As almost all Americans know, on this day 250 years ago at what is now called Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. I have been thinking about the Declaration all day today, as well as in the past few days, and over the past year. I want to use this blog today to share a few of my thoughts on the Declaration of Independence.
As we also know, the Declaration sets forth the principles that the United States of America was founded on. Today, July 4, 2026, Americans and others across the United States and around the world have read or listened to the stirring words of the Declaration. The full text is easy to find and I do not need to repeat it all here, but I want to focus on two passages of the Declaration that I feel are especially important to reiterate today.
Some historians claim this as the greatest sentence ever written, and I am not inclined to argue:
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, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In the Declaration of Independence our Founding Fathers did not cite as the basis for the creation of our nation English laws such as the Magna Carta, their national heritage as Englishmen (although most were of English ancestry), their European ethnicity (though all were descended from Europeans), or the Bible or the Christian religion (although all were nominally Christian even if some were privately Deist). Some of the Founding Fathers certainly cited these attributes in their arguments for American Liberty, but our Founding document — the Declaration — does not. Instead the Declaration of Independence indicates our rights are derived from the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that are “self-evident.” The Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence “by Authority of the good People of these Colonies,” and the American people needed no other authority to create a new nation.
Some point to the reference to “Nature’s God” and other sentences in the Declaration that invoke the authority of a monotheistic God. But they simply reflect that the American colonists who worshipped God believed in a monotheistic God. After all Americans in 1776 were overwhelmingly Christian with only a smattering of Jews and Deists, and all of them were Monotheists. Even if some slaves carried to America from Africa or Native Americans may have retained polytheistic beliefs, the Founding Fathers sadly did not consider them to be citizens of the new United States. So the references to “Nature’s God” and the “Creator” in the Declaration cannot possibly be cited as authority for the proposition that the United States was founded as a Christian nation or on the authority of the Bible. Some may argue that the Declaration indicates that belief in a single God is a founding principle of our nation, yet the Founding Fathers cited Roman and Greek sources as frequently as they did the Bible in arguing for Independence, notwithstanding that they were fully aware that the Greeks and Romans worshipped multiple gods. So you cannot conclude from the Declaration that the Founding Fathers wanted a nation that welcomes only people of monotheistic faiths, such as Christians and Jews, and excludes people of polytheistic faiths.
The Declaration of Independence only indicates that the Founding Fathers believed that the universal tenets shared by all religions — “self-evident truths” — are founding principles for our nation. Nothing in the Declaration supports claims that the United States of America was intended to be the homeland of those of European heritage or Judeo-Christian faith, or that other faiths or heritage can be excluded from the United States because they do not belong here.
The Declaration declares that the founding principles of the United States are “self-evident” and include “unalienable rights”. The Continental Congress left it to Americans to decide if they agreed that these truths are self-evident and if they wanted to defend their unalienable rights. Some did not — many Americans in 1776 refused to recognize these truths are self-evident, or could not accept the consequences of claiming their unalienable rights, and became Loyalists to the King. But we won the Revolutionary War, not just with the force of arms, but also with the force of the ideas and ideals of these self-evident truths and unalienable rights. Our Nation was dedicated to these self-evident truths and unalienable rights and patriotic Americans should fight for them today, even if some Americans are willing to abandon them.
The Declaration also makes clear that the founding principles of the United States are not defined by statutes or laws or other documents written by kings or parliaments — or by the Founding Fathers themselves. They are “self-evident”. Our “unalienable rights” were not created by the Continental Congress, or the Constitutional Convention, and they cannot be taken away — they cannot be alienated — by a President, or a Congress, or a Supreme Court. Our “unalienable rights” were not given to us by anybody; they were claimed by Americans 250 years ago in a Revolution, and we should preserve them today.
The most important of the unalienable rights is that Governments must derive their “powers from the consent of the governed.” The “consent of the governed” is fundamentally expressed through periodic free elections. When the President, or legislators, or the courts impose or enforce restrictions on who can vote, or how people can vote, or whose votes get counted to secure the outcome they prefer in elections, they are not deriving their “powers from the consent of the governed.”
We should also remember if our present “Government becomes destructive of” of our unalienable rights or of “Life, Liberty, or pursuit of Happiness, . . . it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” Furthermore, as the Declaration asserts in a later paragraph, when a Government “evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Our Founders had to fight a Revolution to abolish the government that became destructive of their unalienable rights, but I hope Americans today will be able to alter ours through peaceful the means of protests, litigation and elections.
Finally, I want to focus on one of the abuses of the King of Great Britain that Thomas Jefferson listed as a justification for throwing off British government, specifically that the King was
obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither
It is ironic and tragic that 250 years later our President and his Administration are obstructing the laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners and refusing to allow immigrants who came to this country lawfully to remain in the United States, and that our Supreme Court ruled only this past week that the President can do so. American citizens have an unalienable right as part of their “pursuit of Happiness” to have their friends and families and neighbors who entered into this country lawfully, and abide by our laws, remain in this country. The President and the Court do not have the authority to take that unalienable right away, and it angers and saddens me that they are doing so.
Source: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
In counterpoint and on a happier note today, July 4, 2026, I was at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and the Naturalization ceremony for 75 immigrants who became American citizens today. It gladdens me and gives me hope to see new Americans pledging their loyalty and commitment to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, and to be with hundreds if not a thousand Americans who joined me in celebrating their new citizenship today.
You can see photos from Monticello at my Facebook page here:
On This Day In The Revolution 