SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Kingdom Bound Church at seventy-four Kelly Road Extension in Middlebury, Connecticut. We gather for worship at ten AM on Sundays. I figured that today I would tackle the question of was America founded as a Christian country? That question is causing a lot of chatter, a lot of debate. And so again, these episodes are only meant to be just short, a primer, and um, so let's let's let's get into it. Let's let's talk about a question that that, you know, that question that still sparks arguments at Thanksgiving tables. Was America founded as a Christian country? The short answer is that the evidence is stronger than many modern textbooks admit. The United States was not established as a theocracy with an official state church. The federal constitution deliberately avoided establishing any denomination. But the people who built the country, the documents they wrote, the laws they passed, and the moral framework they assumed were deeply steeped in Christianity. That is that is not nostalgia. That is simple history. Start with the Declaration of Independence. Four times it points beyond human government. Rights are endowed by their creator. The colonies appeal to the laws of nature and of nature's God. They rely on the supreme judge of the world and quote unquote divine providence. Those are not secular enlightenment slogans. They reflect a worldview in which rights do not come from the state, the majority, or the king. They come from God. That idea has deep biblical roots. Genesis chapter 1, verse 27 says, every human being is made in the image of God. Because of that, no government has the right to treat people as property or to invent or cancel basic rights at all. The founders did not invent natural rights out of thin air. They inherited a tradition shaped by centuries of Christian thought about the dignity of man under God. Now, look at look at the early state constitution. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina, and others required public officials to affirm belief in God, the inspiration of scripture or the Christian religion. Several states had established churches for decades after the federal constitution was ratified. These were not fringe groups. These were the people who actually governed. They saw no contradiction between protecting religious liberty and openly acknowledging Christianity as the moral foundation of the society. And then look at George Washington. He said it plainly in his farewell address. Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. He warned that we should not expect national morality to survive if we exclude religious principle. John Adams went further. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Adams also wrote that the Bible is, quote unquote, the best book in the world. These were not private opinions whispered in diaries. They were public statements by the first and second presidents. Congress itself acted like it believed this. The Continental Congress called for days of fasting, humiliation, and prayer. The first Congress under the new Constitution appointed chaplains for both the House and the Senate. They reauthorized the printing of Bibles for use in the country. Thanksgiving proclamation from Washington, Adams, and Madison regularly spoke of Almighty God and providence and the duty of a nation to acknowledge him. That is not the behavior of a deliberately secular founding generation. The connections between biblical ideas and American freedoms run deeper still. The concept of limited government rests on the biblical teaching of all people, including rulers, under a higher, higher law. Deuteronomy, the prophets, Romans 13 all assume that civil authority is real but not absolute. The idea that government exists to secure rights rather than create them flows from the conviction that those rights were already given by the Creator. Equality, before the law, draws strength from the Christian insistence that there is no distinction in God's sight between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female in the sense of ultimate worth. Even the separation of powers reflects a sober Christian view of human sinfulness, that people cannot be trusted with unchecked power because the heart is deceitful. That's Jeremiah 17, 9. None of this means every founder was an orthodox, born-again evangelical. Some, like Jefferson and Franklin, held unorthodox views of Jesus while still operating inside a broadly Christian moral universe. The federal constitution contains no explicit Christian confession and Article uh five, I think it's five, forbids religious tests, or maybe a six, religious tests for federal office. That was intentional. The founders wanted a country where no single denomination could dominate the national government by law. But they also assumed a society shaped by Christian ethics, Christian ethics, Christian assumptions about human nature and a public culture that treated the Bible as a source of wisdom. So was America founded as a Christian country? If by that we mean a nation whose laws and institutions and public rhetoric and understanding of rights were profoundly shaped by Christianity in the Bible, then yes, yes, it was. The evidence is not as sparrous, it is everywhere once you stop filtering it all out. The same generation that refused to establish a national church still believe that liberty without virtue, in virtue without religion, would not last. And history, history has a way of proving them right. I'm running, you know, running out of time here. It's a clock that's winding down here, but that is a great question that is being asked today. And I would really encourage everyone is to know your history, um, know your primary sources and understand that this country, yes, was founded on Christian principles. There is no doubt about that.