When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he stated it was ‘self-evident’ that man derives his rights and liberties from God, his Creator … since rights and liberties were not State-given, but God-given, they existed before any State. The only reason a government was instituted was, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, ‘to secure those rights,’ that is, to protect and safeguard rights already existing in virtue of the value of the human person created by God…
In establishing our government on the principle that the State exists for the person, our political forebears were merely reiterating the great Christian tradition that the supreme value on this earth is the human person because God made him, because Christ died for his sins, and the Holy Spirit sanctified him. Not upon any psychological or anthropological or biological theories concerning man was this democratic doctrine grounded, but upon the Christian tradition that a single man is precious because he has an immortal soul. What, therefore, our ancestors in the Declaration of Independence called ‘self-evident’ was, in reality, a matter of faith and tradition. … Our Constitution puts politics under theology, democracy under God.
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