Summer 2026
The Three Revolutions of 1776
By Dr. Vincent Phillip Muñoz
This essay is based on remarks delivered by Professor Muñoz on campus in April, 2026. An earlier version of the essay was published in the journal National Affairs.
As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, not everyone is eager to celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the political revolution it sparked. The left has long been skeptical of 1776. Their critique is familiar: “[A]ll men are created equal” did not really mean all individuals because the Constitution did not include African Americans or women, and the founders’ alleged commitment to the rights of man was really a cover to advance their own economic interests.
A different criticism has emerged in recent years from the “post-liberal” right. Liberalism has failed, political theorist Patrick Deneen alleges, because liberalism has succeeded. The political philosophy of the American founding, some on the right now claim, was untrue, and has eroded traditional morality and sound religious belief.
There is, however, an alternative interpretation of the Declaration. The American founding was indeed animated by a revolution in political thinking, but it was hostile to neither human equality nor religion. Moreover, the American founding’s political philosophy of natural rights placed limits on political authority in recognition of, and out of deference to, legitimate religious authority.
America’s separation from Great Britain in 1776 set in motion three interrelated revolutions. In the Declaration and their writings on religious liberty, the founding fathers instituted a new understanding of the foundations of political authority, advanced a new conception of government’s purpose, and recognized the existence of religious truth and the legitimacy of religious authority. America’s founding was animated by both the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion — a philosophical and practical achievement worth understanding and attempting to recover today.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY
America begins with the “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. But equal in what respects? How do we know? And what is the significance of that equality?
Just days before he died, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, explained the meaning of equality in a remarkable letter to Roger Weightman, the mayor of Washington, D.C.:
Jefferson stated:
“All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. — 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.”
To understand Jefferson, we must work through his metaphor. Horses, too, are not born with saddles on their backs, but common sense tells us that it is legitimate for us to break them, saddle them, and use them for our own purposes. We have reason and free will, which provide the capacity to deliberate about what is good, true, and just, and then to make reflective choices informed by those deliberations. Animals do not. Animals’ inferiority to human beings makes it legitimate for human beings to own horses.
If we follow Jefferson’s metaphor, no human being stands in relation to another human being as human beings stand in relation to horses. One human’s ownership of another, or one person’s subjection to another, is contrary to how human beings have been created “by the grace of God.” Thus, “all men are created equal” means that, by nature, no person is either a master or a slave. The capacity of all humans — being naturally endowed with reason, free will, and moral judgment — to exercise dominion over their own lives makes us equal.
Given that men and women of all colors and all races equally share in the fundamental attributes of personhood, if we push Jefferson’s metaphor to its logical conclusion, the Declaration’s philosophical teaching about human equality necessarily includes the entire human race. As a deist who suspected “monkish ignorance and superstition,” Jefferson held that “the light of science” reveals this principle of human equality.
That all human beings, by nature, equally possess the right to exercise dominion over their own lives has a specific implication for the institution of legitimate political authority. Given that, by nature, no human being has a right to govern another, legitimate political authority can arise only from consent. While it might be in every man’s interest to be a citizen of a decent political order, given every individual’s right of natural liberty, no man can be bound to a particular political order except through his own consent.
The idea that legitimate political authority requires the consent of the governed was the first revolution of 1776. The necessity of consent follows from the self-evident truths that all men are created equal in their natural liberty and possess natural authority over — and responsibility for — their own lives.
THE PURPOSE OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY
As the right of natural liberty follows from our equal capacities to direct our own lives, the principle of consent follows from human equality. But consent alone, while necessary, is insufficient. Legitimate political authority also must be directed toward the ends proper to the political community.
The primary end of good government, according to the Declaration of Independence, is to secure the rights with which individuals have been “endowed by their Creator.” Good government may do more than secure natural rights, but no government can be considered good if it fails to secure the natural rights of the people it governs. The conviction that governments are instituted first and foremost to secure natural rights was the second revolution of 1776.
Government is needed because our natural rights are not secure without it. In a state of nature — that is, the condition in which no commonly recognized governing authority exists — a natural moral law exists. It is wrong, for example, to take others’ property and steal others’ labor. But human beings do not always recognize or obey the natural precepts of right and wrong. “What is government itself,” James Madison asked in Federalist No. 51, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Angels, presumably, would know and do what is right. But men are not angels; they do not always know what they ought to do, and they do not always do what they ought.
