That was the only mention of Christianity in the whole document—that the Christian king is a slaver while “infidel powers” loathe the slave trade. This effectively chastises Christianity’s monopoly on morality, with handwritten emphasis on its shortcomings. It’s the only explicit reference to Christianity, and it is highly critical. However, it didn’t make the final cut. (That Jefferson could write of freedom so eloquently and condemn slavery in fervent and revealing terms here and elsewhere, while at the same time owning slaves and fathering children with the slaves, who then became slaves themselves, is a paradox of cowardice. He was one of America’s greatest intellects, excelled at communicating grand ideas in simple and poetic terms that enthrall us centuries later, but failed utterly and in terrible ways to practice some of those ideas.)11
Detail of Thomas Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence, written in June 1776, showing his emphasis of the word “Christian.”
Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin knew about George III’s pious nature, especially given that it was in such stark contrast to the bent of his predecessors.12 Including some religion in an argument that is meant to convince a devout Christian king that he’s wrong in the eyes of a god is rhetorically intelligent. Indeed, appealing to a higher power may have been necessary to change the devout king’s opinion. After all, if you believe a god put you on earth to rule, to whom would you answer but a god? One constitutional scholar, Jeffry H. Morrison, has aptly labeled these added references “strategic piety.”13
Finally, there is no reason to believe that the four terms “Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge,” and “Providence” were capitalized to lend gravity, respect, or specificity to the Declaration. Jefferson used minimal capitalization in his rough drafts and often did not capitalize—including the first words of most sentences—as you can see in the passage on the opposite page. The founders left the task of capitalization to the engrosser, Timothy Matlack, and to printers John Dunlap14 and Benjamin Towne. Writers of the time capitalized many words, mostly nouns, that are not capitalized today. The list of words capitalized in the Declaration, other than those claimed by Christian nationalists, those that were then considered proper nouns (such as “King of Great Britain,” “United States of America,” “States,” and “Colonies”), and words beginning sentences, includes all the following:
Course, Laws of Nature, Rights, Life, Liberty, Happiness, Governments, Men, Powers, Form of Government, Right, People, Government, Safety, Happiness, Governments, Object, Despotism, Government, Guards, Colonies, Systems of Government, Tyranny, Facts, Assent to Laws, Governors, Laws, Assent, Laws, Representation, Legislature, Records, Representative Houses, Legislative, Annihilation, People, State, States, Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners, Appropriations of Lands, Administration of Justice, Assent to Laws, Judiciary, Judges, Will, New Offices, Officers, Standing Armies, Consent, Military, Civil, Assent, Acts, Legislation, Quartering, Trial, Murders, Inhabitants, States, Trade, Taxes, Consent, Trial by Jury, Seas, System, Laws, Province, Arbitrary, Boundaries, Colonies, Charters, Laws, Forms of our Governments, Legislatures, Government, Protection, War, Coasts, Lives, Armies, Mercenaries, Cruelty, Head, Citizens, Captive, Seas, Arms, Country, Brethren, Hands, Indian Savages, Oppressions, We, Petitioned, Redress, Petitions, Prince, Tyrant, We, Separation, Enemies in War, Peace, Friends, Assembled, Name, Authority, People, That, Right, Absolved, Allegiance, Power, War, Peace, Alliances, Commerce, Acts, Things, Lives, Fortunes, and Honour.
Becker wrote that the fact that the engrossed Declaration’s “capitalization and punctuation follo[w] neither previous copies, nor reason, nor the custom of any age known to man, is one of the irremediable evils of life to be accepted with becoming resignation.”15
First Reference: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”
The first reference is the only one Jefferson employed when crafting the political philosophy of the Declaration. With this language, Jefferson invokes natural law, not the Judeo-Christian god.
In 2011, Michael Peroutka, founder of the Institute on the Constitution, tried to argue that evolution, a scientific theory, is anti-American because of the Declaration of Independence. Peroutka paraphrased what he believed to be the Declaration’s political philosophy: “There exists a creator God. He is the God of the Bible. He is not Allah, nor any of the million Hindu deities, nor is he the God that is the wind or is in the trees or some other impersonal force. He created us.”16 Peroutka has it backward: it’s not true that the creator mentioned is the god of the bible, and the only “god” mentioned is “Nature’s God”—a concept considerably closer to the “God that is in the wind or in the trees” than the biblical god.
