The Declaration of Independence is not something to be taken for granted. Even in rebellion, Americans might have chosen to remain in the British empire, seeking only concessions from king and parliament. Having decided upon independence, they could have issued a more perfunctory document to notify foreign powers that they could now open diplomatic relations with the American government and treat the conflict between Britain and America as an interstate war, not merely a British internal matter. The Declaration of Independence as we know it was not inevitable: The Committee of Five to whom the Continental Congress delegated the task of drafting the document could have chosen a penman other than Thomas Jefferson. And, of course, America might have lost the war, reducing the Declaration of Independence to a memento of treason. 

Instead the Declaration is the introduction to all the world of a republic that has become the mightiest power on earth, a free republic on an unprecedented scale blessed with prosperity that was unimaginable in 1776. The course of every nation and people on earth has been changed by what the Declaration announced. Americans have good reason to look back to the origins of their independence to understand who they are and what has made them successful. They also look to it to understand the morality of the case for their cause, both in 1776 and today. 

The Declaration and its significance have been much debated over the past 250 years—by Americans themselves and by foreigners, by laymen and experts, by conservatives, liberals, and radicals. Modern Age has been host to many of these debates, and for the semiquincentennial of America’s independence, we present now a symposium of twenty-eight responses from serious thinkers of many perspectives, but chiefly on the traditionalist right, to the questions, “How should we think about the Declaration of Independence today? What significance should it have for conservatives or liberals—or for Americans themselves as a people—in the twenty-first century?” —ed.

Our contributors are

Michael Anton

The 250th anniversary of American independence has occasioned renewed combat in the creed versus culture wars. Each side correctly sees that the other misses an important element of America’s meaning, but both incorrectly believe theirs tells the whole story. 

The American founders faced a challenge unresolved since antiquity: to identify and articulate a new foundation for political legitimacy and law that citizens could believe is true and just, and not merely resignedly accept. This problem’s age-old (we may say “default”) solution—a claim of divine origin—had not been viable since Christianity cleaved civil from religious law, resulting in centuries of bifurcated authority, political and theological confusion, dynastic wars, and claims to “divine right” that, whatever their erstwhile value, were no longer credible. The law’s new basis also had to bind together peoples of differing ethnicities and faiths on terms all could accept. The only viable solution was, therefore, a rational—and thus ipso facto universal—principle. 

None of that obviates the fundamental and permanent fact that all politics is necessarily particular, or that early Americans’ particular experiences and traditions were indispensable in creating our country. Nor does it diminish America’s serendipity, as Publius reminds us in Federalist 2, in being (mostly) culturally, linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and philosophically similar, nor justify or demand any policy or practice that reduces this similarity. 

As Jerusalem and Athens are the twin pillars of the West, creed and culture are the joint foundations of America. We could not be who we are without both.

Michael Anton is lecturer in politics and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington, D.C.

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Andre Archie

In commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, we should take pride in the founding fathers’ rejection of antiquated British political theories that were prevalent during the revolutionary period. One such theory was “virtual representation.” It held that Parliament represented those, like the Americans, who had no seat in the House of Commons and did not participate in British elections. Colonial Americans resoundingly rejected this theory in favor of actual representation: Voters elect representatives who voice their interests and are accountable to them. The rejection of “virtual representation” was, of course, the impetus behind the rallying cry “no taxation without representation.” Here we find one of the roots of federalism! 

The Declaration of Independence also brilliantly embodies two seemingly antagonistic political traditions that remain relevant to our political discourse today. An older political tradition prevalent in colonial America understood the public good, according to the political scientist Cecelia Kenyon, “as a corporate entity.” The newer political tradition, the Lockean tradition, to which the American colonists were growing receptive, reinterpreted the public good such that it remains the end of government but protects the natural rights of individuals in regard to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The American people are a collection of individuals, not an abstract whole. Some of our individual interests overlap with those of other Americans; some do not. The Declaration of Independence holds both traditions in tension, affirming that legitimate government exists to secure the natural rights of individuals while remaining answerable to the people as a whole. 

Andre Archie is an associate professor of ancient Greek philosophy at Colorado State University. His latest book is The Virtue of Color-Blindness.

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Bradley J. Birzer

As we approach America 250, we should keep several things in mind. First, the Declaration combines a deeply conservative past with an aspirational future. As Thomas Jefferson revealed in 1825, we find the common sense of the document rooted in the lineage of Aristotle, Cicero, Sidney, and Locke. 

Second, the Declaration incorporates timeless truths rooted in natural law and the divine, manifested as natural rights and common-law grievances. While most scholars focus on the natural rights, we must remember that the twenty-seven grievances are common-law violations. 

