Did America Have a Christian Founding?

August 12, 2019
Hall (Great Christian Jurists in American History), senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, argues in this persuasive study that the founders of the United States of America were not deists, but rather leaned on their Christian beliefs to create constitutional order. Though the Constitution never mentions God specifically, Hall suggests that the document bears distinctly Christian elements, such as the phrase “in the year of our lord” and the prohibition of work on Sunday. Hall then argues that the Bill of Rights is rooted in the Christian belief of original sin, which acknowledges that people will inevitably make mistakes, so inherent rights must be protected against trespassers. Through a meticulous reading of the founders’ own works, Hall explains how the separation of church and state did not originally mean a total separation, citing the early history of religious support by the state, such as the government funding of chaplains in Congress and in the military. Hall also tracks early conflicts that defined the current understanding of separation of church and state, such as the rejection of religious tests for federal officials. Hall’s trenchant analysis will pique the curiosity of any reader interested in the religious origins of American government.

November 15, 2019
Religion and law in the early republic has been Hall's focus for more than 20 years and in a dozen books he's written or edited. Too many other writers on the subject, he says, have stressed, misleadingly and even dishonestly, the deism of such key Founders as Franklin, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison at the expense of many of their peers who were forthrightly Christian but not prolific writers. He highlights some of the latter, such as Roger Sherman, who was active in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and he cites many instances of the ostensibly deist Founders asserting the importance of Christianity to the nation and encouraging church attendance and Christian ethics explicitly (without disparaging Judaism). He establishes that the nation's founding documents were forged in a milieu saturated by Christianity, though no church was involved in creating them. For him, that amounts to a Christian founding. Many still may not be so sure, but Hall states his case with strength and candor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)