In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American founding, our Semiquincentennial Essay Contest invited undergraduate students to reflect deeply on the foundational principles of 1776—exploring core ideas of human equality, liberty, faith, and the nature of constitutional governance. We are pleased to publish the runner-up entry by Notre Dame undergraduate Paige Ellis, which thoughtfully examines the historical, theological, and philosophical relationship between the Catholic faith, the Declaration of Independence, and the inherent dignity of the human person.
The water was cold; Father Brian’s hands were steady. Somewhere in the nave of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, surrounded by candlelight and the quiet breaths of a vast congregation, I stopped being who I was before.
When Father Brian poured the water over me, my mind went immediately to the Jordan River; John the Baptist and Christ standing in the current, the heavens opening, the voice saying this is my beloved son. I wasn’t comparing myself to Christ in this instance but rather was following him. Mimicking him. In that moment, where I stood in one of the most beautiful churches in America, something settled into place with a particular certainty I had yet to feel ever before: I was made in the image of God. Not metaphorically or as a theological abstraction but irreducibly made in His image – imago Dei – and no earthly power had put that there or had the ability to revoke it.
I would argue that it is also the ground the Declaration of Independence stands upon.
“All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” I cannot read past that line anymore. Because I spent a year critically questioning who that Creator is, I found an answer. Not just intellectually through a study of scripture or mentors who walked alongside me, but in cold water in a sacred basilica. Now, that line reads differently. The Declaration isn’t making a political claim that is dressed up in religious language. It is making a theological claim that bears political consequences. Rights do not come from the government, but from the act of creation itself. This means the government cannot grant them, nor take them away.
The question worth consideration is whether America actually lives up to that promise. In a broad sense, I believe it does. The most honest evidence, however, is not found in legislation. It is found in something more stubborn and simple: the fact that no government has ever successfully taken away a person’s ability to pray.
In Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, a Japanese peasant farmer named Mokichi is tied to a cross at low tide, left to die slowly by the sea. Stripped of every freedom, every protection, every dignity the law could offer, he prays through all of it. In the real world, Jacob DeShazer, an American airman captured after the 1942 Doolittle Raid, spent years in Japanese captivity including long stretches of solitary confinement. It was there, with nothing, that he encountered God so profoundly that he later returned to Japan as a missionary. No government gave either man that access. No government could take it away. That pre-political dignity the Declaration points to isn’t just a philosophical claim, but it is observable. It persists in the utmost extreme circumstances because it was never the government’s to give or remove in the first place.
This is why the Americans who have most powerfully demanded the Declaration’s promise be extended have almost always done so on the grounds of theology. Fredrick Douglass argued in the 1840s that slavery was a moral abolition precisely because it violated the Declaration’s own premise that God, not government, confers human worth. Elizabeth Cady Stanton made the same move in 1848, opening the Seneca Falls Declaration by rewriting the Declaration itself: “all men and women are created equal.” This wasn’t an attempt to invent a new argument. She was holding America to the one it had already made, that Creator-given dignity belongs to every person, not a select few. Both Douglass and Stanton appealed upward, past the state, to the Creator who the Declaration invokes. Instead of asking America to establish new rights, they were demanding it recognize rights that were already inherent.
That is the exact tradition I find myself in as a new Catholic. I came to this faith as someone who had to deliberately choose it. I wasn’t raised in it, I sought it out, sat with it for a year, and said yes to it standing in a basilica at Easter Vigil service. The Declaration was also deliberately chosen, by people making a claim about human nature that required them to believe in something beyond themselves. Both documents ask the same question: what are we, actually? They point to the same answer, that we are creatures made in the image of something greater. This fact is the beginning of everything else.
I chose Catholicism. I chose Notre Dame. But the dignity confirmed by that baptismal font was never a choice. It was already there, inscribed in me before I had words for it. It will outlast every government that has ever tried to define it.