As a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice, Justice Neil Gorsuch has distinguished himself as one of the nation’s foremost originalists in constitutional interpretation, seeking the original understanding of the text at the time that it was written. Like conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch also favors natural law jurisprudence, the belief that particular moral laws are established in nature and can be discovered and clarified through reason.

Despite his fierce originalism, Gorsuch still somehow fails to grasp the essence of the United States of America and the understanding of the nation clearly articulated by the Founding Fathers, recently parroting the misguided claim that America is a “creedal nation,” nothing more, in fact, than a series of propositions: in short, just an idea.

“The Declaration of Independence had three great ideas in it: that all of us are equal, that each of us has inalienable rights given to us by God, not government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves,” Gorsuch observed in a recent podcast appearance, discussing America’s founding document and the legacy of the Founding Fathers. However, he continued, “Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture, even, or heritage. It’s based on those ideas. We’re a creedal nation.”

The Supreme Court’s first chief justice, John Jay, who also served as president of the Second Continental Congress and a co-author of both “The Federalist Papers” and the Constitution itself, did not agree with Gorsuch’s assessment, nearly 250 years removed from the actual foundation of the nation. As a matter of fact, nearly all of America’s Founding Fathers would have, based upon their own immortalized words and writing, rejected Gorsuch’s statement. In Federalist No. 2, Jay wrote:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other.”

Here’s where Jay and Gorsuch do agree: the rights which the American government was established to protect are rights given to man by God, not rights which originate within the government itself. But Jay’s definition of a nation — specifically, the American nation — is utterly at odds with Gorsuch’s. The nation, Jay contended, was not founded upon mere ideas, but is defined by its people, who in turn are defined by a common ancestry, a common heritage, a common language, a common religion, and common manners and customs, or culture. This is a direct contradiction of Gorsuch’s claim: “Our nation is not founded on a religion. It’s not based on a common culture, even, or heritage.”

Those ideas — that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that they have a right to govern their own selves — are not the foundation of the American nation. They are, rather, the fruits of this nation’s spiritual soil, the results of a distinct people with a common religion, a common culture, a common heritage. No religion other than Christianity could have produced such a charter for a government. All men are created equal? This belief certainly did not originate in India, where women were burned as property on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands, and where even today a caste system, intimately intertwined with the Hindu religion, still dominates social and even political life. This notion cannot be traced to China’s Confucius, who advocated a strict hierarchy and class system. It did not come from the then-mighty Ottoman Empire, a Muslim domain which often persecuted Christians and other non-Muslims. Nowhere can it be found in the superstitious beliefs of the African continent of the time, where tribe or clan identity defined one’s worth and where slavery was far more commonplace than in either Europe or the New World.

The concept that all men are created equal is inextricably rooted in Christianity, which has upheld over the centuries that all men are created in the image and likeness of God and are thus inheritors of a dignity and worth which is beyond the power of other men either to increase or decrease. Less than a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it was this same Christian principle that would move leaders and lawmakers in the U.S. to formally abolish the practice of slavery. The well-known words of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” commonly sung by Union soldiers during the Civil War, explicate this:

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”

The founding stock of America most certainly shared a common religion: Christianity. True, the Founders adhered to varying brands of Christianity — the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence included a Baptist, a Catholic, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Quakers — but they were all Christians. At the time, “Christian” was almost synonymous with “European.” It was Europe that had, for centuries, not only embraced but lovingly cherished and fiercely defended the Christian faith, even from before the fall of Rome. It was the great minds of Europe — Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Plato and Duns Scotus, Cicero and Stephen Langton — who applied the moral principles of the Christian faith to the formation of the laws which governed Europe, out of which came the American people.

More specifically, the American people came from the unique application of Christian morality to law found in the culture of the English. It is for this reason that Gorsuch and his colleagues on the Supreme Court still turn to English common law when deciding constitutional questions with little precedent or contemporary historical context; the justices do not turn to the laws of 17th century India or 16th century Japan, nor even to the laws of medieval France or Spain. The American nation was born from predominantly English stock: the settlers of Jamestown, the Mayflower Pilgrims, the English who conquered New Amsterdam and renamed it New York.

