Philosophy, faith and the Fourth of July

The doctrine that human beings are by nature equal is one that Americans of the Founders’ era had learned from both philosophy and religion.

In 1690, in his influential “Second Treatise of Government,’’ the English philosopher John Locke had written that the “state all men are naturally in’’ is one of “perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions … as they see fit,’’ as well as one “of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal … without subordination or subjection.’’ Even older, and no less influential, was the biblical teaching that because all human beings are made in the image of God, all are born with the same God-given right to equality and freedom.

So when delegates to the Continental Congress declared unanimously in 1776 “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,’’ their words accurately reflected what Americans had believed for generations. They invoked “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’’ in the Declaration’s opening line not as a throat-clearing flourish, but because those laws and that God validated the independence they were about to assert. “Coming from these sources, having as it did this background,’’ remarked Coolidge, “it is no wonder that Samuel Adams could say, ‘The people seem to recognize this resolution as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven.’’