In preparing for its 250th anniversary, I reread the Declaration of Independence. What it says and does not say is fascinating. In between hot dogs, slices of apple pie, and before dusk falls and the fireworks commence in earnest, every American ought to reread it today.

Every school child knows (or should know) that Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote the Declaration,  borrowing from earlier documents. My interest in this essay is to note the pragmatic approach to religion in the Declaration.¹

As Richard Carwardine observes, the signers of the Declaration represented a number of different Christian sects, and several were decidedly non-Christian in their religious sentiments. The author of the Declaration was famously dissatisfied with orthodox Christianity. He produced his own edition of the New Testament, which is known as “Jefferson’s Bible.” Thomas Kidd describes it as “Jefferson’s cut-and-paste edition of extracts from the Gospels.”² His stated intention for the work was as “an abridgement [sic] of the New Testament for the use of the Indians.”³ Kidd tells us that Jefferson’s second edition was “a polyglot edition, with side-by-side passages in English, French, Greek, and Latin.”⁴ Though Jefferson rejected orthodox Christianity, especially “Calvinism,” which he dismissed as “demoralizing,”⁵ he did so as he read the Greek New Testament. Jefferson’s religion was eclectic. He appreciated Jesus’s ethical teaching and did not entirely eliminate the supernatural from his edition of the Gospels. Jefferson was what we would today call a theological liberal. He sat in judgment over Holy Scripture. Jesus was allowed to say and teach what Jefferson approved. He followed a Jesus of his own imagination.

The religious language used in the Declaration, however, was vague enough to accommodate the more orthodox convictions of the only “active clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration,” John Witherspoon.⁶ Both Deists and the orthodox Christians could agree with Jefferson that governments are subject to the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”⁷ They could also agree that there are “self-evident truths” (they were not epistemological skeptics nor deconstructionists), that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”⁸

For the American founders, one of the unalienable rights with which humans have been endowed is the right to gather in worship freely, according to the dictates of conscience, without being molested by the magistrate and without being made by the magistrate to subsidize and support a religion or denomination. We know that because the founders explicitly rejected a national established church and their successors quickly disestablished the state churches.⁹ As D. G. Hart says,

The settlement hammered out in the 1780s somehow made room for all religious groups—including, eventually, skeptics and atheists. The full measure of religious freedom took a while to include Catholics, Mormons and Jews. But in time religious disestablishment freed all religious groups from governmental restrictions. The downside, for churches that had been established, was the loss of the government’s financial support. But the benefits more than compensated for the loss. Religious groups were free, and remain so, to practice their convictions without seeking the state’s approval.¹⁰

As Carwardine observes, the religion of the signers varied. John Adams (1735–1826), the second president of the Republic, was a “Calvinist Congregationalist turned Unitarian.”¹¹ Benjamin Franklin (c. 1706–90), whom D. G. Hart aptly characterizes as a “cultural Protestant,”¹² was “a Freemason devoted to the ideal of human progress.”¹³ A “dozen signers of the Declaration” had been “shaped by Presbyterianism,” including Richard Stockton, a trustee of the College of New Jersey, and “the distinguished physician” Benjamin Rush.¹⁴ According to Carwardine, it was Rush who persuaded Witherspoon to come to the New World.

Most of those who gathered in Philadelphia were for the first time engaging face to face with representatives of that rich religious pluralism. Unitarians, Presbyterians, and Anglicans rubbed shoulders with those of Quaker background like Joseph Hewes of North Carolina, and Baptist farmer-politicians like John Hart of New Jersey. The Catholic Church was present, too, through the lone figure of the Jesuit-educated Charles Carroll of Maryland, whose vast Carrollton estates and slave-holding interests made him possibly the wealthiest man in the colonies. The multiplicity of traditions had the effect of concentrating minds on what united them: independence from Britain.¹⁵

Why was religious liberty not specified in the Declaration? Carwardine argues it was “probably because the fractious question of religious establishments was a divisive issue for colonial churches.”¹⁶ That seems right. As I noted sometime ago in this space, not all the colonies had established churches, and some of those that had established churches disestablished them in 1776.¹⁷ That is not to say, however, that religious freedom was not a powerful motive for the Americans to revolt against King George III. “The threat that the king might appoint an Anglican bishop in the colonies had fed resistance during the 1760s and 1770s. John Adams later claimed that “the apprehension of Episcopacy” contributed as much as anything to the coming of revolution.”¹⁸

There is a bevy of uninformed voices now clamoring to overturn the American founding and to establish some undefined, general, heretofore unknown sect they describe as “generic” Christianity as the state church. These erstwhile establishmentarians seem ignorant of the history that preceded the founding of the Republic. The English Congregationalists who first came to these shores repeated the mistakes of their British forefathers. They established a church in the first colony and punished religious dissent, thus laying the foundation to bring to these shores the same sort of religious warfare that had dominated British and European life for most of the sixteenth century and for all of the seventeenth century.

