The Protestant Character of America’s Founding
On the Fourth of July, we celebrate the Declaration of Independence and America’s independence from Great Britain. Many of us are familiar with the Declaration, its content, and purposes—or at least we think we are. But curious minds will ask many questions about it: What were the circumstances that led to the Declaration? Who wrote it, and what was the drafting process like? What is the meaning of the Preamble, and is there any logic or reason to the long list of grievances? Had there ever been a document like the Declaration before, or were the founders doing something de novo?
One of the more interesting questions that is often overlooked is, what kind of document is the Declaration? More often, all of the debate centers on what the Declaration says and means. Yet the meaning of what the Declaration says will, in part, be determined by what kind of document it is, as literary genre is important for understanding the purpose, scope, and meaning of a literary work. In the popular imagination, the Declaration is a “social contract.” What comes to mind, of course, is Rousseau’s famous Social Contract (1762), in which the French philosopher describes the origin of civil society as requiring the collective will of the people to draw up a political contract to preserve themselves.
Scholars of American history and political philosophers are more precise: the Declaration is a “social compact” of the kind described in John Locke’s Two Treatises (1689). There, Locke describes how men create political society: “the only way whereby anyone divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it” (§95). Most political scientists would argue that the authors of the Declaration were knowingly following Locke in writing a document whereby the American people could compact with each other to create a new nation with a new constitution in order to protect the people’s rights and secure their safety against foreign aggressors.
Once you read deeper into the literature, however, you find that the assertion that the Declaration is a Lockean social compact is, for many political scientists, a denial of something else: that the Declaration (and the founding in general) is a radical break from the colonial period that was marked by religious and political covenants. The contrast is especially poignant with the Puritans, who organized their communities first around religious covenants of the Christian faithful and then modeled their political charters and oaths after their religious societies (this was known as the Congregational Way, which primarily referred to church government). The assertion by political scientists is that the Declaration (and later the Constitution) broke from this mold for the following reasons: the Declaration is made between men and men, not man and God; it does not require church membership or Christian salvation to be a part of society; and its ends or purposes are purely secular, not religious or eternal. In this sense, the Declaration as a social compact marks the influence of the Enlightenment, rationalism, secularism, and early modern political thought (of Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke), and thus a rejection of the Christian, provincial, and closed societies of the Puritans in New England and other settlers elsewhere in the Americas.
Contract, Compact, Covenant?
Is there really a meaningful difference between a contract, a compact, and a covenant? If so, how can we tell? There is some evidence that these terms were used interchangeably in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; yet even so, we can discern general distinctions between them—and even other kinds of political agreements and arrangements. In multiple works, Professor Donald S. Lutz (1943-2024) outlined the main differences between a contract, a compact, and a covenant (Lutz also overviews what was meant by “agreements,” “organic acts,” “combinations,” “frames,” “oaths,” “ordinances,” “patents,” and “charters”).
A contract is an agreement among men that stipulates mutual responsibilities regarding a specific matter. It usually involved small groups of people or individuals and was closely associated with business and legal dealings. Importantly, a contract cannot form the foundation of a political community since contracts imply a pre-existing political or legal authority under which the terms of the contract are legally binding, enforceable, and justiciable (in cases of conflict or negligence). While contracts are “law” in the modern sense, they are not fundamental law.
In a similar vein, compacts are mutual agreements among men, but their foundation and scope are greater. A compact was usually made by all the members of a political community or between independent political societies (nations). The root idea of a compact is to “knit together” in terms of binding the disparate pieces of a nation into a single and coherent political people. It was an agreement that created a community or political entity that did not exist prior. (While one might look to the “Mayflower Compact” as an example of a political compact, that was a later name given to it. It was originally called “the Plymouth Combination.”)
Covenants were more complex than both contracts and compacts, and they were much older—both as religious and political agreements. Covenants had a civil meaning in England, where they referred to a formal agreement that derived its legal validity from the seal of the Crown. It was an agreement witnessed and made good by the highest authority in the land. The religious counterpart substituted God for the King: the religious covenant among believers was formalized and secured by God, whether or not God was a party to the contract or just its guarantor. Critically, religious covenants were essentially religious oaths made between men whose promises were sworn on the authority of God. Similarly, political covenants also included an oath-taking component before either the King or God himself instead of resting merely on the authority of the consent of the parties. Those agreements where both the Crown and God were invoked as witnesses and securers of the covenants were simultaneously civil and religious covenants.
