On the Presentation of the 2025 Rudolf and Timothy Smith Award for Distinguished Contributions to Pro-Life Scholarship
In his Gettysburg address, President Lincoln dated the Founding of the United States with the Declaration of Independence: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
The Declaration and the Constitution are the two most important “State Papers” in American history. The most recognized, the most acclaimed, the most unifying, compared to others. Mortimer Adler referred to the Declaration, the Constitution, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as “America’s Testaments.” Historian Peter Onuf has called the Declaration “the touchstone of American nationhood” which has “served as a sacred text for subsequent generations of Americans.” Many other great American officials and orators throughout our history have acclaimed the Declaration as a founding document. Abraham Lincoln declared in a speech in 1856 that “the corner-stone of the government…was the declaration that ‘all men are created equal.’”
The Declaration has had world-wide influence. In his 2007 book, The Declaration: A Global History, historian David Armitage documents the influence of the Declaration on many nations and their aspirations for liberty.
The Declaration is the most important political document that proclaims the right to life, while the Constitution protects the right to life from the federal and state governments. As historian James Stoner has written, the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence still frame our political discourse,” and the Declaration “has proven to anchor American unity, to define key elements of American identity, and to supply principles that have guided American social and political development.
In addition, the Declaration provides a significant philosophical and political foundation for civility in American politics and society. Because human beings are created equal, people deserve respect in public and private. And the cause for life can speak into that issue, as well, in our divided society. The cause for life in America has understandably relied upon the authority of the Declaration and its principles since at least the 1960s. Lamenting the tenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision in the pages of The Human Life Review in 1983, President Ronald Reagan invoked the Declaration and wrote “…there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.”
We are now 13 months from the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Because the Declaration and the Founding will receive increasing public attention by Americans over the next 13 months, this time is an invaluable opportunity to emphasize the Preamble of the Declaration in the public square and its self-evident truths, including the right to life. If the Declaration loses respect and confidence among Americans, its principles may give way to the will to power that is increasingly put forth by forces on the Left and the Right. For these reasons, the Declaration needs to be defended from critics on both the Left and Right.
The Meaning & Significance of the Declaration’s Preamble
The Preamble makes at least seven truth claims, building blocks for a free society that protects human rights and dignity:
“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.”
Our Commitment to Finding Truth
That the truths are self-evident calls upon an earlier standard of reason and proof. In his first draft, Thomas Jefferson used the term “sacred and undeniable.” Benjamin Franklin suggested the substitution of “self-evident”—an older understanding of epistemology. “Self-evident” does not mean that everyone will understand or accept something as true, but those who take the time to carefully study the propositions and the premises of the argument.
There is a Creator, which implies design and purpose. Lincoln too referred to us as “human creatures.” Here, in the second paragraph confidence in the Declaration may fall apart by the rejection of a Creator based on scientism or materialism. As Edward Feser has reminded us, a series of philosophers over 2,500 years—including Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz—have demonstrated the likelihood of the existence of an extremely powerful, necessary, immutable, non-contingent, immaterial, eternal being through reason and the observation of reality.
If anyone is doubtful about the claim of created equal, consider the argument for “the radical equality of all human beings” that is made by Robert George & Christopher Tollefsen in their book, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life. Tollefsen has written that
You and I, after all, have a right to respectful treatment, including a right not to be killed at will, that does not vary in consequence of the many differences that exist between us—differences of age, intelligence, awareness, status, or appearance. What can such an equality of rights be founded on except the one thing we do have equally in common: our humanity?
And, from the oldest written records of Judaism, the conviction of equal creation provoked a reflection on justice:
If I have denied justice to my menservants and maidservants when they had a grievance against me, what will I do when God confronts me? What will I answer when called to account? Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers? (Job 31)
Our Creator endowed us with “certain unalienable rights.” Like self-evident, endowment is an ancient concept, and a Biblical concept (Isaiah 48, 55, 60), signifying bestowing a gift, quality, or capacity upon someone. Like our creation, our endowment gives us purpose and dignity. This has necessary and enduring implications for bioethics. It is important, for example, in giving a realist and non-materialist account of human beings in the public square and in the academy.
Unalienable means that such rights cannot be given up or forfeited. Those include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This counters the claim that the Declaration is “voluntarist.” We cannot consent to give up those rights. We cannot ethically consent to suicide or to be a slave.
