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The Founding Fathers disagreed about plenty — taxes, the structure of the Senate, whether Alexander Hamilton should be trusted with anything. But on the connection between faith and liberty, they found striking common ground. They drew from different traditions — Anglican, Presbyterian, Deist, Catholic, Congregationalist — and arrived at the same conclusion: that a free people could not remain free without the moral anchoring that religious conviction provides. That argument is worth hearing again, in their own words.
- George Washington — Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
“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 labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men & citizens.”
Washington spent years refining his Farewell Address before releasing it. He was not speaking as a clergyman but as a statesman who had watched a nation hold together against impossible odds. His verdict was blunt: strip away religion and morality, and liberty itself collapses.
- George Washington — Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
“Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure — reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Later in the same address, Washington pressed the point further. Educated elites might manage a kind of secular morality, he allowed — but an entire nation? That, he argued, was a bridge too far.
- George Washington — Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”
Washington wrote this to Moses Seixas, warden of Newport’s Touro Synagogue, after visiting Rhode Island. He rejected the word “toleration” — framing religious freedom not as a government gift but as a natural right. It remains one of the most liberal statements on religious pluralism any Founder ever made.
- John Adams — Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams wrote this to Massachusetts militiamen bracing for a possible French naval assault. It remains one of the most direct statements any Founder made about the preconditions of democracy — the idea that the Constitution was not a self-sustaining machine but a framework for people already shaped by moral conviction.
- John Adams — Letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813
“I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God: and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature.”
Adams and Jefferson’s late-in-life correspondence is one of the great documents of American intellectual history. Here Adams argued that Christianity’s core principles — not its institutions, but its moral logic — undergirded the entire project of American liberty.
- Benjamin Franklin — Address to the Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787
“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?”
Franklin was 81 and in failing health when he delivered this appeal for daily prayer at a Convention that was fracturing over representation. The man most often stereotyped as a skeptic among the Founders was, in that moment, the one invoking Providence most plainly — calling the delegates to humility when pride was threatening to wreck everything.
- Thomas Jefferson — A Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774
“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
Jefferson wrote this pamphlet two years before the Declaration, arguing the colonists’ case to the Crown. It planted the seed of what would become his most famous claim — that liberty is not a political arrangement but a gift from the Creator, inseparable from existence itself.
- Thomas Jefferson — Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, 1782
“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
Jefferson wrote this with the institution of slavery in view — a terrifying self-indictment from the man who held other people in bondage. But the principle holds beyond its original context: freedom requires not just legal protection but moral conviction rooted in accountability to God.
- James Madison — Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785
“Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.”
Madison drafted this petition anonymously to defeat a Virginia bill that would have levied taxes to support Christian teachers. He won — and the document became foundational to American religious liberty: faith held at the point of a sword is no faith at all.
- John Jay — Letter to John Murray, October 12, 1816
“Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”
Jay was the first Chief Justice of the United States and a co-author of The Federalist Papers. Whatever one makes of his specific prescription, his premise — that self-governing people bear responsibility before God for how they use that freedom — was not unusual among the Founders.
- Alexander Hamilton — A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, December 15, 1774
“Remember civil and religious liberty always go together; if the foundation of the one be sapped, the other will fall of course.”
Hamilton was 19 when he wrote this pamphlet defending the Continental Congress against Loyalist criticism. His argument was simple and durable: religious and civil freedom don’t occupy separate rooms in the same house — they share a foundation. Knock out one wall, the whole structure goes.
- Samuel Adams — Letter to James Warren, February 12, 1779
“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.”
Adams — the firebrand of the Revolution — wrote this during the grinding middle years of the war. Military victory, he was already insisting, was the lesser challenge. The greater threat to the American experiment was internal: the slow rot of public virtue and the convictions that sustained it.
- John Witherspoon — “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men,” May 17, 1776
“He is the best friend to American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind.”
Witherspoon was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. He preached this sermon at Princeton six weeks before the Continental Congress took its fateful vote. For him, the Revolution was not merely a political act — it was inseparable from the cause of God.
- Charles Carroll — Letter to James McHenry, November 4, 1800
“Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure, and which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.”
Carroll was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration and its longest-surviving one, dying in 1832 at 95. He wrote this the year John Adams lost the presidency to Jefferson. His conviction — that Christian morality and republican government were bound together — never wavered across his long life.
- Patrick Henry — Speech to the Second Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Henry delivered this speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond — fittingly, inside a house of worship. The text, reconstructed from the recollections of those present, was published by William Wirt in his 1817 biography of Henry. The invocation of God was not rhetorical flourish. Henry believed, as most of his contemporaries did, that the case for liberty was ultimately a case about who held final authority over the human soul.
These were not pious platitudes. They were working convictions — arguments made by men who put everything on the line to build something that had never existed before. They kept asking what a free society required to survive. And they kept arriving at the same answer.
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