Christianity Produced the American Revolution — Darwin Attacked Its Foundations
America was built on creation, equality, and God-given unalienable rights. Darwinism declared war on all three.
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by Mark Tapscott
April 4, 2026
Summer sweltered in Philadelphia in July 1776 when delegates to the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence drafted by the young Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, with sage advice and counsel of John Adams of Massachusetts.
“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,” the Declaration said in words heavily influenced by the Christian faith practiced by most of the 56 signers and the vast majority of the people they represented in the 13 British colonies that thus became the United States.
The foundational document of the new nation informed the world that Americans believed God created human beings while equally blessing each of them with fundamental individual rights that no government could justly violate.
The enduring significance of that magnificent 18th century document and how its original principles have been all but lost in the 21st century is the focus of a landmark new book, Endowed by Our Creator, by the Discovery Institute’s John G. West. It is one of those rare books by which every American, especially every evangelical Christian American, will profit by reading it closely and carefully considering what it tells us about the spiritual and political condition of our beloved nation in 2026.
Yes, there were slaves imported from Africa in the Southern states of the then-new nation — including those owned by Jefferson — but the Declaration’s influence was in part why, in the late 1780s, freedmen voted along with their white neighbors in many of the states’ ratification elections of the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. By contrast, it would be nearly two decades before William Wilburforce would finally persuade the British Parliament to ban the slave trade.
The Declaration of Independence made America the first nation in human history founded on God-given, unalienable, and individual rights, and on the equality of men and women everywhere. And in the early decades following the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, those essential principles enunciated in the Declaration provided significant impetus toward the ultimate abolition of slavery.
Evidence that such impetus was deeply effective is seen in Jefferson’s statement a few weeks before he and Adams both passed away on the same day in 1826: “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.”
Jefferson further observed that he saw “a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation…”
For the signers of the Declaration, faith in the God of the Bible and the power of the rational faculties He gave all men were fundamental. West points to signer James Wilson, who called the human mind “the noblest work of God,” and observed that “the power of reasoning is frequently selected as the characteristic quality, which distinguishes the human race from the inferior part of the creation.” Wilson’s words represented something quite close to the consensus view among the Founders, as seen in similar signers’ quotes West cites from Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, and others.
As West notes, however, in March 1861, just 35 years after the passing of Jefferson and Adams, and as the United States staggered into the Civil War, Alexander Stephens, the former U.S. Representative from Georgia and the newly elected vice president of the seceding Confederate States of America, delivered a speech in which he totally and comprehensively rejected the Declaration’s fundamental claims about God, individual rights, and human equality. In the process, he also blasphemously rewrote a Bible verse.
Stephens acknowledged that equality was among “the prevailing ideas” of the founding era,” yet “those ideas…were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ‘storm came and the wind blew.’”
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”
Two points are notable here: First, in alluding to Paul’s description of Jesus Christ as the “cornerstone,” Stephens substitutes the inequality of the races for Jesus Christ as the source of salvation for Southerners, and, second, he attributes that change to newfound knowledge from “the various departments of science.”
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in the year prior to Stephens’ address, but it is not known if he had read it before speaking. As West makes clear, he didn’t have to have read Darwin to reach the same conclusions. How to account for the reversal on so fundamental a principle as human equality as occurred between Wilson and Stephens without reference to Darwin is not a mystery.
“Stephen’s claims seem outlandish today, and deservedly so. Yet, they reflected a powerful new intellectual current of the day that had been growing for decades among philosophers and scientists. Even as American patriots were declaring that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, a vanguard of intellectuals was enlisting science to supply a justification for racism by repudiating the natural unity and equality of mankind,” West writes.
Two years before the Declaration, the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames claimed multiple origins accounted for differences among white and black men, and he was followed in the decades after by thinkers like physician Samuel Morton, biologist Louis Agassiz, and ethnologists Josiah Clark and George Glidden, who enjoyed growing receptivity, especially among the American elites, West explains.
After the Civil War destroyed the Confederacy, there was a steady and deep expansion of the influence of Darwin’s several books advocating multiple lines of evolutionary development producing mankind on the basis of natural selection of characteristics that increase survivability — “survival of the fittest” — and random variation. Darwin’s evolutionary process completely excluded anything resembling a purposeful designer, or God, thus pointing the way to a purely materialistic understanding of creation.
