Two hundred and fifty years ago, delegates gathered in Philadelphia and, without a single dissenting vote, declared that thirteen British colonies were now “Free and Independent States.” It is tempting, in light of an anniversary as celebratory as this one, to reduce that moment to fireworks, parades, and vague sentiments about freedom. But anniversaries are also occasions for sober reckoning, and this quarter-millennial mark invites us to inquire who our founders were and what shared foundation grounded their Declaration of Independence.
The honest answer is not comfortable for a nation that has spent the last half-century prizing diversity over unity. What united the thirteen original colonies as a nation was not a common government, for they had none yet, nor merely a common language. They were bound together by a common culture, and that culture was, pervasively and unmistakably, Protestant Christian. This essay, Part One of two essays marking America’s Semiquincentennial, argues that recovering this plain historical fact is not an act of nostalgia or triumphalism but a necessary first step before we can ask a far more urgent question. This question is one the Founders themselves posed: whether a republic of “moral and religious People”1 (in John Adams’s words) can survive a culture that has strayed far from its Christian origins and recast its own motto to emphasize diverse differences instead of unity.
1. John Adams, “Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,” in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 9 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1854), 229.
A Protestant Christian Culture Declared Independence from Britain
A factual and honest reading of history reveals that a common culture, overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity, united America’s thirteen colonies when they declared independence from Britain, which prepared for the eventual form of government. Essential to colonial America’s culture was the English language, derived from Great Britain. Yet, the greater cohesive cultural bond was conveyed by Protestant Christianity, which dominated the colonies, giving birth to its customs and traditions, economic system, social organization, arts and literature, and its form of government, all noteworthy aspects of its shared culture.
Following the sustained, spiritually shaping First Great Awakening of 1730–1743, the thirteen American colonies approved the Declaration of Independence from Britain, and each drafted its initial state constitution (1776–1784). Those first state constitutions and accompanying documents profoundly integrated Christian commitments with established churches, religious tests for holding public office, and, in Virginia, a mandate that everyone attend a house of worship and pay taxes to fund ministers’ salaries.2
2. From Virginia’s founding in 1607 until 1776, the Church of England was the established church. It required citizens to attend services and pay taxes to support ministers. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to abolish compulsory church attendance and religious taxation.
Though most citizens claimed to be Christians, they adhered to varying beliefs and practices depending on their denominational affiliation—Anglican, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Quaker, Unitarian, and many others.3 Even early Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who moderns have mythologized as Deists, both spoke of God as providentially involved in human affairs, hardly a Deistic belief. No Deist would have offered the impassioned plea Franklin presented during the Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787:
3. Among the original thirteen states, Massachusetts was unique, with its Constitution of 1780 requiring the governor to swear this oath—“I do declare, that I believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth.”
I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a bye word down to future age. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human Wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.
I therefore beg leave to move—that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.4
4. See the transcript of Franklin’s “Constitutional Convention Address on Prayer.”
At its founding, the United States of America was a nation filled with Christians and many, like Franklin and Jefferson, who adopted Christian principles and practices; hence, a “Christian nation.” No one who affirms this suggests that America was founded as a theocracy nor that its citizenry consisted only of individuals who embraced Christianity. Historical records confirm that Christian beliefs concerning the Creator, nature’s God, morality, and fallen human nature indisputably and greatly governed, influenced, and shaped our nation’s founding institutions, moral philosophy, legal traditions, political culture, and economic theory.
The U.S. Constitution, Written for Morally Self-Governed People
5. Mark David Hall correctly rejects two polarized interpretations of the Founders’ views as grotesque distortions of reality: (1) that America’s Founding was assuredly not Christian, and (2) that the Republic’s Founding was decidedly Christian. Rather, Christian ideas and moral truths significantly shaped the nation’s Founding, establishing a government that was hospitable to Christianity and its practitioners but also tolerant of other religions (“Did America Have a Christian Founding?” Heritage Lectures: The Heritage Foundation, 1186 [June 7, 2011]).
