The Religious Backdrop of the Declaration of Independence

The late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once wrote, "If we call the American statesmen of the late eighteenth century the Founding Fathers of the United States, then the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great-grandfather . . . though the fashionable eighteenth century Deism may have pervaded some intellectual circles, the prevailing spirit of Americans before and after the War of Independence was essentially Calvinistic."

Religion, and a particular one at that, was a pervasive influence in the founding of America. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 34 were Anglican, thirteen were Congregationalists, and there were six Presbyterians, one Baptist, one Catholic, and a single Quaker. Similarly, of the 68 members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, 45 were Anglican, fourteen were Congregationalists, and there were five Presbyterians, one Baptist, one Dutch Reformed, and two Quakers. If only half of the Anglicans were Calvinists, in view of the historic commitments of the combined segments of Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists, one can estimate how persistent Calvinism was among the founders. Even Anglican adversaries of America admitted that, "a great part of the clergy who go to America are Scotch." Added to this was the fact that a majority of "colonial Presbyterian ministers were drawn from Northern Ireland until a late date."

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were conceived in this ethos of skepticism about human ability. One result was that no human being would be given unlimited power. Another safeguard was the belief that states were governed best with the input of the people and guided by fixed constitutional principles. At first, the American Constitution stood alone, indeed unique. In time, many other nations would come to follow aspects of this pattern so rooted in Scripture. Some, including Calvin’s Swiss descendants in 1848, would imitate American democracy driven by human-centered populism; nevertheless, it is most difficult to ignore the God-centered principles at the base of American government.

In 1773, the theological argumentation explored earlier by Bucer, refined by Calvin, and broadcast by the Puritans, trumpeting that "Supreme or unlimited Authority can with Fitness belong only to the Sovereign of the Universe," was still sounded, especially in America. That theo-logic had remarkable consequences for Western political thought. Founding father John Adams credited the Reformation for tumbling the monarchical claims, and he believed that British parents, extending back to the Magna Carta, sought to limit rulers and government by a compact. It should not be surprising, therefore, to learn that opposition to Britain’s monarchical claims arose first from Calvinists, who believed that real sovereignty belonged exclusively to God.

Even though some political discourses engaged in "compulsive name-dropping" by referring to many secular thinkers like Grotius, Pufendorf, or Burlamaqui, it was the "content of . . . long-familiar Calvinism" which shaped American’s revolutionary mind. Americans, saturated by these Genevan ideas, knew that earthly sovereigns were limited, whereas the heavenly Sovereign was not. Preachers catechizing that "God is the only absolute Lord and Sovereign" convinced American colonists to resist political claims that transgressed the borders of God’s own sovereign prerogatives.

Consistent with these ideas, a Massachusetts Court called for resistance to Great Britain in January 1776 on the theological grounds that "in every government there must exist somewhere a supreme, sovereign, absolute, and uncontrollable power; but this power resides always in the body of the people, and it never was, or can be delegated to one man or a few; the great Creator having never given to men a right to vest others with authority over them unlimited, either in duration or degree."

Jonathan Clark, citing these and other examples, has shown that God’s dealing with nations at the time of the founding of America was an accepted doctrine. References to the OT, particularly to Pharaoh and the Red Sea, were employed until the end of the seventeenth century, revived in Scotland or Ireland—usually whenever it was needed to oppose a king—and "canonised [by] the Founding Fathers of the American republic." It was "seemingly impossible to theorise upon the nature of the state or the monarchy," writes Clark, "without casting their origins, existence and maintenance in scriptural terms." American orators in the Revolutionary period still identified America with the "New Israel." Far from being a secular errand in the wilderness as claimed by some after-the-fact revisionists, they saw God’s providence in daily events. Hardly based on pluralistic models, American colonists had a strong religious identity that even superseded the rights of Englishmen.

