Against Authority

In our ongoing quarrel about the nature of the American Founding, Christian conservatives often point to the Declaration of Independence to demonstrate the religious basis of the American project. With its four references to the deity, the statement of the Continental Congress stands in bold relief to the later “godless” Constitution of 1787.

The signatories of the Declaration may have invoked, in their statement to a “candid world,” “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world,” and proclaimed their “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” language that could both encourage orthodox Christians and reassure rationalist deists, but the document’s justification for the Patriots’ endeavor rested on a social contract theory taken not from Scripture but from Enlightenment notions of natural equality and rights: 

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. 

The “self-evident” claim of equal rights-bearing individuals, the argument for the origins and purpose of government, and the justification for revolution against one that failed to secure such ends–all of this was not obviously derived from Christianity. It wasn’t necessarily inconsistent with Christianity, of course. The Bible did teach that all human beings were created in the image and likeness of God, and the right to resistance to unjust civil authority had long been endorsed by Reformed political theology. The natural rights philosophy developed by English Enlightenment philosophers had been taken up by some Christian ministers and expounded in sermons and promulgated in pamphlets throughout the colonies. The Declaration spoke to its times; “it said,” as Carl L. Becker noted in his celebrated study, “what everyone was thinking.” 

Yet, the belief that the political theory of the Declaration of Independence was, and was rooted in, an expression of Christian tradition was never universally shared. Throughout the nation’s history, there have been voices that complained that the argument for revolution proclaimed dangerous falsehoods about the nature of human beings, the origin and purpose of civil government, and the duty of obedience to authority. It should not be surprising that at the outset the Patriot claim that governments were instituted by men to secure their natural rights was challenged by those who remained loyal to George III. “When mens Principles are wrong, their Practices will seldom be right,” thundered Myles Cooper, Church of England divine and exiled president of King’s College, near the conclusion of a sermon preached at the University of Oxford on Friday, December 13, 1776. “When they suppose those Powers to be derived solely from the People, which are ‘ordained of God,’ and their heads are filled with ideas of Original Compacts which never existed, and which are always explained so as to answer their present Occasions; no wonder that they confound the duties of Rulers and Subjects, and are perpetually prompted to dictate where it is their Business to obey. When once they conceive the Governed to be superior to the Governors, and that they may set up their pretended Natural Rights in Opposition to the positive Laws of the State; they will naturally proceed to ‘despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities,’ and to open a door for Anarchy, ‘Confusion, and every evil work,’ to enter.”

Already in 1773, the English-born divine Jonathan Boucher had been cautioning his parishioners in Prince George’s Country, Maryland, about the false and dangerous ideas regarding government that were found in treatises of political theory, circulating in popular periodicals, and pronounced in sermons. Boucher warned them of “the degeneracy of modern times,” a “corruption of principles,” and a “destruction of foundations” through “inculcating a general persuasion that government is neither sacred nor inviolable.” In a later sermon, he focused on those “loose and dangerous” opinions on government that were animating the present unrest. Most of that lengthy discourse he dedicated to demonstrating the erroneousness of the theory that legitimate government came about by means of a “social contract” agreed on by free and equal individuals to escape from the inconveniencies of “the state of nature.”

For Boucher, the claim that “the whole human race is born equal; and that no man is naturally inferior, or, in any respect, subjected to another; and that he can be made subject to another only by his own consent” was both demonstrably false as well as unbiblical. “Man differs from man in everything that can be supposed to lead to supremacy and subjection, as one star differs from another star in glory,” he noted. God had intended human beings to be social creatures, but in their fallen state, human society requires government to maintain peace and stability, and government itself depends on fixed distinctions of rank. The very appeal to natural equality and government by consent served only to destabilize government: “Governments, though always forming, would never be completely formed: for, the majority to-day, might be the minority tomorrow; and, of course, that which is now fixed would soon be unfixed.” Boucher further noted that “there is no record that any such government ever was so formed. If there had, it must have carried the seeds of it’s [sic] decay in it’s very constitution.” Indeed, government based on consent would defeat the fundamental purpose of government itself, which is to maintain the social order. He concluded that the social contract theory was nothing but a “Utopian fiction,” which flatters our pride and legitimates our baser desires. “What we wish to be true, we easily persuade ourselves is true,” the minister observed. Those counseling resistance to British authority in the end sanctioning resistance “clearly and literally against authority.” 

