Exceptionally Blessed

While our founders had many differences in their approach to various issues, they all thought alike in the one area that mattered most: they all held an identical world view. And what was that world view? It was the Judeo-Christian view that God exists, that the Bible is true, that we, and everything around us, are here by a special act of creation whereby God assigned to His creation the laws that would govern the physical and moral universe. As we have already seen, this world view played a key role in our court decisions and in our educational system.

The unanimous Declaration of Independence, which was supported by all thirteen of the States, spelled out the ideas, the foundational philosophy that these States all shared in common and embraced in 1776. The States proclaimed in the Declaration that they believed in the God of Creation, that He had created them free and equal, and that they were ultimately bound by His law above all else.

The language of the Declaration illustrates that common world view as nothing else could. First, it must be pointed out that the “self-evident” fact that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” is an indication that these men did not hold this view as a mere religious principle. No, they believed it to be an obvious, observable fact. In Jefferson’s first draft he used the language “we hold these truths to be sacred.” That was later amended from the word “sacred,” a religious concept, to “self-evident,” a non-debatable, obvious fact of nature. Even those founders who are claimed today to have been less “religious,” Jefferson and Franklin, still believed in the existence of God the Creator as self-evident truth.

Indeed, they all proclaimed that the very authority that they acted on in declaring independence from Great Britain was “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In so declaring, they were also declaring that they were not a secular, but rather a God-honoring people and that they were willing to implement the law of God as the highest possible authority of a government. They believed that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” were higher than the authority of the King of England or the British Parliament, and they were willing to stake their very lives, fortunes and sacred honor on that distinction. In the next chapter we will discuss the whole idea of natural law and of its role in this and other founding documents.

Our founders, all very well versed in the concept of natural law, appealed to natural law not only as the authority for their actions but also as the source of their fundamental rights. Referring to this idea of natural law, the Declaration of Independence goes on to say, “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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

What does it mean when they write that “all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”? It means that under natural law our rights and our laws are part of the Created Order. It means that God is the giver of life and liberty, because life and liberty are part of God’s holy character. It means that because God gives us life and liberty, it is absolute, far above the reach of government. It means that government must give priority to God. It means that God’s laws are higher than the laws established by any human government. (This, by the way, is why there is a concerted effort on the part of secular academia to view the U.S. Constitution as our founding document rather than The Declaration of Independence.)

In 1776 this was not just some quirky theological theory or an offhanded rationalization for rebellion. This was the legal operating understanding of all of the signers of the Declaration, and later for all of the signers of the U.S. Constitution for that matter. This is how our founders understood and viewed the world, and it was the main distinguishing difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The American Founders embraced a Judeo-Christian world view. The French revolutionaries embraced various forms of a materialistic world view. And the differences in outcome were predictable and understandable.