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Jefferson was an athiest too, and he wrote that text.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of values, a list of the ways the Crown had violated those values, and a list of the ways they felt were proper to address those violations, up to and including armed revolt.
The Constitution was an attempt to make a goverment based on those values. It was and is flawed, and should be changed to better reflect those values. That's why "What about the 3/5 Compromise?" isn't a gotcha. It's wrong, everyone knows it's wrong, schoolchildren are taught it's wrong by the government itself.
So it's an American value in a founding document unless we think it's wrong?
You're just being deliberately obtuse at this point
No I'm not. That's what you appear to be arguing. Either the founding documents are what we derive American values from, in which case we have to accept the bad things as well as the good things, or they are not, in which case we need a different way to define our values and what makes them American.
Then go back and reread my comment three up in this thread where I said that the DoI was a statement of values, and the Constitution is an attempt to make a goverment based on those values
Then, again, what makes a document written before America existed where we get American values from? They would not be American values if they were written before there was an America.
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, ...
America didn't begin with the signing of the Constitution.
It absolutely did. Those states still operated as independent entities. They were united on the issue of declaring independence. Until the Constitution was signed, the states were not united as a nation.