The closing paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is among the most theologically elevated prose in American public life. The fifth installment in Casey Spinks’s series is a serious attempt to read it as such. His reading of the “we”—representative, covenantal, theological—insists that the Declaration ends not with a political theory but with a covenant, and that republics, as Augustine said, are founded on their loves.
I find myself largely persuaded. What follows is not a refutation but an attempt to follow Spinks’s argument where it leads: above all, the question of what it takes to constitute and sustain the “we” the Declaration envisions. This exploration arises from a single ecclesiological conviction: the church is not primarily a cultural resource that political communities draw upon to sustain themselves, nor simply one denomination among the many voluntary associations a liberal order tolerates. She is, in her own right, a politics—the community that most fully embodies the just rule of the true King, and that bears authoritative witness to that King and his will for all human communities. Political life is a genuine good of creation and can function apart from explicit acknowledgment of Christ; but no political community is beyond his lordship, and none can rightly understand its own authority, its own limits, or its own obligations so long as the community commissioned to proclaim that lordship is recognized only as one religious society among others. The “we” of the Declaration presupposes more than it can itself supply—and the 250th anniversary is a fitting moment to ask what that presupposition is, and whether the political order that once received it still understands it.
I. A People Before Its Declaration
Before we can appreciate what Spinks says about the representative “few”, we need to ask how the covenental “we” was constituted in the first place. This is the question Spinks circles across all five installments: does the people make the Declaration, or does the Declaration make the people? His answer—that the people is already constituted by circumstance before it deliberates or declares—is exactly right. The Declaration’s opening is written, as Spinks observes, in something like a middle voice: it is not the signers who demand separation but the “course of human events” that makes it necessary. The people does not invent itself; it finds itself.
But this raises a further question: what, specifically, formed this people before its declaration? The political theorist Bernard Yack offers a useful framework. Nations are neither pure consent communities—defined by agreement to shared principles—nor pure descent communities defined by bloodline. They are heritage communities, constituted by an inherited legacy passed down through language, symbols, stories, laws, and institutions. One does not choose this inheritance any more than one chooses one’s parents; it is given, contingently, through birth into a particular time and place. Yet it requires active affirmation in each generation to remain alive. Christians can understand this providentially: the boundaries of peoples are not accidents but appointments (cf. Deuteronomy 32:8; Acts 17:26). The contingencies of American nationhood are not accidents to be overcome but gifts to be received and transmitted.
Now, the Declaration’s appeal to consent is real and necessary—but consent alone cannot ground political obligation. A political community defined only by agreement faces an immediate problem: what obliges anyone to keep the agreement? This is not merely a theological observation but a philosophical one. Voluntarist accounts of political obligation have answers to this question—but those answers, on inspection, depend on prior moral commitments the theory cannot itself generate. You need a moral order that precedes and exceeds the will of the contracting parties, a law that no individual or collective invented, to give the consent its binding force. This is precisely why the Declaration appeals to “Nature’s God” and the “Supreme Judge” rather than to the general will—these are not ornamental additions to an otherwise secular consent framework, but structurally necessary foundations. The founders who spoke the language of social compact were shaped by several traditions in complex combination—including John Locke, whose influence is real and should not be minimized. But Locke did not operate in isolation. The founding era was also inhabited by a broader intellectual world shaped by Reformed thinkers like Richard Hooker and Johannes Althusius. These thinkers had long wedded consent to a natural order the contracting parties did not themselves create, grounding obligation in something real that precedes any act of individual or collective will. That inheritance formed the conceptual air the founders breathed, even when they did not cite it directly. The problem is not that these resources were absent from the founding; it is that the liberal culture that followed—for reasons that need not detain us here—progressively narrowed the tradition, retaining Locke’s consent framework while losing the natural law inheritance that alone gave it coherence. Spinks’s reading confirms what that richer tradition always insisted: the Declaration’s “one people” finds itself already constituted before it deliberates, and its consent is rendered before a Judge whose authority preceded any human assembly.
This leads to a point that is easy to miss but crucial for everything that follows. The Declaration calls certain truths “self-evident”—but these truths were not self-evident to most of human history. That consciousness had been slowly formed through centuries of Christian culture, transmitted above all by the churches. This is why the question of what community formed—and continues to form—the “we” is not incidental to the Declaration’s political vision, but internal to it.