Third, the Declaration offers the single most important statement about the dignity and freedom of the human person since St. Paul declared that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female. The Declaration’s critical proclamation—that all men are created equal—is a universal claim, transcending accidents of birth, time, and place. If true (and it is), this claim is applicable to all human persons, everywhere and always. 

Fourth, the Declaration, through its final sentence—“we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”—becomes something more than a political document. It becomes something much closer to a covenant. 

Fifth, no country had ever begun with such a profound philosophical statement, claim, and desire, as well as a self-destruction clause—it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off tyrannical government. We Americans should count our blessings.

Bradley J. Birzer is Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College.

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David Bromwich

The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, taken together, mark a moment of political founding. Yet the Constitution ventured no argument concerning the moral commitment of the people whose union it sought to establish. It presumed the desirability of a framework that could enable the practice of republican virtue; and the presumption was credible largely because the Declaration spelled out an underlying principle: “All men are created equal.” The inclusion of the Bill of Rights—especially the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments—suggests that the framers understood the complex relationship between an instrument of practical guidance and a statement of principle. When we agree with this view of their intent and read the Constitution through the Declaration, we follow the judgment of Abraham Lincoln. The founders, Lincoln believed, meant to give form and substance to a “government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Could Jefferson really have meant what his words seemed to say? Lincoln thought so: “I say that there is room enough for us all to be free.” Equality means a fair chance, for all men and women, on the simple authority of the rights with which they were endowed by their Creator.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. 

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Jonathan Clark

Visitors to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., can admire the Declaration of Independence to this day. It is displayed in a monstrance, an airtight glass case on the high altar of a secular church. But the crowds of pilgrims are not encouraged to read it: Armed guards gently move them along. How many visitors appreciate that its interpretation is still a live historical issue? Famously, it begins with a few general principles. But they demand historical explanation, not uncritical reverence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration claims; but had they been, they would have occurred to all people, in all places, at all times. Historians record otherwise. The Declaration then turns to a long list of specific grievances; but all peoples at all times and in all places have grievances, real or rhetorical, which are usually resolved by the normal political means of friction, argument, and compromise, continued indefinitely. Why did this particular list instead cause the Revolution? Remarkably, the Declaration was not (as is popularly assumed) a program for revolution (armed conflict had already begun the previous year); it merely claimed that resistance was obviously right. Nor did its account of the grievances well anticipate how they could be resolved by independence in 1783, or by the Constitution of 1787, or why these omissions might lead to a second civil war, as happened in the 1860s. Would “jaw, jaw” have been better than “war, war”? 

Jonathan Clark is a historian of Britain and America in the eighteenth century; he was a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and then of All Souls College, Oxford, and latterly held a distinguished chair at the University of Kansas.

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Gregory M. Collins

American self-government is an “experiment,” we are often told—or is it? The Declaration of Independence, read in its entirety, suggests it is not, at least not to the extent that conventional accounts of the American founding indicate. Of the twenty-seven specific grievances against King George III and Parliament the document enumerates, all but four had been previously included in the state constitutions of Virginia, South Carolina, and New Hampshire. English colonists in British America had honed the practice of self-government for generations. Upon declaring independence, the Americans still retained inherited English customs of due process, trial by jury, Christianity, and property rights. 

Describing the American system of republican self-government as an “experiment” fuels the misleading impression that it was an innovative attempt to discover previously unknown principles. The American founding certainly designed keen modifications to this inheritance, such as the extended republic and the Electoral College. But this system, at root, was indebted to tried-and-true practices throughout the ages that revealed the wisdom of inherited customs. The significance of the Declaration today should derive from this distinction between experiment and inheritance: An experiment blesses the unknown; an inheritance sanctions the wisdom of forefathers. Politics, more than any other vocation, should be on guard against the former. For if we experiment without heeding this wisdom, what emerges in American politics are not states men with judgment but revolutionaries with petri dishes. 

Gregory M. Collins is a lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University and the author of Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy.

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Alan Pell Crawford

Samuel Johnson, not alone among thoughtful Brits, was not terribly impressed by the rebellious colonies’ claims. “How is it,” he asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson had a point, but today it has become a kind of commonplace that we, of course, would have seen the irony that our founders did not. 

What Johnson did not understand, but Edmund Burke did, was the seemingly paradoxical connection between the existence of slavery in the colonies and support for the Revolution. 

The “spirit of liberty” among Southerners was “more high and haughty than in those to the northward,” Burke argued, precisely because of the institution of slavery. In Virginia and the Carolinas, “they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.” 

Burke in no way intended “to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it,” but, he said, “I cannot alter the nature of man.” Southerners were “much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty” than Northerners. In such people, “the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.” And so it proved to be.

