‘All Men Are Created Equal’ Is Not a ‘Self-Evident’ Truth — It’s a Catholic One
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
— The Declaration of Independence
These are among the most powerful words ever written in the English language – words that launched a revolution, emboldened freedom movements, and inspired countless souls to risk their lives for their fellow man. These words also stand at the center of America’s founding promise.
That all men are created equal is an important truth. But the idea that it’s “self-evident?” If we pause and think it over critically, we quickly realize it’s not.
It’s not self-evident in the sense that “two plus two equals four” is self-evident. It’s not a product of reason alone, or of enlightened reflection on the nature of man. It’s also not what a Roman senator, an Athenian philosopher, or a Viking warlord would have concluded about the world. In fact, almost no one in the ancient world believed that all people were equal. They believed in hierarchies – brutal, unshakable, and divinely ordained.
No, the principle that “all men are created equal” is not the fruit of human, rational deduction, but of divine revelation. And not just any tradition that claims to carry revelation — but specifically the Catholic Church’s long, hard, and often painful working-out of what it means that every human being is made in the Imago Dei, the image and likeness of God.
Power and Paganism
In the world of Plato and Aristotle, the idea of human equality would have been laughable. Aristotle famously taught that some people were “natural slaves” – beings who were better off being ruled. He believed in a hierarchy of souls: Greek men at the top, women, barbarians, and slaves well below.
Even the Stoics, who flirted with a notion of universal reason, never built a moral system around a universal human dignity. They accepted the social structures of empire and slavery as a given. No one in the ancient world questioned the practice of infanticide. No one thought the poor or disabled had any great value – certainly not the same value as their “betters.” The dignity of man wasn’t a starting point found in antiquity. It wasn’t even on the map.
A Shocking Revelation
And then, something happened. Or rather, Someone happened. The God Who made the universe entered it — not as a king, not as a warrior, not as a philosopher, but as a child born to a Hebrew girl living under Roman occupation.
God walked among fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, and lepers. He touched the untouchables. He wept with the grieving. He ate with the despised.
And then He was nailed to a cross.
That world-redefining life, as St. Paul said, was “foolishness to the Greeks.” But it shattered their systems of thought. In Jesus Christ, the infinite God assumed a human face, a human body, a human soul. In doing so, He raised human nature itself. From the womb of Mary to the wood of the cross, He revealed the hidden dignity of the human person. Not because we are strong. Not because we are smart. But because we are human – and, therefore, thanks to His life, death, and resurrection, literally of the same species as God.
The earliest Christians – many of them slaves, women, and outcasts – grasped the great revelation at once. Baptism was a leveling. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) That wasn’t a metaphor. It was a description of a new reality that was destined to launch a moral revolution worldwide.
The Church and the Long Working-Out
It didn’t all happen overnight. The early Church lived under Roman rule, navigating persecution and compromise. But the seed had been planted, and it grew.
The Church Fathers began to reflect deeply on what it meant that man was made in God’s image. St. Gregory of Nyssa condemned slavery – a radical stance in the fourth century. St. Augustine, despite his era’s blind spots, developed a theology of the soul that pointed toward universal equal dignity. In the Middle Ages, the Church created hospitals and legal protections for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the refugee. The idea that society should bend to protect the weak – this came not from empire or enlightenment, but from the cross.
Over centuries, Catholic anthropology – rooted in the Imago Dei – began to transform not just hearts but institutions, including European legal and political systems that, though imperfect, began to recognize limits to power and obligations to persons regardless of their social status.
From the Altar to the Anglo Tradition
This Catholic vision found a unique expression in the Anglo political tradition.
The Magna Carta of 1215 stands as a milestone. Drafted under the guidance of Archbishop Stephen Langton and enforced by the moral authority of the Catholic Church, it declared that even kings were not above the law. “To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.” (Magna Carta, Clause 40.) It wasn’t full-blown equality, but it was revolutionary: it affirmed a higher law before which all men stood, including the sovereign.
Later, the English common law tradition – shaped by Catholic jurists and philosophers like Sir John Fortescue – developed the idea of natural rights grounded in divine law. Fortescue argued in the 15th century that kings exist for the people, not the people for kings, because all authority derives from God for the good of His image-bearers.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 built on the same moral grounding. Though the Revolution was driven by political and religious tensions, the Bill of Rights affirmed the necessity of a lawful government – accountable to its subjects. It was imperfect in execution, but there is no mistaking that it reflected a growing intuition: rulers are stewards, not gods.
These documents were not explicitly Catholic. In fact, some came in contexts openly hostile to Catholicism. But each of these texts would be unthinkable without the groundwork laid by Catholic thought. They were secular shoots from a sacred root.
The Declaration as a Flowering
By the 18th century, the Anglo-American political tradition had internalized these insights so thoroughly that they seemed obvious. When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration, he intended it to be “an expression of the American mind” and “the harmonising sentiments of the day,” as he told a friend after the fact.
In other words, he was not inventing a new philosophy but drawing on centuries of reflection – Christian anthropology translated into Anglo political language.
“All men are created equal” may have been expressed in Enlightenment prose, but its soul was older and deeper. It was a truth first spoken at the altar, refined in canon law, defended by bishops, and eventually echoed in charters and declarations.
This lineage does not diminish the brilliance of Jefferson and his peers; it shows how ideas can migrate, adapt, and inspire across generations.
The Crisis of Forgetting
Today, we live in a time of moral amnesia. We chant slogans about equality and human rights while tearing up the roots that made those concepts possible. We replace the revealed truth of man made in God’s image with a vision of man remade in the image of machines, ideologies, and political tribes. We exalt autonomy while ignoring the source of our dignity.
We cannot keep the fruit if we refuse to cultivate the tree. The idea that all men are created equal will not survive long in a world that forgets the cross.
To keep the promise of the Declaration alive, we must return to its source. We must kneel before the Crucified God who revealed what we are worth. We must defend the vulnerable – the unborn, the refugee, the elderly, the imprisoned – not out of sentiment, but out of a conviction that Christ died for them.
Equality is not a political theory. It is a Christian proclamation. A Catholic one – transmitted through centuries of imperfect but determined Anglo political development.
To forget that is to imperil everything we’ve inherited, and all who come after us.