For their phrase, the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson and members of the Continental Congress could have appealed to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, or William Blackstone. In his recent book on the pursuit of happiness, Jeffrey Rosen makes clear that the phrase was well-known to the Founding generation and was understood to mean the pursuit of virtue, because virtue was necessary for happiness.
Government is instituted not to create but to secure “these rights.” These are preexisting rights, natural rights, which come from the creation of human beings and their nature.
And governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This too has a long pedigree. Jefferson and the Congress could have relied upon Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) or Franciso Suarez (1548-1617), contemporaries who asserted the legitimacy of the consent of the governed.
How did the Founders define Liberty?
Many people today undoubtedly value liberty as personal autonomy. But the Founders did not value liberty merely for its own sake. Liberty is an instrumental good that is necessary to achieve the common good and to protect human life and dignity.
Even decades after the Founding era, Lincoln acknowledged the problem in a speech in 1864:
The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty.
We should not take liberty for granted. Perhaps we do—until we lose it. R.R. Reno—editor of First Things and a very traditional Catholic and a very strong opponent of modernism—was one of the first at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to plead “Keep the Churches Open”—a claim for religious liberty that depends on our Constitution.
Clearly, we must be concerned about the illusion of autonomy in many circumstances and its negative consequences. Delaware’s Governor Meyer signed a law that legalized assisted suicide last month. It seems that some lawmakers think that the answer to every social evil is simply more autonomy. That hides the reality of coercion of vulnerable people–especially at the beginning or end of life—and hides the cost savings, which has to be the motive in some cases.
Were the Founders—in Professor Nathan Schlueter’s phrase—“liberal individualists who privilege liberty over the common good”? The evidence is abundantly clear. The Founders were not advocates of license or licentiousness. Instead, as James Patterson has written, “American republicanism rests on the maxim that individual persons possess God-given rights and corresponding duties to one another, to their communities, and most of all to God. Constitutions make plain how governments assist in the efforts of citizens to exercise these rights and duties.”
It is not enough to know that the Founders read Locke. What in Locke did they rely upon? During the Founding generation, political liberty was the emphasis, not moral license—protections against tyranny or government overreach in an age of royal absolutism. This is clarified by the rights that the states enshrined in their constitutions in the decade between the Declaration and the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
That older understanding of liberty seems to have lasted, among some American leaders, until the middle of the 20th century. President Truman, in a speech in 1951, said, “Without a firm, moral foundation, freedom degenerates quickly into selfishness… Unless men exercise their freedom… within moral restraints, a free society can degenerate into anarchy. Then there will be freedom only for the rapacious, and those who are stronger, and more unscrupulous, than the rank and file of the people.”
When we consider the state of the world—and the many dictators and the countries where political freedom and freedom of speech doesn’t exist or are under threat—we should not take liberty for granted.
It’s no surprise that liberty can be used for good or evil. Read yesterday’s paper. Read the Old Testament. But there’s no constitution which has perfectly allowed liberty to do good, but outlawed liberty to do evil, and clearly delineated both. For prudential reasons, our Constitution leaves that for subsidiary governments (political authorities), like the states.
The Founders understood the fallen world or, to put it in Aristotelian terms, a world of constraints. As Mary Ann Glendon rightly observed, James Madison in Federalist #55 “specifically acknowledged that republican government required a higher degree of virtue in its citizens than any other form” of government. And recently in his opinion in Dobbs, Justice Alito referred—at least six times—to “ordered liberty” not just liberty. (p. 231, 234, 238, 240, 256, 298)
To claim that the Framers did not provide sufficiently for education in virtue, you must ignore the doctrine of federalism, the existence of the states and their sovereignty. The states retained the broad police power to provide for the “health, safety, morals and general welfare.” The federal government, in contrast, was not granted any police power but must rely upon enumerated powers to act.
The Founders were oriented toward the common good. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #57, “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society, and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
Who most influenced the Founders? And in what way, and for what purpose? Was it Hobbes or Machiavelli? Based on the research of a number of scholars, it was less Hobbes than Locke and maybe less Locke than Blackstone. Or, some Founders may have read their Locke through Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
If you compare the Declaration with the first volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries, published 11 years earlier, you might be surprised by the similarities (1 Blackstone 38-54).
