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These founders were not saying that religion is the source of morality or that an individual’s morality cannot exist without religion. They were claiming that religion is necessary for societal morality. And they were wrong. The educated elite, including the founders, achieved morality independent of religion, but they failed to extend the possibility of that achievement to others. They thought religion was needed for the commoners. The enlightened could use reason to discover morality, so they needed no religion other than a bare deism or theism, to which many luminaries ascribed. John Stuart
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The founders may have been influenced by Enlightenment thinkers on this subject. We know that both Baruch Spinoza and John Locke profoundly influenced the founders’ thinking. Berated as an atheist and drummed out of Jewish society in Holland, Spinoza thought religion “in the highest degree necessary for the common people who lack the ability to perceive things clearly and distinctly.”42 Locke thought that for the “vulgar” and the “mass of mankind” it was better to have divine rules than to “leave it to the long, and sometimes intricate deductions of Reason, to be made out [by] them. Such
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Even if the founders were correct in this elitism and people really did need religion to prevent them from running amok, it does not follow that we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles. That a republic requires morality and therefore a moral people, and therefore a religious people, does not mean it requires Christians. The founders’ guarantee of religious freedom for all makes it clear that they did not think so either.
these Enlightenment thinkers and the founders they influenced shared an important constant: they did not view religion as valuable because of its truth claims or as a source of morality, but simply as a means of producing good behavior without a reasoned moral analysis. This is a severe blow to the Christian nationalist. Any religion would do; Judeo-Christianity was not special. Montesquieu, the political theorist the founders may have relied on more than any other, perhaps said it best: “even a false religion is the best security we can have of the probity of men.”46
WHEN REVIEWING THAT IRREVERENT MANUSCRIPT, Franklin rhetorically asked, “If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?”47 [emphasis in original] Here, Franklin’s imaginative mind failed him. To be fair, Franklin and the other founders did not have the data we possess today. Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a so...
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sociologist Phil Zuckerman explains, “Murder rates are actually lower in more secular nations and higher in more religious nations where...
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In fact, when any given factor of societal health or well-being is measured, the less religious countries score better. The least religious countries: Have the lowest rates of violent crime and homicide Are the best places to raise children and to be a mother Have the lowest rates of corruption Have the lowest levels of intolerance against racial and ethnic minorities Score highest for women’s rights and gender equality Have the greatest protection and enjoyment of political and civil liberties Are better at educating their youth in reading, math, and science Are the most peaceful Are the most
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This pattern also exists within the United States. Those states that are the most religious have more societal ills, and tend to: Have the highest rates of poverty Have the highest rates of obesity Have the highest rates of infant mortality Have the highest rates of STDs Have the highest rates of teen pregnancy Have the lowest percentage of college-educated adults Have the highest rates of murder and violent crime.51
This, of course, does not prove that religion causes immoral behavior, but it confirms that religion is not requi...
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By protecting the freedom of religion and divorcing government and religion, the founders guaranteed that religion would flourish in the new country. The benefits of the religion they thought necessary for the common people would be assured by keeping the two forever separate.
IF THE FOUNDERS BELIEVED THAT RELIGION was important to ensure moral behavior for the masses but not for themselves—the educated elite—it means the founders were moral without religion. It means they built a government using their own morality, not religion. And this eviscerates the Christian nationalist claim.
In fact, the Declaration cannot even properly be said to have severed the connection with Great Britain. It simply announced the separation. Two days before the Declaration was adopted, the Continental Congress approved Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, which John Adams had seconded, that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”8 The vote that approved Lee’s resolution
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Nearly fifty years after he drafted it, Jefferson wrote about “the object of the Declaration of Independence.”9 It was “[n]ot to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of” or “to say things which had never been said before.”10 It was meant “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.”11 It did not aim “at originality of principle or sentiment.”12 Put simply, “it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”13
The idea that all people are created equal is not a religious idea; the idea that some people are special or chosen is one that various religious groups have embraced throughout history. The entire Hebrew Bible is about the chosen people. Religion promotes elitism, not equality.
