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The Constitution

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While the Declaration of Independence includes references to the Creator and the Supreme Judge of the Universe, the Constitution is utterly devoid of any mention of God or the supernatural.

Those who want to put as much distance as they can between the United States and her spiritual heritage use that absence to justify insisting that the Constitutional Convention was a purely secular enterprise.

But that wasn’t the case…

In 1787 the United States were anything but united. In many cases, the delegates that convened to retool the Articles of Confederation represented states that were very guarded about the idea of a strong, central government. Instead, they were determined to remain as autonomous as possible, given the way the larger states seemed ready to overwhelm the interests of smaller ones.

Still, there was a prevailing mindset that recognized a loose confederation was incapable of providing the necessary strength needed to levy taxes, enforce laws, and defend against foreign adversaries, many of which were already poised to exploit the apparent weakness of the new nation that had just won her independence. Not only would the Articles of Confederation have to be replaced with a solid Constitution, but a collaboration would have to be established under the heading of a government that subordinated the concept of statehood to “we the people.”

However familiar that phrase is today, it was a brand new idea in the 18th century. While great thinkers had envisioned a representative government in the past, the type of Constitution that needed to be drafted would be the first of its kind.

Part of what made it so challenging is that most monarchies up until that point had built their authority on a partnership between the state and the church that enforced its will by through both a corrupted throne and a corrupted theology.

Religion and the Founding of the
American Republic

Against a prevailing view that eighteenth-century Americans had not perpetuated the first settlers’ passionate commitment to their faith, scholars now identify a high level of religious energy in colonies after 1700. According to one expert, religion was in the “ascension rather than the declension”; another sees a “rising vitality in religious life” from 1700 onward; a third finds religion in many parts of the colonies in a state of “feverish growth.” Figures on church attendance and church formation support these opinions. Between 1700 and 1740, an estimated 75 to 80 percent of the population attended churches, which were being built at a headlong pace.

Toward mid-century the country experienced its first major religious revival. The Great Awakening swept the English-speaking world, as religious energy vibrated between England, Wales, Scotland and the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. In America, the Awakening signaled the advent of an encompassing evangelicalism–the belief that the essence of religious experience was the “new birth,” inspired by the preaching of the Word. It invigorated even as it divided churches. The supporters of the Awakening and its evangelical thrust–Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists–became the largest American Protestant denominations by the first decades of the nineteenth century. Opponents of the Awakening or those split by it–Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists–were left behind.

Another religious movement that was the antithesis of evangelicalism made its appearance in the eighteenth century. Deism, which emphasized morality and rejected the orthodox Christian view of the divinity of Christ, found advocates among upper-class Americans. Conspicuous among them were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Deists, never more than “a minority within a minority,” were submerged by evangelicalism in the nineteenth century.2

It was that state sanctioned brand of Christianity that had inspired America’s first settlers to leave their homes and establish colonies where religious freedom could be enjoyed. The Great Awakening took the idea of religious liberty a step further by emphasizing how one’s relationship with the Almighty needed to be a personal decision and not something that could be accomplished in the context of a legislative action. With that spiritual epiphany came the idea that our rights are guaranteed by God and not dispensed by a king, which obviously gave credence to the quest for independence.

But how do you outline a system of government founded on the Divine principles detailed in the Declaration of Independence, and yet not reference them in a way that makes them appear compulsory?

Bear in mind that in some states, should you want to serve in government, you had to belong to a specific denomination in order to be considered.1 When the Constitution was being ratified, Christianity wasn’t just a casual religious exercise, as much as it was ingrained into the culture.

It’s in that context that you want to process the substance of the Constitution.

Critics who want to reduce the Constitution to a purely secular enterprise have to ignore the spiritual perspective of the delegates, the people they represented, and the resources they appealed to for guidance and inspiration.

Dr. M.E. Bradford of the University of Dallas wrote a series of biographical sketches on the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The following table lists the church membership of each of the delegates.3

Delegate Denomination
New Hampshire
John Langdon Congregationalist
Nicholas Gilman Congregationalist
Massachusetts
Elbridge Gerry Episcopalian
Rufus King Episcopalian
Caleb Strong Congregationalist
Nathaniel Gorham Congregationalist
Connecticut
Roger Sherman Congregationalist
William Samuel Johnson Episcopalian
Oliver Ellsworth Congregationalist
New York
Alexander Hamilton Episcopalian
John Lansing Dutch Reformed
Robert Yates Dutch Reformed
New Jersey
Wiliam Patterson Presbyterian
Wiliam Livingston Presbyterian
Jonathan Dayton Episcopalian
David Blearily Episcopalian
William Churchill Houston Presbyterian
Pennsylvania
Benjamin Franklin Deist
Robert Morris Episcopalian
James Wilson Episcopalian / Deist
Gouverneur Morris Episcopalian
Thomas Mifflin Quaker / Lutheran
George Clymer Quaker / Episcopalian
Thomas FitzSimmons Roman Catholic
Jared Ingersoll Presbyterian
Delaware
John Dickinson Quaker / Deist
George Read Episcopalian
Richard Bassett Methodist
Gunning Bedford Presbyterian
Jacob Broom Lutheran
Maryland
Luther Martin Episcopalian
Daniel Carroll Roman Catholic
John Francis Mercer Episcopalian
James McHenry Presbyterian
Daniel of St Thomas Jennifer Episcopalian
Virginia
George Washington Episcopalian
James Madison Episcopalian
George Mason Episcopalian
Edmund Jennings Randolph Episcopalian
James Blair, Jr Episcopalian
James McClung Presbyterian
George Wythe Episcopalian
North Carolina
William Richardson Davie Presbyterian
Hugh Williamson Presbyterian / Deist
William Blount Presbyterian
Alexander Martin Presbyterian / Episcopalian
Richard Dobbs Spaight, Jr Episcopalian
South Carolina
John Rutledge Episcopalian
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Episcopalian
Pierce Butler Episcopalian
Charles Pickney III Episcopalian
Georgia
Abraham Baldwin Congregationalist
William Leigh Pierce Episcopalian
William Houstoun Episcopalian
William Few Methodist

Two professors, Donald S. Lultz and Charles S. Hynemman, reviewed an estimated 15,000 items, and closely read 2,200 books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and monographs with explicitly political content printed between 1760 and 1805. They reduced this to 916 items, about one-third of all political writings longer than 2,000 words.

From these items, Lutz and Hynemann identified 3,154 references to other sources. The source most cited by the founding fathers was the Bible, which accounted for 34% of all citations.

The Constitution was referred to as a “miracle” by George Washington. He presided over all the proceedings and was there to watch the negotiations first hand.

With each state you had a religious and economic culture that was, in some cases, very distinctive. With that distinction came a specific set of expectations and anxieties that needed to be addressed and resolved in a way that allowed for the birth of a nation as opposed to an argument between neighbors.

This was accomplished only because of a willingness to acknowledge an Authority that transcended politics. John Adams said it best when he said, ““We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

Without a Divine Absolute as the starting point – without incorporating the Biblical Principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence – real collaboration and true community is overwhelmed by selfishness posing as entitlement.

1. “Constitution Annotated”, “ArtVI.C3.2.1 Historical Background on Religious Test for Government Offices”, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artVI-C3-2-1/ALDE_00013638/#ALDF_00027145, accessed May 6, 20262.

2. “Library of Congress”, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic”, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel02.html, accessed May 6, 2026

3. M.E. Bradford, (Marlborough, N/H.: Plymouth Rock Foundation, 1982), pp iv-v

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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