Blackstone’s Commentaries was “the most influential law book in Anglo-American history,” according to Professor Albert Alschuler, who has noted that “all of our formative documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the seminal decisions of the Supreme Court under John Marshall—were drafted by lawyers steeped in [Blackstone’s Commentaries].”
At the outset of his Commentaries, in the Introduction, the second section on The Nature of Laws, Blackstone said that natural law must guide human laws and human conduct. He referred to:
- “The supreme being [who] formed the universe”
- positive “laws… denote…the precepts by which man…a creature endowed with both reason and freewill, is commanded to make use of those faculties in the general regulation of his behaviour.”
- “[m]an, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his creator, for he is entirely a dependent being….”
- …the creator is a being, not only of infinite power, and wisdom, but also of infinite goodness, he has been pleased so to contrive the constitution and frame of humanity…he has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be obtained but by observing the former.…”
- “But in order to apply this to the particular exigencies of each individual, it is still necessary to have recourse to reason…
- “Those rights … which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty….”
- “For no subject of England can be constrained to pay any aids or taxes, even for the defence of the realm or the support of government, but such as are imposed by his own consent, or that of his representatives in Parliament.” (135)
How the Declaration Has Reflected America’s Moral and Political Standards
Ever since it was published, the Declaration has been used as a mirror to hold American practices to a political and moral standard. The Declaration served as a mirror to show Americans how they had fallen short during the decades of slavery after 1776. It was used by many Americans—including Luther Martin in 1787, William Lloyd Garrison in 1838, John Quincy Adams before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case in 1841, and Frederick Douglass in 1852—to challenge slavery by holding up the Declaration and comparing the record against the standard of the Declaration.
But the most influential was almost certainly Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln expressly used the Declaration as a mirror:
They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began – so that truth, justice, mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land….
Above all else, we have Lincoln’s use of the Declaration against slavery after he reentered politics in 1854. Several weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Massachusetts Senator, Charles Sumner, eulogized him in Boston: “The inevitable topic to which he returned with most frequency, and to which he clung with all the grasp of his soul, was the practical character of the Declaration of Independence in announcing the liberty and equality of all men.” After Lincoln reentered politics in 1854 with his Peoria, Illinois speech, Lincoln invoked the Declaration in at least 21 speeches, and the number may be much higher.
What about the influence of the Declaration after Lincoln? In her book, A World Made New, Mary Ann Glendon laid out the back story to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in December 1948 without a single dissenting vote, noting that it “marked a new chapter in a history that began with the great charters of humanity’s first rights movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” which included the Declaration of Independence.
A decade later, the U.S. civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. relied on the Declaration of Independence. In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in 1963, Dr. King referred to “those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” And later that year, in his I Have A Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Dr. King again referred to “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” which were “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” but which “America has defaulted on….”
Attacks Against the Declaration
Despite the positive influence of the Declaration, it is increasingly attacked by both the Left and Right in America, and we will be hearing more of that over the next 13 months.
On the Left, the Declaration and the Founders are condemned as hypocrites. Progressives from Woodrow Wilson onward have criticized the Declaration. But what’s most significant about the Declaration is not the social conditions in which it was written, but its principles. Those are what has endured.
Lincoln said that the authors of the Declaration:
[m]eant to set up a a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.
And Bernard Bailyn observed that the opposition to the slave trade during the Founding era, combined with the unity of a growing nation, created the momentum and opportunity to defeat slavery when the nation became able to do so:
What is significant in the historical context of the time is not that liberty-loving Revolutionaries allowed slavery to survive, but that they—even those who profited directly from the institution—went so far in condemning it, confining it, and setting in motion the forces that would ultimately destroy it….A successful and liberty-loving republic might someday destroy the slavery that it had been obliged to tolerate at the start; a weak and fragmented nation would never be able to do so.
On the Right, one of the most prominent critics has been Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen, author of the 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. In a foreword, James Davison Hunter understands Deneen’s argument, writing that “liberal democracy, that system that marries majority rule with individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy” and Deneen “locates the source of the legitimacy crisis in liberalism itself.”
