Philosophy, Faith, and the Fourth of July

THE DECLARATION of Independence announced to the world the birth of a new nation. Every birth “excites our interest,’’ President Calvin Coolidge said on the Declaration’s 150th anniversary, but that is not why July 4, 1776, “has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.’’

Since ancient times there had been many revolutions, after all; new nations had broken away from old empires before. What makes America’s founding extraordinary, observed the 30th president, is that it was the first to be based not on blood or soil but on a set of philosophical ideas about “the nature of mankind and therefore of government.’’ Other nations have their deepest roots in ethnicity, tribal loyalty, or military conquest. America, uniquely, was dedicated to a proposition - to the fundamental, self-evident truth “that all men are created equal’’ and the political ideas that flow from that truth.

The doctrine that human beings are by nature equal is one that Americans of the Founders’ era had learned from both philosophy and religion.

In 1690, in his influential “Second Treatise of Government,’’ the English philosopher John Locke had written that the “state all men are naturally in’’ is one of “perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions . . . as they see fit,’’ as well as one “of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal . . . without subordination or subjection.’’ Even older, and no less influential, was the biblical teaching that because all human beings are made in the image of God, all are born with the same God-given right to equality and freedom.

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