Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, recently introduced SB268, which ensures that educators in Utah public schools are free to examine the role of religion in United States history and the significance of religious liberty to American constitutional government.
Although the Supreme Court’s 1960s school prayer cases only prohibited school-sponsored worship activities, the fear of lawsuits and the misapplied doctrine of a “wall of separation” have led to unintended consequences. For 60 years, there has been a far-reaching chilling effect on almost any discussion of religion in public schools. Regrettably, that has kept many public school students from learning the vital role of religion in U.S. history.
Every day, Utah students recite the words “under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance, but do these students learn why the United States declares itself to be a nation under God? Do they learn the meaning underlying the words “created equal” or “endowed by their Creator?” Do they learn the significance that pulpit preaching had on the American Revolution? Or the abolition of slavery? Or the Civil Rights Movement?
Do Utah students learn about religiously motivated reformers who fought for women’s suffrage or against child labor? Or those who founded historically Black colleges or organized immigrant aid societies? Do they learn that George Washington warned against the belief “that morality can be maintained without religion”? Or that Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation because he made a “covenant with God”? Do they learn that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of nonviolence were based on both Gandhian philosophy and the Christian teaching to “love your enemies”?
Understanding the role of religion in the United States is vital to understanding American history, government and values. In guidance to public schools, the Department of Education, under both the Biden and Trump administrations, has affirmed that teaching the role of religion in U.S. history is constitutionally protected.
SB268 ensures that Utah public schools understand how this subject may be incorporated into their curriculum. Here is one example of how the role of religion in U.S. history might be taught in public schools.
Religious roots of equality
The most fundamental principle of American democracy is the self-evident truth that all are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable rights.” This is the central basis for an equal vote in democratic self-government and the foundation for our Bill of Rights. No principle has meant more to Americans than this one — nor, in many respects, to the entire world.
The signers of the Declaration of Independence wrote very little about what they meant by “all men are created equal.” Perhaps as a self-evident truth, they saw little need to do so. A year before his death and a half-century after authoring his most famous words, Thomas Jefferson described the declaration as merely “the common sense of the subject,” a general “expression of the American mind.”
The clearest meaning of “created equal” comes from John Adams. While Jefferson was the declaration’s most eloquent and notable author, Adams was its most consistent and forceful advocate. During debates in the Continental Congress, Adams was, in Jefferson’s words, the “Colossus” of Independence, speaking “with a power of thought and expression, that moved us from our seats.”
Nearly two decades after the declaration’s signing, then-Vice President Adams, in a letter to his son Charles, wrote his most detailed definition of what he called “the modern Doctrine of Equality.” Writing amid the violence of the French Revolution, which championed equality as the leveling of material wealth and social status, Adams clarified the American meaning. “It meant not a Phisical but a moral Equality.”
“Mankind” was “not all equally tall, Strong wise handsome, active,” but they were all “equally Men, of like Bodies and Minds,” and, importantly, “the work of the Same Artist, Children of the Same father, almighty.”
What does it mean to be created equal? To be equally children of God.
Recognizing an identity as children of God elevates humankind as having an inherent dignity “endowed with unalienable rights,” and it equalizes one another as brothers and sisters of the same family. Since the nation’s founding, this elevating and equalizing principle has been the guiding star through America’s most difficult trials, at home and abroad.
Underlying the movement to abolish slavery in the United States was an appeal to return to the nation’s founding principles. Some proponents of slavery had attacked the declaration that “all men are created equal” as a “self-evident lie.” In the first of their famous debates, Sen. Stephen Douglas ridiculed Abraham Lincoln for believing that “the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother.”
Days before, Lincoln had defended the Declaration of Independence as embodying the “lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures … to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man.”
“Nothing,” said Lincoln, “stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.” His words echoed those of Frederick Douglass, the nation’s foremost abolitionist orator: “God has no children whose rights may be safely trampled upon.”
Lincoln heralded this “enlightened belief” as the “beacon” the Founders erected “to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.” A century later, from the Lincoln Memorial, during the Civil Rights Movement to end racial segregation in the South, the Rev. King dreamed of a day when the nation would “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed” that “all men are created equal” by extending the blessings of American freedom to “all of God’s children.”
The American belief in a divine origin and equality was also at the forefront of the ideological Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1949, during the first televised presidential inaugural address, Harry S. Truman used the occasion “to proclaim to the world the essential principles of the faith by which we live,” contrasting American democracy with Soviet Communism. “The American people,” he said, “stand firm in the faith which has inspired this Nation from the beginning.”
For Truman, that faith was the belief that all have a right to equal justice under the law, that all have a right to freedom of thought and expression, and that all “are created equal because they are created in the image of God.” Five years later, Dwight D. Eisenhower, addressing the nation from the White House, shared a similar sentiment: “Out of faith in God, and through faith in themselves as His children, our forefathers designed and built this Republic.”
Since the nation’s beginnings in 1776, the cherished American belief of being created equal as children of God has been battle-tested against the false philosophies of the divine right of kings, of so-called master and subservient races, and of the state’s supremacy over the individual. Utah children should learn the religious meaning of America’s most cherished political principle, if for no other reason than that it is an accurate account of American history. It would be a fitting emphasis for celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
There is also a more urgent reason. As the U.S. political climate becomes increasingly polarized and terrifyingly violent, there could be no better lesson taught to students in Utah and across the United States than this one — that, while we may have many differences, we are all created equal because we are all alike as God’s children.