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  "path": "/2026/04/the-pews-prepared-the-way-faith-revolution-and-the-american-creed/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-09T08:34:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
  "tags": [
    "America’s Founding",
    "The Latest",
    "first piece"
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  "textContent": "Decades before Jefferson drafted the Declaration, ministers from across the 13 colonies preached natural rights and the equal standing of all men before God. In 1638, in the newly formed Connecticut Colony, a Puritan minister named Rev. Thomas Hooker delivered an audacious sermon for its time. He stood before the colony’s General Court and declared that “The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people” and that “The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance.” In the 17th century, a minister telling civil authorities that the government owed its existence to the governed, by God’s design, was seditious. Hooker grounded his argument in scripture and Puritan covenant theology. Consent was God’s idea first.\n\nThe notion spread through New England Congregationalists, whose approach to church governance was already relatively democratic. Congregations elected their own pastors and elders. All believers, not just a clerical elite, had a say under God. In practice and preaching, the colonists were rehearsing for 1776 by applying biblical principles to governance long before Jefferson and the Founders memorialized them in the Declaration.\n\nArguably the most influential of these was Rev. John Wise of Massachusetts, a Congregationalist minister who fought tyranny in his own life. In 1687, when royal governor Edmund Andros imposed taxes without colonial consent, Wise helped lead a citizen’s revolt. For his trouble, he was jailed by the Crown yet was not silenced. By 1710 he published _The Church’s Quarrel Espoused_ , and in 1717 _A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches_ , works that laid out biblical arguments for equal natural rights, government by consent, and the just limits of authority. Wise drew on scripture, the Enlightenment philosophy available to him, and the writings of English jurist Richard Hooker, an earlier theologian who also influenced Locke. The result was a theological treatise on liberty so influential it was reprinted in 1772 on the eve of the Revolution.\n\nIts words are strikingly close to the Declaration. Wise wrote, “Every man must be acknowledged equal to every man,” and “The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights—his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc., without injury or abuse done to any.”\n\nSound familiar? Jefferson’s Declaration would announce that governments are instituted to secure people’s rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The overlap is no coincidence. There was not much in Jefferson’s first draft that Wise hadn’t already preached from his pulpit decades before. The compass that guided the Founders, and later Abraham Lincoln, toward liberty and justice did not arise by accident. It was set by centuries of Judeo-Christian teaching on the worth of the human person.\n\nFounding Father John Adams later admitted as much. Writing in 1822, Adams reflected on the Declaration’s origins and said: “There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before . . . Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet . . . printed by the town of Boston before the first Congress met.” The pamphlet Adams meant was pastor John Wise’s. A key Founder freely acknowledged that the intellectual substance behind “all men are created equal” had been percolating in American discourse, placed there largely by dissenting preachers wielding Bibles and sharp pens.\n\nThe religious revival of the mid-1700s known as the First Great Awakening further democratized the colonial mindset. Evangelists like George Whitefield traveled the colonies. He preached to thousands, saying that all people, regardless of their class or color, must be “born again” in Christ. Rich merchants and poor farmers stood shoulder to shoulder, equally in need of grace. This spiritual leveling reinforced the message that no one stood above another in the eyes of God. When Whitefield preached in the South, even enslaved Africans gathered at the edges to listen. Americans became increasingly convinced that liberty and equality were part of God’s plan.\n\nBy the 1770s, patriot preachers openly linked the “sacred cause” of American liberty with God’s will. Ministers cited Old Testament stories of the Israelites escaping Pharaoh’s slavery and declared that God likewise intended Americans to escape British tyranny. The language of the day mixed biblical Israel with political liberty interchangeably.\n\nEquality became sacred in the American mind. Colonists heard it repeated from a young age: all men are equally sinful before God and in need of redemption. In politics, they began to understand everyone was endowed with rights no government could justifiably remove. Coolidge later summarized: “They [the colonial clergy] preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image.”\n\nIn churches and elsewhere Americans repeated these principles. When the Declaration was first read publicly, crowds cheered as if affirming something they already held in their hearts. As patriot leader Samuel Adams put it, the people received the Declaration “as though it were a decree promulgated from Heaven.”\n\nSome British critics sneeringly labeled the American revolt “the Presbyterian Rebellion.” There was truth in the taunt: Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Jews, and others in the colonies built an ethical consensus that government must respect the God-given equality and rights of every person. When patriots spoke of “Nature’s God” and “Creator” in the Declaration, every colonist knew which God they meant. It was the God preached from American pulpits who “make of one blood all nations” and who calls even kings to account.