I recently rewatched 12 Years a Slave. The film is so heavy with sorrow that it’s almost difficult to endure, but it contains a remarkable exchange between Epps, a slaveholder, and Bass, a carpenter opposed to slavery, on the subject of a universal moral law that warrants our attention.
Here it is below, with some of the more offensive language slightly adjusted:
BASS: “The law may say you have the right to hold a slave as property, but—begging the law’s pardon—it lies. Is something right simply because the law permits it? Suppose a law were passed taking away your liberty and making you a slave?”
EPPS: “Ha!”
BASS: “Suppose.”
EPPS: “That’s not a supposable case.”
BASS: “Because the law declares your liberty untouchable? Because society affirms it? Laws change. Social orders collapse. But universal truths endure. It is a fact—plain and simple—that what is true and right is true and right for all. For black and white alike.”
The issue at hand in this exchange is a timeless debate over the substance of law: Is law merely a decree by political authorities? Can the government simply will moral reality? Or must law reflect a larger moral order that governs and constrains the laws that human authorities enact?
It is into this moral maelstrom—questions of objective morality and its relationship to law and political structure—that I wade, exploring the connection between the Declaration of Independence and natural law.
Natural Law and the Declaration of Independence
Readers are doubtless aware of the timeless Preamble to America’s Declaration of Independence:
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.
Memorized by schoolchildren and memorialized in the minds of Americans, this sentence stands as a singular assertion of what America’s Founders believed they were securing—a government that, rather than asserting its own supremacy, put guardrails around it.
What were the constraining guardrails of the Declaration’s view of government? A government that existed to protect the God-given rights of its citizens. The source of those rights, and the protections undertaken by government to secure them, are what constitute the genius of the American experiment, and which call our attention to theological considerations. The Preamble’s axioms presuppose the reality of a transcendent moral law that constrains what actions government can undertake. Government, the Founders believed, must act in accordance with this transcendent order, and never against it (a concept of law tied directly to such figures as Thomas Aquinas). Even beyond the limitations imposed on government, what undergirds the government’s purpose is the existence of a teleological order, where time, space, and political communities are governed by moral laws, fixed natures, and ultimate purposes. All told, the American Revolution was set off by a moral maxim that preceded it. That moral maxim is unmistakably born from within the classical and Christian natural law traditions.
But first, a definition of natural law is necessary. Natural law refers to the universal, immutable, and rationally accessible moral order that God has woven into the structure of His creation and inscribed upon human nature itself—a law “written on the heart,” as Romans 2:15 calls it. Such a law is not merely a legal convention or cultural inheritance, but rather an objective moral grammar of reality—the law that fits man as man: rational, morally responsible, and made in the image of God. As such, it binds all human beings without exception, regardless of their religious commitments or cultural location.
This moral order reflects the character and wisdom of the Creator. Through the exercise of practical reason, human beings discern the basic goods toward which they are ordered by nature—goods constitutive of genuine human flourishing—and the moral principles that distinguish right action from wrong. Natural law is therefore not an alien imposition upon human freedom but the moral architecture of what it means to be human.
Christian theology holds that sin has darkened the mind’s perception of this order, distorting moral judgment and weakening the will. Yet reason is not altogether extinguished. By God’s common grace, the essential contours of the moral law remain accessible to individuals and societies alike—sufficient to distinguish good from evil, to construct just social orders, and to order life toward the true, the good, and the beautiful. Natural law does not save; but it does illumine, restrain, and orient—preparing the mind for the fuller moral clarity that only special revelation provides.
It is within this milieu, a context shaped by Protestant and classical Christian orthodoxy, that the Founders operated. Not all of America’s Founders were Christian; that is true. But all lived, breathed, and had their being shaped by a moral ecology that was unmistakably Christian in character. Secularism, then, lacks the explanatory power to either explain or narrate the story of the American Founding, for the Founding is unmistakably theist.
