Equality and the American Founding: A Catholic perspective

“All men are created equal!” Perhaps more than any other principle, this phrase captures the transcendent ideal that inspired the Founders to declare their independence from Great Britain. The triumph of the principle of equality in modern Western politics has dulled the contemporary mind to the radicalism of this assertion.

Despite the claim of the Declaration of Independence, this principle was by no means “self-evident.” The stalemate with Parliament over the meaning of the “rights of Englishmen” forced the colonists to appeal to principles beyond the English tradition, principles over which Parliament could claim no interpretive authority.

The imperfect pursuit of equality

Who would, then, have such authority? No doubt Thomas Jefferson had his own particular ideas concerning equality when he wrote those words, yet the political unity demanded of the moment did not allow him the luxury of engaging his fellow colonists in a deep philosophical debate over the true meaning of equality. In this third and last instalment in my response to Hillsdale College’s “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope” project, I will consider the history of the American ideal of equality from a Catholic perspective.

Again, the Catholic difference lies in the Church’s insistence on limits to equality rooted in traditional hierarchies, and the insistence on the subordination of individual rights to a common good rooted in love.

The Hillsdale project arose in large part as a response to mainstream academia’s condemnation of America for its failure to live up to its own stated principle of equality. The most glaring failure lies, of course, in the area of slavery. Professor McClay tackles this issue head-on, going so far as to invoke the conservative English writer Samuel Johnson’s famous, dismissive quip about the colonists: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” McClay rightly notes that many, if not most, of the Founders, including slaveholders such as Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, fully understood this contradiction. He also correctly notes that the Founders evaded rather than affirmed slavery, and this largely for the practical reason that acceptance of the status quo was essential to retaining the support of the southern colonies, where slavery was essential to the economy. I agree with McClay’s insistence that America was not founded on slavery, but rather on the ideals of liberty, equality, and self-rule. Much of the “Story of America” focuses on the efforts to realize, however imperfectly, these founding ideals.

To concede imperfection implies some concept of perfection. What exactly is perfect equality? That the abolition of slavery required the most destructive war in American history suggests that the answer to this question is hardly self-evident. The Southerners who broke from the Union claimed slavery as the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy, yet insisted that their new political order embodied the purest expression of the ideals of liberty and equality that had inspired the Founders. When one considers that the Founders themselves were inspired by ancient pagan republics that were themselves slave societies, the Confederate position is not irrational.

I have no sympathy for the Confederacy, but to criticize them for affirming both equality and slavery assumes there is some clear and distinct, self-evident understanding of the essence of equality itself. Whatever philosophers, even philosophers who are Catholic, may have to say about this essence, history shows us precious little beyond a constantly shifting set of understandings about the meaning of equality.

The confusion over the meaning of equality was self-evident even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In the months following the first shots at Lexington and Concord, the idea of equality spread like wildfire throughout the colonies. In a playful yet serious correspondence, Abigail Adams famously admonished her husband John to “Remember the Ladies,” who, in the name of equality in marriage, would have their husbands trade the name of “Master” for that of “Friend.” John laughs and charges that men are the true victims in marriage, subject to the “Despotism of the Peticoat [sic].” Somewhat more seriously, he acknowledges that “our Struggle has loosened the bonds of Government every where [sic]. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges [sic] were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and that Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.”

This refusal of subordination plagued the Articles of Confederation that governed the United States through the Revolution and the first years of the new nation. States that had voted for independence were loath to pay taxes—even with representation!—to the national government to fund Washington’s army. After the war, the political dysfunction of state equality ultimately led to the drafting and ratification of the new constitution that granted greater authority to the federal government.

Practical wisdom and the limitations of the Constitution

Reverence for the Constitution animates much of the “Story of America.” Every American should indeed respect and admire the achievement of the Constitution at its time and its endurance over nearly two-and-a-half centuries. Respect, yes—but reverence?

Professor McClay states, I believe correctly, that the Constitution is intrinsic to our identity, that it makes Americans who we are. At the same time, he concedes that the Constitution is, in the end, merely a “functional” document. Looking out at the power struggles among the states and those within the states, the Founders offered no clarifying interpretation of the true meaning of liberty, equality, and self-rule. McClay notes, again correctly, that the Founders accepted conflict as part of the essence or nature of society and understood the purpose of government to channel that conflict, to make it work toward some sort of positive good.

Writing on the other side of a revolution in political thought that began with Machiavelli, the Founders rejected ancient pagan and traditional Christian ideals of a properly ordered body politic; in its place, they offered a vision of politics as the distribution of power through a range of checks and balances that would ensure no one group gained dominance over others. The Hillsdale historians praise this practical wisdom, which they attribute to the Founders’ chastened, realistic view of human nature.

Again, there is much to admire in this practical wisdom. It created a political order that has certainly stood the test of time. Good governance indeed requires checks and balances—yet even the medieval understood this. During the Middle Ages, the nobles and the Church served as checks on royal power, while the king could check the power of ambitious nobles and prelates. This acknowledgment of inevitable conflict did not, however, preclude the affirmation of an order beyond conflict, a body politic/Body of Christ in which all the distinct members worked in cooperation to achieve a common good that transcended their differences.