In the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that when a government becomes despotic, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” But, despite the Christian nationalists’ arguments to the contrary, self-government and revolution against tyranny are not principles derived from Christianity or the bible.
The Christian bible stands directly opposed to the Declaration’s central ideas, including that it is “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [their government], and to institute a new Government.”
Paul’s letter to the Romans demonstrates this opposition: Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.38 Paul claims that governments are instituted for men by god and that rebelling against the government is rebellion against his god.
The political philosophy on which the Declaration is based says people have a “duty to throw off” absolutist governments. Altering the government is at once a “necessity,” a “duty,” and a “right.” Jefferson says that it is “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” and speaks of “the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.” Rights, necessities, and duties, not obedience, sin, and submission.
John Adams put it with his customary bluntness in Article 7 of the Massachusetts Constitution’s Declaration of Rights: “The people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same.”43 Not a god, but the people alone.
The Declaration does not require blind obedience; the bible and the biblical god do. God takes away everything Job has—he kills his children, bankrupts him, sets his skin afire with boils. Job bears this train of abuse by continuing to worship god. This is precisely the opposite of what the Declaration demands: “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off…” For the founders, King George III was akin to the biblical god in this situation, abusing the
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Progress threatens religion—this was true for and well known to the founders. The founders had firsthand experience here. Ben Franklin was renowned in his time for snatching “lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”49 Until he invented the lightning rod, ringing church bells specially baptized with water from the Jordan River were used to ward off lightning.50 This practice, which required humans to grasp a connection to a hunk of metal atop the highest structure in a town, killed more than 120 bell-ringers from 1750 to 1784, but was still believed to be effective.51
Franklin retorted that “the Thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the Rain, Hail, or Sunshine of Heaven, against the Inconvenience of which we guard by Roofs & Shades without Scruple.”53 When organized Christianity failed to stop the spread of the useful invention, it blamed other natural phenomena, such as the 1755 Boston earthquake, on Franklin’s rods.54
Scientific, political, and social progress all threaten religion, which is why the bible demands blind obedience—“do not revile the king, even in your thoughts”56—
THE BIBLE AS A WHOLE—and Paul’s epistle to the Romans in particular—contradicts the Declaration and the Constitution in another respect. It holds that governments are “established by God.”58 “By me,” meaning by the biblical god, “kings reign” and “rulers rule,” says the bible.59 The Declaration of Independence is based on a different idea: that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.” This is the very foundation of the self-government ideal and an explicit rejection of a god-given government. That rejection is embodied (and rather
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The Declaration concerns human events, the powers of the earth, and the opinions of humanity; the only possible mention of the divine or supernatural in the above sentence, “Nature’s God,” is—as discussed at length in chapter 4—not supernatural at all.
The entire document enshrines a political philosophy that is, as Abraham Lincoln referred to it in the Gettysburg Address, “of the people, for the people, and by the people.”62
The Continental Congress assigned five men to a committee tasked with drafting the Declaration: Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. The committee then gave Jefferson the job. Franklin and Adams commented and suggested edits on two of Jefferson’s drafts before the draft went to the whole Continental Congress.
Not a single reference mentions Jesus Christ, Yahweh, or a specifically Christian god. The references specify, at most, a broad deism or, possibly, a narrow theism in the “Supreme Judge” reference.
Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin and the Continental Congress could have chosen to root the entitlements, endowments, appeals, and protections in Jesus Christ or any other specific god, but they did not. Instead, they carefully selected references that do not specify any religious denomination or sectarian belief. These were deliberate men who knew they were drafting a monumental and historic document; they chose their words carefully.
The references are not biblical. At the time, there were about eleven major English versions of bibles that the founders could have borrowed verbiage from.7 Two of the phrases, “divine Providence” and “Nature’s God,” do not appear in any of those bibles.
Scholars can argue forever about whether the references are deist or theist, but we can all be sure that they are not Christian.