Let us now work through the Declaration’s Preamble section by section and examine how its wording traces the essential contours of natural law.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident”
Immediately, the Declaration’s Preamble calls forth a daring epistemological claim at odds with modern philosophy. What does “self-evident” mean? It declares that man is a rational animal capable of grasping moral truths. From the vantage point of Christian theology, man is a knowing subject fit with capacities to discern moral facts. That something is “self-evident” means that there are indemonstrable truths—truths we cannot be ignorant of because these truths are constitutive of human nature itself. The natural law tradition refers to these truths as per se nota. A per se nota truth would be “murder is wrong.” How can I prove to you that murder is wrong? I cannot. That murder is wrong is a moral predicate—it just is. It cannot be proven apart from the inherent reasonableness of the claim itself. No further proof for the intelligibility of the moral proposition can be proffered apart from its manifest self-evidence. From the very start of the Declaration’s Preamble, the Founders call for moral realism—the idea that moral facts correspond to reality—grounded in human beings’ ability to know such truths.
“That all men are created equal”
What do the Founders mean by equal? It is patently obvious, after all, that human beings are not equal in their talents, capacities, or appearances. The Preamble here is instead speaking of an ontological equality—an equality grounded in the nature of human beings as such. What metaphysical account can make a claim of equality coherent? Ultimately, the Christian answer is that human beings possess equal dignity because they bear the image of God (Gen. 1:28). Without God as the authorizing agent for human dignity, equality becomes a mere assertion instead of an argument. This explains the vacillating attitude that modern politics has toward humanity—it inconsistently parcels out “rights” based on its subjective beliefs about what “equal” means.
“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”
It is at this juncture that the Founders are making a substantive moral claim. They are saying that the source of rights emanates from the Creator—not the state, not social consensus, not utility. That they are endowed means they are inscribed by God, not constructed by government fiat. That they are unalienable means that the rights inhere by virtue of what a human being is as such.
“Rights” are supremely contested. In my view, we understand rights most richly by grounding them in corresponding duties. If human beings have a duty to God, a duty to perpetuate their existence through the formation of marriage and family, and a duty to seek after the truth and organize their lives around it, there must be legal safeguards guaranteeing the exercise of those capacities. Rather than rights being pliable grants of the state, we should understand rights as legal safeguards protecting the exercise of moral faculties that humans are duty-bound to fulfill to experience their flourishing.
“that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The idea in this famous construction is that there are objective human goods that promote human well-being. Born of the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, the Preamble states that the government’s purpose is to secure the conditions in which human beings can reach their proper end.
Broken down, the Preamble insists that “life” itself is a basic good and that government exists to do one basic thing: to respect and promote bodily preservation. Promoting bodily preservation requires the pathways (i.e., “liberty”) to realize such ends. It is the promotion of bodily well-being that culminates in the human soul finding contentment (i.e., “the pursuit of happiness”).
Thus, in a mere thirty-five words, the Founders set forth a vision for government grounded in the precepts of the natural law tradition. Those precepts are:
- moral realism—that truths are objective, not constructed. There is no language of “we prefer”—there are only statements of objective fact;
- practical reason—“self-evident” maps onto the idea of there being indemonstrable truths graspable by reason;
- human nature and teleology—that “rights” are grounded in the nature of persons implies that human beings have a fixed nature, not merely preferences or emotivist impulses;
- Creator—that the Declaration elsewhere appeals to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the opening sentence establishes that political structures are subordinate to a higher moral law. Positive law derives its legitimacy by proper conformity to natural law;
- Common Good—though easily overlooked, that the Declaration states the government exists to “secure these rights” implies a political philosophy oriented toward protecting human goods accessible by all persons within the political community.
Returning to the opening exchange in this essay, I want to test the Preamble’s thesis against the question of slavery and how its presence at the American Founding challenges the natural law maxims at the heart of the Declaration’s Preamble. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once remarked, “Those who deny natural law cannot get me out of slavery.”[1] What does Thomas mean? Without a law above human law, there is no standard or recourse to free the slave. If positive law is the full measure of law, then slaves will remain as slaves. If there is a law that can be appealed to that calls human law to account, natural law is that recourse. It is the recourse that Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to protest racist laws—specifically invoking Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. In reacting to the heinous Dred Scott decision, Frederick Douglass likewise appealed to the natural law against the injustice done to the slave:
1. Robert P. George, “The 1993 St. Ives Lecture—Natural Law and Civil Rights: From Jefferson’s ‘Letter to Henry Lee’ to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’” Catholic University Law Review 43, no. 1 (1994): 145.