A few years prior to the American Revolution saw a dramatic downturn among popular support for Quakers and Anglicans, coupled with an "astonishing rise of the Presbyterians" and the "Scots-Irish component." Accordingly, those burgeoning denominational groups cursed the old order of things, while blessing the new order for the ages.

The denominational balance shifted decisively away from approval of English denominational customs. As American orators tarred and feathered George III, his religion (Anglicanism) also took a beating. Indeed, Calvinists were quick to note the companionship between the governmental oppression of King George III and the theological error of Arminianism and Anglicanism. To some degree that symbiosis explains the dramatic and successful growth among Presbyterians in the pre-Revolutionary period. In some instances, as the war approached, Presbyterians spoke of Anglicans as "Jesuits," further tarnishing their reputations with association to the crown.

As soon as adopted, the Declaration of Independence would first be read, as important proclamations had been in Geneva or Massachusetts Bay colony, in "respective congregations" following the sermon. Accordingly, we may view as an important intellectual influence on the Declaration "the insistence of John Knox, Witherspoon’s ancestor, on the moral duty to resist tyranny and also the French Huguenot Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, a justification of rebellion on the basis of rights of the people to bring a ruler into line with law under which his reign is bound."

Douglas Kelly recognizes "covenantal argumentation" in the Declaration of Independence and notes how the actions of George III were cited as violations of the limited charter of government, amounting to tyranny. In a list similar to earlier grievances stated by other British Puritans, Americans confidently repudiated their king in terms that matched a theological tradition which was over two centuries old.

The Declaration of Independence illustrates at least five of the themes that we have classified as Calvinistic contributions.

(1) It refers to the transcendent basis for government in its two opening sections. As is well known, the Declaration roots itself not only in the providence of human events, but it grounds the powers of government in transcultural and universal notions as provided by the "laws of Nature and of Nature’s God." That the Declaration is more than mere Deism, which might be thought if it contained only "the laws of Nature" phraseology, is seen with the addition of the phrase "and of Nature’s God." The authors could have, and many moderns likely would have, simply omitted any reference to theological notions. However, they thought such transcendent notions were essential for intelligibility by their countrymen and also necessary for providing the best defense possible for armed resistance. A document this powerful, if it hoped to achieve widespread approval, simply could not fail to reference the dominant theology of the day.

Moreover, the second paragraph refers to self-evident truths. These, the authors believed, were unquestionable. Further, they confessed that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable rights that were endowed by their Creator. God was not only transcendent, he was also the Creator and Donor of human rights. God, not blind nature, was the Guarantor of civil conditions, and as the universal Creator, he gave certain liberties that transcend geographical barriers. That "Governments are instituted among Men" was also close enough in substance to remind the reader of earlier language in the Westminster Confession of Faith and other Puritan treatises on civil government. The penultimate paragraph of the Declaration refers to God as "the Supreme Judge of the World," who at the time had been frequently invoked in those terms by various American Calvinistic theologians and sermons. Certainly other denominations could embrace similar language—one basis for its wide acceptance—but much of the theological phraseology (see ** previous chapter) in these civic documents is derived from Calvin’s Reformation.

(2) The Declaration then moves to discuss derived powers, which stem from the consent of the governed. Many scholars now recognize that the "consent" motif arose and was supported by Reformation advances that overthrew monopolistic powers. In this context, the Declaration refers to "the right of the People to alter or abolish" an existing government. It should be recalled that prior to the age of the Reformation, no such right was admitted. Despite the contributions of Aquinas and select medieval advances, a full justification of the right to revolt did not arise until the writings of Calvin’s disciples—Beza, Ponet, Goodman, and the Vindiciae. Three times the Declaration referred to "tyrant" or "tyranny," leaving fingerprint smudges of the Vindication Against the Tyrants. It is safe to say that such biblical support for revolution did not emanate primarily from Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, or Baptists at the time of composition.

