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“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.” Few words have more profoundly shaped our nation’s identity than these.

But where did our founders get the idea that “all men are created equal?” What’s most striking about these words is that there is nothing self-evident about them. As once well-known rabbi said, “Most societies at most times have held self-evidently that we are created unequal.” Plato held that society was stratified into three classes, and people should be taught where they fit. Aristotle believed some people were born to be slaves. A few years ago, an Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, said in a TEDx talk that human rights are a fiction with no basis in biology. He said, “Homo sapiens have no rights.” Neither Nietzsche nor the Hindu caste system holds the truth that all people are created equal and that this is self-evident.

In a world where some people are stronger than others, some smarter, still others more influential, where did our founders get the idea that human rights are self-evident? Our founders held these truths as self-evident, only because they had been steeped in a culture shaped by biblical truths, for generations. Some of the most revolutionary words in history come from the first chapter of the Bible: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). God stamped every human life with his own image. Therefore, every human life has equal worth and dignity, despite what inequalities they may exhibit in other ways.

It takes a strong authority speaking in the clearest of terms to uphold such a truth when our human tendency regards some lives more valuable than others.

The formation of our country owes much to the Bible. Many of our founders grew up as children of the First Great Awakening. Their hearts and minds were profoundly shaped through the study of Scripture. Even the deist among them could not help thinking biblically. The trajectory of our nation was all the better for the Biblical truths that directed it.