That heritage community was not generically theistic in its formation. Whatever the personal convictions of individual founders—and these varied considerably—the people they represented and addressed had been shaped by a distinctively biblical and covenantal inheritance: generations of preaching, catechesis, and a political culture formed by the conviction that rulers are accountable to a law higher than their own will. The theology of the Declaration’s closing paragraph—Providence, divine judgment, the covenant of sacred honor—did not arise from Enlightenment reason alone. It arose from communities that publicly confessed and transmitted it. Those communities were, preeminently, the churches—not as civic institutions conscripted into the service of national formation, nor merely as schools of virtue producing well-ordered citizens, but as the primary bearers of a shared moral grammar that ran across denominational lines: covenant theology, natural law, the accountability of rulers to divine authority. Whatever their differences, the churches of the founding era transmitted this common inheritance, and it was that inheritance—not Enlightenment reason alone—that gave the Declaration’s theological language its cultural intelligibility. The “we” of the Declaration is only intelligible as a heritage community if we name what historically formed it. To do so inevitably raises the ecclesiological question that the Declaration itself cannot answer.
II. Authority From Above and Below
That heritage question leads directly into the question of authority—because what a people inherits shapes not only its moral vocabulary but its understanding of why political authority exists and what legitimates it. Spinks’s treatment of representation resists the reduction of democracy to “a matter of numbers only.” The representative is a guarantee that people shall be governed by people and not by aggregates—a human being who can be trusted, held accountable, spoken to. The act of vesting power in a representative is itself, Spinks argues, a covenantal act—an act of trust. He is right, and the Declaration’s own structure confirms it: the Congress acts not merely as the instrument of popular will but as a body that receives authority, exercises genuine judgment, and stands accountable for the consequences.
But we need to be precise about the architecture of that authority. The best of the Christian political tradition—from Aquinas through the Reformed covenantal tradition, and in more recent figures like Nicholas Wolterstorff and Oliver O’Donovan—has insisted that the question of political authority cannot be settled from one direction alone. Authority is not simply generated from below by the consent of the governed, nor does it descend from above in a way that bypasses the people’s genuine role. The two dimensions belong together. Political authority is divinely grounded: it participates in an order of justice and human good that no community invented. It is also humanly designated, exercised among and for a particular people who play a genuine role in identifying who shall bear it and holding them accountable for how they do. The people’s role is real, not a mere formality. But it operates within a prior moral and political order that neither the people nor their rulers created, and to which both remain accountable whether they acknowledge it or not.
This is why Paul in Romans 13 describes rulers as God’s servants and liturgists (diakonoi and leitourgoi)—ministers of a divine order they did not originate and cannot revoke. In the American system, the democratic mechanism designates who bears authority; it does not generate the authority itself. God alone is its ultimate source, and rulers bear it as a trust—accountable upward to the divine order and downward to the people they serve, but not reducible to either. The Declaration’s repeated appeals to “Nature’s God,” the “Supreme Judge,” and “Divine Providence” are not rhetorical ornaments on an otherwise secular document. They are structural: they locate the authority by which the Congress acts within an order that transcends it, and they submit the American cause to a judgment no human court can render.
The Latin root of “authority,” auctoritas, carries a generative sense: from augere, to enlarge, to cause to grow (see Plato, Republic, VI). The one who bears authority represents a transcendent order to the community, communicating to it something that exceeds both ruler and ruled. As God’s liturgist, the ruler is not a hired agent executing instructions but a formative presence—one who, by governing well, enlarges the community’s capacity for the common good, and forms its members in virtue. This is the classical conviction that law is, among its other functions, pedagogical—it does not merely constrain but forms, shaping the character and moral imagination of those who live under it. The representative who serves his people well is not reflecting their current preferences back at them; he is leading them, within the bounds of his commission, toward goods they may not yet fully see. Spinks’s instinct that the Declaration’s “we” is constituted by something more than arithmetic is exactly right. The deeper reason for this is that political authority, when it functions as it should, is generative of the very community it serves precisely because it mediates to that community an order it did not itself produce.
This framing illuminates the Declaration’s most theologically serious moment, which Spinks reads with care: “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” The appeal does not claim the Americans are right. It submits their action to a judgment they cannot render for themselves—and in doing so it enacts something Augustine understood. In The City of God, reflecting on the burden of those who must judge in a fallen world, Augustine asks whether the wise man will shrink from such responsibility given the uncertainty and tragic consequences that attend it. No, Augustine answers; serve he must. To refuse is not an option; human society demands it. While he can never be certain in the moment that he is in the right—and thus cannot be “happy” as a public officer—he must act to avoid a deeper failure (City of God, XIX.6). The Declaration’s closing appeal exhibits exactly this posture. The founders do not claim to know they are right; they submit the substance of their action to the One whose judgment no human court can render, bearing before God the weight of choices whose full consequences they cannot see. Dietrich Bonhoeffer retrieved this same Augustinian logic in the darkest years of the previous century. He called it “responsibility”: action taken for the sake of those one is called to serve, in full awareness that one may be wrong and with a willingness to bear the cost. The Declaration’s closing pledge—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—is exactly this: not heroic self-assertion but vocation, the willingness to act as servants of a divine order that exceeds them and stand before God with the consequences.