By 1906, few protests were heard when a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga was displayed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. West tells us The New York Times defended the exhibition, claiming it made no difference if pygmies are “really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary Negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.”
And then came 1913 and an address at the University of South Carolina by Charles Francis Adams Jr., the great-grandson of John Adams. West cites this passage from the address as Adams recalled his service in the Union Army:
“In utter disregard of fundamental scientific facts, we theoretically believed that all men — no matter what might be the color of their skin, or the texture of their hair — were, if placed under exactly similar conditions, in essentials the same. In other words, we indulged in the curious, and as is now admitted, utterly erroneous theory that the African was, so to speak, Anglo-Saxon … In other words, though carved ebony, he was also in the image of God.”
In the decades that followed, Darwin’s successors — many now securely occupying positions of great public power and influence — prudently dropped the racial angle, and in their subsequent ascendancy, saw evolutionary scientific materialism become the conventional wisdom about human origins throughout the commanding heights of American politics, academia, science, and media.
In 1916, a survey of biologists found a mere 17 percent still believed in God, according to West, and in 2016, he and colleagues at the Discovery Institute conducted a public opinion survey that confirmed both the continued dominance of the evolutionary scientific materialism and the corrosive impact on Americans’ understanding of the nation’s fundamental founding principles and the relevance of those principles to contemporary governance.
“The steady drumbeat of criticisms against the truths expressed in the Declaration has taken its toll. As America celebrates the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, many Americans are ignorant of its meaning or ambivalent about its teachings. To be sure, according to a national survey commissioned for the writing of this book, eight in ten Americans still affirm the truth of the Declaration’s propositions about life, liberty, and equality; however, fewer than four in ten Americans accept the Declaration’s view of the source of our rights. Fewer still accept its understanding of the purposes and limits of government,” West reports in his book on the survey’s results.
In an interview with The Washington Stand, West said he wrote this book because he believes “America is really at a crisis point where most people on the Left and the Right seem very confused with some very dark ideas … we really need to understand why our founding was a good thing, was actually built from Christian principles, how it was attacked and subverted, and why that is true today.”
“The first step to going back if you’ve made a wrong turn is understanding the map, that you took a wrong turn, and you can’t get back to the right road if you don’t understand that,” West continued. “I want to lay out the positive alternative to the decline, why the problems we have today are not because of the American founding but because we have evaded that, and there is in fact a path back to a better society.”
In the same interview, West was asked how such a profound change in the Declaration’s public acceptance could develop in the mere 55 years elapsed between Stephens’ speech in 1861 repudiating the Declaration’s equality clause and the 1916 survey that found the vast majority of biologists either took no position on the issue or rejected the idea of a Creator.
“It is an amazing story, especially in an age without the internet, how this took over. I think the answer in a nutshell is in post-Civil War America, you have many Americans who have Europe-envy. They went to Europe, especially to Germany, and basically brought back ideas — Hegelian ideas and the German administrative state. So the founders of the modern political science in America basically were all trained in Europe with those ideas, and they took over the graduate schools and they reshaped everything — Harvard, Princeton, Yale,” West responded.
He added that the 1916 survey showing so few biologists still believing in a creator shocked many Americans, most of whom at the time “were still pretty devout Christians.” But their response was essentially to ignore the fact that most of the American intelligentsia, especially in the political and physical sciences, no longer were.
“When I share that survey today, most people think the materialist, atheist, agnostic, elite academics is something from the last 20 or 30 years, maybe in the 1960s, but what they don’t realize is that by the early 20th century that dominance had already happened,” West said.
West is cautiously optimistic about Americans’ capacity to recover the great truths of the Declaration in the daily life of the republic. Noting in his concluding paragraph the tremendous recent upsurge in interest across the science community in the Intelligent Design (ID) approach to the science of studying the origins of the universe and human beings, West observed, “The message of this chapter is that the eclipse of reality that placed the Declaration of Independence in the shadows is ending. Once again, science is pointing to a creator who endowed us with life and liberty, affirming the wisdom of the Bible and the American founders.”
“And the misuse of science during the COVID era is reawakening the resolve of many Americans to insist on government by consent rather than government by unelected elites,” he added. “The door to a return to the principles of America’s founding stands open. The question is whether we as a nation are willing to walk through it.”
