The Civic Pew
Week 2 · Faith & history

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

What the Declaration, the Constitution, the early state charters, and the founders’ own words actually say—and why the honest answer has more than one part.

By The Civic Pew

Few questions start an argument faster. Some believers answer with a confident “Yes,” and some critics answer with an equally confident “No.” Both usually have a stack of quotations ready. The trouble is that the quotations often come without context, and some of the most popular ones were never said at all.

Scripture calls us to something better than winning the argument: “Do not lie to one another” (Colossians 3:9). It also warns that “The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). So let’s examine. We’ll look at what the Bible means by a nation under God, then let the founding generation speak for itself.

1. Start with the right question

“Christian nation” can mean at least three different things. It can mean a nation in covenant with God, the way Israel is. It can mean a government that officially establishes Christianity as its religion. Or it can mean a people whose beliefs, laws, and habits were deeply shaped by the Bible. The honest answer depends on which one we mean—and the answers are not all the same.

2. America is not a covenant nation the way Israel is (Psalm 33:12; Genesis 17:7)

Believers often quote this verse about America:

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance.” (Psalm 33:12, NASB 1995)
NKJV: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people He has chosen as His own inheritance.”

The second line matters. The psalmist is celebrating Israel, the people God chose for Himself. That choice rests on a covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants, and God Himself called it everlasting:

“I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you.” (Genesis 17:7, NASB 1995)
NKJV: “And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your descendants after you.”

God repeated the promise for Isaac: “I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him” (Genesis 17:19). The psalmist sings that “He has remembered His covenant forever … The covenant which He made with Abraham, And His oath to Isaac. Then He confirmed it to Jacob for a statute, To Israel as an everlasting covenant” (Psalm 105:8–10). Through Jeremiah, God tied His faithfulness to Israel to the sun, moon, and stars: “If this fixed order departs From before Me,” declares the Lord, “Then the offspring of Israel also will cease From being a nation before Me forever” (Jeremiah 31:36).

The New Testament says the same. Paul asks, “God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be!” (Romans 11:1; NKJV: “has God cast away His people? Certainly not!”). He adds that the people of Israel “are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:28–29; NKJV: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable”).

Gentiles who trust in Jesus are welcomed into the blessing promised to Abraham—Paul pictures them as branches “grafted in” to Israel’s olive tree, warning them, “do not be arrogant toward the branches” (Romans 11:17–18). Peter can therefore call believers “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9; NKJV: “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation”). That is a welcome into God’s promises, not a cancellation of them.

So the point here is simple. God made no covenant with the United States, and no modern country can claim the promises He made to Abraham and his descendants. America is not a covenant nation in the way Israel is. That does not make Psalm 33:12 irrelevant to us. Any people is blessed when it honors the true God, and Scripture says plainly that “Righteousness exalts a nation, But sin is a disgrace to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). The word there is again goy—any nation.

3. What the national founding documents say

The Declaration of Independence (1776) speaks of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” says that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” appeals “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” and closes “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Those are unmistakably theistic claims: rights come from God, not from government. They are also phrased broadly enough that a devout believer and a deist could both sign them—and both did.

The Constitution (1787) is quieter. It never mentions God in its body. It forbids any religious test: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” (Article VI). The First Amendment (1791) adds, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Yet the same document assumes a Christian calendar—the President has ten days to sign a bill, “Sundays excepted”—and it is dated “in the Year of our Lord” 1787.

So at the national level the founders made a deliberate choice: no official church, no religious requirement for office, and full freedom of worship. That was not hostility to faith. Many of its strongest supporters were devout Christians who had seen what state-run religion did to dissenters.

4. The states were a different story

Most religious law in early America was state law, and there the picture is far more explicitly Christian. Delaware’s 1776 constitution required every officeholder to declare: “I, A B. do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”

Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution required legislators to affirm: “I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration.” Massachusetts’s 1780 Declaration of Rights called worship of “the SUPREME BEING, the great creator and preserver of the universe” both “the right as well as the duty of all men in society,” and Massachusetts kept tax-supported churches until 1833.

Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, said the same kind of thing in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

5. The founders: devout, doubting, and in between

The founders were not all alike. Many were orthodox believers. John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration, was a minister who trained a generation of leaders. Others held views we would call deist or unorthodox, and honesty means saying so.

Benjamin Franklin gave one of the most moving speeches of the Constitutional Convention on June 28, 1787. “I have lived, Sir, a long time,” he said, “and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God Governs in the affairs of men.” He even quoted Psalm 127:1 (in the NASB, “Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it”). He moved that the delegates open each day with prayer. But James Madison’s notes record that the motion never came to a vote; the delegates adjourned instead. And three years later, a few weeks before his death, Franklin told Ezra Stiles that he believed in one God and admired the morals Jesus taught, but had “some doubts as to his divinity.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1803, “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.” In other words, Jefferson honored Jesus as a moral teacher while denying that He is God. Later he cut and pasted his own edition of the Gospels, leaving out the miracles.

