By Kenneth Levin
"Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit," wrote the medieval cleric Thomas a Kempis. "For man proposes, but God disposes."
The observation that human intent, however well conceived and deftly pursued, is commonly frustrated, does not require the invoking of God. One can, for example, comprehend the frustrating agent as fate, fortune or simply the exigencies of worldly existence. But the founders of our republic considered the particular circumstance of people’s aspirations and intent being frustrated by the heavy hand of government, and in addressing this phenomenon they clearly attached importance to invoking God.
In the Declaration of Independence, they assert, of course, "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." They further assert that the proper role of government, indeed the raison d'etre of government, is to secure these God-given rights.
All the signers of the Declaration were Christian, but they did not all comprehend God in the same way. Nor were the distinctions simply a reflection of sectarian theological differences. Some, including Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration, were sympathetic to Enlightenment-inspired deism, belief in a creator who does not directly intervene in the world but established it with rationally comprehensible natural and moral laws. He was critical, for example, of elements of the Gospels that he believed did not meet the test of reason.