This essay is an excerpt from Finding the Founding: Meditations on the Theology of the Declaration of Independence, published with Front Porch Republic Books.
“When in the Course of human Events. . .”
The Declaration begins with a riddle for today’s readers. It points right away to a moment in time beyond the text, “in the course of human events.” The Declaration is not timeless. We cannot understand it unless we understand the moment to which it declares itself. But we, as readers in 2026, are 250 years removed from that moment. How can we understand it? And if we can’t understand it, how could we come to understand the Declaration?
The riddle is the gap between history and text. The Declaration, as a text, points beyond itself to history—not just the history of its drafters 250 years ago, but to our American history as well. This is not a unique problem. It is a riddle about how we should read anything that is very important to us and has the power to define who we are and may be, by having declared who we have been.
Many have tried to answer this riddle, and many of our bitterest rivalries have arisen from competing answers. Some say that to understand the Declaration, we only need to look beneath this text, to the history underlying it. So, study the events that led to the Declaration: the combination of political, economic, and ideological forces and interests that led to that momentary combustion. Then we will know the beginning of the United States, much like we know the Big Bang which began the Universe. This answer fails to remember that we are not reading a history textbook or watching a documentary; we are reading the Declaration. The drafters and signers did not see fit to tally votes and throw away the record. Instead, they wanted a document, with some character of timelessness or at least endurance, to bear record of this event. And they wanted this document to bear the record—not meeting minutes, a poem, or a textbook written by a later historian (which all, like books on the Big Bang, are also texts far removed from the real historical moment). We must understand that while the Declaration begins by pointing beyond itself to a moment “in the course of human events,” it presents itself as the one way to understand that moment. It could be wrong. But to judge that, we must understand the Declaration first. And to understand something, we must first attend to it in the way it wants itself to be understood. So, for the historical text of the Declaration, there’s only one thing to do: we must read it.
But to read the Declaration well, we must also avoid a second wrong answer to the riddle. This answer pretends that all we need is the Declaration: the text itself, by itself, acts as a compact expression of the philosophy of American-ness. Now, the text may well prove to be so. But we won’t find that out if we assume history is irrelevant to the meaning of the Declaration. If we hold such an assumption, then I don’t know why we would assume the Declaration matters so much to us, being as it is a historical document. We could well philosophize about our American-ness by ourselves, if we liked. Many already do. But many of us don’t. Why? Because in reading the Declaration of Independence, we are immediately impressed by the weight of history upon us. Immediately, because as soon as we take to mind the conclusion that we must read the Declaration seriously, we read: “When in the course of human events. . .” The Declaration reminds us always to keep history in mind.
“. . . it becomes necessary for one People. . .”
We now move from one riddle to the next. The Declaration not only challenges readers with the problem of how to relate history to text. It also raises the question of what makes the United States of America one people. It claims we are such a people. But how?
To put the question in a different way: Does this “one people” make the Declaration of Independence, or does the Declaration make this “one people”? That question cuts right to the heart of the matter—that deep question of Americanness. Is an American one who can claim lineage from those who acted so long ago? Or can anyone claim to be American by submission to, or agreement with, the Declaration? Is America organic, descending by nature, as it were, from ancestors to descendants, or is it constructed, having been founded by rational choice and sustained by will?
These questions matter greatly today, as they long have. “America is an idea”—“America is a creedal nation”—“America has the soul of a church”—these slogans capture the resolute feeling, long cultivated, that it is the Declaration which makes America one people. And these same slogans have come under attack by statesmen as highly ranked as the current Vice President.[1] Recent anxieties over globalization, technology, and mass migration, many of them genuine and heartfelt and rational, have inspired the second thought that America consists of a people in a particular place and time, planted in its own soil and set within its boundaries, before it is any idea about itself with which any and all might agree. Even if the idea is as august as that expressed in the Declaration, it was Americans who wrote them down.
It does not take a theorist to understand the very real stakes of this debate. Today, you only need to read the news to see how much it matters.
