Anyone who studies the founding era long enough will eventually run into the kind of essay that looks to the revolutionary past for answers to the problems of the present. These efforts usually reflect a genuine desire to recover something like a common inheritance: some shared meaning capable of holding divided people together. Casey Spinks’s “Finding the Founding” is an ambitious entry in this tradition. At its core, it is an earnest attempt to rediscover unity by returning to the Declaration of Independence.
Spinks’s central move is what he calls “re-membering”—putting the American people back together again. (I am reminded of theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s call to “waken the dead and piece together what has been broken.”) In Spinks’s telling, the Declaration of Independence is not merely a historical artifact but a generative text, a “gift” capable of bringing coherence to a fragmented nation. It’s a powerful vision, and it speaks to something real. There is a widespread longing in American life today for exactly this: the hope that a return to foundational principles might heal present divisions. But the past cannot simply be summoned as a unifying force without first being understood on its own terms.
Drawing on New Criticism and invoking what he calls a “Barthian audacity,” Spinks treats the Declaration as a text capable of speaking independently of its historical context. He is interested in the document’s internal coherence—its language, structure, and conceptual rhythms—rather than the circumstances that produced it. And he is upfront about this: he explicitly rejects what he calls an “originalist” approach, on the grounds that reconstructing eighteenth-century assumptions merely reduces the text to the limitations of its time.
The Declaration of Independence was drafted in a hurry by a committee under enormous pressure at a very specific political moment. To read it as if for the first time, as Spinks suggests, is to strip away the very context that gives it meaning. The historian’s job is not to approach the text in a state of interpretive innocence. It is to reconstruct the world in which it was written; to recover the assumptions and pressures and intentions that shaped every clause.
The Declaration’s original purpose is not a mystery. It was, at bottom, a document of international communication. Its primary audience was not the American people—it was the “opinions of mankind,” meaning the governments and political elites of Europe. The Continental Congress needed to justify its break from Britain in terms that would be intelligible and persuasive to foreign powers. This was not a radical philosophical treatise. It was an appeal to established norms, a carefully constructed argument for recognition and legitimacy. In essence, the Declaration of Independence was a foreign policy document.
Jefferson himself was clear on this. Writing decades later, he insisted the Declaration was not meant to articulate novel political principles—it was meant to express “the common sense of the subject”:
…when forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our jurisdiction. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles or new arguments, never before thought of…but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
The Declaration’s language drew on a shared intellectual tradition: natural rights philosophy, English constitutionalism, and the conventions of European statecraft. To treat it as an abstract meditation on human equality or national identity is to misread its purpose.
None of this is to say the Declaration doesn’t contain ideas of enduring significance. “All men are created equal” has obviously taken on a life far beyond its initial context. But we must distinguish between original meaning and subsequent interpretation. Spinks collapses that distinction. For him, the Declaration’s significance lies precisely in its ability to transcend its origins—to speak directly to the present as a kind of timeless revelation.
Take his treatment of the phrase “a separate and equal station.” Spinks reads this as an expression of a deeper principle of nationalism—a vision of a world made up of distinct peoples, each with an inherent right to self-determination. From this, he builds a conception of the “American soul”: a people defined by their recognition of shared human dignity and a common “court of opinion.”
It’s an elegant reading. It is not, however, a historical one. “Separate and equal station” had a specific meaning in the diplomatic language of the eighteenth century. It referred to the standing of sovereign states within the international system—a standing that conferred rights and responsibilities: the ability to wage war, form alliances, and engage in trade. The Declaration’s use of this language was not an abstract reflection on human identity. It was a concrete claim to political legitimacy. The “opinions of mankind” were the governments whose recognition the United States desperately needed. The founders knew their survival depended on securing alliances—France above all. The Declaration was a strategic document, part of a deliberate effort to position the new nation within the existing order of states. Reinterpreting its language as a transhistorical moral vision detaches it from the practical work it was doing.
To be fair to Spinks, he knows this. He acknowledges that his reading is not “originalist” and embraces a more interpretive, even existential, approach. In this, he places himself within a long tradition of American thinkers who have reinterpreted the founding for their own purposes. The Declaration has, over time, become what historian Pauline Maier called “American scripture”—invoked not for its historical significance alone, but for its moral authority.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. In the decades after independence, the Declaration was not widely treated as a foundational statement of national identity. It was only in the nineteenth century—particularly in the context of reform movements—that its language of equality gained new prominence. Abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and other reformers turned to the Declaration as a source of moral legitimacy, reading it not as a document bound to its moment but as a statement of universal principles that could be applied to new circumstances.
Abraham Lincoln is the most famous example. In speech after speech, he elevated the principle of equality to the center of American identity, treating it as a moral standard against which the nation must continually measure itself. But Lincoln was also clear-eyed about the document’s original context. He acknowledged that asserting equality was not strictly necessary for the colonies’ separation from Britain. Its real significance, he suggested, lay in what it might mean for the future.
Spinks’s project fits squarely within this tradition. Like the reformers of the nineteenth century, he is after a “usable past”—an interpretation of the founding that speaks to the needs of the present. His emphasis on “re-membering” reflects a desire to overcome fragmentation by recovering shared meaning. That is a noble aim and, as we have seen, Spinks is in good company.
Spinks’s own theological influences point toward a better approach. Barth’s reading of scripture does not deny the importance of historical context—it distinguishes between the text as a historical document and its capacity to become meaningful in new ways. Applied to the Declaration, this suggests something more nuanced: an approach that takes the document’s original purpose seriously while also recognizing how its significance has evolved.
The Declaration can function as a kind of “American scripture”—but only if we are honest about how it got there. It became a source of moral authority not because of its original intent, but because later generations chose to make it one. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott at Seneca Falls, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass in The Liberator and The North Star, and Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg did not simply recover the Declaration’s meaning. They transformed it and, in the context of American civil religion, sanctified it. I am reminded of Barth’s view of scripture: The Bible does not become a sacred text until people read it and interpret through God’s grace, Christ’s revelation, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The Declaration did not become a sacred text until its ideals–rooted deeply in post-Glorious Revolution (1688) Great Britain–were preached at moments of national crisis.
In the end, the Declaration’s enduring significance lies not in its ability to transcend history, but in its capacity to be reinterpreted within it. It is a product of its time. It is also a resource for ours.
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