Alan Pell Crawford is the author of This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South and Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson.

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David DesRosiers

The uniting, ennobling, uplifting, and chastening notion of equality that animated our declared origin story circa 1776 has been swapped out for a disuniting, leveling, rootless, and imitative fake. The present notion of equality that is taught and enforced is designed not to unite the human pluribus but to divide it. 

You can’t point to anything that is civilizationally important to our nation that is not showing signs of advanced personal, collective, cultural, and political morbidity. If we stay on the present course, the prognosis for “We the People” is not good. Our vital statistics are pointing toward cultural and political suicide. 

The prescription for what ails us only requires a change of mind: an improvement—an upgrade in our mental code—in how we think about equality and pursue it. 

Here is what “created equal” really means: Every human being is born for self-government, politically and personally. Equality extends the franchise of political liberty, and its free pursuits, to the human family. It is only because all are created equal that all are free. 

That’s it. And it turns out that’s a pretty big, new-order-of-the-ages deal. 

All we must do is swap out the leveling, debased, fake mental software that is ill serving us for the uplifting, real American McCoy and its benefits.  

David DesRosiers is the president of RealClear Media Fund and the host of Get Real.

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Donald Devine

I like how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas put it recently: The Declaration “announces the ends of government”; the Constitution “is the means of government.” 

Thomas notes that “the Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties” in the Declaration “from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism—truly for the first time in modern history—to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights.” 

As important as the Declaration’s moral ends and the legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed are, it is clear that its own justifications rested primarily upon its higher moral authorities—nature and its God, a supreme World Judge, Providence, and the Creator. 

These are less definitive today, and moral ends need effective means to support them. A more practical problem is that the Constitution’s framers placed their confidence in the separation of powers and federalism, but these have now been so diluted under progressivism as to undermine the whole understanding of “consent of the governed.” 

Understanding the problem, as they say, gets us halfway to the solution.

Donald Devine is senior scholar at The Fund for American Studies.

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Glenn Ellmers

I can hardly go online these days without seeing another volley in the “creed versus culture” war that has overtaken the right. This battle strikes me as deeply counterproductive, insofar as it distracts us from fighting the left. What’s more, it is totally unnecessary. 

As a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute who studied under Harry Jaffa, I’ve been reading, writing, and teaching about the Declaration for thirty years. If I’ve learned anything, it is that the generation that waged the American Revolution believed that both “form” and “matter” were necessary to make republican government work. 

What’s special about the American identity can’t be reduced to superficialities like baseball and hot dogs. Does any serious person think that preferring sushi to frankfurters makes someone a bad citizen? 

Wouldn’t a more serious defense of our tradition and cultural identity point to free enterprise, individual liberty, religious faith, and strong communities? Is this American way of life—which mixes virtues, principles, opinions, and habits—creed or culture? It isn’t easy to separate them, and there is no need to. 

Trusting in “divine providence,” the founders pledged their “sacred honor” to protect the natural rights of “the good people of these colonies.” They didn’t posit a false dichotomy between our political principles and our moral and religious heritage, and neither should we.  

Glenn Ellmers is the author of The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America and is the Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding at the Claremont Institute.

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John Fonte

The quarter-millennial celebration of the United States of America should remind us that the Declaration of Independence was one of the most profound political documents ever written. The Declaration, along with the Constitution and The Federalist, was, of course, the handiwork of America’s founders. In terms of theoretical sophistication (an unparalleled comprehension of the intricacies of human nature) and real-life courageous statesmanship (“we mutually pledge . . . our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”), our founders rank as one of—no, make that the—greatest political leadership class in world history, surpassing any political elite past or present from any nation or political community of any type. 

I challenge today’s critics of the founders to name a political leadership class anywhere on earth superior or even equal to our founders: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, Jay, Henry, Mason, Wilson, Dickinson, Witherspoon, Carroll, Rodney, Hancock, and others. As citizens of the republic that they created, a constitutional republic that has provided more opportunity, freedom, and prosperity to more people than any other nation, our debt to the founders is enormous. 

In our 250th anniversary year, as bad faith actors defame the founders and the founding, our task, our duty, is to defend their honor and explain to future generations of Americans and the world at large their momentous accomplishments. 

John Fonte is the author of Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. 

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Bruce Frohnen

Respect for the Declaration of Independence, for its authors, and for ourselves as a nation and a people requires that we take it for what it so clearly is: a legal document dissolving the political bands connecting the American colonies to Great Britain. From here we can proceed to recognize in the Declaration’s soaring rhetoric and in its precise terminology the Revolution’s goal, namely self-government under God, as made real within our constitutional tradition. 