(3) Another post-Reformation treatise was likely in mind when the Declaration condemned "absolute Despotism" and called citizens to their "duty" to overthrow a king who would not submit to the law of the land. Echoes of Rutherford’s Lex Rex are heard in the call for King George III to reside under the Law. Rutherford had earlier written that the king must be circumscribed by constitutions and other legal limits. Moreover, even the Reformation maxim that "any government is better than no government at all" is witnessed in the apologia for the American Revolution, to wit: "Mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." The reiteration of the principle that the king is under the law, not over it, was widely accepted in early American culture because of the spread of that idea through the likes of Rutherford and Buchanan.

(4) Separated powers and checks and balances were other political signatures of the Declaration. One of the condemnations of British rule was the litany of items whereby the King had abused his power. According to the Declaration (and numerous sermons a generation before it), he made judges dependent on his own will (including for their pay); he created new offices which became "Swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance; and he imposed Standing armies." These and other abuses are instances of non-separation of powers. When totalitarian power is lodged in a single individual, checks and balances are minimized. With a functioning tripartite government in Geneva as a model, aided by the popularization of Montesquieu’s theory (and typical preaching like that of Francis Alison), Americans in 1776 wanted governors limited and their powers divvied up. The reason for this rested in man’s untrustworthiness. Had Americans believed in the innate goodness of man, the Declaration would have looked substantially different than it did growing in a Calvinistic garden.

(5) Minimal governments were alluded to in the last paragraph of the Declaration. The Continental Congress based its action on the "Authority of the good People of these Colonies," and lodged other responsibility with independent states. These decentralized ruling units, the independent states (a phrase used three times in this closing paragraph), had "full Power to Levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of right do." And three theological ideas are stressed in this final paragraph as the moral basis for these independent states: the "supreme Judge of the world," "divine providence," and "sacred" honor. God was not absent from the Declaration, and the understanding of God at the time (although it would change afterwards) was altered little from the theology of the Swiss Reformation.

Buttressing the Declaration, according to Douglas Kelly, are certain "underlying Calvinist themes [which] permeate the founding documents." Among these are "the two-powers theory of church and state and the covenantal-conciliar thesis of limitation of governmental powers in terms of divine law. Throughout the carefully ordered separation of powers with checks and balances, deliberately restraining a more unified operation of government, we see a reflection of the Calvinist doctrine of the fallenness of human nature, with its inevitable tendency of an ascendant arm of government to abuse power in a tyrannical direction."

When George Washington spoke of "providence," the precise theological history for this term could not be simply ignored. "Providence" had been a major theme of the theological tracts and preaching by predominantly Calvinistic ministers in America for over 150 years. Washington declared that no one had a stronger reliance on God as an "all-wise and powerful dispenser" of providence than he did. To those under his command, in 1777, he practically preached: "A superintending Providence is ordering everything for the best. . . . . in due time all will end well." The next year, he ascribed credit for success thus far to "Providence," and in 1779, he wrote to his fellow compatriots, "I look upon every dispensation of Providence as designed to answer some valuable purpose, and I," sounding almost as Calvinist as Calvin, "hope I shall always possess a sufficient degree of fortitude to bear without murmuring any stroke which may happen." This was the same Washington who was infamous for the sentiment that America could not be or remain a blessed nation if she jettisoned her piety. If one interprets these documents within their contexts, the influence of the Reformation clearly continued to impact the ideas of America’s founding.

Patrick Henry manifested Calvinistic themes as well. Henry frequently rubbed shoulders with Presbyterian patriots. Besides growing up under the preaching of Samuel Davies, Henry also served as a Trustee for nine years at Hampden-Sidney College, seeking to inculcate the youth of the region "in the distinctive principles of the Protestant Faith." The pious Henry also realized the threat that the French philosophes were to republican institutions (as few others did). Henry’s defense of an assessment supporting the salaries for religious teachers was not as atypical as one might think. Many others (including Witherspoon) supported the idea at the time. Toward the end of his life, he ardently studied sermons by British Puritans and announced that any doubts he had ever entertained were remedied by them. He once commented that the Bible "is worth all the books that ever were printed, and it has been my misfortune that I have never found time to read it with the proper attention and feeling till lately. I trust in the mercy of Heaven that it is not yet too late."

