Regain the Vision of our Founding Fathers by David Barton and Rick Green

How do we regain the vision of our founding fathers and cast it to today’s culture?

To understand their vision, we must understand the source of their ideas: the Bible and the sermons of Christian ministers. Christian ministers such as the Revs. John Wise, Jonathan Mayhew, Charles Chauncey, Samuel Cooper, and others are credited with laying the basis for American independence. In fact, after a comprehensive study of hundreds of sermons in the century preceding American independence, historian Alice Baldwin concluded: “There is not a right asserted in the Declaration of Independence which had not been discussed by the New England clergy before 1763.”

Today, however, we have allowed Christianity to be so constricted that it now only applies to the saving of souls (which is certainly vital) and no longer to issues of taxation, education, transportation, and every other form of public policy, even though II Timothy 3:16-17 reminds us that the Scripture is given to prepare us for every good work.

We must recover a knowledge of our history, including the applicability of the Bible to all aspects of public life and policy. As President Woodrow Wilson accurately acknowledged: “We are trying to do a futile thing if we don’t know where we have come from, or what we have been about.”

How has the relationship between freedom and religion in our country disconnected from its original intent?

Americans have largely forgotten the source of our freedoms, having never heard John Adams’ declaration that: “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were. . . . the general principles of Christianity.” Significantly, signer of the Declaration Richard Henry Lee declared that the Declaration itself was “copied” from John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government – a book that cites the Bible over 1,500 times to show the proper operation of civil government. Similarly, political scientists have documented that the single most cited authority in the writings of the Founding Era was the Bible. For example, signers of the Constitution George Washington and Alexander Hamilton acknowledge that the principle undergirding the separation of powers was found in Jeremiah 17:9; and compare the Constitution’s clause on uniform immigration laws with Leviticus 19:34; its provision that a president must be a natural born citizen with Deuteronomy 17:15; the section regarding witnesses and capital punishment with Deuteronomy 17:6; and the clause against attainder with Ezekiel 18:20. Similarly, notice that Isaiah 33:22 defines the three branches of government; Ezra 7:24 establishes the type of tax exemptions that the Founders gave to our churches; and the concept of republicanism – of electing our leaders at the local, county, state, and federal levels – has its origins in Exodus 18:21. In America, our freedoms and our faith are directly connected.