\n\nSome argue that Enlightenment philosophers in Europe had already articulated equality and America merely applied secular ideas. Many European republics did spread lofty theories. But which societies actually attempted a republican experiment grounded in equality at that time? Only in the deeply religious American colonies did those theories take root broadly enough to sustain a revolution. France attempted it shortly after, but the French Revolution, launched with Enlightenment fervor, veered into violent anti-clericalism and the deification of Reason itself. Lacking any guiding compass of transcendent moral law, the French experiment degenerated into the Terror and ultimately traded one tyranny for another in Napoleon.\n\nThe American Revolution, by contrast, though not without its hypocrisies and failings, kept its grounding in a transcendent moral order that restrained excess. At its best, the United States always treated the Declaration’s ideals as aspirational standards, almost scripture, to hold itself against. That is due to the Declaration’s religious character. Abolitionists later seared America’s conscience with the Declaration’s words, asking how a nation founded on the truth that all men are created equal could tolerate human bondage. Their appeals hit home because the creed had sacred origins.\n\nWe should also address a fair question: if Judeo-Christian values informed “all men are created equal,” why didn’t the Founders apply the principle to enslaved Africans or to women? The painful irony of the Declaration is that its authors did not live up to their own words. Enslaved people remained in chains; women remained voiceless in political life. Hypocrisy? By today’s standards, certainly. Yet the internal logic of “created equal” proved over time to be a ticking clock against slavery.\n\nMore often than not, people of faith lit that fuse. Quakers and evangelical Christians were among the earliest and loudest abolitionists, citing the image of God in every person and the Declaration’s creed side by side. They pushed the nation to extend its founding promise to those it excluded.\n\nAbraham Lincoln later observed that the Founders placed a standard in the Declaration “for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for . . . even though never perfectly attained.” The standard was human equality, which he called “the father of all moral principle” in the American mind. Lincoln knew that principle held power because it was rooted in spiritually-informed morality.\n\nIn the winter of 1861, as the Union splintered and war drew near, Lincoln turned to the Hebrew Bible to describe the relationship between America’s founding documents. In a private reflection, he wrote that the Declaration of Independence was an “apple of gold,” a bright truth at the center of America’s story. The Constitution and the Union were a “picture [frame] of silver” built to surround and guard that apple. The order was important. “The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.”\n\nHe lifted this image from Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” The fitly spoken word was the Declaration’s assertion of liberty for all. In this elegant metaphor, Lincoln, a scripturally immersed thinker, affirmed that human equality gave ultimate meaning to the entire American project.\n\nAlso implicit in Lincoln’s metaphor is a biblical way of seeing the world, one in which meaning flows from origin and form exists to serve purpose. In Scripture, the Creator precedes creation; what is made derives its significance from the One who made it. Lincoln applied that same moral grammar to the American experiment. The Constitution, laws, and institutions were never meant to generate that truth, only to preserve it. The American order, like the biblical one, only holds when the foundation comes first. When structures forget what they were made to serve, the picture overtakes the apple, and the silver loses its shine.\n\nLincoln’s generation, like ours, wrestled with the gap between the Declaration’s ideal and political reality. He never doubted the ideal’s sacredness. In the heat of civil war, he described the Declaration as an “immortal emblem of humanity” and reasserted that the nation was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” To Lincoln’s mind, and to countless Americans before and since, the Declaration’s proposition was a moral beacon rooted in what he once called the “ancient faith” of our people. That faith is the Judeo-Christian conviction about the dignity of man under the sovereignty of God.\n\nCalvin Coolidge, speaking on the 150th anniversary of Independence, issued a warning that remains relevant. He said: “In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document . . . Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—they have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world.” Then came the kicker: “Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.” Whether or not you share Coolidge’s theological conclusion, his historical point stands: equality emerged from deeply held convictions about human worth.\n\nLincoln knew the stakes. He watched the nation nearly split over whether “created equal” meant what it said. He went back to Proverbs, back to the ancient image of golden words set in silver frames, because he understood that the Declaration’s power came from its spiritual tradition. Strip away the pews and the pulpits, the covenants and the sermons, and the long Judeo-Christian insistence that every person bears the image of God, and what remains is silver without gold: beautiful, perhaps, but no longer true.\n\n—\n\n_Editor’s Note: This the second in a two part series on the Jewish and Christian moral foundation of the American Revolution. The first piece in this series traced the Declaration’s equality clause to its biblical roots and showed how even secular Enlightenment thinkers borrowed from Jewish and Christian thought. But ideas need legs, and in colonial America clergy provided them._",
  "title": "The Pews Prepared the Way: Faith, Revolution, and the American Creed"
}