Date posted: 05-21-2021
Estimated Reading Time : 4:00
America was built on the truths of the Bible. This statement should not be (and indeed, did not used to be) controversial. But because of the leftist indoctrination of our nation today (through a long, patient revision of American history), most people are unaware of our thoroughly Christian roots.
To prove the point, let’s look first at our national birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence. It expressly mentions God four times. The references made there about God endorse principles that can be found in their entirety in no other religion or philosophy besides the Judeo-Christian tradition, namely:
- God created mankind.
- God vested mankind with unalienable rights.
- God has established a universal moral law (which they called the Law of Nature) which articulates those rights.
- God is the Supreme Judge of all people and will judge us by the purity of our conscience (“the rectitude of our intentions” as the Framers put it).
- We can trust God to take care of us (stating famously, “For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”).
Although school children (and university students alike) are taught today that the Founders were deists, the last quotation above proves otherwise. Deists believe God is uninvolved in the affairs of men – an idea our Founders almost universally rejected.
The Founders relied heavily on Two Treatises of Government, by British theologian John Locke. In that work, Locke articulated the biblical principles of government, citing the Bible over 1,500 times.
A strong majority of the signers of the Declaration were Christians. Twenty-nine of the fifty-six held what today would be considered seminary or Bible school degrees. Signer John Witherspoon was an ordained minister. Founder Charles Thompson published the first translation of the Greek Septuagint version of the Bible into English in America. John Hancock, while governor of New York, issued 22 evangelical prayer proclamations – and on and on.
Scholars at the University of Houston reviewed 15,000 original writings by the Founding Fathers and found that the Bible was the most common source they cited, approximately four times as often as the next most frequent source.
Secularists (those who want to remove God from all aspects of public life) claim that America had a secular founding and want you to believe that their view is supported by “modern historians.” If those modern so-called historians are right, then the great leaders of the past must have been wrong.
Founding Father John Adams said, “The general principles on which the Fathers achieved independence were . . . the general principles of Christianity. . . . Now I will avow that I then believed (and now believe) that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”
President Andrew Jackson said, the Bible is the “rock on which our republic rests.”
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren observed, “I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. . . . Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia . . . or to the Charter of New England . . . or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay . . . or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut . . . the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”
Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a Nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. . . . Its refining and elevating influence is indispensable to our most cherished hopes and ideals.”
America desperately needs Christians to re-awaken to their calling to be salt and light in the culture. We are called to stand for truth in every area of life, not just while in clerical robes behind a pulpit. This includes government. Biblical principles deserve equal consideration in the “marketplace of ideas.” Christians need to stop sitting on the sidelines, and get in the game.
Learn More
Visit our Research Center for great practical resources, including links to America’s foundation documents. Also learn how you can become a Truth & Liberty Coalition member and join us in standing for truth in the public square.