Our Very Christian Founding

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The United States has reached its 250th birthday, and remarkably, there is still debate about whether we were founded as an explicitly Christian nation. That’s because late 19th-century academia came up with the nebulous idea of a post-Christian “Enlightenment,” causing a lot of confusion. But there shouldn’t be.

Part of the problem is that some Christians today want to see the Founders as conventionally Christian, when some were not. Jefferson, for one, was a resolutely heterodox thinker. The amateur historian David Barton even had to withdraw his 2012 book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson due to the numerous fake or unsupported quotes he used.

But that’s all quite irrelevant to the question at hand.

Rather, consider this -- a country today with Sharia law as its official justice system would undoubtedly be considered a “Muslim country.” So also, the United States is founded upon an explicitly Christian system -- the English common law.

49 of our 50 states have laws that essentially state -- the common law of England, insofar as it is not repugnant to the principles of the Bill of Rights and Constitution of this Commonwealth, shall continue in full force…

That includes Justice Coke’s magisterial 1608 opinion in Calvin’s Case, where he wrote the “law of nature is the law of England,” and the “law of nature is that which God at the time of creation of the nature of man infused into his heart, for his preservation, and direction...”

The English common law began with Saxon King Alfred’s 893 AD Doom book, enshrining Christian natural law by coordinating the customary laws of the Anglo-Saxons with the principles of the Ten Commandments and New Testament.

The British scholar John C.H. Wu wrote that the “English common law is a cradle Catholic while Roman law was a deathbed convert,” referring to the legal system begun by Catholics, and continued by Protestants, such as Coke.

Russell Kirk explained in The Roots of American Order (1974), that Blackstone’s famous 1765 Commentaries was the common law’s “lodestar” for the Founders.

From this Christian jurist they learned of “no taxation without representation,” the “absolute rights of the individual,” and that the law of nature “being coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.”

Kirk stated “The natural law described by Blackstone was rooted in Christian ethics… There, more clearly expressed than by Locke, is (the) fundamental doctrine of American politics.”

Not content to leave credit for the Founding to the lawyers and the Scholastics, though, academics since the late 19th century have tried to claim our system for a collection of disparate philosophers, later dubbed “Enlightenment thinkers.” Men who never studied law or theology -- from Voltaire to Kant -- who shied away from Christian natural law, or like Hume, Bentham and others, denied it entirely. Some, like Locke, were also supporters of slavery, and nearly all of them supported “scientific racism.”

Few of these men or their ideas were of great interest to the Founders. Rather, they were only championed later by Progressive-era politicians such as Woodrow Wilson, who dismissed natural law and promoted a " living Constitution," or Oliver Wendell Holmes and his “legal realism,” which stood common law on its head.

The Founders also had no use for the anti-clerical zealotry of Tom Paine. (And even Paine believed in a soul and an afterlife and a Supreme Being who authored the Rights of Man).

Benjamin Franklin, who called himself a deist at times, might be better described as a super-generic Protestant. A lot of the Founders were merely estranged Anglicans, as the English Crown treated its American church as a patronage operation and filled it with Tories.

But the Founders knew modern natural law began with St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and with St. Augustine’s principle -- restated by Coke -- that “an unjust law is no law at all.” They knew the Imago Dei became the universal political refrain, “all men are created equal” under the Church Fathers.

Some, such as the brilliant James Wilson, read Aquinas and the Anglican Richard Hooker. Educated in law and theology, he wrote in 1791, “Human law must rest its authority, ultimately, upon the authority of that law which is divine… Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other. The divine law, as discovered by reason and moral sense, forms an essential part of both.”

All knew of Cardinal Langton and his role in Magna Carta, securing the right to trial by jury among other things. They also knew of Simon de Montfort, the struggle for elective democracy and the birth of “no taxation without representation.”

The lawyers read the cleric and jurist, Henry De Bracton, a contemporary of Aquinas, who wrote his monumental On the Laws and Customs of England in 1259, insisting that the King was always bound by law and that his nobles could even bridle him like a horse if need be.

The English American scholar Theodore Plucknett stated that the “Constitution of the United States was written by men who had Magna Carta and Bracton, and Coke and Littleton before their eyes.”

They also had the best of later Scholastics, distilled down by secondary sources. Such as Cardinal Bellarmine and his work, De Laicis, which the Founders encountered continuously -- through Locke’s Second Treatise, Filmer’s Patriarcha, and Sidney’s Discourses, which alone offers two dozen quotations. British American historian Caroline Robbins in 1947 called the Discourses the “textbook of the American revolution.”

It was even discovered in 1917 that Jefferson’s personal copy of Patriarcha had quotations from De Laicis underlined, especially regarding the consent of the governed.

Jefferson was always evasive about the broad sources of his work, writing to Henry Lee in 1825, he would only mention “the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”., skipping 1600 years of European history between the Stoics and the Enlightenment; and ignoring the giants of the English common law, both the Catholics -- Bracton, Fortescue, Littleton and the Anglicans -- Coke, Hale, Blackstone.

Unfortunately, shortchanging the traditional Catholic and Anglican thinkers has led to the myth that the Founders were all deists. But the history is clear. Jefferson’s phrases -- “all men are created equal,” “endowed by their Creator,” and “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” -- were already common in 14th-century England.

Patrick Henry’s 1775 Liberty or Death Speech, a great influence on Jefferson and Washington, well illustrates the Christian God the Founders had in mind.

“We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power… millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force… we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles…”

Someday, Americans might get a better understanding of their real history and all the things progressive-era academics have labored to obscure. Beginning with the Christian ideals in the center of the Declaration of Independence, the Apple of Gold, as Pres. Lincoln memorably phrased it.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.