As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, the following essay from my friend Michael Peabody is very informative with regard to the faith that led up to these founding documents. If you enjoy Michael Peabody’s insightful essays, I encourage you to become a subscriber to his web site: RELIGIOUSLIBERTY.TV. His latest essay follows:

Two hundred fifty years ago this week, fifty-six men signed a document declaring that certain rights come from nowhere lower than the Creator himself. That claim, so familiar it has lost its strangeness, was in 1776 a piece of theology as much as politics. To understand why the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights that followed it read the way they do, a reader has to go back two and a half centuries earlier, to a monk nailing grievances to a church door in Wittenberg.
Martin Luther did not invent the phrase “priesthood of all believers,” but he gave it its modern force. Drawing on a line from the first epistle of Peter, which calls believers “a royal priesthood,” Luther argued that every Christian stood in direct relation to God, without need of a priest, a bishop or a pope to broker the connection. Baptism, he wrote in his 1520 address to the German nobility, consecrated every believer as fully as any ordination. The claim was radical because it stripped the institutional church of its monopoly on divine access. If a farmer’s conscience could read Scripture and answer to God as competently as a cardinal’s, the entire architecture of medieval authority, resting on the idea that grace flowed downward through a hierarchy, had lost its foundation.

That single theological move had two centuries of political sediment to work through before it reached Philadelphia. Luther’s own instincts on civil government were often conservative. He wanted princes to keep order and left the priesthood of believers largely inside the walls of the church. It was the radicals who followed him, the Anabaptists of Zurich and Munster, who pushed the logic further and asked why a state church made any sense if every believer already possessed direct standing before God. They were drowned and burned for the question in numbers historians still argue over. The question survived them.
It crossed the Atlantic with Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1636 for arguing that civil magistrates had no business enforcing the first table of the Ten Commandments. Williams founded Rhode Island on the premise that faith coerced by government was not faith at all, and that conscience answered to God alone. He wrote of a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, a phrase Thomas Jefferson would echo, likely without knowing its source, in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.

By the time of the American founding, the priesthood of all believers had migrated from a doctrine about sacraments to a doctrine about sovereignty. Evangelical Baptists in Virginia, dissenters excluded from the tax-supported Anglican establishment, made the connection explicit. John Leland, a Baptist preacher and something of a political operator, pressed James Madison in 1788, warning that Baptist support for ratifying the Constitution would depend on a firm guarantee of religious liberty. Madison, who had been troubled by reports of Baptist preachers jailed in Virginia for preaching without a license, delivered. The First Amendment’s religion clauses, forbidding an establishment and protecting free exercise, are the direct legislative offspring of a theology that had spent two hundred fifty years insisting no earthly office stands between a soul and its maker.

The Declaration itself carries the same premise in different clothing. When Jefferson wrote that men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, he was drawing on John Locke and the Enlightenment as much as on Geneva or Wittenberg, and historians are right to resist a tidy story that makes the American founding a straight line from the Ninety-Five Theses to Independence Hall. Locke read Scripture closely and argued for toleration on grounds that were part rationalist and part religious. The Declaration’s debt to natural law theory, classical republicanism and Scottish moral philosophy is real, and any honest account has to hold those threads alongside the Protestant one rather than erase them.

But the overlap is not coincidence either. A political theory that locates ultimate authority in the individual conscience, answerable directly to a higher power without mediation by crown or miter, fits naturally beside a religious tradition that had already made the same argument about salvation. The signers who declared that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed were applying, whether they knew it or not, a structure of thought that dissenting Protestants had been rehearsing in meetinghouses for two centuries: legitimate authority flows upward from the individual, not downward from an office.

None of this settles current arguments over the Establishment Clause, and it should not be pressed into service as a trump card in them. The founders themselves disagreed sharply, Madison and Jefferson far more separationist than John Adams or Patrick Henry. What the history does establish is that the vocabulary of unalienable rights and consent of the governed did not spring fully formed from Enlightenment salons. It had a pulpit history first.

At 250 years, the country built on that premise still argues about its boundaries, as it should. The argument itself, conducted in courtrooms and statehouses rather than settled by decree, is the clearest evidence that the premise took hold. A nation that lets its citizens contest the meaning of liberty in public, without asking a bishop’s permission first, is still cashing a check written by an Augustinian monk in Saxony five centuries ago. Whatever else divides Americans this Independence Day, that inheritance is common property.