How does the Declaration answer this contested question? I think it will take the rest of this book to find out. The question is largely why I’m writing, and I don’t yet know the answer. For now, I want only to appreciate the gravity of it. The question attests to the felt need for roots as well as reason, openness as well as closure, depth no less than breadth. None of these needs should be met with disdain. We all have them. And we all naturally hope they might be satisfied, if not wholly then in part, by our country, nation, and people. But what is “our” people? That we so quickly ask such a question attests to the great danger, the quiet but present disharmony sulking in our air, that we are not one people at all, not today. But it also attests to the problem America has always had: we cannot easily answer the question of who we are, because we do not have a primeval origin—a common stock, a god-born myth, a language implanted from time immemorial, on which to depend. We aren’t Finns. We are a people, before we are one people, of questions, and so a people of crisis. (Alexis de Tocqueville thought “there is not, in the civilized world, a country where one occupies himself with philosophy less than in the United States.” But since we are a people of questions before givens, perhaps we are most philosophical. This point does not reduce America, or any American, to an idea. Philosophers, of course, are more than their ideas.) Perhaps that is why the Declaration does affirm that, “in the course of human events,” it is “one people” which makes the Declaration. So the people makes the declaration after all. But they do so only when, in that moment in time, “it becomes necessary. . .” as a matter of crisis.
“. . . to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another. . .”
Above I wrote that Americans are first, if they are anything, a people of crisis, and this is why. America was declared, and born, not in slow, organic emergence but out of decisive rupture. The bonds that make America “one people” were forged by dissolving the “Political Bands” that had connected them to another. None can deny that America is founded upon a breach. And just for that reason, the foundation of America is, then as now, unstable.
And yet this phrase must also be understood more subtly, without diminishing its harshness. The dissolving of bands is not arbitrary. Neither the Founders nor the people they represent are the primary actors in this separation. The subject of this clause is not human at all. It is unstated. If the English language had such a form, we could say the subject is “the middle voice.” The action is performed by those who are not themselves the chief actors. In this case, the one people must “dissolve the Political Bands,” but it is not the one people who demanded it. Instead, it is the very “Course of human Events,” in which now “it becomes necessary” to make so harsh a break. The agent, if we can even name it, is necessity.
That’s not just fatalistic nonsense or obscurantism. We must keep this necessity in mind for many reasons. Among them: There is a tendency, in those who favor the rational and decisive nature of America’s founding, to give far too much credit to human agency. And often this credit esteems human will more than human reason, even when it thinks it means the latter. If we succumb to this tendency, then we undermine the importance of what some used to called chance, others called Fate, and still others Providence, and all now at least admit as context or circumstance. The Declaration turns into an isolated manifesto of ideas, and America becomes a philosophical proposition only. But it was not only, or even primarily, ideas that created this “one People.” It was the course of human events which made it necessary for one people to arise out of its break from another. At the very least, this means the signers of the Declaration were not gods. Before they found themselves free, they found themselves responsible. To whom? Bare fate, chance, necessity alone, Providence? The Declaration will answer later.
Until then, we can recognize, in the Declaration’s declaration of responsibility to necessity, the consequence that America’s founding does share something with the more organic origins of other peoples. It emerged not entirely on its own, neither by the whims of one Great Man nor by the collective power of one committee, nor the unity of one decisive spirit. Of course, some combination of all the above contributed. But the whole became, and remains, greater than its parts, and greater than its rational or volitional parts. This is what I think people mean when they say “organic,” in its best sense, when they describe nations and cultures. Their point is not to banish human rationality and agency, but to acknowledge that there is something higher than our arbitrary reason or will at work in shaping our community and our sense of who we are. We are creatures before we are creators, given before we can make or take. And it is this fact which puts us, beyond our consent, into a place and time we can call home, because it first called us.
The Declaration recognizes this givenness of America. That is why it first names the necessity of one people—who have been made so not by decision or deliberation but by circumstance—to respond to the moment by dissolving “the Political Bands which have connected them with another.” Political bands—not fraternal or cultural, ethnic or racial or religious. For somehow, in some way at a certain point in time, there had already become two entirely separate peoples, not one. And now the Declaration of that fact is necessary.
See the acceptance speech by J.D. Vance for the Claremont Institute Award for Statesmanship: Vance, “American Statesmanship for the Golden Age.” ↑
Image Credit: John Trumbull, Declaration of Independence (1818)