Boucher concluded his discourse with the instruction of 1 Peter 2:13–17: “fear God: honour the King,” a text to which Reverend Cooper had appealed toward the end of his fast day sermon, and which served as the text for Loyalist sermons delivered during the war. From that and other scriptural warrants–Jesus’s instruction to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:13–17, Matthew 22:15–22, Luke 20:20–26), Paul’s counsel to “be subject unto the higher powers” (Romans 13:1–7)–they proclaimed the Christian duty to obey the sovereign under which God’s providence had placed them. Human beings are not born free and equal in a state of nature but are born in sin and into society, consigned by Providence to their stations in this life. Government is not formed by individuals freely entering into a compact to protect their rights but ordained by God. Men have no right of resistance to its authority; they are bound instead by the duty, disclosed by revelation as well as by reason, to respect its officers and obey its dictates. In their eyes, the American conflict was to be understood as a continuation of that older dispute about the nature of government and the duties owed to the sovereign, the relationship between a religious establishment and political stability, dissent and disorder.

While the Declaration of Independence had been composed to justify (and implore support for) the breaking away from Great Britain, in time Americans came to realize that its stirring words could be deployed for other causes. That affirmation of the “self-evident” truths of human equality and inalienable rights came to be a most formidable rhetorical weapon in the fight against slavery. If its claims were indeed “self-evident,” then it self-evidently followed that no person could rightfully find himself or herself the property of another, that the institution of American slavery was both a sin against the Creator who endowed those rights and an affront to the American project. 

Religious abolitionists coupled the Declaration’s self-evident truths to those disclosed by Christianity. For example, The Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, adopted in Philadelphia in 1833, opened with an appeal to its assertions as “the corner-stone upon which is founded the Temple of Freedom,” and proclaimed, “With entire confidence in the overruling justice of God, we plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of divine revelation as upon the Everlasting Rock.” Jonathan Blanchard stated that “abolitionists take their stand upon the New Testament doctrine of the natural equity of man. The one-bloodism of human kind:—and upon those great principles of human rights, drawn from the New Testament, and announced in the American Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men have natural and inalienable rights to person, property and the pursuit of happiness.” Albert Barnes wrote that slavery “is a violation of the first sentiments expressed in our Declaration of Independence, and on which our fathers founded the vindication of their own conduct in an appeal to arms… Nothing can be more certain than that man was formed by his Maker for freedom, and that all men have a right to be free.” The argument that the Word of God endorsed slavery, he warned, would turn people to infidelity. “‘If such are the teachings of the Bible, it is impossible that that book should be a revelation given to mankind from the true God…. No book which departs in its teachings from those great laws can possibly be from God.’”

For proslavery theologians, such appeals to “equality” were simply contrary to what they believed Christian revelation clearly instructed. Barnes had warned that the clergy’s disavowal of the Declaration’s principles would turn anti-slavery Americans away from Christian faith. Frederick A. Ross countered in his Slavery Ordained of God (1857) that it was the abolitionists’ strained interpretations of Scripture that were the true cause of their infidelity. He accused abolitionist preachers of “torturing the Bible for a while, to make it give the same testimony,” in order to have the prophets condemn slavery as “a violation of the first sentiments of the Declaration of Independence.” “You find it difficult to persuade men that Moses and Paul were moved by the Holy Ghost to sanction the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson!” he mordantly remarked. “You find it hard to make men believe that Moses saw in the mount, and Paul had vision in heaven, that this future apostle of Liberty was inspired by Jesus Christ.” The Declaration of Independence, rather, expressed an “infidel theory of human government.” Its propositions were not self-evident truths but claims that could only be verified by means of reasoning through experience or vouchsafed by revelation. The entire chain was dependent on that first assertion of natural equality, and if that first link could be refuted, the entire argument would collapse: “If all men are not created equal in attributes of body and mind, then the inequality may be so great that such men could not be endowed with right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, unalienable save in their consent; then government over such men cannot rightfully rest upon their consent; nor can they have right to alter or abolish government in their mere determination.” For Ross, Scripture taught that political authority was not derived from the consent of the governed but was bestowed by God (to Adam and Noah, directly to Israel, and indirectly to the other nations). The appeal to Romans 13 would appear to settle the case. So long as the government did not require one to violate God’s word, one owed it one’s obedience. “God gives no sanction to the notion of a social compact. He never gave to man individual, isolated, natural rights, unalienably in his keeping.” 

