The Original Covenant: What the American Founders Truly Meant by Freedom of Religion
An originalist exegesis of the American Founding proves that the Constitution was never intended to be a blank check for ideologies hostile to Western liberty. True religious freedom requires a shared commitment to the nation’s core values, and the law was never intended to protect practices that actively seek to dismantle the very system providing that freedom.
Reading the Constitution According to Original Intent
In legal and constitutional scholarship, the approach of interpreting the Constitution through its original language and historical setting is called original intent or originalism. It closely parallels the historical-grammatical method of biblical interpretation, which seeks to discover the author’s original meaning based on the text, grammar, and historical context, rather than injecting modern cultural views.
Originalists argue that meaning is fixed at ratification. The words of the Constitution mean exactly what they meant to the people who wrote and ratified them in 1787, and the Bill of Rights in 1791. To understand that intent, originalists heavily rely on primary sources: the personal letters, diaries, state constitutional drafts, and essays, including The Federalist Papers, written by Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. These documents reveal their worldview and the precise definitions they had in mind.
The main opposing philosophy is called the “Living Constitution,” which argues that the text should adapt to modern societal values. The interpretation presented here follows the originalist and intentionalist framework used by modern legal scholars and Supreme Court justices to interpret the Constitution.
The Founders’ Moral and Legal Foundation
The First Amendment’s freedom of religion was explicitly designed by its Christian framers as a covenant for Judeo-Christian individuals fleeing state-sanctioned tyranny, not a suicide pact meant to accommodate hostile ideologies completely incompatible with Western civilization. When Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and the Framers drafted the nation’s founding documents, they were creating a covenant for a people rooted in Judeo-Christian morality and English Common Law.
The Founders heavily cited the Bible and modeled early American governance on Mosaic law. They utilized these biblical principles to protect liberty of conscience for varying Christian denominations and Jewish citizens who shared a foundational morality and understanding of human dignity, not to give legal shelter to practices that violate human rights.
The legal framework they created assumed a shared, objective moral code derived from the biblical tradition, which they routinely referred to as “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Founders openly acknowledged that their system required this specific moral fabric to survive. John Adams famously wrote in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The legal landscape of early America heavily incorporated English Common Law, which explicitly prohibited actions like polygamy, child marriage, and blasphemy against Christian foundations.
Liberty of Conscience and the First Amendment
When the Founders drafted the Free Exercise Clause, their immediate historical goal was to stop centuries of bloody warfare between different Christian denominations—such as Anglicans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—and prevent a federal state church.
Framing the Constitution as a blank check for any belief system—including Sharia law, which permits the subjugation of women, polygamy, and child brides—is a dangerous perversion of original intent. Using the First Amendment to shield such practices, completely antithetical to the nation’s laws, weaponizes the Constitution to protect the very forces that would destroy it.
George Washington and the Inclusion of Jewish Citizens
The inclusion of Jewish citizens into this national fabric was explicitly confirmed by George Washington in his famous 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. He stated that the United States government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” legally and culturally binding Jewish Americans into the foundational covenant of the new republic.
Patrick Henry on Christianity, Morality, and Freedom
Patrick Henry was one of the most vocal advocates among the Founders for grounding civil government directly in the Christian faith and biblical morality. On government and morality, Henry stated: “The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone, that renders us invincible.”
On the danger of forgetting God, he stated: “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated [corrupted] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”
On the supremacy of the Bible, Henry stated: “The Bible... is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed.” His personal will contained his ultimate statement on faith: “This is all the inheritance I can give to my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed.”
Benjamin Franklin on Jesus, God’s Role in Government, and Public Virtue
While Benjamin Franklin was personally more unconventional in his religious beliefs than Patrick Henry, he explicitly argued that the morals of Jesus were the greatest ever seen and firmly believed that a republic could not survive without divine assistance and public virtue. On the teachings of Jesus, Franklin stated: “As to Jesus of Nazareth... I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see.”
When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was falling into chaos and division, Franklin stood up and demanded that they open every session with prayer, stating: “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?”
When asked what kind of government the Framers had built, Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” He elaborated on what was required to keep it: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Primary Source Evidence as the Authority
The argument stands independently on the primary source evidence, regardless of who aligns with it. The data is the authority. When I argue for the historicity of Jesus using ancient creeds, manuscript evidence, and cross-cultural historical witnesses, my argument is not right because Gary Habermas says so; it is right because the historical data itself is robust and factual.
The historical-grammatical method is universally valid. Applying it to the Constitution is not a valid approach because modern judges use it—it is a valid approach because that is how language works. To read any document otherwise is to completely detach words from their actual definitions. The foundation of the argument is the evidence itself, rather than academic labels.
You May Also Benefit From
About the Author
EDWARD D. ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House. He has authored over 220+ books. In addition, Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV).
Comments