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The Declaration of Independence makes a critical error about the nature of truth.

“It’s good to look someone in the eye when you are talking to them.”

If, like me, you’re Australian, you will no doubt have heard this said many times. We consider it polite to give the person with whom we are speaking “our full attention”.

But is it really ‘good’? To someone from an Asian, Middle-Eastern or Native American culture, a gesture like direct eye contact can be seen as rude and offensive.

To show a person from a Middle-Eastern culture the sole of your foot is offensive and dishonouring. Isn’t it obvious? The feet are the dirtiest part of the body, so why would you show disrespect to someone else by exposing the sole of your foot?

Likewise, sticking your tongue out is rude — except in some Polynesian cultures and traditional Tibetan culture, where it is a great way to greet people.

It’s clear that the culture in which we are brought up programs us to view certain behaviours and values as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’.

Defining Worldview

Our cultural values and behaviours — along with our underlying beliefs about the nature of the world — are known as our ‘worldview’. A worldview colours the way a person understands and interprets the world around them, much like a pair of blue-tinted glasses would cause a person to see the world in blue.

In his book The Universe Next Door, James Sire defines a worldview as follows:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions that may be true, partially true or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and move and have our being.

Notice that Sire first ties a person’s worldview to his or her commitment and orientation of the heart. This is followed quickly by the words ‘presupposition’ and ‘assumption’.

This means a person’s worldview is deeply personal and includes subjective elements which are assumed to be true (but may not be).

Complete objectivity just isn’t possible.

The implications of this are startling. What is ‘obvious’ to one person may be completely counterintuitive and ‘obviously wrong’ to another.

Think beyond the level of cultural behaviours: our inescapable subjectivity runs deep into the questions of ultimate reality and the purpose of the world.

The Declaration of Independence’s ‘Self-Evident’ Truths

“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.”

These famous and oft-quoted words lay the foundation for the rest of America’s founding document. What we want to focus on here is the phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. Applying what we know about the importance of worldview, there is good reason to think the well-intentioned Founding Fathers overstated their case.

For example, is the equality of all people self-evident? For many cultures and civilisations down through history and until today, equality is not obvious at all.

In the first-century AD Roman Empire, it was ‘evident’ that males should enjoy a higher social standing than females. All were not created equal.

And when this belief in the inequality of people was applied to unwanted newborn babies, it led to the practice of infanticide — where babies were abandoned, exposed to the elements and left to die. Unsurprisingly, baby girls were at the receiving end of infanticide far more than baby boys.

The following letter written in the first century AD by Hilarion to his pregnant wife Alis reveals his deep care and concern for his son while holding an unflinching disregard for a baby daughter:

I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it.
— Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 97

For Hilarion, it’s ‘self-evident’ that boys are worth more than girls. His newborn baby girl does not have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rather, he has a right to end her life.

Christian Roots of the Declaration of Independence

The ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence — such as the equality of all people, human rights, and freedom of thought and conscience — did not arise in a vacuum. They were born from a deeply Judeo-Christian worldview, evidenced by the word “Creator”. Indeed, except for a few of the authors who were deists, the great majority were Christians.

The idea of the equality of all people comes straight from Genesis 1:26–27, where male and female are equal in value, dignity and worth because both are equally made in the image of God.

By writing “we hold these truths as self-evident”, the authors — whether unintentional or not — have placed humans as the ultimate source of truth claims about the world. This is the critical error America’s Founding Fathers made.

Since no human has complete objective knowledge, human reasoning will always include subjectivity. That means, once again, that what is ‘self-evident’ to one is ‘not true’ for another.

But there is a way of escape from this subjectivity. If someone has complete knowledge of all things and correctly interprets all events, then there is certainty about all truth.

This is precisely the Christian claim: God has infallibly spoken in the words of Scripture and imparted objective truth to humanity within its pages. The beliefs and values in Genesis 1:26–27 are objectively true!

Had the authors of the Declaration of Independence written, “We hold these truths to be divinely revealed”, they would have grounded their document on the objective, infallible and unchanging knowledge of Almighty God.

Hope for Australia

Australia is deeply indebted to its Judeo-Christian heritage, including its belief in human equality. But if Australia continues to move away from this foundation, will its Christian ideas survive? Only time will tell.

But we have no guarantee that they will.

To guarantee their survival, Australia needs a shift back from confidence in human reasoning to confidence in the truth of the Scripture.

And this can only come if our nation experiences revival and awakening to God.

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Image: Filippo Costaggini, “Reading of the Declaration of Independence” (1877) / Wikimedia Commons