Jesus and the Declaration of Independence

Charles Scriven September/October 2026

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Where am I in the American story? Where are you?

I am male, blue-eyed, and the color of wheat, so in my role as just a person in America, I’ve never felt resented or looked down upon. I’ve never thought that my value comes down, as with hammers or hoes, only to usefulness. So I can’t personally identify with Frederick Douglass, who long ago escaped his Maryland owners and became a famous writer and speaker. Nearly a decade before the Civil War, on the July day that commemorates the American Declaration of Independence, he stood before an audience and asked: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

We can agree now, fortunately, that the Fourth of July is for all Americans. Except that it’s (still) a bit complicated.

Two hundred fifty years after the first Fourth of July, you may yourself be ill at ease about America. Perhaps you don’t feel fully at home or fully accepted here. Perhaps you know too much about America’s beginnings, or perhaps too little. Perhaps, whatever your political stripe, you feel dissatisfied with the national direction.

But how about the original Fourth of July? Wasn’t it truly a great day for America?

It was certainly part of a great story. The first Fourth happened amid conflict. Colonists and Native Americans were at odds. The 13 American colonies were living under British authority, weary of its taxes and red-coated soldiers. War with England, indeed, had already begun. And besides all this, there was conflict within. Some settlers didn’t even want the quarrel with England. Some hated slavery; others defended it. Yet out of this complexity came the Declaration of Independence, the most famous and influential document modern civilization has ever produced.

Three “Perfect Ideas”

On July 4, 1776, colonial leaders formally declared their independence from Britain. The written Declaration had been drafted by Thomas Jefferson. It had undergone an editing process involving such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Upon its release, attention first centered on the document’s list of 27 grievances against King George and the British Parliament. But startling sentences from the second paragraph still stood out:

“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.”

Three truths—three “perfect ideas,” as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has put it. But the story, great as it is, has a downside. Some who soon after the first Fourth risked their lives signing their names to a parchment copy of the Declaration were slave owners. Jefferson himself was. In his draft he had proposed abolition of slavery, but when that part was voted out during editing, he continued to own human beings. Still, the Declaration’s key sentences remained and would become the foundation for slavery’s end. A black American soldier of the time invoked these sentences and declared, “Men were made for more noble ends than to be drove to market like sheep and oxen.” That soldier was Lemuel Haynes; he became America’s first ordained Black minister.

Voices such as his helped put the three “perfect ideas” at the center of the Declaration’s meaning. Eighty or so years later, Abraham Lincoln said they were basic to his entire political outlook. America, he declared at Gettysburg, had been “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That was the nation’s “promise,” as he had put it earlier, to all.

That promise became America’s creed. We have never embodied it perfectly, or even close to perfectly. But from early on it has driven American aspiration. At the nation’s first-ever women’s rights conference, in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, a decade before Lincoln gained wide notice, delegates invoked the Declaration to say that God made “men and women” equal. It took decades—until 1920—but their argument finally helped American women secure the right to vote, what the founders themselves had failed to grant.

A hundred years after Lincoln, in 1963, Martin Luther King invoked the Declaration to help break the lock of Jim Crow segregation. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial he echoed the former president and called the key paragraph a “promissory note” to every American.

All this is a wonder. Yet we may well notice what one character from American playwright Thornton Wilder declares: “Every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.” And just now, whatever our national successes, democracy seems vulnerable. And if that is so—if embodiment of something as good and excellent as the Declaration of Independence lies, now and always, at risk—how may we best contend for it?

A Moral Heritage

First, we may renounce overconfidence in the staying power of Declaration claims. The signers of the Declaration of Independence said these claims were “self-evident.” All too soon, though, American politicians from slave states were discrediting the idea that everyone is created equal: they called this a dangerous mistake. As for key human “rights” and the idea that just government proceeds from “consent” on the part of the governed, tyrants and authoritarians to this day cast doubt on both, not only by their actions but also, in some cases, by their considered arguments. Xi Jinping thinks his competition with Western liberal democracy will actually disprove its claim to universal relevance.

Instead of being “self-evident,” or obvious to anyone anywhere, the Declaration’s key ideas depend for persuasive power on the long moral heritage that underlies them. The signers inherited wisdom from Enlightenment and earlier thinkers, and these earlier thinkers, or most of them, had lived in a Scripture-saturated world. Such convictions as that God made humans in the divine image and that love of God entails love of neighbor were familiar. They knew that the good Samaritan story challenges indifference and insider-outsider discrimination; knew that Jesus had come down against the few “lording it over” the rest; knew that “abundant life”—flourishing for all—is a proper human goal.

All that scriptural impact remains foundational, or at least crucial, for sustaining the political transformation associated with America’s founding. That transformation has touched people around the world and helped make the Declaration of Independence a document for the ages. Certainly its “perfect ideas” have now come, widely if not universally, to feel self-evident. One way to contend for the Declaration, then, is by contending in our various ways, religious or not, for the moral heritage that undergirds it. This means giving that heritage due honor, and meeting—not just defensively, but also self-critically—the challenges it may face. We contend for our heritage by ever-readiness to interpret it afresh.

