Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Mark David Hall
Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Political Science

[link to www.heritage.org (secure)]
Christian ideas underlie some key tenets of America’s constitutional order. For instance, the Founders believed that humans are created in the image of God, which led them to design institutions and laws meant to protect and promote human dignity. Because they were convinced that humans are sinful, they attempted to avoid the concentration of power by framing a national government with carefully enumerated powers. As well, the Founders were committed to liberty, but they never imagined that provisions of the Bill of Rights would be used to protect licentiousness. And they clearly thought moral considerations should inform legislation.

Interestingly he also said this:
A fourth possibility is that the Founders acted as Christians in their private and/or public lives. Some historians have argued that the Founding cannot be called Christian because some Founders did not join churches, take communion, or remain faithful to their spouses. Moreover, in their public capacity, they did not act in a Christian manner because they did things such as fight an unjust war against England and did not immediately abolish slavery.

Some historians considered slavery as unchristian???



During the time of the Magna Carta the Church and Christianity was evolving and reassessing their theological philosophy. Due legal process and reasonable doubt came from changing views of the Church. How to enforce laws without angering God or committing the ultimate sin by sentencing someone to death?

In his book, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, James Whitman, Law Professor at Yale Law School, argues that the ultimate concern of the medieval judiciary was not necessarily how to identify factual proof, but how to absolve oneself of moral responsibility for the outcome of judgement. This was an issue that had existed ever since Christianity had become adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire – and Christians had found themselves in positions of authority, required to dispense justice.

The medieval focus on a due and proper legal process develops, therefore, out of a theological concern for the guilt of those charged with the dispensation of justice. It was only by establishing ‘the procedures of the law’, that those who sat in positions of judgement could be absolved of moral responsibility for their judicial decisions. In so far as the judiciary followed a developed legal process, it was the law that shouldered the burden of responsibility for punishing the guilty party. This concept of due process pervades the Magna Carta, not simply in its appeals to “the lawful judgement of peers and the law of the land”, but in the fact that the basic purpose of the charter was to set out what constitutes right and proper action on the part of the governing authority. With this in mind, it is particularly relevant that this question of due process within a legal framework was a major theological concern of none other than Archbishop Stephen Langton who framed the Magna Carta.

So of course the Church looked hard at the Bible for inspiration and a basis for this change. As I have said before the Bible can be used to argue both sides of any argument just as you are. The Church is always evolving, from your ancient dogmatic views to the more friendly and encompassing views of more modern society. The words of Christ have been used for this change in philosophy.

From a link found here
[link to www.bethinking.org (secure)]

The human race is ruled by a twofold rule, namely, natural law and practices.Natural law is that which is contained in the law and the Gospel, by which each person is commanded to do to others what he would wish to be done to himself, and forbidden to render to others that which he would not have done to himself. Hence, Christ says in the Gospel, ‘All things whatever that you would wish other people to do to you, do the same also to them. For this is the law and the prophets.’

The so-called ‘golden rule’ lies at the very heart of justice – and should thus lie at the very heart of earthly laws. This might sound unsurprising to the modern ear, but in the 12th century it would have been something of revelation. As the Political Philosopher Larry Siedentop suggests:
By identifying natural law with biblical revelation and Christian morality, it gave an egalitarian basis – and a subversive potential – utterly foreign to the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as ‘everything in its place’

The “subversive potential” of such a revisionist approach to the concept of natural law lay in the fact that it treated all persons as equal before the natural law of God. The natural law as conceived refused to differentiate between persons based on their status, for the golden rule commands that everyone do to others as they would have done to themselves. If all persons stood equally before natural law however, and if natural law formed the basis of human law, then the unavoidable implication was that all persons should also stand equal before human law. This egalitarian line of thinking would go on to mark a subtle shift in the way that medieval Europe thought about whom the law was intended to serve. Rather than serve the king or the state in the preservation of the “natural” social order, the law came to be seen as an instrument of justice intended to serve the whole populace. Thus Pope Innocent III, writing in 1204, would declare:
'It may be said that kings are to be treated differently from others. We, however, know that it is written in the divine law, ‘You shall judge the great as well as the little and there shall be no difference of persons’.

A number of eminent scholars have identified this shift as the root from which we have come to speak of natural or inherent human rights. The statement that all humans are fundamentally equal before God naturally lent itself to the suggestion that humans have a ‘natural’ responsibility towards each other. This was particularly true with regards to the poor, for the Church issued a number of striking warnings that suggested a failure to feed the poor left the wealthy responsible for their deaths (e.g. “Feed the poor. If you do not feed them you kill them,” and “A man who keeps more for himself than he needs is guilty of theft”). The question that subsequently arose was whether the poor had a right to claim subsistence from the wealthy in times of need. Such a line of thinking was one that was as deeply indebted to the Scriptures and to the Early Church Fathers. A fundamentally egalitarian message was central to the Christian gospel, and the development of a coherent framework of canon law had allowed this fact to once more to thrust itself into the public sphere.



So yes, the Magna Carta has a very clear Christian philosophy woven into it, one that was only in existence at that time because of the Church and their changing views.