America turns 250 this year. That’s not counting from Lexington and Concord in 1775. Or from Britain recognizing our independence in 1783. Nor from our Constitution’s drafting in 1789. Rather, we’re counting from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
It could hardly be more fitting than celebrating the Declaration’s role in shaping our national character. We rightly esteem the words penned two and a half centuries ago: “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.”
We can say much about these self-evident truths. The first has guided our national life for the better. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln commemorated the fallen at Gettysburg by way of that truth. As he put it, our Founders “brought forth” a new nation, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. again invoked that same truth. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King expressed the hope that “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed … that all men are created equal.”
There’s a solid throughline from the Declaration to the Gettysburg Address and to King’s speech. It’s America’s championing the God-given reality of human dignity. Whereas some dismiss dignity as sentimental fluff, and others count it a useful fiction, Americans understand human dignity as self-evident truth.
Christians in particular understand human dignity as due to all human beings bearing the image of God. It’s a natural inference from the Declaration of Independence to the book of Genesis. All men being “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” evokes the moment when God said, “Let us make man in our image.”
Although rooted in the Bible, this equality can be universally understood. It’s not the equality of outcome that Marxists try to impose by force. Rather, it’s an equality of rank, or status. Plato and Aristotle believed that only some human beings were by nature capable of being free. In early modern Europe, nobles enjoyed their rank by virtue of their blood. But the Declaration established that all “men” possess the same rank of freedom God created us for. Thus, Americans could not be held in subservience to the British. And blacks could not be held in subservience to whites. Truly, all human beings should be recognized by the content of their character, not their national origin or the color of their skin.
So, celebrating that all men are created equal should be a no-brainer. But some of America’s political leaders will have a hard time doing so this year. None more so than U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, who cast an alternative vision for America in a speech last year. The Senator dismissed that “all men are created equal” as an “abstract and vaguely defined proposition.” In other words, what has long held immense meaning for millions of Americans, the senator sees as meaningless.
The senator has his rationale. It’s not just self-evident truth, but all of America’s founding ideals that are a problem. In his view, they’ve been despoiled by an existential enemy. As the senator tells it, “[T]he Left took these principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed.”
Disappointingly, Senator Schmitt isn’t even interested in “taking back” America’s ideals. All because the Left, by some imagined preternatural power, has irreversibly drained those ideals of substance. Instead, the senator now champions a new founding in the name of Christianity and the West. It’s a purportedly more tangible grounding in culture, heritage, and ancestry. In this revisionism, the senator is far from alone.
But nothing has been tangible if not America’s legacy of championing human dignity. That includes abolishing slavery and defeating Jim Crow and racial segregation. And that includes winning friends abroad. We led the world in defeating Nazism and Japanese imperialism in World War II. In the Cold War, we armed, encouraged, and fought alongside those whom President Ronald Reagan called “freedom fighters.” Together, we thwarted the conquering ambitions of Soviet-led communism.
So, as we celebrate 250 years together as a free nation, we face a choice. We could, like some of our misguided politicians, renounce the vision of our Founders and the concrete legacy of championing human dignity. Or we could celebrate and renew the truth of human dignity that is inextricable from our national identity. For posterity’s sake, let’s choose the latter.