After long days advocating for biblical values on Capitol Hill, it is a comfort to see plaques hanging in congressional office buildings that read: “In God we Trust.” That phrase is not archaic, nor is it shallow nostalgia — it reflects the historical fact that the United States of America was founded on Christian principles. That is why Concerned Women for America (CWA) celebrates Faith Month each April.
In August 1620, William Bradford’s band of Separatists departed for North America aboard the Mayflower, making landfall later that year in November. Bradford wrote of his company, “Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven.”
Historians Peter Marshall and David Manuel observed that the Separatist Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact, written and signed on board the ship for the establishment of their Massachusetts colony, was “the first time in history since the children of Israel in the Sinai wilderness (with the exception of John Calvin’s Geneva) that free and equal men had voluntarily covenanted together to create their own new civil government based on biblical principles.”
This distinction is an important one. Not only was the Mayflower Compact a forerunner of the United States Constitution, but it was the lifeblood of the Christian families that laid the foundations of our Christian country.
Founder John Adams agreed. He wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The men who built America and wrote the Constitution that has framed our government for almost 250 years acknowledged that America’s government is Christian, and so are its people.
This foundation is evident in several core functions of American civilization: the equal dignity and value of all humans, the sanctity of human life, special care for children, the equality of the sexes, and the dignity of work and free enterprise.
