The Declaration: Ode to individualism or shared values?

It’s the 249th birthday of the United States. And as Americans begin to prepare for our nation’s grand semiquincentennial celebration next year, it is worth reengaging with the document whose enactment marks our national birthday: the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration is sometimes championed by right-libertarians and left-liberals alike as a paean to individualism and a refutation of communitarianism of any kind. As one X user put it on Thursday: “The 4th of July represents the triumph of American individualism over the tribalistic collectivism of Europe.”

But this is anything but the case.

We will turn to lead draftsman Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “self-evident” truths in a moment. But first consider the majority of the text of the Declaration: a stirring enumeration of specific grievances by the American colonists against the British crown. In the Declaration’s own words: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

One might read these words in a vacuum and conclude that the Declaration indeed commenced a revolution in the true sense of the term: a seismic act of rebellion, however noble or righteous, to overthrow the established political order. And true enough, that may well have been the subjective intention of Jefferson, a political liberal and devotee of the European Enlightenment.

But the Declaration also attracted many other signers. And some of those signers, such as the more conservative John Adams, took a more favorable view of the incipient America’s inherited traditions and customs. These men thought that King George III had vitiated their rights as Englishmen under the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights that passed Parliament the following year.

It is for this reason that Edmund Burke, the famed conservative British statesman best known for his strident opposition to the French Revolution, was known to be sympathetic to the colonists’ cause. As my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague Ofir Haivry argued in a 2020 American Affairs essay, it is likely that these more conservative Declaration signers, such as Adams, shared Burke’s own view that “the Americans had an established national character and political culture”; and “the Americans in 1776 rebelled in an attempt to defend and restore these traditions.”

The American Founding is complex; the Founders themselves were intellectually heterodox. But suffice it to say the Founding was not a simplistic renouncement of the “tribalistic collectivism” of Britain. There is of course some truth to those who would emphasize the revolutionary nature of the minutemen and soldiers of George Washington’s Continental Army. But the overall sounder historical conception is that 1776 commenced a process to restore and improve upon the colonists’ inherited political order. The final result was the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

Let’s next consider the most famous line of the Declaration: the proclamation that “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.” We ought to take this claim at face value: Many of the Declaration’s signers did hold such genuine, moral human equality to be “self-evident.”

But is such a claim self-evident to everyone – at all times, in all places, and within all cultures?

The obvious answer is that it is not. Genuine, moral human equality is certainly not self-evident to Taliban-supporting Islamist goat herders in Afghanistan. It has not been self-evident to any number of sub-Saharan African tribal warlords of recent decades. Nor is it self-evident to the atheists of the Chinese Communist Party politburo, who brutally oppress non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities such as the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang.

Rather, the only reason that Jefferson – and John Locke in England a century prior – could confidently assert such moral “self-evidence” is because they were living and thinking within a certain overarching milieu. And that milieu is Western civilization’s biblical inheritance – and, specifically, the world-transforming claim in Genesis 1:27, toward the very beginning of the Bible, that “God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him.”

It is very difficult – perhaps impossible – to see how the Declaration of 1776, the 14th Amendment of 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any other American moral ode to or legal codification of equality, would have been possible absent the strong biblical undergird that has characterized our nation since the colonial era.

Political and biblical inheritance are thus far more responsible for the modern-day United States than revolution, liberal rationalism or hyper-individualism.

Adams famously said that Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Indeed, each year we should all celebrate this great nation we are blessed to call home. But let’s also not mistake what it is we are actually celebrating.