The Declaration of Independence was, of course, just that. It was an official declaration of independence by the “United Colonies” (upper case), as they were thus described by Thomas Jefferson, his editors John Adams and Ben Franklin, and the Congress in their July 4, 1776, statement for the ages. The document also referred to the colonies as the “united States of America.” Note the lower case “united.” This was not yet the U.S.A. — the United States of America.
These were the new “States of America,” here united together. What were they united against? They opposed “the present King of Great Britain” and his “history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” laid out in a litany roughly 1,800 words in length, remarkably brief in light of what they projected. Because of the “long train of abuses and usurpations,” intended to “reduce them to absolute Despotism,” it was the colonies’ “right” and “duty” to “throw off” their governance from Great Britain.
They were thereby declaring their independence. Or as Jefferson eloquently put it in the opening, they set forth to “declare the causes which impel them to the separation” from Britain. These “representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” did just that.
They and their new country and the world and history would never be the same.
Even then, the Declaration of Independence was more than just a document declaring independence. It remains a splendid philosophical and moral statement on human nature and governance, acknowledging (among other things) that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
But it wasn’t aimed merely at those governed from faraway Britain.
Consider the document’s audience. The first thing any writer considers is the audience. The document’s author, Thomas Jefferson, selected by John Adams and Ben Franklin for the task, knew that his audience was not merely the colonists, King George III, and Parliament. This document was written to the larger world. It was a diplomatic statement to other nations as well.
To that end, my good friend, the late, brilliant Michael Novak, argued that the Declaration of Independence should be read as a declaration of just war. Our founding fathers set out to explain to other nations the injustices against them, and hence why they were justified in declaring this separation. And speaking of war, what the signers did was considered an act of treason against the British crown. They could literally hang for this. The famous exchange between John Hancock and Ben Franklin expressed that well:
“Gentlemen, we must be unanimous,” insisted Hancock to his colleagues in Congress. “There must be no pulling different ways. We must all hang together.” Franklin nervously quipped in response: “Yes, we must all indeed hang together, or most assuredly, we shall hang separately.”
Dr. Benjamin Rush put it this way: “Stepping forward to sign the Declaration was like signing your own death warrant.” And yet, he and the 55 others did just that. They pledged to one another their lives and sacred honor. It was no accident that they finished the document with this powerful statement of unity: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
There was truly a sacred quality to the document. The 56 signers included four references to God in their statement, with two of the four added to Jefferson’s original text by Congress. The Almighty appears in the Declaration in four forms: Law Giver, Creator, Supreme Judge of the World, and Divine Providence.
In this, the American Revolution was utterly different from the bloody, ghastly, perverse, deranged, sickening French Revolution. In his A History of the American People, the late, great British historian Paul Johnson, who was a close friend of and longtime contributor to The American Spectator, wrote: “The essential difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution, in its origins, was a religious event, whereas the French Revolution was an anti-religious event. That fact was to shape the American Revolution from start to finish and determine the nature of the independent state it brought into being.”
This was indeed evident from start to finish. It was obvious to anyone watching, especially to John Adams, who warned of France’s revolution of militant God-haters: “I know not what to make of a republic of 30 million atheists.”
What they made was the guillotine. That became the stark symbol of the French Revolution.
France’s own Alexis de Tocqueville would later observe: “For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other.”
By contrast, noted Tocqueville, “In France I had seen the spirits of religion and freedom almost always marching in opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joint reign over the same land.”
Michael Novak nicely captured what Tocqueville saw. Novak said that the American revolution was all about faith and reason, fides et ratio (the later name of a wonderful Pope John Paul II encyclical), working together in harmony. These were the “two wings,” said Novak, that lifted the American Revolution, elevated upward toward the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of the founders’ intentions.
Whereas the leaders of the American Revolution looked upward, the French Revolution looked elsewhere. Our revolution was a just cause, a righteous one; theirs was not. Ours was launched by a Declaration of Independence that appealed to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”
Whether that nation today, so conceived in liberty — and in faith — remains righteous is an open question. Yes, it’s a free nation, but it’s hard to call it a just nation. Today’s citizens of the United States of America are assaulting the faith of their founders and rejecting it outright, aggressively casting it aside, not unlike the Jacobins. One popular left-wing American magazine proudly calls itself, Jacobin. Many Americans no longer want the faith of their fathers.
Freedom, like reason, needs faith to sustain it. A nation cannot ascend to its noble heights on only one wing. A genuinely righteous nation needs both, in July 1776 and still today.
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