It doesn’t follow that if you evolved from nothing, from goo, through apes, or whatever you believe about evolution, that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that human beings have rights and must be protected and have dignity and that you should make sure you protect children or women or minorities. Those just don’t follow from the evolutionary premise. Those things follow from Christian assumptions about the God-givenness of human dignity and being made in God’s image. But we now treat them as self-evident.
Self-Evident Truths
Thomas Jefferson writes to Franklin a couple of weeks before the Declaration is going to be ratified and says, “Here’s my draft. Have you got any changes?”
And Franklin reads Jefferson’s draft which says, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and he crosses out “sacred and undeniable” and replaces it with “self-evident.” And that’s the edit, and I think it’s a wonderful metaphor or parable for the post-Christian West.
Now, in and of itself, you could say the edit doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. That’s not the claim I’m making. I don’t think that had Jefferson left the words “sacred and undeniable” in that then we would’ve gone down a very different path. That’s not the claim. But I think it serves as a really good parable of the post-Christian West, which is that what we do is we take truths which are actually grounded in Christian thought and Christian anthropology—even the fact that it said “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” in a modern sense, that’s certainly not self-evident to most people today at all.
And it wasn’t self-evident to several of the founders, in many ways, and a lot of them hadn’t believed that these rights they then enumerate were a real thing even ten or fifteen years before they wrote the Declaration.
These things are sacred truths. They are things that are grounded in Christian assumptions about God and about human beings, but by calling them “self-evident,” two things happen. One is that Franklin is wanting to make a broader Enlightenment appeal. It is, to some degree, a universalization of the idea.
Rather than saying these things come from Christian roots, it’s a way of saying these things are, if you understand the terms of the debate, obvious. And there’s a lot of literature about what self-evident means, and people go back and forth about exactly how it was meant. But effectively, one of the things that happens is that he universalizes a presumptively Christian claim into a more universal one.