The requirements of both mere life and the good life lead men into political communities. While political communities must be constructed and require consent to be instituted legitimately, the founders held that men are social and political beings whose nature leads them into political communities.
In his 1792 essay “Property,” Madison offered his clearest statement on the purposes of political authority: “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort.” By property, Madison did not mean just land or material possessions. “In its larger and juster meaning,” he wrote, the concept of property “embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.” An individual thus can have property in land, merchandise, or money, but also “in his opinions and the free communication of them” and “in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.” A person, Madison said, “has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.” “[A] just government,” Madison further taught, is one “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”
Respect for and recognition of individuals’ responsibility for their own well-being — including their moral responsibility to their neighbors and their religious duties to the Creator — led the founders to conclude that a legitimate political community is not, and cannot be, tasked with securing every element of the good life. Indeed, the founders held that we do not turn over our most fundamental responsibilities to the political community. Some rights are by their very nature “unalienable,” meaning that authority over them is not granted to government.
The restriction of political authority to limited ends or purposes — primarily securing natural rights — was, as already noted, the second revolution of 1776. It corresponds to — and was developed from — the precept that God does not directly grant political authority to any one person or group of people. The Creator, by design, leaves us free to organize ourselves politically using the precepts of the natural moral law as guidance, including the natural rights of mankind.
LEGITIMATE RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY
Political freedom and proper limitations on the state’s authority do not imply indifference to religion. Politics must remain limited because of the nature of religious truth and in recognition of religious authority’s proper domain.
The founders grasped this truth through biblical revelation and philosophical reasoning. Their philosophical argument held that an omniscient and all-powerful deity who created mankind with the capacities of reason and free will would only find worship exercising those capacities acceptable. While Madison and the founders did not quite put it this way, we might say that an omniscient God who created us with the capacity to adore Him, or even to love Him, would settle for nothing less than our full devotion.
That true religious worship must be offered freely and cannot be coerced is the fundamental philosophical and theological insight that animated the American founding’s position on religious liberty and matters of church and state. That worship must be in accord with a person’s conscience to be true means that the control and direction of one’s religious beliefs and exercises must, in a fundamental sense, remain one’s own. Accordingly, a state dedicated to securing religious liberty for its citizens is not indifferent or neutral toward religion; rather, it restrains itself to its proper jurisdiction.
By restraining itself and recognizing the limits of legitimate government authority, the state implicitly acknowledges religion’s distinct and superior authority. The absence of laws mandating specific religious beliefs or exercises, dictating the religious education of the young, or regulating churches in their religious capacities does not constitute a commitment to secularism — at least not if secularism is understood as atheism or presuming that religion is opposed to reason. The founders’ constitutionalism is instead grounded in a commitment to religious liberty, which itself is based on the truth that religious worship must be freely given.
Religious liberty and the separation of church and state also recognize that political authorities as such possess no special insight or access to divine revelation. As Madison emphasized in his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” — a 1785 petition opposing a proposed Virginia bill to buttress state-sponsored churches — we have no good reason to believe (and many reasons to doubt) that political authorities are competent to judge religious truth. Those truths that lie beyond reason — matters above the natural law that pertain exclusively to the divine law — are the proper subject of church authority alone. The limits of human wisdom contain political authority to temporal matters accessible to our principled and prudential judgments.
Proscribing state authority over religion, however, does not mean minimizing religion’s political importance or influence. As Madison and the founders understood, religion and religious authority do not need Caesar’s sword to guide society. “We are teaching the World the great truth,” Madison wrote in 1822, “that Governments do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson, that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.”
The idea that true worship must be performed according to conviction and conscience was the third revolution of 1776.
A REVOLUTIONARY TRUTH
These basic principles of political right — what I have called the revolutions of 1776 — task politics with the protection of our natural and unalienable rights, and recognize the authority of churches to do the divinely ordained work they are called to do.
This is the legacy for which the signers of the Declaration pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. We pay tribute to their legacy and accept our rightful patrimony by understanding these revolutionary principles — principles that still make America, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “the last best hope of earth.”
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Professor of Political Science, Concurrent Professor of Law, and the Founding Director of the Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy. He won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to support his most recent book, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (2022), published by the University of Chicago Press.