Unclean Lips

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When you take an inventory of all the individuals who have earned a prominent position in our nation’s history, it’s inevitable that you find in each one of them a character flaw of some sort.

  • George Washington is the father of our country, yet he was a slaveowner.
  • John Witherspoon was a powerful preacher, the President of the University of New Jersey (Princeton), and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Yet, he was a slaveowner as well.
  • Gouvernor Morris wrote the Preamble of the Constitution and spoke more on the Convention floor more so than any other delegate.1 While his faith in God isn’t something you could easily define as orthodox, he belonged to a denomination that believed in a Triune God and his approach to government was obviously informed by a biblical worldview.2 And yet, Morris was involved in several illicit affairs, including those with married women.3

How do you reconcile the way in which history honors these men with the fact that they were fundamentally flawed at some level?

We don’t honor Witherspoon because he owned slaves anymore than we honor Moses for murdering an Egyptian. We don’t respect Morris because he was an adulterer anymore than we applaud David for being in the same category and then went as far as having Bathsheba’s husband killed.

Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution represent a brilliant approach to human rights and the structure of government. We don’t evaluate either one of them according to the character flaws of the men who wrote them. Rather, we evaluate them according to the substance of the documents themselves.

In a similar fashion, we don’t honor these men because of the inconsistencies that exist between the doctrine they subscribed to and the way that same doctrine failed to manifest itself in their approach to certain issues. Instead, we honor them because of the sacrifices they made to champion those principles that resulted in the freedoms and the rights we’re able to enjoy today.

When the prophet Isaiah was first commissioned by God, Isaiah is in the Lord’s Presence and instantly becomes aware of how he compares to the standard of God’s Perfection.

He says…

5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” (Is 6:5)

Anyone who believes themselves to be “qualified” to be used by God in any capacity is inevitably humbled once confronted by the depravity that characterizes themselves along with every member of the human race.

What makes sin so toxic isn’t just the sin itself as much as it’s Who you’re sinning against (Is: 40:12-14; 45:9-10). When you take an honest inventory of Who God is, the idea that a human being would have the audacity to disobey Him or to rebel against Him is unconscionable, and yet…

…that’s what we do all day, every day (Rom 3:23).

It’s not the instrument, but rather than One working in and through that instrument that produces the results that are worthy of our respect and admiration. We applaud our Founding Fathers, not because they were beyond reproach, but because of their willingness to obey and be used by God in a crucial moment when compromise or rebellion would’ve been a far easier path to take.

The assessment that concludes that our Founding Fathers were wrong in the way they viewed certain topics, is neither inaccurate nor inappropriate.

But to dismiss what they accomplished, assuming that any dirt on their hands soils the integrity of the Truth they proclaimed or the substance of the sacrifices they made is to invoke a standard that is not only nonsensical, it is also hypocritical.

1. “Christianity and the Constitution”, John Eidsmoe, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 1987, 2003, p179
2. Ibid, p189
3 “National Endowment for the Humanities”, “The Confessions of Gouverneur Morris: An interview with Melanie Randolph Miller”, https://www.neh.gov/article/confessions-gouverneur-morris, accessed March 21, 2026

American Concrete

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When it comes to the topic of our nation’s Christian heritage, you have two main schools of thought:

  • The liberal mindset that insists our forefathers viewed religion as something to be negotiated as an administrative duty
  • The Conservative Christian platform that maintains an aggressive acknowledgement and pursuit of God’s Assistance characterized the collective perspective of the founding fathers

Much of the controversy stems from a ruling given by the Supreme Court in 1947 and the way they interpreted a phrase used by Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut in 1802. They declared that Jefferson’s usage of the term “the separation of church and state” constituted “the authoritative declaration of the scope and effect” of the First Amendment.1 Since then, that ruling has become the standard by which all public expressions of religious convictions have been measured, leading to an ever increasing limitation being put on the acknowledgement of God in governmental agencies as well as an ever lengthening shadow of doubt being cast on our nation’s religious heritage.

The debate is, at times, passionate and you’ve got buffoons on both sides of the aisle. The venom and the inaccuracies can culminate in a spectacle that can make it difficult to know which argument is correct.  But there is a bottom line that transcends the way in which a solitary statement can be potentially dissected to the point where its meaning becomes illusive. That bottom line is to consider, not only the comment that was made, but also:

  • the context of that comment
  • the character of the person speaking
  • the cultural backdrop that made what that person said both relevant and influential

In other words, rather than just scrutinizing what was said, look at also why it was said, to whom was the person speaking and who was it that made the comment. At that point, you’ve got a full color, three dimensional rendering of what was stated as opposed to an intentionally cropped, black and white snapshot.

Using that kind of approach, let’s take a look at Thomas Jefferson and his exchange with the Danbury Baptists.

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Twenty Five Inconvenient Realities

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The Separation of Church and State is a phrase often used by people who want to insist that Christianity had no real role in our nation’s founding – cerntainly nothing that had any significant influence on those that articulated our cause, created our Constitution and fought the battles that culminated in the surrender of Great Britain.

You see this in comments like what you see below from the “Freedom From Religion” website:

The Christian Right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States, as part of their campaign to force their religion on others who ask merely to be left alone. According to this Orwellian revision, the Founding Fathers of this country were pious Christians who wanted the United States to be a Christian nation, with laws that favored Christians and Christianity.

Not true! The early presidents and patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the absurdities of the Old and New Testaments.

You have to be very selective in the information you use to validate such a statement. At the same time, you have to be willfully oblivious to the specific references to God and Christ that punctuate the relevant events and documentation that established the United States.

Below is a brief yet potent list:

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The Black Robe Regiment

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Dissenting Clergy

Peter Oliver was a lawyer and by the time of the Revolution had risen to the position of chief justice of the Superior Court in Massachusetts. He was incredibily wealthy, served in a variety of community and church positions and was fiercely loyal to the crown.

His perspective on the Revolutionary War was that of a Tory. Unlike the way in which most historians present John Adams and other such Patriots as noble statesmen, Oliver saw them as deluded troublemakers.

Not long after Cornwallis’ surrender, Oliver published a book entitled, “Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View.” What makes his perspective valuable is that he has nothing to gain by glamorizing or exaggerating any one aspect of the American effort to win their independence, in that he views all of it as a form of sedition.

At one point, he sets aside an entire section of his text to describe the “Black Robe Regiment,” or what he refers to as the “Black Regiment.”

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