The US Must Return to Her Founding Principles

As this year is the 250th birthday of the United States, it is valuable to note that while our culture is comparatively young, our constitutional government is among the oldest in the world. A unique revolution in 1776 became an inspiration for many future countries. Due to the Christian foundations upon which this nation was formed, we immediately set about writing a governing set of laws, finally settling on the world’s oldest continuously governing constitution, the United States Constitution.

Those foundations, under God’s providential blessing, are the reason why the United States would go on to become the greatest nation on earth for human flourishing. The Declaration of Independence was not only our birth certificate, but also one of the best expressions of the nature of those foundations that hold up our republic. It is by no means insignificant that our 250th anniversary is marked by the signing of that great document.

The Impact of the Great Awakening

The first words of the declaration are, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” The authors recognized that they were a part of the flow of the historical events in which they lived. What began in 1620, born in Christianity, became the cultural ethos of the entire nation with the Great Awakening during the 1730s and ’40s. The Charter of Rhode Island in 1663 is a great example of this point as seen in this excerpt:

They have freely declared . . . that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained . . . with a full liberty in religious concernments and that true piety is rightly grounded upon gospel principles.1

Without the Great Awakening, it is quite possible that we would not have had the American Revolution. Historian Joseph Laconte noted that colonial America was deeply shaped by Protestant Christianity.2 The Bible served as a primary educational and cultural text. It was by far the most quoted book of the founding generation. It was the ministers that provided the moral and theological justification for resistance to Britain. Even Thomas Paine, the most atheistic founder, relied heavily on biblical arguments in Common Sense. The Enlightenment was wreaking havoc in France and would produce a destructive force ending in multiple revolutions, including the dictatorship of Napoleon, and the destructive communist revolutions of the 20th century. But that was an anti-religious, secular cultural revolution. The American Revolution was entirely different. The declaration said that our republic was taking “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”3 It was a result of the Scottish enlightenment movement combining the truths of Scripture with reason from God’s given natural law. It was the Great Awakening that saturated the American culture with a biblical grounding to grow the ideas of liberty and limited government.

Rights Given by Our Creator

Only when a nation bases its laws on God can you hope to have a stable republic.

Again we turn to the Declaration of Independence to see the nature of what makes the United States unique. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Only when a nation bases its laws on God can you hope to have a stable republic. Not just any God, but the one who created heaven and earth. If our rights come from anyone but God, then anyone can take them away. Thomas Jefferson and the founders believed this was self-evident because they believed that God has written his law on our hearts. In Romans 2:15 (ESV), Paul writes, “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them” We see that even those who do not have the Mosaic law can recognize God’s moral standards through their conscience, indicating that God’s law is universally known.

It was self-evident to Benjamin Rush, a key contributor to our independence. He wrote that we cannot profess to be republicans and yet neglect the “only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government; that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of republicanism.”4 George Washington in his Farewell Address noted that religion and morality were the two great pillars our nation is built upon.5 John Adams said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”6 These are not just historical quotations; they are the expressions of the very fabric of what undergirds good government.

The Bible teaches that a nation’s laws should be grounded in God’s Word because he is the ultimate judge, lawgiver, and source of blessing. When laws reflect his righteousness and standards, nations prosper; when they do not, they face judgment.

He made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation. (Acts 17:26)

For Yahweh is our judge,
Yahweh is our lawgiver,
Yahweh is our king;
He will save us. (Isaiah 33:22)

The wicked will return to Sheol,
Even all the nations who forget God. (Psalm 9:17)

Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh,
The people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance. (Psalm 33:12)

Righteousness exalts a nation,
But sin is a disgrace to any people. (Proverbs 14:34)

National Sins

Especially, note the last verse, in that it is any nation that is exalted and it is any nation that would be condemned. Remember that when the Israelite people marched into the promised land, they did so when God was righteously bringing judgment upon the Canaanites as God noted in Genesis 15:16 because their iniquity was complete. The Canaanites were not God’s people. They are pagan nations who are still accountable to God’s laws. Unfortunately, the Israelites forgot these commands and by the end of Judges, we read that they were under a constant cycle of judgment because everyone was doing what was “right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

Unfortunately, these principles are not so self-evident anymore.