In establishing a separate American legal and political jurisdiction, the drafters of the Declaration enabled Americans to vindicate and build upon the British constitutional tradition. This tradition had flourished in America even as it was increasingly abandoned by the British themselves. The self-evident truths of human equality, unalienable rights, and legitimate government’s basis in the consent of the governed had been made real within that tradition. From the Magna Carta through the dark times of Tudor tyranny, into the era of English Civil War, to the triumph of the Glorious Revolution, British peoples had worked and fought to bring kings under law. In the process they established traditions of self government embodying due process of law, limitations on power, and respect for the fundamental associations in which alone we can lead good lives. 

The Declaration does not call us to an abstract dream of individual autonomy, mere filial piety, or any grand project of national fulfillment. It calls us to live within and vindicate through our own actions a way of life grounded in a hard-fought constitutional order. To live this life requires increasingly rare but necessary courage, self control, and humility.

Bruce Frohnen’s latest book, with Ted V. McAllister, is Character in the American Experience: An Unruly People. He is professor of law at Ohio Northern University. 

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Paul Gottfried

Presumably I was chosen to participate in this symposium as somebody who is profoundly skeptical of the view that natural rights provide the necessary moral and political foundation for our political institutions. I deeply admire those brave men who affixed their signatures to the document creating this country, but I am less impressed by Jefferson’s borrowing from Locke about “all men being created equal” than by what the signers did after they won national independence. They proceeded to draft a fitting constitutional framework for their federal union, an achievement in statecraft that Forrest McDonald, George Carey, and a multitude of other historians whose work I have pondered explain in magnificent detail. 

This is what separates our state-builders from the leaders of the French Revolution, who on August 26, 1789, proclaimed the inborn rights of humanity (not only Frenchmen) and then proceeded to launch what became a European bloodbath. What made our “revolution” different was not the appeal to natural-rights rhetoric but the prudent political labors that came after gaining independence. 

Paul Gottfried is the editor in chief of Chronicles: A Magazine for American Renewal.

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John G. Grove

Since at least 1863, Americans have primarily gone back to the Declaration of Independence looking for the timeless, hoping (usually in vain) that an appeal to its capacious philosophic lines might provide political unity or shared ideals toward which we might strive. The marking of an anniversary, however, ought to stimulate reflection on history and context—of the document in its time. In particular, Americans ought to reacquaint themselves with the eleven-year conflict that prompted patriots to declare their colonies to be “free and independent states.” That struggle is reflected in the Declaration’s oft-ignored list of grievances, which gives con crete meaning to the more elusive language about equality, liberty, and happiness. 

What does that context show? Not so much men looking for unity of purpose or ideals after which to strive but rather men jealously guarding an inherited constitutional liberty. When the metropole showed itself utterly disdainful of local, representative government, of traditional rights, and of the rule of law, allegiance was at an end. Let their example inspire us to preserve what is left of the constitutional settlement their generation passed on, and to revive what has been lost.

John G. Grove is the editor of Law & Liberty and author of John C. Calhoun’s Theory of Republicanism. 

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Sarah Gustafson

Tocqueville did not comment on the Declaration of Independence in Democracy in America. But his observations enlighten it. He observed that Americans have a “passion for equality.” Though Americans “have an instinctive taste” for liberty, it does not drive their action, in contrast to the founders, who had a “sincere and passionate love” for liberty. The passion for equality can become depraved; nonetheless there is also a “manly and legitimate” love of equality that inspires men to be “strong and great.” The logic of equality extends also over thought; democratic historians replace great men with great forces, and Americans love big ideas and imprecise language. 

Most of us, when we think of the Declaration, think of the resounding theoretical claims about equality and government in its opening paragraphs (a kind of confirmation of Tocqueville’s argument). Yet the majority of the text is not the stuff of theoretical “big ideas.” It is historical, practical, lawyerly, and contingent. It is partly a product of necessity, crafted by men who offered a litany of “facts . . . to a candid world” and pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. 

The Declaration should inspire Americans to reject the pusillanimous love of equality for that courageous, manly love of both liberty and equality that inspired the founders. The preamble makes a start at something noble and distinctly American. 

However, if all the Declaration is to ordinary Americans today is its grand theoretical preamble, its meaning is undermined and we lose its significance. This produces deeper problems of pietas and community, problems with which civic education and ultimately politics have to contend.

Sarah Gustafson is an assistant professor of politics (political theory) at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

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Kevin R. C. Gutzman

On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention—the legislative branch of Revolutionary Virginia’s government from the flight of Lord Dunmore down to implementation of the 1776 Constitution—passed resolutions that Virginia must adopt a declaration of rights, a constitution, federation with other British colonies, and alliances with other countries. Soon, a Continental Union flag replaced the British Union Jack over the Capitol at Williamsburg. James Madison, for one, considered Virginia independent from that day—as he wrote that night. 

