America has a sage and does not know it. His name is Clarence Thomas, and he sits on the Supreme Court. He is a font of wisdom, not only in detailing the mistakes of his life, as told in his remarkable autobiography, but also in the timeless wisdom he seeks to promote through his championing of American ideals. I consider his memoir the finest autobiography by any living American.
It is the occasion of America’s 250th anniversary that Justice Thomas spoke last week at the University of Texas on the enduring principles of the Declaration of Independence, specifically our famed preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.” I would recommend everyone take the time to listen to Justice Thomas’s speech, for it is an instant classic for bolstering American civics and capturing the essence of the American experience—the securing of just government to promote human excellence, not simply raw “liberty” or “autonomy” for its own sake. Or, as he said in his own words, “The Constitution is the means of government. It is the Declaration that announces the ends of government.” The ends of government are the promotion of the common good, wherein individuals are freed to secure their liberty to live well and unencumbered by overbearing government.
Justice Thomas’s speech on the Declaration was not only about what the Declaration teaches positively—human equality, human dignity, pre-political rights, and the limitations imposed on government. He also used the occasion to mount a sustained broadside against what he considers to be incompatible with the American project—namely, progressivism. Stunningly, and accurately, he set the Declaration of Independence against progressivism. Which explains why most of the headlines about Thomas’s speech were not about the virtues he extolled in the Declaration, but of the audacity of a sitting Supreme Court justice to vocally and unapologetically condemn a political philosophy that finds broad acceptance in America’s most elite precincts. We should take Justice Thomas’s framing—and his warnings—seriously.
What is the primary problem of progressivism, according to Thomas? Its complete incompatibility with the Declaration of Independence. Thomas says it was the promises of the Declaration that gave people like him, who experienced the ravages of a racial caste system, the ability to believe in the promises of America despite its injustices. But if the Declaration of Independence concerns the primary goal of securing man’s pre-political rights that come, ultimately, from God, the guarantor of rights against raw majorities, Justice Thomas identifies progressivism as the political philosophy that begins and ends with itself—and which impales the idea of natural rights in total. It denies divine providence. It believes that history is little more than the fluctuating dynamics of conflict and liberation, defined solely within an immanent, material horizon, which government experts—not free persons—are best left to manage. Progressivism denies inherent limitations on the government’s abilities. It believes truth is little else than accepted custom.
He calls the architects of progressivism—Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey—architects of “a new set of first principles of government,” principles that begin not with the inherent rights of man and restraints on government but with an ambition to remake man and society. Rights come not from God in this view; they come from government, and when they do so, they become revocable based on whoever is in power. As Justice Thomas put it, “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government.” Juxtapose that with his own perspective: “In God’s eyes, we are equal. We are all equally created in the image and likeness of God. We are all endowed with the natural rights to life, liberty, and happiness. Our rights and our dignity are inherent.” Strip America of this axiom and racial subjugation, eugenics, and abortion quickly follow.
And he rightly reviews the historical record of progressivism’s reign to observe the obvious: When governments begin and end with their own power, they bend toward totalization with the result that those who stand in the way of newfound government diktats become disposable.
While Justice Thomas does not spend much time on his own Christian faith and devotion to the Christian natural law tradition, it is that background that explains his devotion to the Declaration’s promises, its conditions for liberty under law, and his condemnations of progressivism. For indeed, it must be said: The worldview of the founders was impossible to construct apart from Christian theism, even if many of the founders were not orthodox Christians. A Christian moral ecology was the air that colonial America breathed. We must confess the accuracy of this claim: The Declaration of Independence is meaningless apart from the Christian worldview. Bare-bones theism is no safe harbor for rights and dignity (just visit an Islamic country to test that thesis). No, it is a peculiar form of theism, a theism that reveals itself in Holy Scripture, that tells us that the God of the Bible is the same God of nature, and His decrees are not arbitrary or unknowable.
Let us reflect, though, on the outrage that predictably follows from speeches like Justice Thomas’s. That the speech’s content is now so foreign, so unfamiliar, to so many reveals how successful progressivism has been in memory-holing our national inheritance. Progressivism is a civic, moral, and theological cancer. It must be defeated if there is to be an American order (and moral decency).
What makes Justice Thomas’s remarks so attention-grabbing is their lack of grievance. While he re-told America’s past racial sins as a contradiction to American ideals, one need only to compare Thomas’s hope and optimism to the clamor and recriminations of modern progressivism, which is always looking for its newest victim. What explains Thomas’s perspective? A belief in what the Declaration of Independence taught and teaches: “At home, at school, and at church, we were taught that we are inherently equal, that equality came from God and that it could not be diminished by man. We were made in the image and likeness of God. That proposition was not debatable and was beyond the power of man to alter. Others with power and animus could treat us as unequal, but they lacked the divine power to make us so. Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these God-given or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority.”
Progressivism offers no such perspective, hope, or protection. What it offers is bureaucracy, relativism, and tyranny.
I am all the more convinced that political progressivism is not only at odds with American ideals but also stands as the single gravest ideological threat to human flourishing. Before we rightly call it a political error, one unfeasible and which bends toward brutalism, managerialism, and decadence, we must name it first as a theological heresy. Or to put it in the words of Justice Thomas, progressivism “has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.” If America is to regain the Christian imagination it had at its beginnings, it cannot be progressive.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on April 21, 2026.