6. James McHenry’s diary records that on September 17, 1787, thirty-eight men signed thirty-nine names to the Constitution of the United States. Because John Dickinson was ailing, he asked George Read to sign on his behalf. After Benjamin Franklin exited Independence Hall, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” The Constitution was clear that their signatures had no legal significance until nine of the thirteen states ratified it, which occurred on June 21, 1789. To Franklin’s response, Powel’s queried, “And why not keep it?” he answered, “Because the people, on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.”
Thus, two hundred and fifty years ago in Congress on July 4, 1776, “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America” avowed that it is self-evident that the Creator endowed all men with certain unalienable rights, affirming the truth that all men are created with equal standing before the law. Neither a king nor parliament but the Creator of all bequeathed to them their rights or standing. The Founders chose the word “Creator” neither accidentally nor flippantly but from within a particular cultural-religious milieu, one shaped by centuries of Christian proclamation, theological instruction, biblical law’s governance, and Protestant moral conviction.5 Whatever their diverse individual beliefs, all the Founders breathed Christendom’s air and digested the Protestant quest for freedom from religious tyranny. Despite denominational differences, their political imaginations took form within a society of self-governing, self-determining individuals heavily exposed to Scripture, sermons, and catechizing. Thus, the republic they formed was neither religiously neutral nor did it strive for neutrality; it was conceived within the Christian tradition, prompting the Founders to acknowledge that abandoning Christianity would seriously jeopardize the Republic’s survival.6
This is readily clear in a letter that President John Adams, a Unitarian who denied the deity of Christ, wrote to officers in the Massachusetts Militia.
We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge, or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.7
7. See “To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,” October 11, 1798. Two years later, in the Treaty of Tripoli, addressing the piracy by the Barbary States, signed November 4, 1796, in Tripoli, and on January 3, 1797, in Algiers, President John Adams and Congress approved the following wording. “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], – and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan [Muhammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
Against the long tradition of Great Britain and other European nations, although the Founders wisely resisted establishing a federal state church, they acknowledged the fragility of the republic they established. Its endurance was both correlated with and dependent on the religious culture from which it was born. Thus, the republic’s indispensable need for Christian churches to propagate the Christian faith throughout the nation to sustain the existing culture. As Adams’ Unitarianism illustrates, signs of departure from historic Christianity were already occurring.
We must distinguish, though never separate, the nation of the United States of America from its government because the two are not identical, as evidenced from its three historic forms of federal government: (1) the Continental Congress (1776–1781); the Articles of Confederation, the first national constitution (1781–1789); and (3) the U.S. Constitution (1789–present). Yes, it took thirteen years and two earlier forms of government before the United States of America established its present form of government. This distinction between the nation and its government was essential and remains so because while the nation was characterized as Christian at its founding, the ratified Constitution contains no direct reference to Christianity and expressly prohibits religious tests for holders of federal office, contrary to requirements in Maryland and Massachusetts. The Constitution reveals that the Founders envisioned a non-religious government for a Christian nation to serve all its presumptive, morally self-governed citizens, whose consciences were formed in large measure by beliefs and institutions derived from the Christian tradition. Consequently, throughout the republic’s varied and checkered history, given humanity’s fallenness, a citizen in good standing, even a Christian, can cherish the country and the form of federal government but loathe how elected officials operate the government, especially when they stray from the founding principles.
The Continental Congress appointed a committee—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams—to create an official seal for the new nation founded on July 4, 1776.8 Though Congress eventually rejected the committee’s seal, they retained the motto—E Pluribus Unum; Out of many, one—a Latin phrase that effectively expresses the unification of thirteen distinct and diverse but cohesive former British colonies uniting together not only to gain freedom but also to form a new integrated nation. The Coinage Act of 1873 required the Latin motto to be inscribed on all coins minted in the United States. In 1956, a new national threat arose. To contrast America’s religious freedom and faith with the atheism and oppression of the Soviet Union’s Communism, Congress adopted “In God We Trust,” derived from the final stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust,’” as the official national motto to be minted on all U.S. currency. Together, “E Pluribus Unum” and “In God We Trust” appear on U.S. coins and paper bills.