Lutz explains that a “complete political covenant” would include the following elements:
(a) An oath calling on God as a witness or partner; (b) the creation of a people whose members are identified by those who signed the covenant; (c) the creation of a civil body politic or government; (d) the specification of the shared goals and values, a shared meaning, that defined (self-defined) the basis for the people living together; and (e) the creation and description of institutions for collective decision making.
In the evolution of English and American politics and law, covenants devolved into compacts and then contracts. However, compacts and covenants were almost identical: all covenants were compacts, and any compact could be turned into a covenant merely by calling upon God to witness the agreement.
Re-Reading (and Rethinking) the Declaration
Given this categorization, is it best to classify the Declaration as a contract, a compact, or a covenant? A good case can be made that the Declaration is best understood as a covenant—it is more than just a compact and certainly not a contract.
The Declaration announces the existence of a people: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” In a sense, the Declaration presupposes the existence of a people already in America, and yet it also helps to create and shape the people as a united community that had never existed before. Who are the parties to the Declaration? Both the people of the colonies and the colonies themselves: “We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress … do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right out to be free and independent states.” In this manner, the unique federative nature of America consisting of many different peoples, independent states, and a united national government, was present in nascent form in the Declaration.
The Declaration also effectively created a new American civil body politic with a shared understanding of the world, of shared meaning and values, and especially of shared goals or political ends. The united colonies were equal among each other, and the people of the states were endowed with natural rights that governments were obligated to protect. Government is immediately the creation of the consent of the people, indicating that the people corporately possess political sovereignty that they then delegate to their representatives. Thus, government is a trust, and political representatives must govern for the good of the whole—the welfare of the people—their lives, liberties, and happiness. When governments fail to do this and when they abuse their power and oppress the people they were designed to benefit, then the people have the right to revolution: to overthrow their political officials and the political system and to establish a new government upon grounds more just and prudent than before.
However, the critical aspects of the Declaration that make it a covenant are its religious elements. God is invoked four times: as Creator, Nature’s God, Providence, and Supreme Judge. These are not just random names or references. Instead, what is represented is God as occupying the three branches of government: Legislator (Creator of man and Nature’s God), Executive (Providential governor), and Judge (Supreme Judge). The foundation of America’s political philosophy cannot be understood without reference to the Christian God. It is God who has created men, who has endowed them with natural rights and equality, and who has designed government as a divine ordinance for their good. In this sense, by referencing a living God who loves and cares for the good of men and who has providentially provided for their needs through the institution of government, the nuts and bolts of the American political tradition appeal to divine authority and divine witness for its coherence. Without the Christian God, the Declaration and all that followed (the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance, the state constitutions, the Early Republic, and all of American political history) does not make sense.
Enlightenment Objections
At this point, atheistic and secular scholars will argue that the references to God in the Declaration are not the Christian God (there’s no reference to Jesus Christ, the Bible, or the gospel) but bare theism, perhaps even deism, or what many term the “God of the Philosophers”—the God of the Enlightenment. Besides, the argument goes, Jefferson drafted the Declaration, and Jefferson was hardly a Christian. Perhaps he wasn’t a full-fledged deist, but he held the prerogative to judge the Christian God (and His revealed Scripture) on the basis of man’s reason. The Declaration’s invocation of the divine is not an appeal to the Christian God but to Reason’s god—what human rationality can know about the divine. Man’s reason, then, is the ultimate witness and guarantor, not God. This argument continues via comparison. Look at the Mayflower Compact (1620) versus the Declaration (1776), they say. The former speaks of “the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith” as the purposes of the charter. The Declaration lacks such specific Christian references. Instead, the Declaration’s references to God are less-than-Christian terminology, a kind of ‘secularization’ of the covenantal form as it devolved into a social compact and then a legal contract.
This objection fails because it does not fully know or account for America’s Protestant political history. In its continental, English, and American iterations, Protestant political theory regularly referred to the Christian God in these exact terms when referencing temporal and civil kingdoms. Consider John Davenport’s 1663 sermon A Discourse About Civil Government, where he begins by distinguishing between the two orders of government:
First then, let us distinguish between the two Administrations or Polities, Ecclesiastical and Civil, which men commonly call the Church, and Common-wealth. I incline rather to them who speaking of a Christian Communion, make the Communion to be the Genus, and the State Ecclesiastical and Civil to be the Species of it. For in a Christian Communion there are these different Administrations or Polities or States, Ecclesiastical & Civil: Ecclesiastical Administrations, are a Divine Order appointed to Believers for holy communion of holy things: Civil Administrations, are An Humane Order appointed by God to men for Civil Fellowship of humane things.