If there is to be an established church, then it is reasonable to ask, Which church? History knows nothing of the generic Christianity imagined by the Christian nationalists. For example, the “Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” is remarkably vague on this point.¹⁹ At least the Roman Catholic integralists are relatively clear about their desire to impose Roman Catholicism on the rest of us.²⁰

Whatever denomination is imposed in the future as the putative established church (history tells us that the established church must be of some denomination), there will be dissent. Brad Littlejohn proposed a couple ways to handle the dissent, but his proposals are, from an American perspective, radically un-American.²¹ I and others will not be made to subsidize a state church. We will resist. We will not be made to submit to a state church. There will be resistance. If you want to know the future should the integralists, Christian nationalists, and other establishmentarians get their way, please read very closely the history of the American Revolution. The irony of Americans proposing to establish a church is enormous and reveals a considerable degree of hubris and ignorance of history.

I trust that it will not come to this. One way to prevent the establishmentarians from plunging us back into another American Revolution is to appreciate the marvelous flexibility and wisdom of the American Declaration of Independence. In it we began to model a way for a variety of religious views to live together peaceably. In the Bill of Rights we articulated the principles by which we agree to live with our differences.

It may be that the establishmentarians have simply rejected the American Experiment. Besides the integralists, the Christian nationalists, and other Christian establishmentarians, there are other religious views that are manifestly unwilling to live with the American settlement—for example, most orthodox versions of Islam. There are Westernized, liberal Muslims who do not much believe the Qur’an or the Hadiths (authoritative Muslim traditions) who are comfortable with secular pluralism, but it is not difficult to find fire-breathing imams in mosques across the United States who reject the separation of mosque and state.²² They are replete on YouTube. The last twenty-five years have illustrated the danger of orthodox Islam in America.

Today, however, is a day to celebrate the gift we Americans have been given by the founders, the gift of religious liberty and the absence of religious warfare, which has facilitated (relative to Europe and the UK) a relatively healthy and free church.

Notes

1. On this see Richard Carwardine, “New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers: The Religious Diversity of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,” History Now 64 (Fall 2022).
2. Thomas S. Kidd, “The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder,” Text and Canon Institute, July 4, 2022.
3. Kidd, “Jefferson Bible.”
4. Kidd, “Jefferson Bible.”
5. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, ed., Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson (London, 1829), 4:357–58, quoted in Carwardine, “New Light.”
6. “John Witherspoon,” National Constitution Center, “Signers,” accessed July 2, 2026. Witherspoon was president of the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton University. According to this article he “taught James Madison and Aaron Burr.” For more on Witherspoon, see Kevin DeYoung, The Religious Formation of John Witherspoon: Calvinism, Evangelicalism, and the Scottish Enlightenment, Routledge Studies in Evangelicalism (Routledge, 2020).
7. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives, “America’s Founding Documents,” accessed July 2, 2026.
8. “Declaration of Independence.”
9. See the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. National Archives, “America’s Founding Documents.” For more on the process of disestablishment of the state churches, see R. Scott Clark, “The American Experiment,” The Heidelblog, Sept. 15, 2026.
10. D. G. Hart, “Christians Err If They Give Up on America,” Wall Street Journal, “Opinion,” June 29, 2023.
11. Carwardine, “New Light.”
12. D. G. Hart, Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant, Spiritual Lives (Oxford University Press, 2021).
13. Carwardine, “New Light.” For more on Franklin, see Thomas S. Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2017).
14. Carwardine, “New Light.”
15. Carwardine, “New Light.”
16. Carwardine, “New Light.”
17. Clark, “American Experiment.”
18. Carwardine, “New Light.”
19. R. Scott Clark, “Sub-Christian Nationalism? (Part 4),” The Heidelblog, June 21, 2023.
20. R. Scott Clark, “Roman and Protestant Integralists Together: Or Why an Established Religion Is a Really Bad Idea,” The Heidelblog, April 13, 2022.
21. See Clark, “Roman and Protestant.”
22. Immanuel Al-Manteeqi, “Jihadists Dream of the Caliphate. Here’s What You Need to Know,” Counter Jihad, September 13, 2016.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He is professor emeritus of church history and historical theology at Westminster Seminary California, where he taught for 29 years. He also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007 and the Heidelcast since 2009.

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