John Winthrop invoked a version of this social ideal in his “Model of Christian Charity.” Aside from creating a political order with no established Church, hereditary king, or landed nobility, the Constitution rejected this ideal, at least at the national level. States, however, were free to forge more robust, less purely functional, political orders, even to the point of retaining established churches. One could argue that the very thinness of the Constitution with respect to substantive principles reflects the assumption that much of life, and much of politics, would be lived at the state and local level.

To understand the meaning of the Constitution in history is to confront the fact that the whole social and economic world of the Founders, overwhelmingly local and agrarian, would begin to disappear in the generation after the Founding. A Constitution created to channel political conflicts regarding state and federal authority would prove totally inadequate to the task of managing the unforeseen economic conflicts attendant upon the rise of industrial capitalism.

The problem of the new aristocracy

In highlighting economic forces, I am only following the wisdom of the Founders themselves. The Hillsdale historians note Madison’s clear-eyed recognition of the inevitability of conflict; they are less forthcoming about Madison’s understanding of the primary source of conflict. In the oft-quoted Federalist, no. 10, Madison lays out his understanding of group or “faction” conflict in the political order: “The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man . . . . But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”

Was Madison a Marxist? Of course not. Rather, Madison and Marx both drew on a common font of 18th-century thought (e.g., Adam Smith) that held economic interests as the driving force of social and political life. Property was, in fact, a precondition for participation in politics. This elite conception of politics did indeed clash with more inclusive ideals of equality spreading through the young nation. The Founders initially dealt with this contradiction by expanding property ownership through the redistribution of Indian lands ceded by the British at the Peace of Paris. Fears that this land would soon run out led Jefferson to purchase Louisiana from the French. No amount of land seemed capable of holding off the conflicts that came with unequal distribution; by the 1830s, Jacksonian Democracy “solved” the problem by dropping all property restrictions for voting.

The prior existence of property restrictions reflected the Founders’ belief that political equality depended on a roughly equal distribution of property. The notion of political power without economic power would have struck them as nonsensical. The Age of Jackson bore out this understanding, as political power without property resulted in a growing and fearful economic inequality that would have horrified the Founders. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer generally understood as a cautious admirer of American democracy, observed with great concern the rise of an “industrial Aristocracy.” Already in the 1830s, the factory system had begun to emerge. The Founders’ ideal of a nation of small property owners seemed to be giving way to an English-style industrial nation of propertyless wage earners (or “wage slaves” as they would come to be known), ruled over by a new economic elite of factory owners.

Tocqueville noted that this new aristocracy seemed to embody all the vices and none of the virtues of the old aristocracy. It achieved power without responsibility:

The territorial aristocracy of past centuries was obliged by law or believed itself to be obliged by mores to come to the aid of its servants and to relieve their miseries. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our day, after having impoverished and brutalized the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourished by public charity in times of crisis.

Concerned as he clearly was for the basic material deprivation of the workers, Tocqueville was even more troubled by the lack of “genuine association” between the worker and his employer. As with his more famous account of “individualism,” Tocqueville sees in this situation a distressing absence of a sense of “society at large” that formed a basis for social cohesion in the Old World. Despite each faction possessing the political “equality” of “one man, one vote,” the “self-rule” of the new elite came at the expense of the “self-rule” of factory workers. In adjudicating this conflict, the Constitution was no substitute for the common bonds of “society at large.”

Justice and the proper ordering of society

The shocking inequality Tocqueville observed only worsened over the next fifty years. The Church’s first authoritative response to this situation, Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), addressed a wide range of issues. I wish only to focus on one oft-neglected aspect of that teaching, one that addresses the deficiency in the American political tradition I have been examining. Leo called for far more than “social justice” in the material sense; he called also for justice in the sense of a proper ordering of society.

Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, to maintain the balance of the body politic.

Leo rejected socialism because it insisted on the primacy of class conflict. Curiously, he offered more qualified criticisms of capitalism despite its own self-understanding of the market economy as a ceaseless, competitive clash of individual self-interest. Similarly, American Catholics too often ignore the centrality of conflict to the Constitution, which offers no harmony, but only checks and balances on the endless clash of factions.

Faithful Catholics may certainly respect and honor the Constitution for the relative prosperity and freedom it has enabled. But I do not think we can properly love it. Hillsdale’s “Story of America” is a labor of love that invites its viewers to love America and the Constitution it claims defines America. Can one really love a social contract? The Church, since Vatican II, has affirmed many of the functional principles found in the U.S. Constitution, yet it has also consistently called for the creation of a “civilization of love.”

This love is not a vague sympathy for others or a commitment to charitable works. It is public, not private. It is a recognition of mutual dependence and mutual obligation stemming from the fact that we are one body. It is the opposite of self-rule.

Related at CWR:
• “The 1531 Project: A distinct and Catholic view of American history” (Sept 22, 2025) by Christopher Shannon
• “Charity, liberty, and the contested history of the American story” (Oct 26, 2025) by Christopher Shannon
• “Catholicism and the American Founding: A further response to ‘The Great American Story’” (Nov 13, 2025) by Christopher Shannon