We Hold These Truths: Christianity and the Declaration of Independence

You know these words by heart, even if you couldn't say where you first learned them.

All men are created equal. Endowed by their Creator. The pursuit of happiness.

Two hundred and fifty years after they were written, Americans on every side of every argument still reach for them, sometimes to defend the country, sometimes to indict it.

The Rev. Charlie Holt asks a question most readers never think to ask: what happens when everyone keeps using words like these while forgetting what made them true in the first place?

This book calls it the cut flower problem. A flower cut from its roots can look alive for days. It holds its color and shape, its scent lingering a while longer. But it is already dying, and there is no way back to the ground it came from. Holt argues that America's founding language, equality, unalienable rights, the laws of nature, the appeal to a Supreme Judge, the reliance on Providence, has been cut from its theological roots for so long that most people no longer notice the wilting.

Chapter by chapter, Holt walks through six phrases buried inside the Declaration of Independence and traces each one back to the soil it grew from: Genesis, natural law, the prophets of Israel, the Book of Common Prayer. The story moves forward too, through Jefferson's own broken conscience, Frederick Douglass's furious hope, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, all the way to the Supreme Court's own words in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Neither side of today's argument gets let off easy here. The founders do not get a halo, and their critics do not get the last word either. What Holt asks of every reader is harder than picking a side: can truths like these still be held once their roots have been cut away this long, and what would it take to plant them again?

Written for a study group of any kind, and for anyone who has ever wondered whether the words on America's oldest document still mean what they say.