Summer sweltered in Philadelphia in July 1776 when delegates to the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence drafted by the young Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, with sage advice and counsel of John Adams of Massachusetts.

“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,” the Declaration said in words heavily influenced by the Christian faith practiced by most of the 56 signers and the vast majority of the people they represented in the 13 British colonies that thus became the United States.

The foundational document of the new nation informed the world that Americans believed God created human beings while equally blessing each of them with fundamental individual rights that no government could justly violate.

The enduring significance of that magnificent 18th century document and how its original principles have been all but lost in the 21st century is the focus of a landmark new book, “Endowed by Our Creator,” by the Discovery Institute’s John G. West. It is one of those rare books by which every American, especially every evangelical Christian American, will profit by reading it closely and carefully considering what it tells us about the spiritual and political condition of our beloved nation in 2026.

Yes, there were slaves imported from Africa in the Southern states of the then-new nation — including those owned by Jefferson — but the Declaration’s influence was in part why, in the late 1780s, freedmen voted along with their white neighbors in many of the states’ ratification elections of the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. By contrast, it would be nearly two decades before William Wilburforce would finally persuade the British Parliament to ban the slave trade.

The Declaration of Independence made America the first nation in human history founded on the God-given inalienable and individual rights and equality of men and women everywhere. And in the early decades that followed the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, those essential principles enunciated by the Declaration provided a significant impetus toward the ultimate abolition of slavery.

Evidence that such impetus was deeply effective is seen in Jefferson’s statement a few weeks before he and Adams both passed away on the same day in 1826: “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Jefferson further observed that he saw “a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation …”

For the signers of the Declaration, faith in the God of the Bible and the power of the rational faculties He gave all men were fundamental. West points to signer James Wilson, who called the human mind “the noblest work of God,” and observed that “the power of reasoning is frequently selected as the characteristic quality, which distinguishes the human race from the inferior part of the creation.” Wilson’s words represented something quite close to the consensus view among the Founders, as seen in similar signers’ quotes West cites from Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, and others.

As West notes, however, in March 1861, just 35 years after the passing of Jefferson and Adams, and as the United States staggered into the Civil War, Alexander Stephens, the former U.S. Representative from Georgia and the newly elected vice president of the seceding Confederate States of America, delivered a speech in which he totally and comprehensively rejected the Declaration’s fundamental claims about God, individual rights, and human equality. In the process, he also blasphemously rewrote a Bible verse.

Stephens acknowledged that equality was among “the prevailing ideas” of the founding era,” yet “those ideas … were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ‘storm came and the wind blew.’”

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

Two points are notable here: First, in alluding to Paul’s description of Jesus Christ as the “cornerstone,” Stephens substitutes the inequality of the races for Jesus Christ as the source of salvation for Southerners, and, second, he attributes that change to newfound knowledge from “the various departments of science.”

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” had been published in the year prior to Stephens’ address, but it is not known if he had read it before speaking. As West makes clear, he didn’t have to have read Darwin to reach the same conclusions. How to account for the reversal on so fundamental a principle as human equality as occurred between Wilson and Stephens without reference to Darwin is not a mystery.

“Stephen’s claims seem outlandish today, and deservedly so. Yet, they reflected a powerful new intellectual current of the day that had been growing for decades among philosophers and scientists. Even as American patriots were declaring that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, a vanguard of intellectuals was enlisting science to supply a justification for racism by repudiating the natural unity and equality of mankind,” West writes.

Two years before the Declaration, the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames claimed multiple origins accounted for differences among white and black men, and he was followed in the decades after by thinkers like physician Samuel Morton, biologist Louis Agassiz, and ethnologists Josiah Clark and George Glidden, who enjoyed growing receptivity, especially among the American elites, West explains.

After the Civil War destroyed the Confederacy, there was a steady and deep expansion of the influence of Darwin’s several books advocating multiple lines of evolutionary development producing mankind on the basis of natural selection of characteristics that increase survivability — “survival of the fittest” — and random variation. Darwin’s evolutionary process completely excluded anything resembling a purposeful designer, or God, thus pointing the way to a purely materialistic understanding of creation.