— Mark Tapscott is an award-winning senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand, where this article first appeared. He is also the founder and editor at HillFaith (which you should support), the former Executive Editor and Chief of Investigative Reporting at the Daily Caller and Executive Editor of the Washington Examiner.
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Something that rarely gets mentioned is the complete title.
You could also connect the dots between This book and the rise of Eugenics
I come to this excellent piece by Mark Tapscott from a unique vantage point. I’m a theological liberal and a believer in Evolution. I also have great respect for Charles Darwin. All that being said, I don’t swallow whole the claims Darwin made. I still believe the world was made by a divine creator that of course being God. I think evolution came after. I would use this analogy. God the master baker made the cake and then evolution is when he stood back and let nature take its course, like an oven bringing the baker’s creation into being. Evolution simply took the pie God made and baked it to golden brown perfection and made it ready to eat. But without the master baker, there would’ve been no tasty pastry for natural selection to cook. I also recognize that evolution has its dark side.
The founding fathers believed ALL human beings women and people of color included, were equal. Not let me be clear, they did NOT mean the word equality the way we would use that word today. They didn’t believe that all people are equal in the sense that everyone deserved the same rights and opportunities. They believed all people were equal in the sense that all people had the same God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We may not be equal in all ways, but we are in the sense that we are all created in the image of God therefore all deserving equally of the blessings of the natural rights God gives all human beings when they come into the world. Again, when the founders said all men they meant not just men, but men meaning all human beings and in a gender neutral sense including women as well. Free black men voted in several states following the Revolution and women free and enslaved, voted in New Jersey until 1807. The founding fathers may not have seen blacks and women as fully equal with white men, but they did recognize their humanity and that they have the same God-given natural rights as the rest of us did.
Christianity produced the American Revolution, but Darwinism rejected the three main tenets of the Revolution and that the founding fathers believed in, those being creation, equality, and God-given rights. Charles Darwin it’s also important to remember, was a man of his times. He was an avowed sexist and racist. He believed in a racial hierarchy and that the “civilized” white race would eventually drive the “savage” races: Asians, Africans, Arabs, and Indigenous peoples, to extinction in the competition between the races. In his famous book The Origin of the Species, Darwin spoke of the “preservation of the favored races in the struggle.” Though in this case he was referring only to animals, in his later work he would also apply this idea to races of men. He called non-white people “savages” and “lowly.” Racist scientists would take both Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and his less admirable ideas even further. The Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens explicitly rejected the Christian principles and the core principles of the American Revolution in his infamous Cornerstone Speech. He said the founding fathers were wrong when they said all men were created equal. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was the great truth that the black man was inferior to the white man.
Stephens substituted the inequality of the races for Jesus Christ as the source of salvation for Southerners and second, he attributes this change to newfound knowledge from the departments of science. But the latter he refers to ideas either that came directly from Darwin or those racial theorists who took after him. For decades, prominent thinkers like physician Samuel Morton, biologist Louis Agassiz and ethnologists Josiah Clark and George Glidden built on the work Darwin had done and claimed there were multiple sources for the differences between whites and blacks. These ideas were catching on like wildfire with the American elites. In 1906, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga was displayed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo and few protested this. The New York Times defended the exhibition, saying that it was just a way to study the origins of the pygmys which were either related to apes as closely as other black Africans or were the degenerate descendants of American blacks. In a 1913 address to the University of South Carolina, John Adams’ great-grandson Charles Francis Adams Jr. as he recounted his service in the Union Army. He stated that it was contrary to scientific facts to say Anglo-Saxons and Africans were of the same species or that the latter were made in the image of God. In 1916, a survey found that along with believing in biological racism, most biologist did NOT regard themselves as religious and that remains true today.
Though they’ve now dropped the racism, the dominance of the theory of evolutionary scientific materialism to the field has led to a greatly diminished understanding of our nation’s founding principles and their relevance to contemporary governance. The Theory of Evolution gave us a framework from which to better understand our world. It addition, it laid the foundations for the field of biology, helps scientists track disease evolution, combat antibiotic resistance, develop crop varieties, and understand biodiversity. But at the same time, it opened the door for the birth of the evils of race science and biological white supremacy championed by Darwin and his predecessors, ideas the Eugenics Movement and the Nazis would later take to new, terrifying heights. It also caused many people to doubt the existence of a God and become disconnected from the very principles our republic was founded on and why they are important today. I look forward to one day reading Endowed by Their Creator by John G. West!