This argument also ignores, as most Christian nationalists do, the first part of the term “the Laws of Nature.” And if one is going to ignore the natural law reference and inject religion where it does not belong, there is no reason that that religion should be Christianity. Because nature is referenced twice in the first reference and pagan religions revere nature and the natural world, paganism would be a more appropriate choice. But any “pagan nation” claim is as untenable as the “Christian nation” claim, even though the natural law aspects of the Declaration dominate.
The oft-ignored initial four words of the first reference are the most important. There are two basic categories of law: positive law and natural law. Positive law is “promulgated and implemented within a particular political community by political superiors,” according to Black’s Law Dictionary.17 Positive law is the law we make. Natural law is defined as a “philosophical system of legal and moral principles purportedly deriving from a universalized conception of human nature or divine justice rather than from legislative or judicial action.”18 Natural law is the law that is. To achieve what ought to be, one must either change positive law with legislation or a constitutional amendment or invoke natural law.19 Early twentieth-century Harvard Law School dean and legal scholar Roscoe Pound preferred to call natural law “philosophical jurisprudence.”20 Voltaire defined it as “The instinct by which we feel justice.”21 But as the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary points out, there are two views of natural law. The first is founded on universal human nature, the second on divine justice.22 William Blackstone, an accomplished English jurist, is a favorite of Christian nationalists because they believe he defined the law of nature as the revelations of the Christian god.23 Blackstone preceded the founders and influenced their legal thought. But he was anti-republican, and his influence on the founders’ revolutionary ideas, such as natural law, revolution, and self-government, was minimal. The founders mostly disagreed with him on those important points.24 Jefferson blamed Blackstone for the “degeneracy of legal science.”25 Blackstone was not only anti-republican, but had “done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man than” Napoleon Bonaparte, wrote Jefferson in 1814.26 Blackstone was not a man Jefferson was likely to agree with, particularly when outlining a political philosophy of rebellion and republicanism.
The Declaration invoked natural law because the founders needed a legal basis to justify revolting against the positive law imposed by Parliament and George III. Natural law demands the abolition of inequality and privilege, so it is perfect for arguing against oppressive positive law.27 Again, Becker helps us understand: “When honest men are impelled to withdraw their allegiance to the established law or custom of the community…they seek for some principle more generally valid, some ‘law’ of higher authority, than the established law or custom of the community. To this higher law or more generally valid principle they then appeal.”28
But which natural law did Jefferson invoke in the Declaration: natural or supernatural? According to Alan Dershowitz, “‘Natural Law’ based on divine revelation—the source of Christian natural law for Aquinas—was anathema to Jefferson.”29 Jefferson’s own words—within the Declaration and in writings penned before and after—support this conclusion. Seventeen years after the
Declaration, as secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson wrote Opinion on the French Treaties. In it, he espoused natural law based in human nature: “Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense & reason of man. Those who write treatises of natural law, can only declare what their own moral sense & reason dictate in the several cases they state.”30 The Declaration, a pinnacle of natural law, is built on humans’ moral sense and reason. Two years before that document, in A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson, in a precursor to the Declaration’s litany of crimes, listed the grievances against the king:
with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate…. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.31
Rights are not bestowed, not even by kings. Rights are asserted, not given. Rights come from human nature, not divine nature. Most of all, natural law is a product of “liberal and expanded thought,” not of divine revelation.
In the draft language of the Declaration that condemned the “Christian king,” Jefferson wrote that violations of natural law, such as slavery, are not violations of divine law; rather, they amount to “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty.”32 In the Declaration, Jefferson appealed to a natural law founded in human nature and discoverable by human reason to justify a revolution against tyrannical positive law.
The human nature interpretation of “the Laws of Nature” is favored over the divine justice interpretation elsewhere in the discourse of American independence. George Mason wrote Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in May 1776, and the Virginia convention ratified it that June. Jefferson relied on Mason’s charter for the Declaration’s opening, and it also influenced the Bill of Rights more than a decade later. The first right Mason declared was “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”33 The similarities are obvious, and religion is nowhere to be found. This passage simply codifies the social compact theory of government and rights that had recently been explained by Hobbes, Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mason is relying on the natural law centered on humanity, not the supernatural natural law of Blackstone and Christian nationalism.