That Virginia was arguably the one state that had established its independence by the end of May 1776 accounts for the legislative instruction that led to Virginia Congressman Richard Henry Lee’s moving a declaration of independence in the Continental Congress. Better, as Dr. Franklin would say, that the states should all hang together—or Virginia’s leaders would surely all hang separately. 

At least as late as the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30, political leaders in the Old Dominion still dated their independence to May 15, 1776. 

One other aspect of the story merits our attention. Since its introduction into modern political science by Machiavelli, the word state has denoted a sovereign entity—not Andalusia in Spain or Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, but Spain or the United Kingdom. When a Virginian said in Congress that “these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states,” he was not saying that Virginia, for example, was now a part of some great American agglomeration and Rhode Island and Delaware ought to be too. He was claiming that the North American British colonies represented in the Continental Congress ought to join Virginia on the level of Russia, Prussia, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.  

Kevin R. C. Gutzman, JD, PhD, is a historian of the American Revolution and early republic whose books include Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776–1840 and James Madison and the Making of America.

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William Anthony Hay

Thomas Jefferson famously described the Declaration of Independence as “an expression of the American mind.” Americans today, especially conservatives, would do well to consider what that mind aimed to accomplish with an eye to securing what the founders eventually won. Congress approved the Declaration to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” A model treaty with foreign states accompanies the Declaration, with Articles of Confederation to govern the new republic soon following. That package asserted sovereignty by establishing a legal form of government and opening relations with other powers—sovereignty that would be vindicated by a bitter war. Americans demanded respect as a sovereign power, but they also granted the same respect to foreign states without regard to their form of government. Americans further strove to be a treaty-worthy partner able to keep agreements and enforce the law within their own territories. 

The founders respected the just claims of other states. All this in combination secured American independence in fact as well as form, while setting a powerful check on hubris and the temptation to export principles that may or may not work elsewhere. Yielding sovereignty to transnational organizations and provoking conflicts by needless challenges both threaten what was won at such cost. Both errors became increasingly prominent over the twentieth century, but looking back to the Declaration, and how the founders used it, offers a better path still available today. 

William Anthony Hay is associate director for public programs and professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University and the author of the forthcoming King George’s Generals: The British Struggle for North America, 1763–1781.

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Yoram Hazony

All too often, public discussion portrays the American founding as a one-party affair, in which a homogeneous group of founders committed themselves to a single political doctrine best expressed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. The result is a view of America’s “founding principles” or “founding creed” that is overly dogmatic and abstract, and largely ahistorical. 

True, the United States was launched at a revolutionary moment by radicalized men. Americans rightly celebrate the Revolution of 1776, whose spirit we can explore in the documents that emerged from the Second Continental Congress: the Declaration of Independence and the first U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1777. 

But there was a second American revolution, a counterrevolution, which produced a second U.S. Constitution. The Constitution of 1787 was written by a different, and much more conservative, group of men. Headed by General Washington, the framers had views that had been forged by ten years of war and ten years of internal turmoil often bordering on madness (which frequently resembled that of the later French Revolution of 1789). The document they produced gave voice to a conservative nationalist impulse with out which America as we know it would not exist. 

These two political moments constitute the American founding. But they did not give birth to a homogeneous political doctrine that can be reasonably described as a single dogma or creed. They gave birth to rival political parties: Washington’s Federalist Party, which tended toward conservatism, and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, which tended toward liberalism. 

Because America was born of the contest between these political parties, it is best to describe the founding as a coalition and collaboration between different ways of understanding America. To say this is not to denigrate the Declaration, whose importance cannot be denied. But it is to orient ourselves toward a less dogmatic and more historically accurate view of the Declaration as one crucial document among others.

Yoram Hazony is chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery. 

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Yuval Levin

The Declaration of Independence not only establishes the firm moral foundation of the American political order but also puts forward the fundamental challenge of our politics. Its affirmation of the truth that we are all created equal carries two political implications that are in great tension with each other, and that tension is how we have sustained our freedom for generations. On the one hand, our equality means that political authority can only be exercised with the consent of the governed, which as a practical matter demands majority rule. On the other hand, our equality means that each of us is possessed of equal rights that must be protected, even if we are in a political minority. 

For a government to be legitimate over us, it must therefore both vindicate majority rule and secure minority rights. Just how to do both at once is the challenge that gives shape to the American Constitution and to many of our most intense political controversies. A society that makes these two competing demands of its government, and insists on both, stands a chance of sustaining the tension that makes the survival of an ordered liberty possible. There is nothing new about that. Indeed, there is something permanent about it. To see that for all that is new and different about our moment, the fundamental quandary of our politics remains pertinent as ever may be the most daunting challenge every generation faces. Let us hope we are up to it.

