GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum loves to flaunt the Declaration of Independence as irreproachable proof that civil laws must always, ultimately, comply with God’s laws. He specifically rips out of context the beginning of the second paragraph, which reads:
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.
In addition, Santorum likes to stress how the above wording serves the additional purpose of validating what is not the source of man’s rights, rhetorically asking an audience last week: “Are we going to believe, as our Founders did, that our rights don’t come from the government, that they come from a much higher authority?”
Naturally, Santorum assumes the founders were referring to the Christian God as this “much higher authority” but for some reason they neglected to spell this out. Perhaps they just happened to be in a demiurgic mood the day they framed the nation’s founding document and took poetic license in using the word “Creator” as a placeholder for “the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac”, as Santorum is wont to say.
Unfortunately for Santorum within neither the Declaration nor the U.S. Constitution can one find a single reference to any revealed religion – be it Christianity, Judaism or otherwise – or for that matter any footnotes citing the likes of Noah, Jesus or the Virgin Mary. Considering the document was drafted long before the publication of Dianetics we can rule out Thetans, otherwise the term “Creator” could in fact represent any type or form of Higher Power. For all we know the founders could have believed a ubiquitous woodland gnome was the Grand Designer of the Cosmos.
More importantly, the founders probably had a very good reason for neglecting to spell this out, bringing us to the very next phrase in the document which Santorum curiously never fails to omit:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
To get a better glimpse into the state of mind of the founders let us review the wisdom of a pamphleteer some scholars have referred to as the Father of American Independence, Thomas Paine. Although he never actually signed the Declaration, Paine’s writings, especially his pamphlet Common Sense, provided the political philosophy and moral impetus for breaking the chains of British Tyranny.
Ironically Santorum happens to be an admirer of Paine’s polemical nemesis Edmund Burke, one of the godfathers of conservatism. Santorum even describes his view of freedom with a quotation from Burke: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their appetites.”
In The Age of Reason Paine characterizes the religious faith of many of the architects of the American Revolution, including men like Jefferson and Franklin, as Deistic in nature. In addition, Paine makes clear that most of the founders preferred the religion of reason over revelation and, unlike Santorum, abhorred literal interpretations of scripture.
The reason the founders didn’t harp upon the nature or role of the “Creator” was because it wasn’t germane to defining the actual source and true nature of man’s rights. Let us concede the assumption, for the sake of argument, that the “Creator” is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. With respect to the rights of man Paine suggests that a religious justification is superfluous, because man by virtue of being born is endowed with inalienable natural rights, regardless if God does or does not exist. Paine argues that even if God does exist and created man in his own image, the rights of man do not depend on that creation.
Although Paine saw government as a root cause of society’s ills, he was referring to bad government. Poverty and unhappiness he considered the chief sources of social disorder which, in Paine’s eyes, were the result of inequitable taxation, itself a result of ineffective government.
Santorum fails to prove how anything written in the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution makes it clear that America’s legal system must be based on natural law as defined by the Church. But if he does become President, according to the oath he would have to swear, his number one duty will be to preserve, protect and defend the laws contained within the Constitution of the United States, not those found within Vatican edicts.
The source of man’s rights is ultimately irrelevant when it comes to determining who has the authority to recognize and protect human rights and who has the power to make and enforce society’s laws. According to the Declaration of Independence that authority would be the government, a government that derives its powers from the consent of the governed -- not the consent of the Almighty.
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