By 1906, few protests were heard when a Congolese Pygmy named Ota Benga was displayed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. West tells us The New York Times defended the exhibition, claiming it made no difference if pygmies are “really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary Negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.”

And then came 1913 and an address at the University of South Carolina by Charles Francis Adams Jr., the great- grandson of John Adams. West cites this passage from the address as Adams recalled his service in the Union Army:

“In utter disregard of fundamental scientific facts, we theoretically believed that all men — no matter what might be the color of their skin, or the texture of their hair — were, if placed under exactly similar conditions, in essentials the same. In other words, we indulged in the curious, and as is now admitted, utterly erroneous theory that the African was, so to speak, Anglo-Saxon … In other words, though carved ebony, he was also in the image of God.”

In the decades that followed, Darwin’s successors — many now securely occupying positions of great public power and influence — prudently dropped the racial angle, and in their subsequent ascendancy, saw evolutionary scientific materialism become the conventional wisdom about human origins throughout the commanding heights of American politics, academia, science, and media.

In 1916, a survey of biologists found a mere 17% still believed in God, according to West, and in 2016, he and colleagues at the Discovery Institute conducted a public opinion survey that confirmed both the continued dominance of the evolutionary scientific materialism and the corrosive impact on Americans’ understanding of the nation’s fundamental founding principles and the relevance of those principles to contemporary governance.

“The steady drumbeat of criticisms against the truths expressed in the Declaration has taken its toll. As America celebrates the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, many Americans are ignorant of its meaning or ambivalent about its teachings. To be sure, according to a national survey commissioned for the writing of this book, eight in ten Americans still affirm the truth of the Declaration’s propositions about life, liberty, and equality; however, fewer than four in ten Americans accept the Declaration’s view of the source of our rights. Fewer still accept its understanding of the purposes and limits of government,” West reports in his book on the survey’s results.

In an interview with The Washington Stand, West said he wrote this book because he believes “America is really at a crisis point where most people on the Left and the Right seem very confused with some very dark ideas … we really need to understand why our founding was a good thing, was actually built from Christian principles, how it was attacked and subverted, and why that is true today.”

“The first step to going back if you’ve made a wrong turn is understanding the map, that you took a wrong turn, and you can’t get back to the right road if you don’t understand that,” West continued. “I want to lay out the positive alternative to the decline, why the problems we have today are not because of the American founding but because we have evaded that, and there is in fact a path back to a better society.”

In the same interview, West was asked how such a profound change in the Declaration’s public acceptance could develop in the mere 55 years elapsed between Stephens’ speech in 1861 repudiating the Declaration’s equality clause and the 1916 survey that found the vast majority of biologists either took no position on the issue or rejected the idea of a Creator.

“It is an amazing story, especially in an age without the internet how this took over. I think the answer in a nutshell is in post-Civil War America, you have many Americans who have Europe-envy. They went to Europe, especially to Germany, and basically brought back ideas — Hegelian ideas and the German administrative state. So the founders of the modern political science in America basically were all trained in Europe with those ideas, and they took over the graduate schools and they reshaped everything — Harvard, Princeton, Yale,” West responded.

He added that the 1916 survey showing so few biologists still believing in a creator shocked many Americans, most of whom at the time “were still pretty devout Christians.” But their response was essentially to ignore the fact that most of the American intelligentsia, especially in the political and physical sciences, no longer were.

“When I share that survey today, most people think the materialist, atheist, agnostic, elite academics is something from the last 20 or 30 years, maybe in the 1960s, but what they don’t realize is that by the early 20th century that dominance had already happened,” West said.

West is cautiously optimistic about Americans’ capacity to recover the great truths of the Declaration in the daily life of the republic. Noting in his concluding paragraph the tremendous recent upsurge in interest across the science community in the Intelligent Design (ID) approach to the science of studying the origins of the universe and human beings, West observed, “The message of this chapter is that the eclipse of reality that placed the Declaration of Independence in the shadows is ending. Once again, science is pointing to a creator who endowed us with life and liberty, affirming the wisdom of the Bible and the American founders.”

“And the misuse of science during the COVID era is reawakening the resolve of many Americans to insist on government by consent rather than government by unelected elites,” he added. “The door to a return to the principles of America’s founding stands open. The question is whether we as a nation are willing to walk through it.”