For Reverend Thomas Smyth, the Declaration of Independence was not only unscriptural but the very origin of the nation’s erupting crisis. “Now, to me, pondering long and profoundly upon the course of events,” he told his audience in Charleston, South Carolina, in a fast day sermon on November 21, 1860, “the evil and bitter root of all our evils is to be found in the infidel, atheistic, French Revolution, Red Republican principle, embodied as an axiomatic seminal principle—not in the Constitution, but in the Declaration of Independence. That seminal principle is this: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted by God, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,’ and so on to inevitable consequences.”

Christians, he said, were not to be fooled by the appeals to the deity that punctuated that document. “God is introduced to give dignity and emphasis; to create man, and to ordain government; and then He is banished. The sceptre is torn from his hands, and fictions are substituted for facts.” Americans’ acceptance of the false principle of equality had brought about government by the ignorant mob, and even the interpretation of the Bible according to “the will of the majority,” that is, the rejection of its “infallible, unalterable authority.” On account of the nation’s primal sin, they were now “now partakers in the penal curse and consequences, and in all the disastrous results of violated faith, and in the aggressive encroachments of a cruel and crushing majority.” 

Today, such assaults on the Declaration of Independence may appear shocking–perhaps even scandalous–given the prominent place the document–and the ideas it pronounces–has taken in our civic life. Nevertheless, the text still has influential despisers. Contemporary “postliberal” and “National Conservative” thinkers have lodged similar complaints, regarding the document as a fundamentally Lockean production announcing a decisive break from the political principles of medieval Christendom or biblical values and ushering in the destructive liberal project. Conservative writer Rod Dreher, for instance, has written that the “Lockean” Founding was a break with the Christian concern for a government that would pursue virtue. Political theorist and leading postliberal intellectual Patrick Deneen has argued that the Founders’ emphasis on the rights-bearing individual set in motion a regime which in time undercut all traditional affinities and local commitments, placing the satisfaction of individual self-interest above all pursuits. Liberalism has failed, he claims, because liberalism has succeeded. To rescue themselves from this social and spiritual disaster, Americans need to break from the Lockean emphasis on the individual’s “self-fashioning” announced in the Declaration of Independence, in which the commonwealth is established to secure our individual rights, and return to a politics based on a classical Christian vision of the common good in which “inequality based on differences in talent, interest, and achievement … is a sign of our deeper solidarity.” 

National Conservative impresario Yoram Hazony suggests that the Declaration of Independence–a liberal Enlightenment statement proclaiming “the Lockean doctrine of universal rights as ‘self-evident’ before the light of reason”–was a kind of false beginning, corrected by the Constitution of 1787 which was fashioned by men influenced by and committed to nation and tradition rather than liberal fantasies. But in the twentieth century, that liberal impulse had powerfully reasserted itself, bent on uprooting and supplanting the nation’s conservative inheritance. Those who now promote the myth of America as a “creedal nation” based on Jefferson’s assertions do so in “in service of liberal dogma” which is the source of so many of our curren woes. And such dogma contradicts what is proclaimed by Scripture. “Whereas the Bible depicts moral and political obligations deriving from God and inherited by way of family, national, and religious tradition,” Hazony states, “liberalism make no mention of either God or inherited tradition…. while the Bible teaches that all are created in the image of God, thus imparting a dignity and sanctity to each human being, it says nothing about our being by nature perfectly free and equal.” 

Such attacks on the bold declaration of the Continental Congress have the salutary effect of urging us to consider again this eighteenth century text and horizon of liberty that it has opened. We may disagree whether it represents a continuation or a break, on the balance and importance of its religious and Enlightenment elements, but in an increasingly illiberal world, our attention to the fundamental questions of political life, of the legitimate–and limited–ends of government, could not be more urgent.

Editor’s Note: The arguments of this piece are adapted from the author’s recent book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale, 2024).

References

Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1942). 

Myles Cooper, National Humiliation and Repentance recommended, and the Causes of the present Rebellion in America assigned (December 13, 1776).

Jonathan Boucher, “On Fundamental Principles” and “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-Resistence,” in A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution; on Thirteen Discourses, Preached in North American between the Years 1863 and 1775: With an Historical Preface (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967).

Frederick A. Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857).

Thomas Smyth, The Sin and the Curse; or, the Union, The True Source of Disunion, and our Duty in the Present Crisis, a discourse preached on the occasion of the Day of Humiliation and Prayer appointed by the Governor of South Carolina, November 21, 1860 (Charleston, NC: Steam Power Presses of Evans and Cogswell, 1860).

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2018).

Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (New York: Sentinel, 2023).

Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2022).