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  "path": "/2026/04/made-equal-the-declarations-forgotten-judeo-christian-foundation/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-09T08:11:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
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    "The Latest",
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  "textContent": "Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the New Testament, cutting out the healings, resurrections, and accounts of walking on water, pasting what remained into a small blank book. The surviving text was moral wisdom from Jesus, stripped of the divine. Jefferson doubted the virgin birth, rejected the Trinity, and called the apostle Paul the first corruptor of Jesus’s actual teachings. Yet when this same man reached for language to justify the American Revolution, he wrote that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Not by nature and not by reason. By their Creator.\n\nIn July 2026, the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The occasion demands reflection. What, exactly, did the Founders mean when they declared that “all men are created equal”? Where did that radical claim come from, and why did it carry enough moral force to justify revolution? Many modern commentators dismiss it as a child of the Enlightenment, a secular creed of reason alone. But even a man who razored God from the Gospels could not cut God from the Declaration. Why not?\n\nThe idea that all people possess equal worth, holding rights upon which no government may infringe, did not rise from reason alone. Instead, it emerged from centuries of Jewish and Christian teaching that human beings carry a dignity conferred by the God in whose image they are made. America’s belief in equality joins Enlightenment reason with moral truths guided by scripture. This is a historical claim, not a religious one. The American idea of equality welcomes believer and skeptic alike; it requires no faith test. But ideas have histories. The Founders could call equality self-evident because earlier generations had absorbed moral traditions that treated dignity as something people possess by nature, not something rank or power confers. Those traditions shaped the culture that made such a declaration understandable, attractive, and worth dying for.\n\nDetractors argue that the Declaration owes its existence to secular 18th-century philosophers like Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau rather than Moses or Jesus. Jefferson and the Founders were indeed children of the Enlightenment, fluent in its language of natural rights and social contract theory. But that tells only part of the story. Even the Enlightenment’s leading voices drew from older wells. John Locke grounded natural human equality in the fact that “all Men are the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker,” all sent into the world by God’s order.\n\nWhatever secular reputation Locke later acquired, he and thinkers like him borrowed heavily from Judeo-Christian ideas of creation and moral law. The American revolutionaries lived in a culture steeped in biblical morality and language. As Calvin Coolidge observed 150 years after Independence, the great truths of 1776 had been “long pondered and often expressed” by colonial preachers long before any French _philosophes_ arrived. The Declaration’s assertion of equality did not spring from the Enlightenment alone. It grew from the convictions of a people who read their Bibles, convictions that reach back far earlier than Jefferson, Locke, or Voltaire, beginning with the Hebrew Bible and the early church that carried its ideas into the Roman world.\n\nThe Torah introduced a revolutionary idea that all humans carry inherent value because they bear God’s image. In the opening chapter of Genesis (_Bereishit_) we read that God created man and woman “in His own image.” That doctrine, known as _Imago Dei_ , spread into Western thought and established the notion that every person carries innate worth.\n\nIn Egypt and Babylon, by contrast, kings were semi-divine and peasants were expendable. The Jewish scriptures refused that hierarchy. From king to commoner, all people share the same divine imprint. “Have we not all one Father? Did not one God create us?” the prophet Malachi chastised his people. If a common Creator made us all, what justifies oppressing one another?\n\nEven Israel’s kings were required to follow the law, as answerable to God’s commandments as the lowest servant. The Law of Moses commanded impartial justice: “You shall not show partiality in judgment; hear the small and the great alike” (Deuteronomy 1:17). The law even required a newly crowned king to copy its text by hand, a lesson that he stood no higher in God’s eyes than his subjects. Everyone was equally answerable to their Maker.\n\nChristianity took those Jewish moral foundations and universalized them. All are equal in fallenness; all are equal in redemption. That message upended the class-bound Roman Empire. Jesus walked among prostitutes and lepers, preaching a kingdom where “the last shall be first.” In one famous parable, a despised Samaritan became the hero while Israel’s elites failed. Every person is equally our neighbor (Luke 10:25–37).\n\nSt. Paul went further, rejecting the most entrenched divisions his world recognized: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Most people at the time assumed slaves and nobles, men and women, simply belonged in different moral categories. Most human beings were treated barely better than animals. Paul’s words were explosive. No political manifesto ever made a claim like that. Every soul stood on level ground before God.\n\nThe vision began with Jesus, who confounded religious authorities of his day by challenging hierarchies they believed God had ordained. When a crowd prepared to stone a woman accused of adultery, Jesus did not deny what the law required but he exposed the presumption of superiority behind it: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Accusers and the accused stood together. Both needed mercy. Jesus repeatedly elevated those deemed unclean or inferior while rebuking elites who mistook status and rule-keeping for righteousness. Paul’s declaration in Galatians gave doctrinal form to what Jesus had already enacted: human worth rests on a shared standing before God, not on pedigree, power, or purity.