Yuval Levin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. 

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Daniel J. Mahoney

The Declaration of Independence remains what it has always been: an eloquent and spirited bulwark against tyranny and moral relativism. It boldly proclaims time less truths without being reducible to an abstract declaration of rights à la the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, a document far more subversive than constructive. An American people already well practiced in the arts of liberty and the rule of law defended their customary “rights as Englishmen” against British encroachments on them while appealing to “unalienable rights” bestowed by the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” These higher laws, which must inform our exercise of freedom, ultimately depend on “a firm Reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” and our determination, if need be, to “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” Here we see at work practical wisdom of the first order and an abiding commitment to civilized liberty that draws freely on the best ancient, modern, and Christian wisdom. 

Against a widespread culture of repudiation, we must never cease reminding our fellow citizens that as articulated in the Declaration, our founding principles are utterly incompatible with what John Quincy Adams called the “gangrene of slavery” or any form of despotism itself. Conversely, the liberty and equality under God articulated by the Declaration has nothing to do with a human “autonomy” or self-sovereignty that dispenses with sacred limits and restraints or a doctrinaire and leveling egalitarianism. The spirit of ’76 is much more noble than that. 

Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a senior teaching fellow at Hillsdale College, and professor emeritus at Assumption University. 

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Joshua Mitchell

A religiously homogeneous nation, or one whose religious majority is clearly in charge, has the good fortune of having its civic celebrations align and overlap with its predominant religious self-understanding. The United States does not now have that good fortune. The question of the origins and future of our country must begin from that misalignment. At the outset let me state my unwavering belief that the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution constitute the framework through which any and all of the problems we face today, and in the future, can be worked through. However, this can work not because it is the self-evident starting point for our political deliberations and actions but because it is the end point of a deeper Christian self-understanding, without which that political framework is incoherent and unworkable. And therein lies the central problem of the conservative movement in 2026: It wants the boldness and courage of the men associated with the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution, but not the at once humble and unwavering Christian self-understanding that made them possible. It wants the fruit of the vine without the vine. 

Conservatives frequently cite George Washington’s 1796 farewell address (“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports”) or John Adams’s 1798 address to the Massachusetts militia (“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”). Packaged together under the heading of “religious values,” these and other reminders of the bearing of Christianity on American life have become little more than think-tank fundraising slogans in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. 

Do you seek to heal the ills of our nation, the central cause of which is the identity politics left today? Do you seek to return our citizens to building a common world together, to stewarding nature, to showing our youth wherein hope lies, none of which is possible when the identity-politics language of purity and stain poisons every citizen’s engagement? Do you seek to win elections by more than razor-thin margins because your encomiums to the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution have little purchase on the tens of millions of citizens who are daily terrified by whether they are pure enough or irredeemably stained? If you wish to accomplish these things, you must publicly declare that the problem of man’s impurity cannot be solved by identity politics’ scapegoating but rather by the divine scapegoat who “takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). 

We are today engaged in a great struggle, in the United States and in the whole of what was formerly Christendom, over the question of how the stains of the world can be washed clean. The identity politics left offers an answer that enchants hundreds of millions of people: Renounce your nations, your history, your institutions, your monuments, and you will be cleansed. Conservatives, in turn, offer the Declaration, the U.S. Constitution, and “religious values.” The one thing that they dare not offer—the one thing that alone can answer the heresy of identity politics—is the scandalous claim from Galatians 5:11, the claim that is foolishness to the worldly-wise (1 Corinthians 1:23), that the blood-soaked world to which history everywhere is a testament cannot be washed clean by any other means than by a divine self-sacrifice. To have the fruit that is the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution, you must cherish the vine that is the singular Christian answer to the violence and to the sorrows of the world. There is no other way.  

Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University.

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C. C. Pecknold

A week before he died, Charlie Kirk proclaimed, “America is a providential people with a distinct heritage and shared history.” Some objected that America is first and foremost an idea. 

While the Declaration of Independence does briefly speak of “self-evident truths” such as the right to life and liberty, and the undoubtedly religious pursuit of happiness, the document gives almost no warrant to the birth of a “propositional nation.” Rather, it speaks for “the good People of these colonies” brought into being and sustained by divine providence. Instead of defending an idea, the Declaration only defends a providential people. 

My thesis is simply this: “America is an idea” is a replacement code and strategy. It is the attempt to replace a particular people with a universal idea, and this is essentially the code of liberalism itself, which habitually seeks to replace Christianity altogether with new universal creeds. Critics intuit that this idea or mantra is bound up with “replacement migration” because they recognize the replacement code in the migration strategy, which has so eroded the common good of a people born from the womb of Christian civilization. To attack that mantra, then, is to defend precisely those for whom the Declaration of Independence speaks: “one people, under God.” 

