We Hold These Truths | Spirituality+Health
July 4, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of what historian Walter Isaacson calls the greatest sentence ever written: “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.”
I don’t know if this is the greatest sentence ever written, but it is certainly one of the most self-serving. In 18th-century America, wealth was essential to securing life, liberty, and happiness. Land was the primary source of prosperity, and ownership was limited to white men. According to Isaacson, the Declaration’s authors “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, slaves, Native Americans, and non-property owners from their concept of we and all men.
The notion that all men are created equal was anything but self-evident. Rather, as Isaacson explains, it was “true by definition … not contingent on observation.” In other words, it was true because the Declaration of Independence said so, but not because it was an accurate depiction of life in the colonies.
A Voice in the Wilderness
Among the colonists who would not have been satisfied with this verbal sleight of hand, had he lived to read it, was John Woolman (1720–1772), a Philadelphia tailor, abolitionist, and Quaker mystic. He wrote in his autobiography, “Conduct is more convincing than language.”
He believed the colonists’ focus on wealth bred a preoccupation with power. “Oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul,” he wrote in the essay “A Plea for the Poor.” In other words, while the revolutionaries demanded justice from England in the name of righteousness, they did so at the expense of their spiritual well-being by depriving slaves of justice in America.
When you see the world from Woolman’s perspective, you cannot hide behind the sophistry of equality’s being “true by definition.” You cannot see the enslaved and proclaim the inalienable human right to liberty. This hypocrisy should be crippling, and the fact that it wasn’t is not only morally damning but also spiritually revealing. Those who enslaved others or countenanced slavery, Woolman wrote, were driven by “the darkness of their imaginations, [whose] love of ease and gain are the motives in general of keeping slaves …”
A Warning Against Inequality and Oppression
Given that 41 of the 56 white men who signed the Declaration were slave owners, and despite a well-known British court ruling in 1772 that slavery was forbidden on English soil, Woolman’s abolitionist ideas were not included in the Declaration. Neither were his ideas on religion.
The authors of the Declaration differed widely on theology and avoided religious arguments, settling on a vague reference to “their Creator.” Woolman, by contrast, promoted what he called True Religion, which “consisted in an inward life of love and reverence” and an outer life of “true justice and goodness not only toward all men but also toward the brute creatures.”
Seeing God “in all his manifestations in the visible world” would change our notion of happiness, Woolman thought. When happiness is linked to property, its pursuit leads one to accept the inevitability of inequality and even oppression, and breeds conditions for war, he wrote. “A day of outward distress is coming, and Divine love calls to prepare against it.”
In this, Woolman was prophetic. The American Revolution began four years after his death. Slavery in the United States persisted until December 1865 and bred yet another war in America. Full equality for those excluded from the Declaration of Independence has yet to be achieved.
A More Inclusive Fourth of July
With this in mind, in addition to whatever else you do to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, I urge you to include the following three things in your celebration:
- Pick up a copy of The Journal of John Woolman and set aside time on July 4 to read the wisdom of one of America’s great mystics, whose beliefs, as a Quaker tapestry honoring him says, “Went beyond religion to the guidings (sic) of Absolute Truth.”
- Take his advice and “look upon our treasures, the furniture of our houses, and our garments, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions.” Recognize the human and animal suffering behind the things we treasure and imagine how you might adjust your consumption to minimize that suffering in the future.
- Imagine “the greatest sentence ever written” as if John Woolman were writing it. Here is my take: “We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, endowed by their Creator with an internal holiness, purity, and divinity, unimpaired and unconstrained by race, gender, religion, or class, and that this endowment obligates them to fashion a just and compassionate world where the protection of the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the well-being of all beings is the uppermost concern of society.”