America’s Founders practiced faith, quoted Scripture, established nation on these virtues

“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…”

To the American ear, this sounds incorrect, but “sacred and undeniable” was the original language Thomas Jefferson, whose birthday is Monday, used in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence before Benjamin Franklin, his editor and senior, changed the language to “self-evident.”

“These rights are guaranteed by a Creator, not reason or common sense alone,” Pastor Cole Feix said in March at The Herzog Foundation’s America 250: National Convention for Christian Education.

Although America was not founded as an explicitly Christian nation, its founders held to Christian values, but some more so than others, Feix said.

“America is not a Christian nation but has always been a nation of Christians,” he said. “This country has always been composed of citizens aiming for heaven, not earth.”

He referenced President John Adams, who prayed to the “Supreme Judge of Judges, of Empires, of the World,” and President Abraham Lincoln, who declared “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous all together.”

“Reason alone could not heal the wounds from the Civil War,” Feix said, referencing his professor who called Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address “the greatest embodiment of the Christian faith ever uttered in American history.”

Long before America’s Founding Fathers penned The Declaration, America was a land of virtuous Christians, Feix said. The colonists aboard the Mayflower signed a compact pledging their duty to the “advancement of the Christian faith,” he said. “They were founding a new civilization that would be lived completely before God and devoted to him.

“They were doing what only two civilizations before had ever done: Geneva under John Calvin and Israel under Moses.”

Biblical references, specifically allusions to the Exodus, were common and intentional during the Founding era, Feix said. As the first U.S. Seal design, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams proposed the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” under an image of Moses dividing the Red Sea.

George Whitefield

To really study the Founders’ faith requires a study of preacher George Whitefield, whom Feix named “the spiritual founding father of the country.”

Whitefield arrived in New England in the 1740s, and historians estimate 10% of the colonies converted to Christianity during this decade. Whitefield often preached in Philadelphia at Christ Church – a mere block from Franklin’s publishing house. During the Constitutional Convention, the Founders, including George Washington and Adams, sat in the pews of that same church.

“It seem’d as if all the World were growing Religious; so that one could not walk thro’ the Town in an Evening without Hearing Psalms sung in different Families of every Street,” Franklin wrote.

He estimated Whitefield could preach to 30,000 people at once by calculating the area of dimensions he marked while listening to Whitefield’s robust sermons. While many historians categorize Franklin as a Deist at most, tour guides with the company Inspire suggest Franklin may have softened to the gospel late in his life. His own writings record how he “emptied my Pocket Wholly into the Collector’s Dish, Gold and all,” despite his initial resolution against the gesture.

Like Franklin, Jefferson is often categorized as a Deist – a term he opposed – calling himself a Christian in “the only sense” of the term.

“In short, Jefferson viewed Jesus as the greatest moral teacher in history but believed anything more than that was a corruption of Jesus’ teaching by his disciples and followers,” Feix explained. “He did not believe Jesus was divine or had a divine mission, but that his universal philanthropy was his lasting authentic teaching.”

Whitefield’s preaching coincided with other famous revivalists of the century preceding the Revolution, including Jonathan Edwards and John Winthrop. One sermon of Winthrop’s focused on Micah 6:8:

“He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?”

This became one of the most referenced verses during the Founding era, Feix said. Washington often quoted another verse from the same prophet, Micah 4:4:

“But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.”

He quoted this in his address to the nation when he announced he would not return to a third term as President.

“This represented, for Washington, the goal of freedom. Freedom from fear, from oppression, freedom to till the land and create a life,” Feix said, emphasizing the rare virtue Washington’s decision signaled to the watching world.

When King George III asked his American painter, Benjamin West, what Washington would do in 1796, West replied: “They say he will return to his farm.”

“If he does that,’ the incredulous monarch said, ‘he will be the greatest man in the world.’”