8. In 1782, Secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson, integrated the best features from the committee’s proposals, placing an ascending American bald eagle at the center of the seal, representing the vigorous independent nation. An unfurled scroll is in the eagle’s beak bearing the motto, E pluribus unum. The eagle’s right claw holds an olive branch with thirteen leaves and olives, signifying peace since antiquity. The eagle’s other claw grasps thirteen arrows, representative of the thirteen colonies’ unified military strength and preparedness to defend the singular nation. The eagle turns its face toward the olive branch, peace. Thirteen stripes, one for each of the original states, adorn the shield mounted on the eagle’s breast, and thirteen white stars form a constellation in the blue sky encompassed by the radiance of the sun shining through billowy white clouds. This visually stands for the illumination of heavenly favor that frames the rise of a new nation in history. Observe the frequency of the number thirteen: 13 letters in E Pluribus Unum, 13 olive leaves, 13 olives, 13 arrows, 13 stripes, 13 stars.
E Pluribus Unum or Diversitas Vis Nostra Maxima?
To affirm these things invites conflict in the present context, even among Christians, where multiculturalism’s mantra, “Diversity is our strength,” is chanted with presumptuous imposition as if it were the true and proper meaning of the original thirteen states’ Latin motto—E Pluribus Unum—which they commandeer.9 On its face, the “diversity is our strength” slogan is manifestly false and contrary to the national motto, “Out of many, one.” Our national motto features the emergence of a single, unified political-cultural entity from many parts. Multiculturalism’s imposed, displacing motto emphasizes not unity but diversity itself as the source of national strength. This difference explains why multiculturalism’s activists, with their complicit allies, have preferred to commandeer, recast, and reinterpret E Pluribus Unum rather than replace it with their own Latin version, Diversitas Vis Nostra Maxima (diversity is our greatest strength).
For more than fifty years, Americans have been told by university administrators and professors, public school teachers, legacy media celebrities, politicians, and even Evangelical educators and pastors, who with the religious fervor of Presentism10 have enforced multiculturalism’s mantras: (1) diversity is our greatest strength, (2) all cultures are equally valid, and (3) to acknowledge any singular civilizational vision as morally superior over another is an act of bigotry. We have been harangued, preached at, scolded, chastised, and canceled by multiculturalists who came to dominate the legacy media, colleges and universities, and even churches. This capture has been so effective that questioning their mantras risks being charged with heresy, canceled, and unemployed. But urgency demands that multiculturalism’s ideology be uprooted because no society, news media, academic institution, church, or nation can survive multiculturalism’s dissolution of the moral and religious fabric that holds it together. America is no exception.
9. For example, see Mitch Landieu’s E PLURIBUS UNUM.
10. Presentism is the arrogant error of making judgments concerning events and the individuals involved in bygone historical eras by current religious-cultural-social-political-intellectual standards. Presentism is a species of what C. S. Lewis properly called “Chronological Snobbery.” He defined it as the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”
Conclusion
None of this is to romanticize the Founders or to pretend America’s founding generation was a company of saints. They were not, and they acknowledged it. No express mention of Christianity in the Constitution was itself a deliberate, principled choice, not an oversight. It was a warranted and reasonable choice made by men who correctly assumed that the nation surrounding their government would remain a morally self-governing, Christian people, capable of restraining “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge, or Gallantry” from tearing through the republic’s Constitution “as a Whale goes through a Net.” Jefferson’s affirmation that the Creator alone is the author of human rights, Franklin’s appeal to Heaven, and Adams’ warning to the Massachusetts Militia were not insincere flourishes for history books; they were authentic confessions that the American experiment in ordered liberty had no engine of its own. It ran on borrowed fuel, ordained by God, drawn from centuries of Christian conviction, and it was never designed to run on anything else.
A government “of, by, and for” a nation of individuals whose rights come from God, who are self-governed by their inherited Christian-formed culture, is the unique historical ground on which the republic has stood, united by shared religious ideals rather than ethnicity. Before we can weigh whether multiculturalism’s creed of “diversity is our strength” can sustain what Christianity once withstood, we first had to establish, plainly and with the Founders’ own words, what was truly here from the beginning. E Pluribus Unum was never a celebration of parts remaining parts. It was a declaration that many had become One, bound together with a common Christianized culture. Whether that One can survive being fractured into Many remains the question before us, and it is to that question and to the meaning and cost of multiculturalism itself that Part Two turns.