That posture—bearing authority as a trust from One whose judgment no electorate can replace—is not instinctive; it is formed. And it is precisely the communities that formed it in the founding generation whose public standing the Declaration’s own grammar cannot secure.
III. The Supreme Judge and the Community That Declares His Will
Spinks has shown, rightly, that the Declaration’s political vision is irreducibly theological. “Nature’s God” is not ornamental. God is the one who orders the course of human events, establishes peoples, judges their actions, and governs history by a law no human can repeal. The Americans do not merely assert their cause; they place it under judgment.
But this raises a question the Declaration itself cannot answer from within its own terms: who declares what this God requires? Who gives determinate content to the justice to which both rulers and peoples are held accountable?
The Declaration’s theology operates at the level of Creator, Governor, and Judge. It affirms a real and binding moral order. But it does not specify the community responsible for bearing authoritative witness to that order in history. It invokes judgment; it does not identify the witness.
In its original context, this gap was not experienced as a problem. The language of “Nature’s God,” “Providence,” and “Supreme Judge” was not a freestanding philosophical vocabulary. It was sustained by a thick network of practices, institutions, and forms of life—above all, by the churches that had formed the moral imagination of the colonies across generations. The grammar of natural law, covenant, and divine accountability was not self-interpreting. It was taught, preached, embodied, and contested within those communities. The Declaration could speak as it did because a people had already been formed to hear it.
This formation was not merely institutional. It was the product of a long historical process by which the gospel had penetrated culture and rendered certain truths legible that would otherwise have remained implicit. The philosopher Jacques Maritain, reflecting on the drafting of the postwar Universal Declaration of Human Rights, made a crucial observation: the reality of natural law and human knowledge of it are two entirely different things. Natural law is objective and universal, but human consciousness of it develops historically and culturally. “The consciousness of the dignity of the person and the rights of the person,” he wrote, “remained implicit in pagan antiquity.” It was the message of the gospel that awakened it—not overnight, but as a slow rising of leaven across centuries. He illustrates the point concretely: slavery faced virtually no principled opposition in the ancient world, yet became increasingly untenable as the gospel penetrated cultures. This was not because the wrongness of slavery was new, but because the moral consciousness capable of perceiving and sustaining that judgment had been slowly formed. The Declaration’s “self-evident” truths are genuinely universal and grounded in human nature, but they became culturally legible, felt as obvious, through that long Christian awakening. Remove the tradition that mediated them, and the truths do not disappear; but they become less legible, more contested, harder to sustain as self-evident rather than merely conventional. This is precisely what is happening today.
The difficulty emerges, then, when that inheritance is abstracted from the communities that gave it life. Detached from its ecclesial setting, the Declaration’s theological language becomes indeterminate. “Nature’s God” can be made to name almost anything, or nothing in particular. The “Supreme Judge” recedes into a metaphor, and the appeal to divine accountability becomes indistinguishable from an appeal to sincerity. What was once a substantive moral claim becomes a formal gesture.
Modern liberalism refuses to resolve this indeterminacy. It treats the question of who speaks for God as one that must not be publicly answered. All religious claims are admitted into the public square on the condition that none may claim authoritative standing for the whole. The result is a settlement that secures peace by suspending the very question the Declaration raises. The Judge is invoked, but no one may say what his judgment requires.
But this resolution comes at a cost. A political order that depends upon a real moral law cannot sustain itself on purely procedural grounds. If the content of justice is left unspecified, or treated as the byproduct of competing wills, then the appeal to a “Supreme Judge” ceases to do any real work. The language remains, but its force dissipates. What was once binding becomes aspirational; what was once authoritative becomes expressive. And when the tradition that once publicly interpreted the moral order is privatized, the state does not thereby become neutral—it simply assumes, by default, the interpretive role that tradition once occupied. A secular critic might counter that reason provides an objective standard capable of restraining the state without any need for publicly recognized religion. But reason is never the view from nowhere. It is always formed within a tradition, shaped by particular practices, communities, and histories. As Maritain himself understood, reason’s grasp of natural law has historically depended on the gospel’s penetration of culture. When the tradition that formed the moral reason of the West is privatized and marginalized, what remains is not neutral reason but reason increasingly captive to the priorities of the most powerful—the same displacement of divine authority, now operating under a more respectable credential.