\n\nThese teachings transformed Western moral sensibility, though not overnight. Historian Tom Holland, a secular scholar by his own description, once assumed that ideals like human equality were simply common sense, the natural baseline of any enlightened society. Extensive study of the Islamic world and pre-Christian West changed his mind. What we now treat as universal values did not emerge from the French Revolution, or the Declaration of Independence, or the Enlightenment. Holland concluded their origins lay in the Bible.\n\nThe ancient Greeks and Romans, for all their philosophy, never arrived at such a concept of equality. In those societies power was virtue and the strong owed nothing to the weak. “The Greek and Roman gods cared nothing for the poor,” Holland observes. Mercy and the sanctity of human life were “no part of the Roman baggage.” It took centuries of Judeo-Christian influence to establish the belief that every life, whether infant, slave, or king, carries equal value. As Rebecca McLaughlin put it, when we recoil at human rights abuses today, we “gasp with Christian air.” Our reflex that all people deserve respect was conditioned by twenty centuries of biblical teaching, whether we recognize it or not.\n\nThe DNA of “all men are created equal” runs back through Genesis and Golgotha before it reaches John Locke or Thomas Paine. The idea of God as ultimate sovereign imparting equal dignity to every person became the philosophical source of Western rights and justice. Even the phrase “created equal” carries this imprint, implying a Creator who bestows equal status on His creations. Jefferson’s words resonated with anyone who ever sat in a pew and heard that “God shows no favoritism” and that we are all “made of one blood.”\n\nChristian Europe often ignored these ideals. Inequality and oppression persisted through the ages. But the ideals endured, pressing through the crust of feudal order over time. By the 18th century, the seedling took root in the American colonies, particularly in the religious soil of New England and the mid-Atlantic. From that, the shoot of political equality sprang up in 1776.\n\nNone of this dismisses the Enlightenment. Jefferson’s phrasing and the Declaration’s structure owe much to secular philosophy. He drew on Locke’s theory of natural rights: life, liberty, and property recast in his own hand as “pursuit of happiness.” French philosophy and rationalism left their mark as well. Enlightenment thought offered arguments for liberty and natural law, and that was indispensable in moving Western politics past the divine right of kings toward the consent of the governed. The Framers were children of Athens and Jerusalem alike, of Voltaire as much as of Isaiah.\n\nBut Enlightenment ideals did not emerge from a vacuum. It was molded by a prior millennium of Jewish and Christian thought. When philosophers proclaimed the “rights of man,” they drew on the moral capital of the very faith they sometimes sought to discard. Holland puts it well: the secular humanist resembles a man sawing off the branch on which he sits, that branch being the Judeo-Christian inheritance. Sever the principles from their sacred roots, and they may not hold. Holland himself was startled to conclude that without Judaism and Christianity, the West would never have arrived, on its own, at the doctrines of universal dignity and equality we now take for granted.\n\nThe American Founders, despite their embrace of reason, were keenly aware of the moral and religious underpinnings their experiment required. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, called “religion and morality” the “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. John Adams warned that the Constitution was fit only for a “moral and religious people” and would falter otherwise. These statements were grounded in the Founders’ recognition that the rights spelled out by Enlightenment thinkers rested on older ethical convictions about man’s origin and purpose.\n\nWhen Jefferson wrote of “inalienable rights,” he did not cite the French Encyclopédie or a social contract theory of society. He appealed to the Creator. That appeal signaled his belief, even in deistic form, that rights are grounded in a higher order, not in the gift of the state or king. The Declaration’s authors invoked “Nature’s God” to serve as guarantor of the self-evident truths they proclaimed. They may have used somewhat generic theological language (perhaps to encompass the varied denominations among them), but the concept was directly in line with Judeo-Christian doctrine: God made human beings moral equals, and no man is born to rule another without consent.\n\nThose who claim the Declaration is purely secular often overlook how saturated it is with spiritual vocabulary. The text references “Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the world,” and “Divine Providence.” These are not the phrasings of atheistic revolutionaries. They reflect the deistic and theistic beliefs common to the Founders—beliefs steeped in the Bible, even when filtered through reason. In July 1776, even skeptics like Franklin and Jefferson agreed to include these appeals to a higher power, because they knew their cause needed legitimacy beyond human whim. A right that comes from God carries a weight no emperor can invalidate. A revolution declared with “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” is one consciously undertaken before the judgment seat of history and Heaven.\n\nEven Locke, the patron philosopher of liberal democracy, anchored his case in theological terms. In his _Second Treatise on Government_ , Locke argues that because we are all the creation of one all-powerful Maker—“make to last during His pleasure and not one another’s”—there “cannot be supposed any such subordination among us” that would authorize anyone to destroy another’s life, liberty, or property. We are equal because God owns us all. That is a biblical rationale.\n\nJefferson trimmed away Locke’s explicit references to God when writing about equality, perhaps to appeal to a broader Enlightenment-informed audience, but the conceptual DNA remained. The Declaration’s logic flows from the proposition that if a Creator endowed each person with rights, those rights are inherent and cannot be alienated by any earthly power. That conviction is Judeo-Christian to its core.\n\n—\n\n_Editor’s Note: This is the first in a two part series on the Jewish and Christian moral foundation of the American Revolution. The second can be read here._",
  "title": "Made Equal: The Declaration’s Forgotten Judeo-Christian Foundation"
}