There has been a fundamental worldview shift in our nation, as well as all Western culture, that has repudiated the very foundations upon which this republic stands. George Washington continued in his Farewell Address by warning that if anyone attacked those two pillars (religion and morality) that hold up our democratic republic, they could not call themselves a patriot.7 Today, these two pillars have been all but replaced with naturalism and secularism. Washington would call people traitors who have pushed the fundamental attack on the sovereignty of God, creation, creation order, origin of law, etc. He would agree with John Adams that our Constitution “is wholly inadequate to the government” of the kind of culture we have been building for the last 70 years.

Many critics of this perspective will claim that Christianity was a problem and that what is needed is a secular state divorced from Christian ideas. But rather, the problems we faced were at dissonance of our founding Christian principles. “A house divided against itself cannot stand” was a biblical reference made by Abraham Lincoln fourscore years after the founding of our nation. He was decrying the cancer of slavery, but his statement could be applied to any idea that stands in opposition to the principles upon which the nation was founded. This statement is just as true and important for us today. The problems we are facing are less obvious but ultimately just as destructive of an attack to the foundation of our country.

Our first chief justice and one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, John Jay, recognizing this said, “It is to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.”8

Even just 100 years ago, Western culture was still heavily influenced by a biblical worldview. If you were to ask people at that time about societal foundations, they would likely have identified primarily with biblical authority. Society largely operated on the assumption that the Bible was the source of truth, influencing law, ethics, and morality. People generally held a belief in the Genesis account, viewing man as a special creation made in the image of God. Marriage was viewed as a permanent covenant between one man and one woman, and the family was considered the primary unit of society, as established in Scripture. Unlike the modern worldview, which is based on a belief that we are just evolved animals, people largely believed they were accountable to God for their actions.

A Post-Christian Society

Where are we now? Our culture has increasingly embraced the ideas of the French Revolution instead of the American Revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau mistakenly believed that “the Christian spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime.”9 As Alexis de Tocqueville so rightly observed, the French Revolution became a religion of reason alone, “a new kind of religion.”10 The ascendant secularism of Modern Progressivism has unfortunately embraced this destructive foundation in an 180-degree reversal of truth. It has influenced our culture in many ways.

As Albert Mohler notes,

A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us. The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.11

American society is full of people whom George Washington would call traitors. They are suppressing the name of God in any public arena, removing the Ten Commandments from courthouses, forcing the removal of nativity scenes from public places, and trying to suppress what Christian ministers can say in the pulpits of their own churches. God is prohibited from public schools, and kids are taught the unscientific perspective that they are nothing more than evolved animals and there is no higher authority to which we must answer. One million of our most vulnerable Americans are being murdered. In the name of radical gender ideology, children are being mutilated. The racial ideologies of slavery and segregation are being revived in the name of critical race theory. Answers in Genesis reveals that the consensus of Christian values has been replaced by the story of evolution, which is at odds with the values on which we were founded.

Return to Our Nation’s Biblical Roots!

Removing God from society is not the freedom of religion that was talked about in every state’s constitution and the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. Prohibition of religious worship in private and public settings would have been the furthest thing from the minds of the founders and other early colonists. Regarding the abolition of slavery, Fredrick Douglass believed a return to our founding principles was necessary. “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny. . . . The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”12

Americans must not let the purpose for which the nation was established be forgotten: liberty and order under accountability to the Creator God.

Preserving our republic and American liberty depends first upon its citizenry understanding the foundations on which this greatly blessed country was built and then preserving those principles. This will only happen if the people begin to return to our biblical roots. Americans must not let the purpose for which the nation was established be forgotten: liberty and order under accountability to the Creator God. In the declaration, the founders ended the document by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions”13 and set their direction toward the only compass point worthwhile. “With a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”14 The founding fathers passed a torch; modern Americans would do well not to let it go out. We should not let the “government of the people, by the people, for the people . . . perish from the earth”!15