This returns us to the ecclesiological question. It is not enough to say that “religion” must recover its public voice, or that “Christian values” must reassert their cultural influence—those framings leave the church as one pressure group among others, competing for influence within a liberal order that has already determined the terms of the competition. The Christian claim is that this task belongs, in a unique and irreducible way, to the church—not because the church is a department of the political order, nor because it may be conscripted as a tool of national cohesion, but because it is the community constituted by the Word of the One whom the Declaration invokes as Judge. The deeper question is whether the church is recognized as church: not as a voluntary association that happens to hold certain convictions, but as the visible, divinely instituted community that bears an authority the state did not confer and cannot revoke. Civil authority cannot be neutral toward that community without rendering a judgment about the nature of the God to whom it claims accountability. A political order may attempt neutrality toward the church as public witness, but such neutrality cannot be sustained. Either that witness is acknowledged as bearing an authority the state does not control, or it is functionally displaced—its claims translated into the language of private conviction while some other voice assumes the interpretive role by default. What presents itself as neutrality tends, over time, to resolve into a quiet form of opposition—not by coercion, but by redefining what counts as publicly real.
The political theologian Oliver O’Donovan helps clarify what acknowledgment looks like in practice. Because Christ’s resurrection has decisively relativized all political authority, rulers now govern within the horizon of an accomplished victory they did not achieve. Their authority is real but penultimate—and this relativization is not a diminishment of politics but its redemption. A political authority that is not relativized by something genuinely beyond it does not thereby become more modest. It becomes absolute, and absolutized politics is the specifically modern form of tyranny. The church’s reminder that there is a King to whom every ruler must answer is therefore not a threat to good political order, but essential to it. And crucially, rulers encounter Christ’s lordship not only at the final judgment but concretely, here and now, through their posture toward the community in which his reign is publicly proclaimed. This is not a merely private or interior matter: when the church gathers, preaches, baptizes, and celebrates the Eucharist, she performs public acts that announce a political reality—that there is a community already living under Christ’s rule, and no earthly court can finally contain his reign. As Paul writes, it is “through the church” that “the manifold wisdom of God” is “made known to the rulers and authorities” (Eph. 3:10). The church is the community that publicly confesses the true identity of this Judge, declares what his will requires, and reminds every political authority—including this republic’s—that its power, though a gift of God, is not ultimate.
To say this is not to propose a simple programmatic conclusion. It is, rather, to identify a structural truth: the “we” of the Declaration depends upon a moral and theological grammar it cannot generate for itself, and that grammar requires a living bearer. Where the church is reduced to one voluntary association among others, that grammar becomes increasingly unintelligible. The result is not neutrality but erosion—the slow loss of the conditions under which the Declaration’s claims could once be heard as self-evident.
The founders could appeal to the Supreme Judge because they inhabited a world in which that appeal had determinate meaning. Whether we can still do so is no longer a question the Declaration can answer for us. It is a question about the communities that form us—about whether there remains, in public, a people capable of hearing and speaking the name of the Judge to whom the nation once appealed.
IV. Renewing the Covenant: Civil Religion, the Church, and the Ordered “We”
Spinks concludes with the Declaration’s final pledge—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—and reads it as a covenant of love. The unity of America is not political at its foundation but theological: a common reliance on Divine Providence, a common submission to the Supreme Judge, a common pledge of honor that can only be called sacred because something holy stands behind it. This is the essay’s finest and most important claim. But it immediately raises the question of how such a covenant is renewed and transmitted across generations—and here a carefully ordered answer is needed, one that neither dismisses the legitimate mechanisms of civil renewal nor mistakes them for something they cannot finally be.
Covenants require renewal. They require communities that remember their terms, rehearse their obligations, and form new members in their commitments. For a heritage community like the American people, some of this work is properly civil: shared public ritual, civic education in the founding documents, the ceremonies by which newcomers are received into the national inheritance, the public holidays that rehearse a common memory. These are genuine goods and should be affirmed as such. A people that loses its civil religion—the shared symbols, rituals, stories, and moral convictions by which a people publicly orders its common life around some conception of ultimate meaning—loses something real. The postliberal instinct to criticize thin civic pieties should not become a dismissal of the legitimate penultimate goods that civil life requires. Assimilation of newcomers, education in the founding’s moral grammar, the cultivation of civic loyalty—these are proper tasks of political community, and a healthy republic will pursue them deliberately.