In 1784, Henry introduced a plan to evangelize North American Indians by settling Protestants in their territory. His view of the innate untrustworthiness of leaders showed Calvin’s lasting impress, when he spoke the following before the Virginian House of Burgesses: "Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?" During debates over ratifying the proposed U. S. Constitution, Henry also endorsed the following notions that Calvin’s disciples promoted: (1) no government could abridge certain inalienable rights; (2) power is vested in the people, with governors serving as "trustees and agents, at all times amenable to them"; (3) "the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive to the good and happiness of mankind"; (4) governing branches of power should be separate and distinct so that no elite accrued too much power unto itself; and (5) elections of representatives should be "free and frequent." Henry, by no means alone, was one of many constitutional fathers who was indebted to the freedoms nurtured by Calvinism.

The Constitution of the United States, proposed in 1787, is a document that does not profess to be overtly religious. However, covert tokens of the original environment are unavoidable. The preamble invokes a theological term "ordain," a term frequently reserved for an act by divine agency. While it would be odd for humans to "ordain," (they are fully entitled to "establish"), God had been depicted for two previous centuries as ordaining human government. Likely the very use of "ordain" is a vestige of a particular view.

The Constitution moves quickly to enunciate the separation of powers, which Hamilton had described as being of recent origin. Acknowledging that Congress has "legislative" power (again contrasted with "magisterial" [reserved for God] or "ministerial" power), a bicameral form was adopted to provide checks and balances against too much power accruing to a single agency of government. Even in the selection of senators and representatives, electors, buffering agents, were warranted (I: 2). Resembling the "ephors" (in Ponet and Althusius, for example), these electors formally select the executive (II: 1). Originally and until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, senators were chosen by the representatives, not by direct plebiscite (cf. original I: 3).

Checks and balances were further insured by granting the Senate "sole power" to try impeachments (I: 3); thus even the highest leader was subject to removal. While impeachment was limited to removal from and prohibition from holding office in the future, nonetheless, if convicted, a previously elected person was "liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment according to law" (I: 3), as any other citizen.

To further limit elected officials from coalescing multiple offices or from arrogating more power than they ought to themselves, they were prohibited from holding any other office while serving in Congress (I: 6). In turn, lest the executive seek to curtail their free exercise, American lesser magistrates were granted freedom of speech and protection against prosecution for "any speech or debate in either House" (I: 6).

Section eight of the first article of the Constitution provided a defined scope for the federal government. Specifics were delineated, and the central government was well-limited. Along with the clarifying language of the Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."), it was clear that government was proscribed from involving itself in every area of life, no matter how well intentioned. Specifically, this section called for duties, imposts, and excises to be "uniform throughout the United States." "Weights and measures" (the term is frequently used in the OT; cf. Prov. 20:10, Lev. 19:35, Dt. 25:14, and the sermon by John Barnard above) were to be regulated fairly by Congress; armies were to be funded only for limited excursions; no titles of nobility were to be granted; and "No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid unless in proportion to the census."

Not only was the federal government limited in keeping with much of the Reformation era thought, the states themselves were limited (I: 10). The executive power was circumscribed (II), and the constitution itself guarantees a republican form of government to every individual state of this union (IV: 4), so thorough was the acceptance of republicanism in principle.

Most scholars admit that the Bill of Rights, ratified December 15, 1791, should be considered as duly reflective of the original intent of the U. S. Constitution. As such, several of those amendments are rooted in Reformation protocol.

