The most famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence contains something of a contradiction, or at least an inconsistency. Happily so for Christians. There is a theological claim hiding there. Not hiding, actually; it is there in plain sight:

“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 “all men are created equal” is not self-evident. Certainly not as it is commonly understood today.

In the context of the Declaration, the claim was being made that the right to govern belonged not to a king, however anointed, but to the people — “from the consent of the governed.” Most of the Declaration then goes on to enumerate the ways in which the British sovereign had governed unjustly, therefore justifying the independence of the American colonies.

“Created equal” is understood today in terms of equality of all before the law, rooted in the belief that all persons are created equal in dignity and rights. That was certainly not “self-evident” in 1776.

Even leaving aside the slaveholding of Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration, and many of the signers, the idea of broad equality, including racial equality, in 1776 was very much a minority view worldwide. In America, it would be nearly another 100 years that “equal protection of the laws” would be guaranteed to “any person” in the 14th Amendment, and another 100 years later that the civil rights movement would end segregation de jure if not de facto.

Equality of men and women before the law would have been held by a tiny minority in 1776.

The declaration that “all men are created equal” was an aspirational claim of history-changing impact. It is not obvious. History and experience suggested the opposite, namely that men are unequal in many and varied ways.

Even to claim universal equality in 1776 was a bold departure, setting humanity on a new path. That is why the semiquincentennial of the Declaration is observed as of importance beyond the United States; it resonates still, 250 years later.

The “self-evident” claim was attractive to the drafters. Self-evident claims are either obvious or logically necessary, so arguments do not need to be made. Had the signers of the Declaration attempted to furnish arguments for the claim of equality, it is unlikely that they would have reached a consensus. Their work would have become a philosophical essay rather than a declaration and call to action.

At the same time, the Founding Fathers knew that such a bold equality claim could not simply be left as “self-evident” when it was not. Where does this equality come from? How do all men hold rights equally?

The answer is theological: “They are endowed by their Creator.”

This is not an invocation of the Triune God, or the incarnate Son in Jesus Christ. It is not an appeal to the God of Israel. It is not a biblical claim. It is a thin claim, but it is a theological one.

As a matter of political philosophy, universal equality can be argued, but it is not an obvious argument. Indeed, it emerged quite late in the history of political philosophy. The ancient roots of political philosophy, enduring through to the early medieval period, argued the opposite.

There is, though, an older — much older — basis for universal equality. Genesis calls it the “image of God.” If God is the creator who creates all things, and created the first man in his image, and that image endures in all that first man’s descendants, then there is a straightforward, simple claim to universal equality.

The image of God is not “self-evident,” though. Quite to the contrary. It is revealed by God, meaning that man could not have known it absent God telling him.

The Declaration knows as much. It could hardly proclaim “truths revealed by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, fully revealed in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ,” so it settles for “self-evident” and then immediately invokes not that God, but a god, the “Creator.”

The Creator of the Declaration is not the God of Christian faith, but it can be read that way by faithful Christians. On the 250th anniversary, it is likely how most American Christians do read it. Hence it is not at all difficult for patriotic Christians to celebrate the Declaration.

In 1976, the bicentennial year, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, had two great preaching engagements outside of Poland. In Lent that year, Pope St. Paul VI invited him to preach the Lenten retreat to the Holy Father and the Roman Curia.

Papal biographer George Weigel characterizes the “pivot” of those 22 preached meditations as Gaudium et Spes Paragraph #22, what Cardinal Wojtyła regarded as the “theological center” of Vatican II:

“The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”

John Paul would later include Gaudium et Spes #22 in every major document. More than “Be not afraid,” it was the refrain of his long pontificate. Gaudium et Spes #22 nicely complements the Declaration of Independence. Who is this Creator? It is the eternal Son, through whom all things were made, who in Christ “fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.” It is Jesus who “restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward.”

If man can recognize in every other man his equal, then it is likely a fruit of Christian revelation, rooted in the “image of God” revelation of Genesis.

Cardinal Wojtyła’s second great engagement of 1976 came in the summer. He spent six weeks in the United States, lecturing at Harvard and The Catholic University of America. The highlight of his visit was his address at the Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, home of the Declaration. The theme was “The Eucharist and Man’s Hunger for Freedom.”

“Our contemporaries make much of this freedom and pursue it eagerly, and rightly so,” Cardinal Wojtyła began, turning immediately to the humanism of Gaudium et Spes, where freedom is part of image of God. “Authentic freedom is an exceptional sign of the divine image within man. … Hence man’s dignity demands that he act according to a conscious and free choice (GS #17).”

The future pope then expressed the same Christian view of man in the language of the Declaration, drawing on the concepts of “endowment” and “Creator” expressed in the Christian humanism of Vatican II.

“[Freedom] is in the first place an attribute of the human person and in this sense it is a gift of the Creator and an endowment of human nature,” he preached.

“Freedom is at the same time offered to man and imposed upon him as a task,” Cardinal Wojtyła continued. The founders understood it as a momentous task, to which they pledged “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” invoking at the same time “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

The Declaration of Independence is not a Christian document. Yet it emerges from a culture shaped by Christianity and it finds its fullest expression in that same culture, in the theological vision expressed at Vatican II and interpreted by John Paul.

In its public culture, the United States is a much less theologically serious place than it was in the bicentennial of 1976. Will the summer of the semiquincentennial bring another friendly foreigner, another Karol Wojtyła, to speak of those “self-evident” truths?