The Classical and Christian Influence over the American Founding
How can a nation renew itself? As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, one is reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Henry Lee on May 8, 1825. Here, Jefferson declined an invitation to Washington, D.C., for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Declaration in 1826 due to poor health. Yet, he provided the following to be read in his absence:
But with respect to our rights, and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American Whigs thought alike on these subjects. When forced, therefore, to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, nor merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.
Jefferson’s appeal to “common sense” provided a practical and intelligible justification for the Revolution. He continued with this well-known passage:
Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversations, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.
One finds a rather unique mixture of individuals in this quote from Jefferson: two ancients (Aristotle and Cicero, one Greek and one Roman, respectively) and two moderns (John Locke and Algernon Sidney, both British). Additionally, there is also a fifth reference: “etc.” (more on that below). As Charles R. Kesler has noted, one commonality amongst these thinkers is that they are republican with a small “r,” that is, they are anti-monarchial or anti-tyrannical and interested in public life led in freedom and with responsibility.
Flashing forward to 2025. What does this quote from Jefferson—and the work of Jefferson and other key American founders generally—tell American Protestants specifically about the roots of their own nation?
Jefferson proves to be a somewhat enigmatic figure. While the list of sources in his letter to Lee may indeed have been an influence on Jefferson’s understanding of the Declaration, one cannot discount the influence of various Christian ideas. Recent academic scholarship can help tell that story, and, in so doing, perhaps shed light on those broader “harmonizing sentiments of the day” as well as Jefferson’s undisclosed “etc.”
Jefferson’s Declaration
It is widely understood that the Founding Generation of Americans was largely Protestant and expressed a high level of biblical literacy. As Donald Lutz has documented, when surveying the political literature from 1760 to 1805, references to the Bible exceeded any European thinker or European school of thought. The Bible accounted for one-third of all citations in his sample. Even still, as others have shown, this study did not account for political sermons and other religious publications that did not also reference secular thinkers, which, if included, would have made his assessment of biblical citations even greater. The Bible was certainly a preeminent source in the thinking and writing of the American Founding era.
The Declaration of Independence refers to the Deity four times–“Nature’s God,” “Creator,” “Supreme Judge,” and “divine Providence.” According to Larry P. Arnn, God appears as each branch of government—legislator, executive, and judicial—and like a Founder. Thus, there is an argument for the separation of powers found in this list implying that man, in his natural equality, is—unlike God—incapable of exercising all the powers of government in his own hands. Additionally, this ontological distinction between God and man also teaches that one man cannot rule another man without his consent, or, as Jefferson would put it in a letter to be read at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Moreover, far from grounding natural rights in subjective relativity, the Declaration grounds its claims in self-evident truth. According to the Declaration, it is self-evident that humans are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Individual freedom and natural rights (including what many founders called the “sacred rights of conscience,” or religious liberty) derive from their equality. Man, then, institutes governments to fulfill his nature and to secure his rights based on the consent of the governed. Such security helps to ensure his safety and happiness. This is a high view of rights—rights that, according to the founders, were no longer protected by British rule. To again quote Charles Kesler, the Declaration “insists on looking at rights as part of a divine and natural endowment, or, to put it differently, looking at rights in light of the high (the ends of human nature) and not simply in light of the low (the needs).” These were rights not just existing in theory but in reality for these overwhelmingly Protestant Americans (as expressed in the long list of grievances against the King making up the bulk of the Declaration itself).
As Kody Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer put it in their book, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, the Declaration’s emphasis on God not only provides a teaching on human anthropology and the separation of powers, but the very grounds for judging an earthly king: “[In the Declaration] the king is thus implicitly contrasted with the only other individual specifically referenced in the body of the Declaration: God…God as Creator and author of the laws of nature is the supremely just legislator who provides the moral standards for assessing the moral validity of the king’s action.”
In a related vein, Daniel L. Dreisbach has connivingly shown that the Bible, and Protestant Reformed theology specifically, had an overwhelming influence on how the Founders understood the duty to resist tyrannical authority. For example, a well-known sermon by Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, delivered in 1750 and widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, articulated that it was a Christian duty to actively resist tyrants. Moreover, Reverend Samuel West delivered a 1776 sermon before the entire Massachusetts legislature stating that when magistrates “pursue measures directly destructive to the publick good, they cease being God’s minsters; they forfeit their right to obedience from the subject, they become the pests of society; and the community is under the strongest obligation of duty both to GOD and to its own members to resist and oppose them.” Similarly, the very first grievance listed in the Declaration calls for good laws conducive to the public good: “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Ultimately, according to Dreisbach, while there were some minority views expressing total obedience to the King, such views were “far out of the mainstream” at the time.
After referencing Jefferson’s 1825 letter to Lee cited above, Dreisbach asks, “Was this Protestant theology of resistance among those ‘harmonizing sentiments of the day’? While not pressing the argument too far, one could argue that the rhetoric of the Declaration is consistent with and, indeed, echoes aspects of the resistance literature rooted in the Protestant Reformation.”
Nature’s God?
Yet, who exactly is the “God” in the Declaration? According to many scholars, it is not the god of deism. To quote Mark David Hall (whose various scholarly works are excellent on this topic), many Americans in 1776 would have understood such a reference to God as the God of orthodox Christianity. Consider these examples provided by him in Did America Have a Christian Founding?:
…the Westminster Standards, a classic Reformed (Calvinist) confession of faith, refer to the Deity as ‘the Supreme Judge,’ ‘the great Creator of all things,’ ‘the first cause,’ ‘the righteous judge,’ ‘God the Creator,’ and ‘the supreme Lord and King of all the world,’ both in the original 1647 version and the 1788 American version. The Westminster Standards also regularly refer to ‘God’s Providence,’ and even proclaim that ‘the light of nature showeth that there is a God.’ Similarly, Isaac Watts, the ‘father of English Hymnody,’ called the Deity ‘nature’s God’ in a poem about Psalm 148:10.
