Our Very Christian Founding

The United States has reached its 250th birthday, and remarkably, there is still a debate about whether we were founded as an explicitly Christian nation. 

Frank Friday | July 1, 2026

The United States has reached its 250th birthday, and remarkably, there is still debate about whether we were founded as an explicitly Christian nation. That’s because late 19th-century academia came up with the nebulous idea of a post-Christian “Enlightenment,” causing a lot of confusion. But there shouldn’t be.

Part of the problem is that some Christians today want to see the Founders as conventionally Christian, when some were not. Jefferson, for one, was a resolutely heterodox thinker. The amateur historian David Barton even had to withdraw his 2012 book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson due to the numerous fake or unsupported quotes he used.

But that’s all quite irrelevant to the question at hand.

Rather, consider this -- a country today with Sharia law as its official justice system would undoubtedly be considered a “Muslim country.” So also, the United States is founded upon an explicitly Christian system -- the English common law.

49 of our 50 states have laws that essentially state -- the common law of England, insofar as it is not repugnant to the principles of the Bill of Rights and Constitution of this Commonwealth, shall continue in full force…

That includes Justice Coke’s magisterial 1608 opinion in Calvin’s Case, where he wrote the “law of nature is the law of England,” and the “law of nature is that which God at the time of creation of the nature of man infused into his heart, for his preservation, and direction...”

The English common law began with Saxon King Alfred’s 893 AD Doom book, enshrining Christian natural law by coordinating the customary laws of the Anglo-Saxons with the principles of the Ten Commandments and New Testament.

The British scholar John C.H. Wu wrote that the “English common law is a cradle Catholic while Roman law was a deathbed convert,” referring to........

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