Deneen defines liberalism broadly, as starting with the Declaration and the American Founders. The Declaration embodies, in Deneen’s words, “the set of principles upon which liberal democracies the world over are built.” He lays the blame for “liberalism” on the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration launched political liberalism and started the decline in America. Modern developments, according to Deneen, like progressivism, or modern liberalism, or “wokeism” are simply late stages of the original sin which started with the Declaration.
The Wall Street Journal in May 2025, referencing Deneen, framed his argument as “why liberalism should be junked and what should replace it.” According to Deneen, liberalism is based on individual autonomy, and it seeks to subordinate Nature.
There are several problems with Deneen’s arguments.
First, Deneen exaggerates what the Declaration claims. Deneen says: The political philosophy of liberalism was “put into effect at the birth of the United States.” It “was a wager that political society could be grounded on a different footing. It conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” Deneen says that “liberalism was the first political architecture that proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived political plan.”
Here, Deneen exaggerates again. He claims that the Declaration did more than Jefferson—or perhaps more accurately the Continental Congress which debated, edited, approved and signed Jefferson’s draft—claimed for the Declaration. If the moderns overturned the ancients, who thought that men should conform their souls to reality, and held instead that “the greatest good was the conforming of objective reality to our thoughts and desires by means of technology”—as Peter Kreeft has described moderns—the Declaration did not found America on that proposition. Nor does the Declaration overturn Aristotle, who held that knowledge is necessary for truth, and adopt Francis Bacon, who held that knowledge is for power—again as Peter Kreeft has described him. The Declaration doesn’t claim either as the foundation for America.
The Declaration doesn’t claim that all political authority is subject to your consent or my consent. As President Coolidge specified nearly a century ago at the 150th anniversary, “the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.” Instead, the Framers relied on prudence to define those powers and to define the procedures for majority rule and for the consent of the governed.
Second, Deneen condemns the Declaration as based on “liberal voluntarism.” Voluntarism may mean different things depending on the context or the critic but generally it is the notion that we treat our obligations as based on our consent. Deneen claims that liberalism “based politics upon the idea of voluntarism—the unfettered and autonomous choice of individuals.” That’s what the Declaration launched. And, Deneen argues, if government is based on consent, that inevitably determines all our other obligations – family, marital, parental.
Yet, the Declaration proclaims not license but “certain unalienable rights,” and these cannot be alienated—forfeit—even with our consent. One cannot ethically consent, as I mentioned, to suicide or slavery.
Third, as a historical matter, none of Deneen’s features of liberalism are recognizable as the plans of the American Founders, or appeals of the Declaration, or policies that the Founding generation favored. He imagines the Constitution as though it established only a central government and ignores the states and what they were doing and could continue to do under the Constitution to educate their citizens, preserve religious liberty and inculcate virtue. Deneen’s targeting of the Declaration as launching the autonomous self is a bad example of presentism—projecting onto the past the perspective of the present.
Most of the characteristics which Deneen condemns in “liberalism” appeared in our political discourse long after the Founding era:
- “the conquest of nature”
- “bureaucratized government”
- “globalized economy”
- “dismantling of cultural norms”
- “statist individualism”
- “fundamentally different anthropological assumptions”, and
- “new relationship between humans and nature.”
Fourth, what’s odd about Deneen’s description of the “older conception” of liberty is that it sounds like William Blackstone and his Commentaries, who greatly influenced the Founders. James Stoner, in contrast, has observed that “in mingling the various rights and privileges inherited from the English constitution…. the Declaration follows Magna Carta rather than modern liberalism.”
Fifth, Deneen contradicts himself. He contrasts an older conception of liberty with modern liberalism:
Liberalism…arises from a redefinition of the nature of liberty to mean almost the opposite of its original meaning. By ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance, whether achieved by the individual or by a political community. Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty…the achievement of liberty required constraints upon individual choice. This limitation was achieved not primarily by promulgated law—though law had its place—but through extensive social norms in the form of custom. This was so much the case that Thomas Aquinas regarded custom as a form of law, and often superior to formalized law, having the benefit of long-standing consent.
How can Deneen endorse “long-standing consent” as a benefit of custom if he condemns the consent of the governed in the Declaration as “liberal voluntarism”?
Sixth, a related critique by Deneen is that natural law is the source of political obligation, not consent. Natural law—or nature—may compel me (and my family) to join society. But natural law is limited in its injunctions or prescriptions. Even if natural law tells me that I should join the community, it does not specify where, when, or what kind.