This is what G. K. Chesterton meant when he said that America was “a nation with the soul of a church.” Christianity is the preceding force that has forged America and that has made us into a providential people. We must now renew our appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the world” with fresh zeal that He might grant us favor, bind up our wounds, and help us continue to build America according to the codes of His eternal commonwealth. 

C. C. Pecknold is associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

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Nathan Pinkoski

The Declaration of Independence informs America’s unwritten constitution. The document’s concepts look back to a classical philosophical order, which saw both natural law and divine law as complementary authorities governing political life and ordering our natural liberties. In signing the Declaration, Americans endorsed this metaphysical consensus. This foundation enabled them to become men of iron. 

But the times have produced men fearful of invoking such authorities. Decoupled from these authorities, the Declaration was turned into a historical artifact, mere parchment paper fit for the archivist to put on display or in a drawer. 

To the extent that this part of the unwritten constitution is acknowledged, it is deemed too “thick” and too Christian to handle the challenges of modern pluralism. Competitors have strived to replace it. Some define the new unwritten constitution as creedalism. Fearful of permitting ethnic markers for American identity, this view places American identity in belief in universal propositions. But unless those propositions are substantively defined, creedalism degenerates into schoolmarm monitoring of our beliefs according to the moment’s prevailing fashions. Others entrust themselves to process legalism. Fearful of power itself, this approach places American identity in the institutional mechanisms created to limit the use of power (“checks and balances”). But proceduralism provides no path to solving our political problems. Tepid creedalism and conflict management are dead ends. The Declaration remains significant because it indicates another way. When we root ourselves in our historic metaphysical foundation, fear need not define us. Great deeds are once again possible. 

Nathan Pinkoski is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America and is most recently the translator of The Suicide of France by Éric Zemmour, from Encounter Books. 

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Claes G. Ryn

Ideologues who want America’s origins to have been different from what they actually were have attributed to the Declaration of Independence a meaning and status that it was never intended to have: a “creedal” statement, a “founding document” announcing America’s sharp break with the past and setting a brand-new direction for America and all humanity. These ideologues dwell on Jefferson’s rhetorical introduction while down playing the Declaration’s much longer, elaborate descriptions of the British government’s “long Train of Abuses and Usurpations,” which violated long-standing customs, the rights of Englishmen, and the common law. Unlike the French revolutionaries thirteen years later, the colonists wanted old ways back. After the War of Independence they were much the same as before, in religion, morality, manners, politics, education, literature, architecture, and music—a society shaped by the classical and Christian traditions as channeled through British culture, albeit now poised for creative reform.

Claes G. Ryn is emeritus professor of politics at The Catholic University of America and the author, most recently, of The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken.

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Leah Libresco Sargeant

When the Declaration begins its list of grievances, the first crimes of the king are not the ones of active commission, which animate our revolutionary storytelling. The first signs of tyranny are not that he has “imposed taxes upon us” nor “deprived us of trial by jury.” The first offenses are crimes of omission: “He has refused his Assent to Laws,” “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance,” etc. The king governs badly when he takes an active interest in the colonies, but he’s also utterly unwilling to allow the law to be responsive to the sprawling empire he has been entrusted with. 

In our 250th year, it is the active errors of our government that get headlines, but, more and more, our sclerotic Congress merits some of the initial charges laid out in the Declaration. Congress yields its prerogatives to an imperial president and the administrative state. We do not look to our legislature to “pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance.” 

The king failed the colonies partly through defects of his personal character, but also partly though failures of state capacity. If he had been willing to entrust more authority to his colonial governments, he would have had the chance to be more responsive to the new problems of the New World. 

America has become large, prosperous, and powerful in its first 250 years. Our institutions have not kept pace. This time, there is no enemy to emancipate ourselves from.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of The Dignity of Dependence and works on public policy in Washington, D.C.

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Barry Alan Shain

On July 4, 1776, twelve, and, shortly after, thirteen, of Britain’s North American colonies declared for a second time—the first time being on July 2—their independence from their king’s feudal-like personal dominion, citing his failure to protect them from what they viewed as the depredations of Britain’s, not their, imperial legislature, Parliament. In this document, after noting its intended audience, the Continental Congress offered a paragraph-length, richly philosophical explanation of its motivation and the legitimacy of its actions before going on at far greater length to document the king’s actions that had putatively led to this moment. In the last of these indictments, most revealingly, Congress excoriated the king for permitting the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to issue a proclamation on November 7, 1775, encouraging Virginia’s slaves to earn their freedom by joining the British forces. 

