Insight On Religious Beliefs Of Our Founding Fathers

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, appointed by Madison at age 32 because of his constitutional scholarship, said in his commentary on the Constitution: “The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less advance, Mohammedanism or Judaism or infidelity by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government.”

Story also said, “We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious establishment to an indifference to religion in general, and especially to Christianity . . . Any attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.”

Patrick Henry, the firebrand of the revolution, said, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not upon religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”

James Madison said, “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves and to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

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