The formal separation of church from state establishment, as in Great Britain and other European countries, was spelled out by the First Amendment. Religion itself was not prohibited; only the agency and authority to establish it. Neither could Congress prohibit the free exercise of religion. That the subject of religion is at the head of the Bill of Rights is of no small importance. It may even be that the remaining First Amendment rights were viewed as flowing from the hearty and free exercise of religion. Freedoms of speech, publicity by the press, and rights to assemble and call the government to accountability historically were associated with the free exercise of the Protestant religion. The Calvinistic-republican nexus had supported such rights, and British Puritans worked diligently to secure those same liberties.

Furthermore, the recognition that citizens had a right to regulate militias and keep arms (which was "necessary to the security of a free State") was designed to prevent tyranny and keep the executive in his place. Likewise, the Third Amendment prohibited the federal government from housing its troops in private homes as European monarchs had often done. Neither could governors, under Reformation and American principles, intervene in citizens’ private "houses, papers, and effects"; these were protected against unlawful searches and seizures. No government prior to this had granted its citizens such extensive protections; the religion that supported this movement can hardly be unrelated to those advances. Other judicial provisions appointed juries for trials, ordered indictment by peers (not monarchs), and gave protection from "excessive bail," clearly protecting this American experiment from many of the abuses experienced by the Puritans in England.

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments, respectively, were strong walls of protection that lodged other rights with the people or with the decentralized states. While it is certainly true that no particular reference in the U. S. Constitution is an exact quotation from a Calvinistic theological tract, support for the constitutional concepts contained grew in few other ideological petri dishes.

At the eve of the Revolution, Americans were rather united in a theo-political tradition, which Edmund Burke in his effort to effect parliamentary conciliation in 1775, attributed to religion, saying: "Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are protestants; and of that kind, which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion." This virile Protestantism had continued for a century and a half and was still living amidst the masses of Americans on the brink of the Revolution, even if not all of the elite intelligentsia preserved those notions. The Genevan root, in other words, had not been hewn out.

Part of Clark’s recently stated thesis is that "religion was a vital concern both of the political elite and of populations at large in this period as private practice, as public morality, and as political symbol." He notes that even if Jefferson pled for a total separation of church and state, "the great majority of his countrymen did not share his Deistic views, and moved further from them in the half-century after Independence. Consequently, and with unconscious irony, the courts of the early Republic continued to repeat the doctrine that Christianity was part of the common law . . ."

It is likely correct that any heterodox sentiments of the founding fathers were sublimated because of mass unpopularity at the time. When the 1820s permitted more candor, Jefferson expressed his hope that Unitarianism would "become the general religion of the United States," and when his true sentiments became known, some contemporaries described his views as "a broad and unqualified avowal of atheism."

Instead of construing America’s founding in isolation from its historical and ideological paternity, some scholars who appreciate the religious influence of the Reformation view the American Revolution as the completion of previous movements like the Genevan Reformation, the Dutch 1581 Declaration of Independence, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Each of these earlier mini-Revolutions is like the shoreline before high tide, with each successive wave progressing incrementally further. However, after the high tide mark erases all the other intermediate marks and when that revolution is completed, only the final water line is left.

It is historically sounder to acknowledge that America was founded not merely in 1776 or 1789, but as part of "intermittent social conflict and insurrection over many decades." Viewing the 1776-1789 period as a climax of an international movement, rather than as the beginning of a new tradition, also allows one more accurately to understand that the dominant religious force in those precursor revolutions was Calvinism in Switzerland, Calvinism in Holland, Calvinism in England, and Calvinism in Scotland and Ireland. Thus, Americans standing on the shoulders of their predecessors naturally associated Calvinistic republicanism with their worldview, which they thought to be squarely founded on biblical notions.

The right to rebellion, supported by a religious frame, only flourished between the time of Calvin and Rutherford. Americans with their deep religiosity would not dare undertake a revolt against the crown without strong and reputable religious justification. That was found only in the thought of Calvin, Martyr, Beza, Hotman, and Knox’s disciples.

