The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

“no foreign Power can consistently yield Comfort to Rebels, or enter into any kind of Treaty with these Colonies till they declare themselves free and independent.”21 The colonies’ instructions to delegates at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia show that acquiring foreign aid was an important aim of the Declaration. North Carolina empowered its delegates in April 1776 to “concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring independency and forming foreign alliances.”22 If the colonies wished to continue the war, if they wished to restore and revive trade, they needed a treaty with a foreign power.23 Negotiating one required declaring independence and achieving legitimacy as a state. The Declaration helped accomplish the first. And Jefferson started the process in the first sentence, when he listed the British and Americans as two separate people: “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”24 That treatment, the obvious yet somehow subtle differentiation between two peoples, was a powerful announcement to the world.