Except by the British authors John Lind and Jeremy Bentham, the Declaration’s long list of grievances was mostly ignored and, for the next forty years, still more so was its rich philosophical second paragraph—but not by all. Most particularly, the petitioners of the “New Hampshire Grants” who appealed to Congress to be accepted as a new state—Vermont—under Congress’s May 15 call for colonies to organize new governments and in accordance with the July 4 Declaration of Independence. In response, Congress on June 30, 1777, rejected their petition and explained that the second paragraph of the July 4 document should not be understood to make any claims regarding individual liberty, equality, or rights because it was written with only the corporate rights of thirteen colonies in mind. 

This straightforward explanation of the florid language of the second paragraph would by the nineteenth century be unable to prevent this paragraph from being made—both domestically and internationally—into something that its congressional authors had clearly explained was not their intention. 

Following the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of March 1857, the Declaration would become—in the too-little-read June 1857 (not 1858) Springfield speech of Stephen Douglas, and, of course, that of Abraham Lincoln—the defining document of two Americas: one historical, British, Reformed Protestant, and in significant ways racially inegalitarian; and the other aspirational, creedal, universal, and, for the time, radically egalitarian. This deep division continued up to the American Civil War but abated for a half century after it following the passage of the Civil War Amendments in the 1860s and 1870s. In ways often forgotten, the Declaration’s key rights and equality claims lost their importance during the first half of the twentieth century, when American historiography came to be dominated by Progressives and Imperial Historians. This, too, would end in the middle years of the twentieth century, when the pregnant second paragraph of the Declaration, perhaps in response to the needs of the Cold War and the emerging civil rights movements, again would become the central element in the teaching of a refashioned American political philosophy—a creedal understanding of equality and individual rights rather than the ethnic, national, and religious understanding of our origins and culture that once again has begun to be promoted by the MAGA right. 

In my opinion, there is no question as to what the historical truths are regarding the Declaration’s meaning and purpose in 1776 and how its meaning changed during the years that followed. Far less clear is whether this original understanding, with its awkward truths, should be controlling. Maybe instead we should follow the advice of editor Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Barry Alan Shain is a professor of political science at Colgate University. 

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Matthew Spalding

The Declaration of Independence is the defining act of the great drama that is the American founding. It is the creed of America’s political identity, our nation’s epic poetry. 

By turning away from the accidents of history to the order and permanence of nature, to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the Declaration recognizes a universal and suprahistorical standard by which to judge its cause, a standard of right understandable by human reason and no less agreeable to religious faith. 

Starting with the progressives, many have overread the philosophical influence of John Locke on the founding—some today to the point of rejecting the founding for being a font of modernity, in favor of some undefined “postliberal order.” 

That is a misreading of the founding and the Declaration, which is grounded in the classical and Christian natural-law tradition. The founders understood Locke to be part of that much larger and older tradition, going back to Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. 

America is not merely an idea, like the categorical imperative. It is a particular place and a particular people, dedicated to permanent truths of man and human liberty. 

Augustine pointed out long ago that nothing can be truly loved unless the object of love is known in its nature and very being. By defining our common loves—our native country and our common commitment to republican self-government based on equal rights, political liberty, and the consent of the governed—the Declaration unites our hearts and our minds in civic friendship. 

Matthew Spalding is the Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government at Hillsdale College and the dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus. This entry is adapted from his remarks in receipt of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Conservative Book of the Year Award for The Making of the American Mind (Encounter Books, 2025).

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Stephen Wolfe

For several decades, American conservatives have relied on the Declaration of Independence to define the nation. They claim we are a “creedal nation,” grounded in universal propositions accessible to all. Because these propositions are universal and affirmed by the intellect, anyone can be an American, regardless of customs, folkways, and religion. America is a place for the abstract human being. 

The American creed is certainly part of our national character and mythos, and it animates our self-understanding. However, the Declaration does not reduce America itself to a creed. Even if the end of civil government is limited to securing natural rights, this does not render the nation, as an entity prior to government, merely a relation of rights-bearers, as if mutual recognition of abstract personhood were sufficient for public happiness. The goods necessary for public happiness go well beyond natural rights and include particular cultural traits, generational ties to a homeland, and shared sacrifice. The founders recognized this in their views on immigration, and the Declaration itself faults those who are “deaf to the voice . . . of consanguinity.” 

After World War II, the creed shifted from a principle of government to a principle of the nation. A limitation on good governance became a limitation on the national good. We should remember that the American people—“a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, [and] very similar in their manners and customs”—founded a limited government to secure their good, not to limit it. 

Stephen Wolfe (PhD, Louisiana State University) is a political theorist. He lives in North Carolina. 

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