As the nation marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an old debate returned: Is America a creedal nation—defined by the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights? Or is that claim a later abstraction that ignores blood, soil, culture, and the European origins of those ideas?
Mike Gonzalez recently addressed this question in a Heritage Foundation essay presenting and endorsing a report by his colleague Jay W. Richards. Richards’s argument, as Gonzalez presents it, is to reject the false choice: creed and culture belong together. The American creed did not drop from the sky. It grew from the Christian West and from the British settlers who founded the country. Principles do not float free of the people who first lived them. A man in Bratislava who believes that all men are created equal is not, for that reason alone, an American. Creedalism does not require open admission. It requires assimilation, and it permits the country to refuse admission to those whose views contradict its principles.
The critics still come from two sides. Some treat the Declaration as English custom, belonging only to a particular people. Others treat it as an 18th-century ideology that hides domination. Both accounts make the same mistake: they reduce a claim about human nature to a product of history. Lincoln would have called this a category error: treating nature as if it were only history, the unchanging as if it were only the changing.
Lincoln did not deny that the Declaration’s ideas had a European history. Who would? He denied that this history made them merely European, or that the Founding was only Old World custom in a new place. The Declaration is not a list of English folkways. It announces “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” That is why Jefferson, in the middle of a fight for one people’s independence, still put the equality principle into the document. The truth does not belong only to those who first said it clearly. It is a truth about human nature that they articulated at a decisive moment.
Gonzalez’s presentation of Richards gets this right: the creed needs soil. Later Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox Americans are full members when they adopt the civic habits of the country. Lincoln explains why that soil is not a racial lock. In his 1858 Chicago speech he pointed to Germans, Irish, French, and Scandinavians already here who had no blood tie to 1776. They could still claim the Declaration, he told them, “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.” What joins them is not ancestry. It is “the electric cord” of the human equality proposition.
The same point appears in his 1855 letter on the Know-Nothings. Once you start carving out exceptions—“except negroes,” then “except foreigners and Catholics”—you have left the founding principle and kept only the hypocrisy. The modern versions of that move treat the creed as discredited because it first matured in Europe, or because outcomes remain unequal. Those are merely more exception clauses.
That is why the relationship between creed and culture matters. A political creed cannot survive on words alone. It has to be carried by habits, institutions, and people who actually believe that the principles mean something. But culture by itself is not enough, either. If custom and inherited identity become the final standard, then there is no longer anything higher by which to judge them. The American achievement was to connect a particular people and its inherited political culture to principles it claimed were true of human beings as such—and true for all time.
This is what the historicists ultimately deny: that there are truths that remain true regardless of the age in which we happen to live. If the Declaration’s “self-evident truths” are understood only as the ideas of eighteenth-century bourgeois society, then there is nothing permanent about them. They were simply what people in that particular time believed, and another age is free to believe something else. But once we take that step, we have also given up any standard outside the prevailing opinions of an age by which to judge slavery, tyranny, or even the effort to engineer group outcomes. Scholars have noted that there is an obvious difficulty here: historicism makes a universal claim about the impossibility of universal truth.
Lincoln would say that the European pedigree of these ideas shows they belong to the high tradition of the West—not that they belong only to Europeans. America is creedal because it made those truths the explicit basis of political membership, rather than leaving them implicit in custom, throne, or descent. Anyone who assents to the proposition, lives under the laws that secure it, and adopts the civic habits that make it real can claim the Founding as his own. That is what “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition” means.
The other path—treating the creed as merely a European heirloom, or as a racist fiction to be replaced by identity-based “equity”—repeats the error Lincoln spent the 1850s fighting. A house divided between the Declaration’s standard and its systematic denial cannot stand.
The question, then, is not whether the Declaration’s universal creed has a history. How could it not? Instead, the pressing question before us is whether that particular history is allowed to cancel the universal truth it discovered.