John Adams, writing as President to Massachusetts militia officers in 1798, put the founders’ common conviction bluntly: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” And George Washington warned in his Farewell Address (1796), “let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”

6. The biblical roots of the founders’ convictions

The founders did not build a church, but many of their core convictions have deep roots in Scripture. Here are several, with an honest word about which links are documented and which are later readings.

Rights come from the Creator. The Declaration says people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Scripture grounds human worth in creation itself: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). The Declaration does not cite Genesis, but the claim that rights come from God rather than from government fits the biblical teaching that every person bears His image (see Week 5).

Human nature needs restraint, so power must be divided. Scripture is blunt about the human heart:

“The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, NASB 1995)
NKJV: “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?”

James Madison made the same kind of argument for checks and balances in The Federalist No. 51 (1788): “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Because rulers are not angels either, he argued that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Madison does not quote Jeremiah, but his view of human nature matches it. Many teachers today also point to Isaiah 33:22—“For the Lord is our judge, The Lord is our lawgiver, The Lord is our king; He will save us” (NKJV: “For the Lord is our Judge, The Lord is our Lawgiver, The Lord is our King; He will save us”)—as a picture of the three branches: judicial, legislative, and executive.

No one is above the law. Even Israel’s king was to live under God’s law. Moses said the king “shall write for himself a copy of this law … and he shall read it all the days of his life … that his heart may not be lifted up above his countrymen” (Deuteronomy 17:18–20; NKJV: “that his heart may not be lifted above his brethren”). In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine, who was no orthodox believer, drew the same line for America: “in America the law is king.” Paine himself argued against monarchy from 1 Samuel 8, though the link to Deuteronomy 17 is our observation, not his citation.

Liberty. The Liberty Bell, ordered by the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1751, bears the words of Leviticus 25:10 in the King James wording: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” That is a documented link. The NASB reads, “proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants,” and the NKJV, “proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants.” The New Testament goes deeper: “It was for freedom that Christ set us free” (Galatians 5:1), and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17). It also guards that freedom from misuse: “only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13; NKJV: “only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another”).

Choose rulers of good character. Jethro advised Moses to “select out of all the people able men who fear God, men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain” (Exodus 18:21; NKJV: “able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness”). The founders made the same connection between virtue and self-government; as John Adams put it (quoted above), the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious People.”

Conscience answers to God first. When the authorities ordered the apostles to stop preaching, “Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men’” (Acts 5:29; NKJV: “We ought to obey God rather than men”). In 1776 Benjamin Franklin proposed a design for the Great Seal with the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God,” and Thomas Jefferson later used the phrase on his personal seal. Whether that motto is a faithful reading of Acts 5:29 is debated (see Week 4 on Romans 13), but it shows how readily the founding generation reached for biblical language about God’s authority over rulers.

7. Two documents that cut both ways

In 1797 the Senate approved, and President Adams signed, a treaty with Tripoli whose English text says “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” Critics of the “Christian nation” view quote it often. It was a diplomatic assurance to a Muslim state that America had no religious quarrel with it. And the State Department’s historical adviser, Hunter Miller, reported in 1931 that the Arabic text of the treaty has no matching article: “There is no Article 11.”

On the other side, believers often quote the Supreme Court’s 1892 opinion in Holy Trinity Church v. United States, which surveyed American history and concluded “that this is a Christian nation.” But the opinion’s author, Justice David Brewer, later explained what he meant. “But in what sense can it be called a Christian nation?” he asked in 1905. “Not in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or that the people are in any manner compelled to support it.” He added that “the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions,” while the people and their culture had been profoundly shaped by Christianity.

Brewer’s answer is close to where the evidence leads. America was not founded as a Christian state. It was founded largely by Christians, on principles they drew in great part from the Bible: that people are created by God, that rights come from Him, that rulers are accountable, and that human nature needs restraint. And the same generation that wrote “all men are created equal” held roughly 700,000 people in slavery. Our history holds real goodness and real sin, and Scripture lets us name both.

So what does this look like in real life?

Was America founded as a Christian nation? Not as an officially Christian government—the founders chose religious freedom on purpose. But as a nation shaped by Christian people and biblical ideas, the answer is largely yes. That heritage is a gift, not a guarantee. It is ours to steward, with humility and with truth.

For reflection

  1. Which version of the “Christian nation” question have you usually heard argued?
  2. Why do you think the founders protected religious freedom at the national level while many states kept religious tests?
  3. Which of the founders’ convictions in section 6 do you see most clearly in Scripture, and which link seems weakest?
  4. What part of America’s spiritual heritage is your family or church called to carry forward?

Peace and Love,
The Civic Pew

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Sources and notes