The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. It is very great, but the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater. Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities. He cannot bale out the ocean, annihilate this firm old earth, or pluck the silvery star of liberty from our Northern sky. He may decide, and decide again; but he cannot reverse the decision of the Most High. He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil.[2]
2. Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision” (speech, New York, May 1857).
What is Douglass saying in these remarks? He’s appealing to objective moral realism as a function of the natural law’s governance. If the natural law is there, its axioms cannot be suspended. By appealing to equality of persons grounded in human nature as such, Douglass is indicting human legal opinions as being in intractable conflict with higher moral law. As President Abraham Lincoln wrote to the same effect, drawing on a natural law principle that one sees in the Golden Rule, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”[3]
3. Abraham Lincoln, “Definition of Democracy” (fragment, ca. August 1, 1858), in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:532. For more on this note, see Christian McWhirter, “Lincoln Draws the Line on Slavery,” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, February 23, 2021.
Conclusion
Scholars endlessly debate the intellectual sources of the American Founding. From my perspective, the American Founding is a brew of Greco-Roman insights into republican government, Judeo-Christian ideas of teleological order, and Enlightenment preoccupations with individual rights.
Even as we herald the Preamble’s natural law moorings, we must also admit that the natural law theory underpinning the Preamble is thin in substance. The Preamble does not tell us the identity of the Creator. It offers no thick account of human nature, telos, virtue, or the common good. It does not cap or limit the extent of those rights. It asserts, but does not demonstrate. Whether this is a failure of the Preamble or a function of what it assumed, given the moral traditions underlying it, is beyond what I can resolve here. Even if we may wish that the Preamble went further in its natural law foundations, we can be thankful that the American experiment begins not first with government’s authority over man, but with government’s duty to man.
Even still, that relative thinness has consequences for modern-day moral dilemmas. “Rights” discourse, stripped of a more robust teleology, quickly mutates into the province of self-interest, which explains why “rights” are now invoked to argue for abortion, sexual autonomy, and gender ideology. The framework of the Preamble is not wrong; it is merely insufficient to protect against the excesses of fallen nature without a more explicit grounding in Christian revelation.
The question facing America on its 250th anniversary is this: As America’s theological consensus that birthed the Preamble continues to erode due to secular progressivism’s hegemony, does the American vision collapse with it? While the metaphysical claims of the Declaration remain true, the question for today is whether the Declaration remains intelligible when the metaphysical claims underneath it are casually objected to within society—when mass civic and philosophical illiteracy runs rampant to the point of a sitting senator scoffing at the idea of rights coming from God.[4] Today, that is in jeopardy.
4. Jonathan Turley, “Tim Kaine’s Constitutional Blasphemy,” The Hill, September 6, 2025, https://thehill.com.
It was also true at the time of the Declaration. Though the Declaration’s natural law precepts are durable, taken on their own, they could not withstand popular majorities that undermine the Preamble. That was true 250 years ago with slavery. It is true today, as America is still living inconsistently with its Declaration given the availability and popularity of abortion. After all, it is an institution so vile that critics are right to question the moral consistency of America’s founding. The moral realism implicit in the Declaration requires a metaphysical foundation that only theism—and ultimately Christian theism—can coherently provide.
Even while Christians can and should champion the natural law, we must insist that rights do not float in thin air. If there is no “Creator,” there is no endowment, and rights and protections become revocable privileges bestowed by would-be tyrants. Without Christianity leavening the truths of the Preamble, I am not optimistic that the Declaration of Independence will remain either enduring or intelligible.
The natural law tradition the Founders drew from was historically shaped by Christian theology, whether or not they acknowledged it fully. Though inconsistently applied throughout its history, it is the vision of a God-given account of the human person that sets America apart in its protection of human dignity when compared to the rest of the world.
The Declaration’s famed thirty-five words are worthy of Christian appreciation because they say something objectively true about moral order—and America’s ongoing crises are a result of us abandoning the metaphysical foundation that originally made these truths intelligible.