Jefferson’s rough draft did contain a mention of the Christian religion—in a section condemning the slave trade. But the Continental Congress removed this passage from the final version.
That was the only mention of Christianity in the whole document—that the Christian king is a slaver while “infidel powers” loathe the slave trade. This effectively chastises Christianity’s monopoly on morality, with handwritten emphasis on its shortcomings. It’s the only explicit reference to Christianity, and it is highly critical. However, it didn’t make the final cut.
(That Jefferson could write of freedom so eloquently and condemn slavery in fervent and revealing terms here and elsewhere, while at the same time owning slaves and fathering children with the slaves, who then became slaves themselves, is a paradox of cowardice. He was one of America’s greatest intellects, excelled at communicating grand ideas in simple and poetic terms that enthrall us centuries later, but failed utterly and in terrible ways to practice some of those ideas.)11
The Declaration invoked natural law because the founders needed a legal basis to justify revolting against the positive law imposed by Parliament and George III. Natural law demands the abolition of inequality and privilege, so it is perfect for arguing against oppressive positive law.27
Seventeen years after the Declaration, as secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson wrote Opinion on the French Treaties. In it, he espoused natural law based in human nature: “Questions of natural right are triable by their conformity with the moral sense & reason of man. Those who write treatises of natural law, can only declare what their own moral sense & reason dictate in the several cases they state.”30 The Declaration, a pinnacle of natural law, is built on humans’ moral sense and reason.
In the Declaration, Jefferson appealed to a natural law founded in human nature and discoverable by human reason to justify a revolution against tyrannical positive law.
“the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” enshrined in the Declaration was not religious in any Judeo-Christian sense.36 As Stewart points out, Nature’s God, “the presiding deity of the American Revolution, is another word for ‘Nature.’”37 This makes sense. After all, the full phrase is “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Thomas Paine agreed: “As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, are regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature’s God, we speak philosophically
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Adams explicitly tells Jefferson that a belief in “Nature’s God” is deism, not Christianity: “We can never be so certain of any prophecy, or the fulfilment of any prophecy, or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle, as we are from the revelation of nature, that is, nature’s God, that two and two are equal to four.”40 Nature’s God is a law, like math.
Jefferson also wrote to Adams about Nature’s God, remarking that “of the nature of this being we know nothing.”42
Natural law centered on humanity was so foreign and antithetical to Christianity that the church considered it atheism.
If the theological scholars of Jefferson’s generation thought invoking “Nature’s God” was “arrant atheism,” we can safely conclude that Jefferson’s usage was not Judeo-Christian. The laws were not the biblical god’s—they were Nature’s, fixed from the beginning, physically impossible to transgress, and discoverable through the application of reason and science.45
US Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas broke down the “full meaning” of “each phrase” of the Declaration in an essay on his website; he quoted the wrong phrase, using “our Creator” instead of “their Creator.”52
But the founders’ choice of language in the second reference is telling. The clause refers not to our Creator or even to the Creator, but to their Creator. If Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin wished to refer to a specifically Judeo-Christian creator, the word their was not the best choice.
Three other possibilities, none adopted by the drafters, offer more specificity.
First, they could have written “Men are endowed ...
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Second, they could have expressed a shared
And of course, the best option for referring to a specific god would be to specify a particular “creator” by name—Jesus, Yahweh, YHWH, Our Christian Lord and Savior. This seems most likely if they had intended to invoke the Judeo-Christian god.
“Their” is also a possessive pronoun—“their rights as individuals.” In this context it indicates a choice, that individuals have their own, valid view of “their Creator.” Readers are meant to interpret this phrase as referring to whichever creator—god or otherwise—they believe in.
Given the phrase’s proximity to Nature’s God, we can be fairly certain that the framers were referring to natural laws and forces. This clause is either invoking a concept that is not Judeo-Christian or, with the simple and elegant use of the word “their,” recognizing the right to freedom of thought and belief that Jefferson protected in the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.58 Perhaps both. Neither supports the Judeo-Christian foundation myth.