Colonists in America saw themselves as heirs of a tradition with both theological and political components. They believed that they were spiritually justified, if not compelled, to resist bad government and institute moral government after biblical patterns. They saw themselves as the progeny of previous revolutions. In short, they assumed that the "principles of the Glorious Revolution had been upheld in the colonies also." The Americans looked to many of the heroes enshrined on Geneva’s Reformation wall, Calvinists like William of Nassau, William III, Admiral Coligny, John Knox, and George Buchanan.

The decade before the American Revolution saw the application of God’s covenantal providence to New England extended more generally to all Americans. As Perry Miller argued a generation ago, it was American Protestantism, not "genial Anglicanism" nor "urbane rationalism," that fueled patriotic fires to scorch the distant British government. Some Anglicans went so far as to assume that, "Independency in Religion will naturally produce Republicanism in the State." Edmund Burke confirmed that the most prevalent religion in the northern American colonies was "a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent; and the protestantism of the protestant religion." Burke continued to note that this spirit of liberty seemed to grow best when removed from Anglicanism.

Burke and others could agree with a modern biographer of one of Calvin’s disciples who claimed this about Calvin’s ideas contained in his Institutes: "[W]hatever its author’s intentions and whatever our intellectual tastes," it was "the most revolutionary publication of that century." It might also be that a larger claim can be made as we stand on the brink of a new millennium: Calvin’s work was the most revolutionary of the millennium.

~Just~ in case you missed this little tid bit:

"...It should not be surprising, therefore, to learn that opposition to Britain’s monarchical claims arose first from Calvinists, who believed that real sovereignty belonged exclusively to God..."

Jean

"It should not be surprising, therefore, to learn that opposition to Britain’s monarchical claims arose first from Calvinists, who believed that real sovereignty belonged exclusively to God."

"Throughout the carefully ordered separation of powers with checks and balances, deliberately restraining a more unified operation of government, we see a reflection of the Calvinist doctrine of the fallenness of human nature, with its inevitable tendency of an ascendant arm of government to abuse power in a tyrannical direction."

"Americans in 1776 wanted governors limited and their powers divvied up. The reason for this rested in man’s untrustworthiness. Had Americans believed in the innate goodness of man, the Declaration would have looked substantially different than it did growing in a Calvinistic garden."

Bump!

"Presbyterian Church with a body of members who tended to not see the truth, so they maintained their 'official' relationship with it while joining the Masons"

~some~ joined the Masons, Dutch, ~some~. Cerainly not ~ALL~ as you are so quick to insinuate! How dishonest. But I expect nothing less from you, now, don't I?!?

Furthermore, of the ~MAJORITY~ of the founders/framers (who were Calvinists) the ~MINORITY~ were ~NOT~ Masons! I would expect, then, that the Majority of Calvinsts (who were not Masons) would certainly keep their weaker brothers in check in their corroboration of the formulation of these wonderful documents!

(you didn't even read this article did you -otherwise you would already know the arguments you are putting forth have already been contradicted!)

Jean

Haven't you already discovered that "Dutch-Comfort" makes this stuff up as he goes along? (After all, everyone knows that John Calvin dedicated the Institutes to King Louis XIV[of some other "Louie"]!)

As a result, I choose not to interact with him, choosing to follow Proverbs 26:4 rather than 26:5.

I've always wondered how a people dedicated to the absolute sovereignity of God get up the gumption to overthrow their leader. I mean, wasn't America being ruled by George III the will of the absolutely sovereign God?

How did Luther get the courage to start a religious revolution?........If it is not God's will it will not happen

See Dave we are no mans puppet ..we have no King but Jesus...ohh yea ...no pope either:>)

How did Luther get the courage to start a religious revolution?........If it is not God's will it will not happen

Huh? So anything we do, we can just say it was "God's will" that it happen?

That's awfully convenient. Everything that everyone does is "God's will." It must be extremely liberating to have no responsibility for your own actions.

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