Coordination issues are arguably the grounding of the natural law source of political obligation. And that may be immediately appealing. When Thomas Lincoln (father of Abraham) moved his family out of Kentucky (apparently because Kentucky allowed slavery) and into Indiana, and settled on a tract of land in the middle of nowhere, the Lincolns either had to do everything for themselves—grow all food, fashion all tools, make all clothes—or they were compelled to find a neighbor or a store or a vendor and trade—simple exchange.
The dictates of natural law are typically general. Assuming the natural law, knowable by reason, recognizes that humans are social or political animals, that is a very general injunction that does not get us very far toward creating an effective governing structure. It doesn’t indicate that the natural law determines that rule by the one, the few or the many is dictated by natural law, nor how to create an efficient governing system, nor how to prevent tyranny, nor how to effectively govern. It does not indicate that an individual or family, upon being drawn into or discovering a governing authority, must consent to that authority or, that upon discovering that the authority is incompetent, cannot withhold or withdraw their consent and move on, until they find a governing authority that is more effective, more conducive to their family’s needs.
And, even if there is a “moral imperative” for me to be in society, that is a separate issue from the legitimacy of the governing authority.
Even if we need society for coordination, what do we do if we live in California or Illinois and decide that the coordination goals or methods of the Governor do not contribute to individual or family flourishing or economic sufficiency? Is the individual or family prohibited from moving to Nevada or Indiana? If we stayed in California or Illinois, we could not refuse to pay taxes. By staying and living off the benefits of that state, we are implicitly consenting.
I would suggest that whatever the natural foundation of government, it can only be sustained by consent, explicit or implicit. And Professor Joel Alicea has recently argued from a natural law perspective that “if the people are responsible for the common good, then they must possess the ultimate power to ensure that the common good is secured.”
When the general prescriptions of natural law reach their end, what do we then follow? Prudence. The cardinal virtue. Principle and prudence led the Founders, in the face of the experience of Greek, Roman and English history, to the consent of the governed.
Moreover, there is much good in consent that Deneen cannot see. One important social and political benefit of consent is political commitment. President Lincoln famously convened an unprecedented meeting with a group of five black pastors in the White House on August 14, 1862. They met while Lincoln was considering an Emancipation Proclamation, and it was five weeks before Lincoln publicly released the draft Emancipation Proclamation. He informed the pastors that Congress had appropriated funds for colonization. He said indelicate things such as “This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both…” But Lincoln also said, “your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” He proposed voluntary colonization of black Americans because he concluded, “it is better for us both, therefore to be separated.” A full text was released to the press, which suggests that Lincoln planned to release it for Americans to read. There were protests on both sides. This is considered by some historians to be Lincoln’s worst moment in his relationship with black Americans.
But think, instead, about what Lincoln discovered by his questions and shared with the public through the release to the press. The black pastors insisted that America was their home. And the meeting demonstrated to Americans that efforts had been made to sell colonization, but black leaders weren’t interested. Nor were the Southern Border states to which Lincoln had recommended compensation. The meeting showed the commitment of black citizens to America as their home, and it showed to those who advocated colonization that Lincoln had made an effort, even if it was later abandoned as impractical or unjust.
The answer to licentiousness, or the autonomous self, is not to take away liberty from everyone—see e.g., the parable of the wheat and the tares—nor to take away the consent of the governed.
Decline of Liberalism after the Civil War
If not at the Founding, when, historically, did liberalism descend into licentiousness? The evidence seems abundant that the decline started after the Civil War, the late 19th century, not at the Founding. Barry Alan Shain answered this question a quarter of a century ago:
Contrary to mythic beliefs widely held by the general public and even most scholars, Americans in the late-eighteenth century were not a people who had founded colonies and then a nation “around a pervasive, indeed, almost monolithic commitment to classic liberal ideas,” such as “individualism, freedom, equality,” and individual autonomy. Nor is it true that Americans wished to “pursue their individual goals and aspirations in a society dominated by the norm of ‘atomistic social freedom.’” Instead, Americans, like their Christian forebears, were more interested in the well-being of their families and communities, local agricultural matters, and the acquisition of Christ’s freely given grace, than in securing individual autonomous freedom. They were traditional in their social and political goals and, accordingly, committed to an understanding of freedom that sharply differentiated between liberty and license.
