When America’s Founders wrote the declaration that gave birth to the new nation, they began by saying that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.” Other nations had been born out of conquests or rebellions, many based on tribal or religious identities. But the United States was born out of an ideal, which they proclaimed in the next sentence:

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.

These truths became the creed that bound a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation. For people of many different beliefs and backgrounds, it defined Americans’ common ground.

Even in the work that went into composing that one sentence, we can see the quest to find this common ground. “We hold these truths to be sacred,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his first draft. Benjamin Franklin, who was on the five-person drafting committee with Jefferson, crossed out “sacred,” using the heavy backslash marks he had often used as a printer, and wrote in “self-evident.” Their declaration was intended to herald a new type of nation, one in which rights are based on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.

But the sentence goes on to invoke “their Creator.” In Jefferson’s first draft, he wrote that men are created equal, and “from that equal creation they derive rights.” That phrase was crossed out and replaced with “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Thus we see, in the editing of just one sentence, the Founders balancing the role of divine providence and that of reason in determining rights.

From the November 2025 issue: The American experiment

I remember researching this one evening when I was working at CNN years ago. At an editorial meeting the next morning, someone reported that an Alabama state judge, Roy Moore, had put a monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. A federal judge had ordered him to remove it, and a clash was about to occur. “Great,” I remember saying. “Who should we have arguing for and against displaying the Ten Commandments?” That evening, it struck me that Jefferson and Franklin had carefully balanced the role of religion in American society in order to unite people, and that now politicians, and we in the media, were using the Ten Commandments, of all things, to divide them.

As the country approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, its people are embroiled in polarized debates about