But civil religion has a characteristic pathology, and it is worth naming clearly. When the church is absent from public life—reduced to a private association, her witness treated as one opinion among many—civil religion tends to fill the vacuum and become the only public theology available. At that point it undergoes a subtle but decisive transformation: the nation itself becomes the primary object of devotion, a kind of ersatz church that promises the supernatural solidarity for which human nature longs but cannot finally deliver. A political community ordered to the common good cannot help but reach toward something that transcends it; when the church no longer functions as a publicly recognized witness to what that something is, the community does not become more modest—it finds a substitute, and the substitute is always, in the end, itself.
The consequences follow with a certain inevitability. The heritage becomes an object of ultimate devotion rather than a gift held in trust. The “Supreme Judge” becomes a mirror of national self-approval rather than a genuinely transcendent authority. What was a penultimate love—real, proper, ordered—curdles into something absolute. The Declaration’s “firm reliance on Divine Providence” slides from submission to confidence that Providence is on our side. Sacred honor becomes national pride. The covenant of love becomes a covenant of self-love—which is, as Augustine would recognize, not true love at all but its corruption.
But civil religion of this kind is inherently unstable. The nation cannot finally deliver the transcendence for which humans long, and when it fails—as every nation eventually must—the religious longing does not dissipate. It migrates, this time to movements that turn against the national inheritance rather than in its service. The classical civil religion that once gave the Declaration’s language its cultural force has been succeeded by a rival that directs its religious energy against the very inheritance it has displaced. This successor civil religion is not without its genuine insights—it perceives real structural evils and unhealed social wounds that a complacent civil religion can ignore. But it interprets and addresses those wounds with tools that cannot heal them. Lacking any account of universal sin and redemption, it must locate evil exclusively in particular human groups and seek atonement through their denunciation. The scapegoat is always another human being. The result is not reconciliation but a cycle of accusation, shame, and division—a civil religion that fragments precisely because it has lost access to the only account of sin and forgiveness capacious enough to bind a people together across their differences.
The antidote is not the abolition of civil religion but its proper ordering—which requires the church to be present and recognized as what she actually is: not a chaplain to the nation’s self-understanding, but the community that already lives under a different and higher rule, already practicing the accountability before God that the Declaration’s closing appeal invokes but cannot itself supply. When the church gathers to feast at the Lord’s Table and confess a King whose kingdom is not of this world, she performs the act that relativizes every earthly political loyalty—not by denying those loyalties but by ordering them properly beneath a prior and higher allegiance. Those formed by the prior pledge of baptism know that their lives are already held by One whose judgment no earthly court can render—and that knowledge is what makes political loyalty possible without making it ultimate. A people formed by that prior pledge can sustain a civil religion without being consumed by it, because their deepest loyalty is already given elsewhere.
The result, when things are rightly ordered, is what we might call healthy “we” nationhood: a people that genuinely loves its heritage, transmits it deliberately, and sustains its common life through shared practices of memory and obligation—while remaining accountable to a Judge it did not appoint and a law it did not make. The nation and its bonds are genuinely penultimate goods, and civil religion is how a people sustains and transmits them. The church’s witness is what keeps both from claiming more than their due. The “we” of the Declaration depends upon this ordering. It weakens when either element is lost: without civil renewal the inheritance dissipates, and without the church’s witness it becomes unintelligible or idolatrous.
The pattern is the same in both cases, because the underlying dynamic is the same: displaced religious longing attaches to whatever promises transcendence, and without the church to order and correct that longing, no substitute can finally hold. The question before us is therefore not whether that Judge still reigns, but whether there remains a people capable of hearing his judgment as anything more than a metaphor. If the moral grammar that once rendered those truths “self-evident” has thinned, then the difficulty we now face is not merely political but cultural and theological. The “we” of the Declaration cannot be recovered by assertion alone. It depends upon forms of life that make its claims intelligible—and without them, its words will remain, but their force will not.
The question is therefore first an ecclesiological one: not what the church should do in public life, but whether she is still recognized—and recognizes herself—as the church.
That question cannot be answered at the level of statecraft, and it cannot be answered by the Declaration itself—which is, perhaps, the most important thing Spinks’s careful reading has shown us. To follow the argument where it leads is to find oneself standing before a question the founding documents were never equipped to resolve.
About The Author