Moreover, Jeffry H. Morrison has persuasively argued that the Declaration’s references to “‘divine Providence’ and ‘the Supreme Judge of the World’ would have been quite acceptable to Reformed Americans in 1776, and conjured up images of the ‘distinctly biblical God’ when they heard or read the Declaration.”1
Yet, today many academics, jurists, and activists who reject Christianity or the idea of a Christian influence on the American Founding often look to Jefferson as Exhibit A for evidence of their claim. Often cited is his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, in which he famously suggested the “wall of separation between Church & State” as the proper interpretation of the First Amendment (later picked up and cited as the definitive interpretation of the Establishment Clause by Justice Hugo Black and Wiley Rutledge by the Supreme Court in 1947). Yet, as Hall has also expressed, a clear understanding of Jefferson’s views cannot be pinned to just this one letter:
Jefferson issued calls for prayer and fasting as governor of Virginia, and in his revision of Virginia’s statutes he drafted bills stipulating when the governor could appoint “days of public fasting and humiliation, or thanksgiving” and to punish “Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers.” As a member of the Continental Congress he proposed that the nation adopt a seal containing the image of Moses “extending his hand over the sea, caus[ing] it to overwhelm Pharaoh” and the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” He closed his second Inaugural Address by encouraging all Americans to join him in seeking “the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old…,” and two days after completing his letter to the Danbury Baptists he attended church services in the U.S. Capitol, where he heard John Leland, the great Baptist minister and opponent of religious establishments, preach.
While Jefferson was not, according to Hall, “a pious man who wanted a union between church and state” and was “not an orthodox Christian,” his actions “did not attempt to completely remove religion from the public square. And what Jefferson did not completely exclude, most founders embraced.” Jefferson once referred to himself as “a sect by myself,” and—as a proponent of human reason—was skeptical of Christian teachings not confirmed by reason (such as the virgin birth and resurrection). Yet, he also described himself as “a real Christian,” and a disciple of the unadulterated doctrines and moral teachings from Jesus, uncorrupted by time or Jesus’s own epigones. Jefferson considered those pure moral teachings of Jesus “the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man.”
Here, an interesting distinction emerges between the exoteric (public) and esoteric (private) meaning of “God” in the Declaration.2 While, as Hall and others have documented, Jefferson did not believe in some core traditional teachings of Christianity, and likely had his own, non-Orthodox understanding of “God,” the broader (exoteric) public understanding of God in the Declaration would have been largely affirmed by many of the other founders and largely Protestant population at that time. In this respect, it is certainly plausible that Jefferson was being honest to “a candid world” in the Declaration and expressing the true sentiments of many Americans at that time regarding the orthodox Christian God.
Finally, to further assess the landscape of thinkers and ideas that penetrated Jefferson’s mind and his thinking on the Declaration, one can ascertain certain recommended reading lists he provided throughout his life. One of particular interest is his 1787 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr. In a section on moral philosophy, he recommends the sermons of “[Laurence] Stern,” an Anglican cleric, as “the best course of morality that ever was written.” In a section on religion, one finds a typical Jeffersonian recommendation. First, he encourages his young nephew to “question with boldness even the existence of a god,” but also to “examine first the religion of your own country. Read the bible then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus.”
Yet, Jefferson is clear to Carr that rejection of God’s existence, if based on a reasonable study, is acceptable: “If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in it’s (sic) exercise…If you find reason to believe there is a god, a good consciousness that you are acting under his eye, and that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement.” Notable here, of course, is that the Bible is not in the attached list of recommended reading but discussed in detail prior to the enclosed list—suggesting, as much as it may include superstition for him, it has a unique place representing the “religion of [his] own people.”
The above examples suggest that one plausible understanding of what Jefferson called “the harmonizing sentiments of the day” includes how God was understood by virtually all who read, debated, or revised the Declaration. That is, the biblical God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who is alive and active in the affairs of men. Additionally, while one cannot draw a definitive conclusion on the meaning of “etc.” in Jefferson’s letter to Lee, it is not inconceivable to suggest it may, in its own way, refer to the broader Christian influence of the time or to the broadly understood and revered God of orthodox Christianity—a God who is the “Alpha and Omega” and beyond addition in a list of merely great human thinkers.
Conclusion
The contemporary state of the American mind is greatly contested—with claims that it is closing, coddled, and even canceled. Certainly, the work of recovery and renewal is needed. While there are important religious components to this effort, there are also political components that, when understood within an Aristotelian perspective, can shape the culture and the broader American mind. In so doing, we mustn’t forget that in our daily political and constitutional battles that there exists an end, or telos, of the Constitution. Yet, this end is not found in the document itself. To identify what The Federalist calls “the fundamental principles of the Revolution,” we must turn to “the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects to which all political institutions aim and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.” That is, “We the People” must turn to the Declaration of Independence to understand what our Constitution is about and the kind of citizens it seeks to cultivate.
In taking up this cause, and the distinctively Christian sources that influenced our nation’s founding, we will not only recover the American mind but—to use Paul’s admonishing in Romans 12:2—renew the American mind. To once again familiarize ourselves with the sources of our own beginnings could help shake us out of our confused state, returning us to what Jefferson called “common sense.” This American mind is, yes, informed by classical and modern philosophy, but it is also deeply rooted in the principles deriving from Yahweh, whose Word so deeply influenced the Founding generation and “shall stand forever” (Isaiah 40:8).
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