Blogger’s note: When I do direct readers to other published material, I strive for that which is available to the general public. But this article is so important in my view that I urge Culture Currents patrons to read it, despite the fact that, to do so one needs to sign in as a subscriber to The Atlantic, start a free trial, or subscribe. Also, the November print edition of the magazine should be available at most public libraries. 

The article is titled “The Moral Foundation of America” by Elaine Pagels. I caught up with it recently when I returned to the remarkable November issue of The Atlantic magazine, which honors the nation’s 250th anniversary with a series of substantial essays on the topic of America. Pagels is ostensibly a historian emeritus of religion from Princeton University.

But she is widely esteemed as a historian more generally, as this essay underscores. It is quite brief and concise, but it boils down the revolutionary history of the American Experiment in Democracy, and the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights as running counter to most of the recorded history of humankind, in which kings and rulers accorded moral authority upon all whom they preside.

Historian Elaine Pagels. Courtesy radiowest.keur.org

Pagels explains Thomas Jefferson’s declaration principles of human equality and freedom as “intrinsic rights” of all and based on the Enlightenment and the Book of Genesis in the Bible, as well as the teachings of Jesus (She notes Jefferson’s own personal failure to live up to those principles as a slaveowner, something he long struggled with.).

So, you see how the Founders culled and synthesized sterling ideas of both secular and religious traditions to create something unprecedented in human history, and the beacon of guidance for democracy to the world ever since.

Her conclusion, however, is pointed — that perhaps the Founders’ greatest fear was a kind of reversion in America to monarchial rule: “power maintained by means of fear, autocracy and military force.”  That is just what we are seeing now in the current administration, she says, which seems morally unmoored from America’s fundamental values.

I don’t believe I’ve read anything since the start of the devastating second Trump administration that provides insight better into the ideals that America, with all its flaws, stands for and, thus, what is at stake.

Here is a link to the Pagels article: .https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/america-founding-morals-rights-life-liberty/684327/: 

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Elaine Pagels’ most recent book is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.