Numerous scholars identify the late 19th century as the relevant period and thereby bolster Shain—including Robert Reilly, Michael Novak, Steven Smith, Roger Kimball, Peter Berkowitz, Ilya Shapiro, James Stoner, Al Alschuler, and Mary Ann Glendon.
The critics on both the Left and Right underestimate the truth and moral power of the Declaration. The Declaration is of historic, world-wide importance that has endured for 249 years. The Declaration is a powerfully influential document. The consent of the governed has been cited as moral authority for government by many theorists, religious authorities, and political philosophers for centuries. The consent of the governed serves to keep rulers in check, and to involve citizens in a Republic–representative government—government of the people, by the people, for the people. A free republic provides the freedom to pursue the common good and to campaign for human life and dignity.
The Question Before Us Today
The question that confronts us today is the same that confronted the Founding generation: how do we use liberty with prudence—practical reason oriented to the moral good? Do we use it for human goods? It requires virtue to promote those human goods. And not simply a good theory or good intentions but prudence. And acting within a government that resists tyranny and preserves liberty to pursue those goods. The Founders looked to both Scripture and historical experience to shape that governmental framework.
Three years after Dobbs, we should not forsake a system of government that allowed the freedom to challenge the Supreme Court, to keep Roe v. Wade unsettled, and to organize 26 states to call for the overruling of Roe and Casey. We should be optimistic that through majority rule, we can persuade our fellow Americans, and work through majority rule to grow the number of pro-life states and build an enduring majority for life. We cannot do that without liberty and the virtues of courage, prudence and perseverance. It is not clear who will explain and defend the Declaration over the next 13 months. The cause for life needs to make the public argument for the truth of the Declaration’s Preamble. The Declaration still acts as a mirror, still inspires, still teaches, still gives hope.
The Enduring Influence of the Declaration for Human Rights & Dignity
For Further Reading
Albert Alschuler, Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (2000)
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007)
Bernard Bailyn, Faces of the Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (1990)
Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame U. Press 2003)
Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1999)
1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (U. Chi. Press 1979 Facsimile of First edition of 1765) (Volume One – Of the Rights of Persons, “Section the Second- Of the Nature of Laws In General”)
H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1965)
Justin Buckley Dyer, ed., American Soul: The Contested Legacy of the Declaration of Independence (2012)
Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius 2017)
Clarke Forsythe, Politics for the Greatest Good: The Case for Prudence in the Public Square (2009)
Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2001)
Robert P. George & Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (2008)
Gary L. Gregg, ed., Vital Remnants: America’s Founding and the Western Tradition (1999)
John H. Hallowell, The Moral Foundation of Democracy (1954)
Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (1958)
Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Rev. paperback ed. 1990)
Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)
Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1988)
Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012)
Daniel Mark Nelson, The Priority of Prudence: Virtue and Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas and the Implications for Modern Ethics (1992)
Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (2002)
Robert Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding (2020)
Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (2024)
Barry Alan Shain, ed., The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context (Yale U. Press 2014)
Colleen Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (2009)
Steven D. Smith, The Godless Constitution and the Providential Republic (2025)
James R. Stoner, Jr., Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism (1992)
Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (1978)
Dallas Willard, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge (2018)
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787 (1969)
Articles
Benjamin Franklin, On True Happiness (1735)
Mary Ann Glendon, Philosophical Foundations of The Federalist Papers: Nature of Man and Nature of Law, 16 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol. 23 (1993)
Oscar and Lilian Handlin, Who Read John Locke? Words and Acts in the American Revolution, 58 American Scholar 546 (Autumn 1989)
R. Mary Lemmons, The Personalist Future of American Law, Lex Naturalis (Fall 2020)
R. Mary Lemmons, Bioethics and the Declaration of Independence: Current Status (2017)
Donald Lutz, The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought, 78 Amer. Pol. Sci. Rev. 192 (March 1984)
Speeches & Documents
English Petition of Rights (1628)
English Bill of Rights (1688-89)
George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights (May 1776)
Abraham Lincoln, Republican State Convention of Illinois (inaugural), Bloomington, IL (May 29, 1856), https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincoln00linc/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater
U.S. Department of State, Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights (2020)