by Marcus Clavys

Created on: August 02, 2010

There is no doubt that the American Founding was a culmination of many different things, and it's just as clear that there is no black and white answer to the question of religion and the founding of America. There were several important ways in which the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and some significant ways in which it was not. Understanding all this takes a bit of unfolding, and the best place to start is by putting ourselves back in the minds and times of the Founders in the summer of 1787, when some of the greatest men in the nation were debating the future of the United States' government.

THE WORLDVIEW OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS

The Founders drew from many sources in their deliberation, but especially from the four great societies of Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and London. The Greek and Roman concepts of government and the Hebrew and Christian concepts of duty and liberty were brought together and re-formed in the crucible of the Age of Reason. The resultant Enlightenment was in some significant ways a rebirth of Hellenic political thought tempered by a solid dose of Christian philosophy and theology, all modified by the emerging rationalism or the times.

An important question to ask in deciding the Christian nature of the Founding is whether the Founders were closer to us today - to us and the shaping ideas of our world, to men such as Darwin, Sartre, and Heidegger - or if they were closer to thinkers such as Aquinas, Copernicus, and Newton. It's clear that in their time, academic philosophy hadn't yet experienced the sort of "human freedom" of Sartrean existentialism nor the Darwinian idea of ordered chaos, and the Founding principles of natural rights was therefore presumed to necessarily stem from divine order and divine authority.

It must be understood that, no matter how familiar men such as Washington and Jefferson seem to us, they would find much more sympathy and have much more in common with many medievalists than they would with the thinkers of our day. Their world was permeated by the sense that men lived in a morally ordered cosmos, that human beings held a high place in a great chain of being, and that they were endowed by God with natural rights and responsibilities. This presumption of order is seen in the influential writings of John Locke, for instance, and of course in the Declaration of Independence ("the laws of Nature and Nature's God," the "Creator," etc). The Framers did not talk about "human rights" as we do today,

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