The US devotion to the peoples’ ‘unalienable rights’ is a logical fallacy.
In the calendar of American civil religion, July 4 is a solemnity, the day we celebrate our national creed, formulated in Philadelphia in 1776. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” we confess in the Declaration of Independence, “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.” By and large, American Catholics embrace this creed with no reservation. Together with our Constitution, we assume that the Declaration provides Catholics in the United States with an arena of political truth within which we may practise our faith unimpeded and unmolested. To the extent that we are hindered in that practice, so the reasoning proceeds, it is because the principles of our national creed have been compromised. (Regardless of our place on the partisan spectrum, we Americans live by the “no true Scotsman” fallacy as to our revered founding principles.) Thus, we suppose that the moral doctrines of our national creed provide us with a solid basis for political patriotism consistent with religious devotion.