Davenport then says this when speaking of God vis-a-vis the Commonwealth: “Though they both agree in this, that God is the Efficient Author of them both and that by Christ, yet not eadem ratione [for the same reason]. For, God as the Creator and Governor of the World, is the Author of Civil Order and Administrations…” Christian laymen, ministers, and statesmen regularly deployed such names for God (Creator, Divine Providence, Supreme Judge, Governor of the World, King, Nature’s God, etc.) when speaking of his relationship to the natural world and man’s civil and political order. You can find these references in the hundreds—if not thousands—of American sermons and political tracts throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The second problem with this objection is its over-reliance on Jefferson. If you read Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, the only reference to the divine is “nature’s god” (not capitalized). Yes, Jefferson wrote the first draft. But then it went to the Committee of Five (Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston), who revised it; then it went to the Continental Congress, which revised it again. Dozens of changes were made to Jefferson’s draft, and Jefferson was not entirely happy with the final product. What was one thing changed? All the other references to God were added by the Committee and Congress over-and-against Jefferson’s initial thought. Later in life, in separate letters of John Adams (1823) and Richard Henry Lee (1825), Jefferson claimed not originality in the Declaration but merely a reflection of the “harmonizing sentiment” of the people. And so it was, more than we realize, for the references to God in the Declaration by which Americans called upon Him to witness and secure their national covenant reflect the civil aspect of their “Christian Communion”—their essential Christian piety, history, and (specifically Protestant) political tradition.
Oaths and Divine Guarantees
The last part of the Declaration that makes it a covenant is that it contains an oath that calls upon God as a witness and guarantor for the promises it makes. The oath is the famous final sentence: “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” And the Declaration invokes God as witness and guarantor twice when the Americans asserted that they were “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” and had “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” The colonists were declaring before the Almighty God that their cause was just and right, and therefore any man who would contend with the righteousness of their independence and grievances would have to contend with a just and holy God. While God is not himself a party to the Declaration as he is in many religious covenants, his role in the political covenant of America is to secure the moral justness of the American cause and, in so doing, bless them. The Declaration even contains indirect blessings and curses: the blessing of good and just government versus the curse of tyranny, oppression, and death.
A final objection to the Declaration as a covenant is that it fails to meet Lutz’s last criterion above in that it doesn’t create the institutions of government used for collective decision making. There is a simple solution to this, however. When the Continental Congress in early 1776 charged the Committee of Five with drafting a statement of national declaration from Great Britain, they simultaneously created a committee with John Dickinson at its head for drafting a constitution. The result, of course, was the Articles of Confederation, which was written in 1776 but not ratified until 1781. Thus, the same national Congress intended to produce a declaration and constitution at the same time: two charters that should be read as one piece since the first breaks the existing political bonds and creates new ones, while the second directs the organization and political expression of those political bonds—the American people.
When the Declaration and Constitution are understood as being a seamless and single political expression, not opposed or in tension, one can make sense of the supposedly strange lack of references to God in the Constitution. The Constitution does not invoke God because the Declaration is its preamble. And with its narrow purpose being to establish the political system, mechanisms, and institutions necessary for collective decision-making, the Constitution did not need to invoke God as an authority or blessing because that was presumed—it had already been said many years earlier and many times since and was assumed by all at the Philadelphia Convention.
Covenantal America
In a sense, those who argue that the Declaration is a compact are not wrong. It is a solemn political agreement between all those of a political community to act on behalf of that community. Yet, whereas compacts are valid by the consent and reason of men alone, the Declaration draws its authority and legitimacy not from the will and strength of men, but from the Creator of the universe, who is almighty in his providential governance and holy in his supreme justice.
Of course, one might argue that the colonists were wrong in their accusations against King George III or that their very justification for the right of revolution was itself immoral and unbiblical. But that the Americans believed they were in the right in the eyes of God cannot be denied, nor can one deny the importance they placed upon having such divine approbation. To that end, it was the yeomen’s work of thousands of Protestant clergy over many generations that laid the groundwork for the coming American Revolution in their efforts (in election sermons, artillery sermons, and regular and occasional preaching) to explain the origins and ends of government, to provide guidance and expound upon the divine standards for civil magistracy, and, in the final analysis, to explain the right to revolution, its grounds, limits, and purposes.
When the Declaration and Constitution are read not as a radical break from the colonial past but as the culmination and achievement of one hundred and fifty years of American history from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the vision of a covenantal founding comes into focus. This is our legacy and inheritance. Much damage has been done to the telling of this story by those who hate the Christian God and want to strip him from America’s history, founding charters, and collective memory. It is our duty on this Fourth of July to rebuke such godlessness, to read the Declaration with new eyes, and to thank God for his mercy, provision, and goodness to us in the founding and preservation of the American people and our nation.
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