The First Continental Congress published its “Declaration and Resolves” on October 14, 1774. It too rested on natural, not supernatural, law: “The inhabitants of the English colonies in North-America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following RIGHTS.”34 Samuel Adams wrote a famed circular on behalf of Massachusetts to other colonial citizens that discussed natural rights in 1768. Sam Adams was one of the more orthodox founders, but he still rested rights on nature and not the Christian god. He wrote that the right to property “is an essential, unalterable right in nature, engrafted into the British constitution, as a fundamental law, and ever held sacred and irrevocable by the subjects.”35 The right is “in nature, engrafted” and held “sacred and irrevocable by the subjects.” It is not god-given.
Matthew Stewart, in Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution (2014), has shown conclusively that the Enlightenment view of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” enshrined in the Declaration was not religious in any Judeo-Christian sense.36 As Stewart points out, Nature’s God, “the presiding deity of the American Revolution, is another word for ‘Nature.’”37 This makes sense. After all, the full phrase is “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Thomas Paine agreed: “As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, are regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature’s God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.”38
This phrase invokes no religion, though it may evince a belief in the unorganized and heretical idea called deism. One of America’s unsung founders, Dr. Thomas Young, wrote, “That the religion of Nature, more properly stiled the Religion of Nature’s God, in latin call’d Deus, hence Deism, is truth, I now boldly defy thee to contest.”39 Jefferson and Adams agreed. Adams explicitly tells Jefferson that a belief in “Nature’s God” is deism, not Christianity: “We can never be so certain of any prophecy, or the fulfilment of any prophecy, or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle, as we are from the revelation of nature, that is, nature’s God, that two and two are equal to four.”40 Nature’s God is a law, like math. Adams continues, noting that organized religions, like Christianity, misunderstand the nature of god:
Is [god] ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation—delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence—though but an atom, a molécule organique in the universe—are my religion.41
One can’t be much clearer than that—Nature’s God is not the Christian god. Jefferson also wrote to Adams about Nature’s God, remarking that “of the nature of this being we know nothing.”42
Church authorities declared natural law as ordained by “Nature’s God” to be heretical. They had been saying so for decades. Churches and theologians raged against the enlightened thinkers who would influence the founders: Bruno, Pierre Gassendi, Lucilio Vanini, Galileo, René Descartes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, and even Locke, to name a few. Priests condemned as “new Epicureans” those who believed that “there is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world except NATURE,” that “God is Nature, and Nature is God.”43
Natural law centered on humanity was so foreign and antithetical to Christianity that the church considered it atheism. Royal Chaplain Richard Bentley of Trinity College at Cambridge opposed “the modern disguised Deists…[who] cover the most arrant atheism under the mask and shadow of a deity, by which they understand no more than some eternal inanimate matter, some universal nature, and soul of the world.”44 If the theological scholars of Jefferson’s generation thought invoking “Nature’s God” was “arrant atheism,” we can safely conclude that Jefferson’s usage was not Judeo-Christian. The laws were not the biblical god’s—they were Nature’s, fixed from the beginning, physically impossible to transgress, and discoverable through the application of reason and science.45 Becker was correct: “Since nature was now the new God, source of all wisdom and righteousness, it was to Nature that the eighteenth century looked for guidance, from Nature that it expected to receive the tablets of the law.”46
Christian nationalists claim that the phrase “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” refers to a Christian god, but there was nothing of Judeo-Christianity in Jefferson’s invocation of natural law.47
Second Reference: “their Creator”
Americans are not terribly familiar with the Declaration. On the first Fourth of July of Trump’s presidency, National Public Radio tweeted the entire text of the Declaration of Independence, 140 characters at a time. Many Trump supporters lost their minds. They assumed that NPR was calling for a rebellion against Trump when NPR tweeted passages like this: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” These die-hard patriots didn’t recognize the words of the Declaration and they assumed the tyrant was Trump, not King George III, which says something about how they truly view their populist champion.48
But the founders’ choice of language in the second reference is telling. The clause refers not to our Creator or even to the Creator, but to their Creator. If Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin wished to refer to a specifically Judeo-Christian creator, the word their was not the best choice.
The Founding Myth Page 10