Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,

and to assume among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of

nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, requires that they

should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Well, thus begins the document primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson, but also edited by a

committee that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, that officially gave birth to the United States of America. July 4th is known as the birthday of our nation because it was the day that the Declaration of Independence was officially adopted by the Continental Congress. The Declaration's most famous line is the next one, the first of the causes,

stated by Congress, that, as they put it, impelled them to separation. We hold these truths to be

self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain

unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, end quote.

It's a remarkable claim, and even more so when it was written,

and before it became so overly familiar as it is to us today.

It's an aspirational claim, an example of what made the newly formed United States

an example of what the eminent sociologist Petirum Sorokin would call ideational. Surroquin contrasted

societies that were ideational or aimed at some higher metaphysical ideal from those that were

sensate or oriented towards achieving immediate, often sensual gratification. Now certainly,

when the declaration was signed, human equality was an

unachieved ideal. In fact, from our nation's original sin of slavery to the contemporary evils of abortion,

recognized, much less realized equality of persons, has remained elusive throughout our history.

And yet, the ideal itself has set for our nation a trajectory

that brought us in many ways closer to it. But is it really self-evident that all men are

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