightenment rationalism in ways that made the Declaration's claims seem simultaneously biblical and self-evidently rational.
Modern Application
The Declaration's claim that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights became the moral touchstone by which subsequent generations measured American law. Abraham Lincoln made it the interpretive key to the Constitution: in the Gettysburg Address he framed the Civil War as a test of whether a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could survive. The Civil Rights movement, from Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King Jr., invoked the Declaration as a promissory note whose payment slavery and segregation had deferred. The Declaration's Creator-endowed rights language has been used to argue both for and against specific constitutional rights - the right to life in abortion debates, the right to liberty in economic regulation debates - demonstrating how live the theological framework of the founding document remains in American legal and political argument.
Scholarly Debate
Scholars debate whether the Declaration's theology is biblical, Deistic, or a hybrid. Daniel Dreisbach's Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers argues that the founders' use of Scripture was more extensive and more literal than is commonly recognised, and that Jefferson's Deism was atypical of the founding generation. John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? provides a balanced assessment. For legal historians, the most important question is whether rights grounded in a theological claim - Creator-endowment - can survive in a secular legal order. Richard Rorty argued that rights talk must be pragmatically justified without appeal to theology; Michael Perry argues in The Idea of Human Rights that human rights claims require a theological or quasi-theological foundation to be intelligible. The debate is live and unresolved, and its outcome matters for the coherence of the human rights project that the Declaration helped launch.