Even when others — again, of Christian European heritage — were permitted into the U.S., it was under the condition of assimilation to this American brand of English heritage. Irish, Dutch, Polish, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians — all were expected to speak the English language, to abide by and conform to the legal, social, and cultural tradition inherited from England, and assimilate to the Anglo-influenced American way of life.

More than two decades before signing his name to the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin wrote of this stipulation in his 1751 treatise “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” Pennsylvania, he said, was “founded by the English,” but a wave of immigrants from Germany threatened to erode the distinct culture and customs inherited from Britain. Why, Franklin asked, should Pennsylvania “become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?”

America’s very first president and the general who won the War of Independence, George Washington, made a similar observation in a letter to his vice president, John Adams. Settling vast swaths of immigrants into “our people,” he warned, was dangerous, “for by so doing they retain the Language, habits & principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.”

In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson, the chief author of the Declaration of Independence that Gorsuch claims to so revere and one of the principal architects of the Constitution, warned that a tangled mass of foreign customs, cultures, laws, and beliefs would easily upset and threaten to destroy the fledgling United States. “They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth. … In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass,” he wrote, with some prescience. He added that “it is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in manners and habits.”

Perhaps the strongest rejection of the sentiments espoused by Gorsuch comes from John Adams, another of the American minds responsible for the Declaration of Independence and one of the great leaders of the American Revolution. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” Adams wrote. The American government — and, indeed, the American Constitution — did not precede the American nation or the American people. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and all the noble principles therein did not give birth to America: they were rather themselves the product of a specific people of a specific heritage who adhered to a specific religion and the customs of a specific culture.

While Gorsuch glibly trots out the first line of the Declaration of Independence in defense of America as a “creedal nation,” his more senior colleague, Justice Clarence Thomas, recently spoke of the significance of the final line of the same document: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Thomas observed, “Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence. Without that sentence, the rest of the Declaration is but mere words on parchment paper.” He continued, “What changed the world was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives — what Lincoln at Gettysburg called the ‘last full measure of devotion’ — for the Declaration’s principles.”

The 56 patriots who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that doing so was an act of treason against the British Crown. The men who fought under Washington against the redcoats knew that in so doing they were making themselves enemies of the world’s greatest, most powerful empire and military force. Nathan Hale knew that throwing in his lot with the colonial rebels meant certain death, yet when he was to be hanged on the morning of September 22, 1776, he boldly declared, “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Hale did not go to the gallows for a creed. None of the men who braved the winter at Valley Forge and crossed the Delaware River or who fought at Lexington, Concord, Saratoga, Cowpens, or Yorktown were putting their lives on the line for a series of propositions. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not willing to die for a mere idea. No, each of these men was willing to brave death for the sake of his nation, for the love of his people.

The principles elucidated in the Declaration of Independence are noble ones, but their longevity and their tremendous impact on history cannot be separated from the men who penned and signed the Declaration, from the people and the culture that birthed the Declaration, and the patriots who were willing to fight and die not for the Declaration but for their nation. The Founding Fathers recognized that the American government, the whole system of American laws and customs, was inextricable from the American people. America is not a “creedal nation,” it is not an “idea,” it is not a series of propositions to which one either assents or does not, it is not a set of terms and conditions which one breezily skims over before agreeing to. No patriot gave his life for such a thing.

There is no such thing as a “creedal nation.” A church, a club, a cult, a community, these may have creeds to which members must assent in order to maintain membership. But America is not a church, a club, a cult, or a mere community. She is a nation, brought forth by a particular people at a particular point in time. America was not founded as some litany of evanescent ideals; she never would have survived the Revolutionary War had that been the case. She is a nation, founded by a people and for a people, and whose system of governance is wholly unsuitable to the maintenance and well-being of any other people.

For all that he may have gotten right on the Supreme Court (and he hasn’t gotten everything right), Gorsuch is dead wrong in his assessment of the foundation and essence of America: Our nation was founded on a common religion, the Christian religion. It is based on a common culture and a common heritage. It is not based on the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence; those ideas are instead rooted in the people who founded the nation.

America is more than just an idea. She is a nation and a people — a nation and a people that generation after generation of Americans and their ancestors, over the course of four centuries, have fought, bled, died, killed, sweat, wept, and toiled to settle, build, preserve, safeguard, cherish, and lovingly pass on to the next generation. If all Americans believed as Gorsuch does, then that noble, centuries-old tradition would be at its end, and America would not live long past 250.