Although America was a nation of many religious persuasions, (i.e. Baptists, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Deists Unitarians, Episcopalians), five religious ideas connected Americans of different religious persuasions in pursuing liberty and independence.
1. The disestablishment of state churches, a movement that promoted the idea of the separation of church and state
2. The idea that God was the guarantor of fundamental human rights: “We hold these rights to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” –Declaration of Independence
3. The threat to states, institutions and community posed by human sinfulness
4. That conviction that a republic needed to be sustained by public virtue and that in the absence of public virtue anarchy would ensure which would lead to the rise of an autocrat.
5. The belief that God—or Providence—moved in and through nations
Reading this book, I was reminded of the Founding Fathers’ conviction that only if a nation’s citizens and its leaders embraced public virtue could a nation hope to preserve good government. Public virtue included honesty, self-sacrifice, and good will towards others. Our Founding Fathers’ believed that religion provided the foundation on which public virtue was built.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness—these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. …and let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.” George Washington’s Farewell Address 1796