Stand in the National Archives long enough and the words in that yellowed document will stop being familiar. Read them not as a history lesson but as a declaration made to a watching world: “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.” Four words in the middle of that sentence changed everything: endowed by their Creator. Not granted by government. Not awarded by culture. Not earned by achievement. Endowed, given as a gift, by God, to every human being who bears His image.

This is the theology of Genesis 1:27 applied to political philosophy. The founders were not inventing a new idea. They were recognizing an old one: the idea that God made every person, and therefore every person has a dignity that no government can grant and no government can legitimately strip away. The role of government, in this understanding, is not to be the source of human rights but to be the protector of rights that already exist because God already gave them. That is a staggering limitation on state power, and it was entirely intentional.

When a society removes God from that equation, everything changes. When human worth is not God-given but government-assigned, the government becomes the highest authority over human life, and history has shown us with terrible clarity what governments do with that authority. One hundred million people were murdered in the twentieth century under regimes that replaced the Creator with the collective, that treated human beings not as image-bearers but as instruments of the state. That is not a coincidence. It is what always happens when God is removed from the foundation. When God dies in a culture, man dies with Him.

The image of God, what theologians call the imago Dei, is the most radical political doctrine ever articulated. It says that your value is not determined by your productivity or your politics or your skin color or your usefulness to the state. It is determined by the God who made you. You cannot lose it. You cannot forfeit it. No legislature can vote it away and no dictator can execute it out of existence. It is stamped into your soul by the hand of the Almighty, and it will be there as long as you exist.

This is why the sanctity of every human life, from the womb to the final breath, is not a political preference for the Christian. It is a theological conviction. Every person you will ever meet, every person your government will ever make a policy about, bears the image of God. That changes everything about how we treat people, how we govern, how we vote, and what we are willing to stand up and say out loud even when the culture pushes back. Four words: endowed by their Creator. Build your life on them. Fight for the people they protect.