Energetic Citizenship

A second way to contend for the Declaration is to emphasize something the text itself takes largely for granted. Yes, citizens must give governing power their “consent,” but bare consent is hardly enough. The Declaration’s ideals can make a difference only if citizens make a difference, if they bring their own moral energy into play. Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark, from 11 years later, bears unmistakably on this point. Now it’s 1787, and American leaders have just approved the Constitution that establishes the particulars—the crucial institutions, how they work together—of our system of government. Someone who had not been in the room approaches Franklin and asks whether we’ve now got a monarchy or a republic. “A republic,” Franklin replies, and then adds: “if you can keep it.”

Franklin was making the point that the democracy America established cannot survive citizen passivity. If external dangers require mindfulness, so do internal dangers. And this means, for one thing, that there can be no substitute for hearty, well-informed citizen participation. At a time when digital culture is both weakening attention spans and heightening cynicism, this truth is more challenging than ever.

Pursuing Shalom

Let me now offer, at greater length, a third thing we can do. It would enhance all citizen life and even address forms of popular Christianity that today seem more to abet the nation’s crisis than to alleviate it.

I will draw from what one scholar calls the “pocket guide” to the Sermon on the Mount. He means the blessings, or Beatitudes, that constitute the introduction to Jesus’ famous statement of moral and spiritual vision. These blessings sum things up, yet the one I will be focusing on is widely passed over even when the words are mouthed. Popular Christianity gives it little notice, yet it could supply what people in a democracy most need: the simplest possible mission statement for living out our citizen responsibilities and keeping our Declaration’s vision alive.

We had better stop, though, to consider America’s guarantee of religious freedom. Officially, our country is religiously unaligned. If the Declaration of Independence assures a welcome for people of all kinds and colors, that welcome includes not only people of our own religion but also people who disagree with us. So is it consistent with American ideals to offer a theme from the Judeo-Christian heritage as light on citizen mission for everyone?

Well, part of religious freedom is the right to put our best ideas—wherever they come from—before the wider public. Such an idea, I will now contend, is what Jesus called peacemaking. His Beatitudes spoke mostly of character traits, such as humility, mercy, and purity of heart. One, though, addressed overall purpose for people who share a common life. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus declared, “for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).

These words idealize peacemaking—connect it with the divine will—but we may still ask what it is. What does peacemaking involve? And whatever it involves, can it galvanize even popular Christianity, let alone the many Americans who do not identify with Jesus—or perhaps any religious figure?

The background here is the long story of Israel, going back to Abraham. He saw himself and his people called into a divine-human partnership, or “covenant.” Later two Hebrew prophets called this partnership a “covenant of peace,” putting peace at the center of faithful life, just as Jesus, building on their vision, would also do. Still, what is it? One of greatest little-known passages in the Bible holds the key. It is Ezekiel 34:25–30, where the prophet speaks beautifully—poetically—of biblical peace. Like a poem, it could well be read aloud, and it begins with these words:

I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild animals from the land, so that they may live in the wild and sleep in the woods securely.*

Peace in the Hebrew is shalom—a beautiful sound as well as concept—and shalom is clearly more than absence of conflict. It is human flourishing. It is safety and security, freedom from fear, insult and hunger. Nor can shalom coexist with slavery. There can be no misuse of people, nor any other taking of unjust advantage. Shalom, in short, is personal and societal wholeness. And exactly this, said one psalmist, you should “pursue.” And pursue, said Jeremiah, even in and for a “city” where you are captives living in “exile” (Psalm 34:14; Jeremiah 29:7).

Jesus was drawing from all of this when He said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” And the rest of the Sermon on the Mount shows how He then developed it. As with love itself, peacemaking is about caring for others, including those who have done you wrong. And like love, it is also about reconciliation. Peacemaking’s goal is flourishing for all, with no hate- or indifference-based exclusions. In a complicated world, following through on all this is itself complicated. It admits, certainly, of no legalist simplification. Still, for Jesus it was the overall social—overall political—imperative.

So now my third suggestion. If contending for Declaration ideals means contending for the related moral heritage, and if it means investing moral energy in our citizenship, what must the exact mission be? We may put it this way: peace is the goal, and peacemaking the way. The story of shalom makes something this brief and aphoristic both arresting enough and comprehensive enough.

Religious conviction—of God’s kindness at the heart of things—provides motivation for such a mission. Secular perspective makes do without such motivation, and argument about how this works will likely persist. But just as secularized people can embrace the three “perfect ideas” America’s founders took, at least indirectly, from the biblical heritage, so they can consider peacemaking for a citizenship ideal.

Amid South Africa’s history of compromise and cruelty, Bishop Desmond Tutu spoke, in one of his prayers, of “true patriotism.” Citizenship does entail a certain patriotism, but shallow versions of it, as he well knew, may differ hardly at all from self-centeredness and in-group tribalism. My argument is for something deeper, something Tutu himself, I think, would identify with: True patriotism is peacemaking; true citizenship is peacemaking.

The Declaration of Independence, perhaps America’s proudest achievement, is well worth fresh consideration after 250 years. To make even a start on such consideration is to perceive the razor-edge of danger and face citizen responsibility anew: Do we have a republic? Yes, if we can keep it.

Article Author: Charles Scriven

Charles Scriven is retired from the presidency of Kettering College in Ohio. Earlier he was both a pastor and a teacher of theology and social ethics. Among his books is The Transformation of Culture: Christian Social Ethics After H. Richard Niebuhr.

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