DATE: Sunday, August 24, 1997               TAG: 9708140594

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR. 

                                            LENGTH:   34 lines

THE SACRED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

AMERICAN SCRIPTURE

Making the Declaration of Independence

PAULINE MAIER

Alfred A. Knopf. 304 pp. $27.50.

In an opinion poll, many educated Americans would probably say that the most famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence - ``We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal. . . '' - comes from the Bible. How did the Declaration become so revered in the modern imagination that it has almost become a piece of secular scripture?

This is the central question historian Pauline Maier examines in her well-researched and well-crafted study, American Scripture, which recounts the Declaration's genesis and writing and its interpretations over the years. Along the way, the author discusses the Declaration's relevance for today. Was it a call for social leveling and class struggle? How did it gain new life periodically throughout American history, by whom and to what effect?

Maier has an intriguing story to tell, detailing how, with major assists from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration ``was what the American people chose to make of it, at once a legacy and a new conception, a document that spoke both for the revolutionaries and for their descendants, who confronted issues the country's fathers had never known or failed to resolve, binding one generation after another in a continuing act of national self-definition.''

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