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During a July 24 appearance on PBS’s “Firing Line” to discuss his new children’s book about America’s founding, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with host Margaret Hoover’s assertion that “there is no common religion or cultural heritage of Americans.”

When Hoover asked him to respond to critics who say Americans did share a common cultural and religious heritage, Gorsuch cited the Amish, the Quakers, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the lone Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.

But these examples do not prove what Gorsuch apparently thinks they prove. The Amish, Quakers, and Catholics are all part of the broad Christian tradition. Their differences were real and sometimes profound, but denominational diversity is not the same as the absence of a common religious inheritance.

Gorsuch was wrong to agree that America had no common religious or cultural heritage. America was a Christian nation in the historical and cultural sense — not because every American was a Christian or because the Constitution established a national church, but because Christianity supplied the shared moral vocabulary through which the founding generation understood God, human nature, liberty, duty and law.

America was never a theocracy. The First Amendment wisely forbids Congress from establishing a national religion while protecting its free exercise. Yet religious liberty does not require historical amnesia, and the absence of an established church does not mean the absence of a Christian national heritage.

The Declaration’s claim that human beings are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights rests on a distinctly biblical understanding of the human person. The idea of moral law above civil government, of rulers accountable to a higher authority and of human dignity grounded in the image of God arose from the Judeo-Christian soil in which the American experiment took root.

Gorsuch himself acknowledged earlier in the interview that the Declaration rests on three great ideas: that all people are created equal, that our rights are given by God rather than government, and that we possess the right to govern ourselves. He is correct. But those ideas did not descend from nowhere, detached from religion and culture. They emerged from a moral universe shaped by Scripture.

Even the Supreme Court building reflects that inheritance. Tablets numbered I through X appear on the lower interior panels of the courtroom doors, while Moses is depicted with tablets elsewhere in the building. Perhaps the justice has walked past them too quickly.

George Washington understood what Gorsuch now obscures. In his Farewell Address, Washington reminded Americans: “With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.” He then warned that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity and that national morality cannot be expected to endure without religious principle.

Washington described republican self-government as an experiment because its success was not guaranteed. Could a free people govern themselves under a constitutional rule of law, or would liberty decay into license and license invite tyranny?

Our Founders Acknowledged God. Gorsuch Is Wrong Denying America’s Christian Heritage.

Even Benjamin Franklin, the one prominent founder secular revisionists commonly regard as a deist, promoted Rev. George Whitefield’s aggressive Christian revival efforts in the colonies prior to the Declaration of Independence. This same Benjamin Franklin recognized that republican government could not flourish if severed from God. During the Constitutional Convention, he called the delegates to prayer, declaring that “God governs in the affairs of men” and asking whether an empire could rise without His aid.

Three months later, Franklin supported the proposed Constitution as a potential blessing, but cautioned that it could “only end in despotism” when the people became so corrupted that they required despotic government, being incapable of any other.

Why would a people ever “need” despotism? Simple. Because as self-government disappears within the human heart, external government expands to restrain the resulting disorder. There is an equal but opposite relationship between the decline of moral self-restraint and the growth of state coercion.

Scripture warns against using liberty as an opportunity for the flesh. The alternative is to serve one another through love. Otherwise, Paul cautions, we will “bite and devour one another” (Galatians 5:13-15). A society whose members will not govern their appetites eventually demands that police, courts, regulators and bureaucracies manage the consequences.

That is the difference between liberty and license. Liberty is the freedom to pursue what is good, true and just. License is the insistence that every appetite deserves social approval, legal protection and sometimes public subsidy.

America, in her forgetfulness of God, increasingly confuses the two. Personal preferences are repackaged as rights, and the government is then enlisted to referee the collisions among them. Worse, that government is composed of officials formed by the same disordered culture.

The Bill of Rights was designed chiefly to restrain government and protect the fundamental liberties inherent in being human under God. Yet constitutional language has repeatedly been stretched to protect conduct the Founders would have regarded as destructive of the moral conditions required for free and civil order.

The First Amendment has been interpreted to protect vast quantities of pornographic expression that do not meet the narrow legal definition of obscenity, contributing to the commodification of the human body. For nearly half a century, Roe v. Wade used a constitutional privacy framework to remove protection from unborn human life, until Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned it in 2022. Obergefell v. Hodges invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to constitutionalize same-sex marriage nationwide.

Meanwhile, under the banner of state autonomy, legislatures have normalized practices that weaken families, devalue life or prey upon human weakness — from no-fault divorce and commercialized gambling to physician-assisted suicide and recreational marijuana.

The result is not greater freedom. It is greater addiction, isolation, family fracture, despair and dependence upon the state.

Can America’s moral train wreck scramble back up the embankment and return to the rails of ordered liberty?

The temptation to reject God’s wisdom in pursuit of a supposedly greater freedom is as old as Adam and Eve. God warned Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Humanity has been repeating that rebellion ever since — imagining that freedom from God will bring life, only to discover we are enslaved to our appetites.

All of us participated in that rebellion. This is not merely an indictment of judges, politicians, activists or cultural elites. It is a call to repentance for a nation and for each of us.

Because we are made in God’s image, to forget Him is ultimately to forget ourselves. We lose sight of what it means to be human, of the meaning of male and female, of the duties that accompany rights and of the moral restraints that make freedom possible.

The answer will not come from another government program. Law can restrain some evil, but it cannot manufacture virtue. Politics follows culture, and culture is formed first in hearts, homes, churches, and communities.

The first step back from the brink is therefore not to look to Washington, but to look up.

It begins when we acknowledge that liberty is not the right to do whatever we desire. It is the opportunity to do what we ought. It begins when parents teach truth, churches recover courage, citizens accept responsibility, and public officials remember that their authority is neither absolute nor self-created.

America can still renew the great experiment. But first we must tell the truth about it. The United States did not establish a national church, but it was founded by a people whose common culture, moral reasoning and understanding of liberty were overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity.

Gorsuch was wrong to say otherwise. A nation conceived under God cannot remain free while pretending it was born without Him.

In Christ,

Rev. Jim Harden, M.Div.
CompassCare CEO
EMC Frontline President

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