god-and-the-constitution.html

From the Article:
To understand America's founders, we have to realize that the thinkers we call men of the "Enlightenment" are really of two sorts. There are those who believed in God and those who didn't. The French Revolution was history's first secular revolution and, incidentally, spilled rivers of blood. They chose to follow the unbelieving thinkers of the "Enlightenment" ---e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and David Hume. But our country’s Founders quoted the men of the "Enlightenment" who believed in the Lord---e.g., Montesquieu, John Locke, and Sir William Blackstone...

The two key founding documents in American history are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The first explains why we exist as a nation. Not only does the Declaration mention God four (4x) times, most importantly, it says that our rights come from the Creator. The Constitution explains how we exist as a nation---how we are to function. The Constitution is predicated on the Declaration. When skeptics claim the Constitution doesn't mention God, which it does, in the Ratification clause, they ignore that the latter is predicated on the former. Skeptics today like to argue that the Founding Fathers purposefully left God out of the Constitution, that a “Godless Constitution” was the intended design of the document. But, they're wrong. The authors of the Constitution not only mention God, they even mention that Jesus is God. They do this in the ratification clause. This was done “in the Year of Our Lord” 1787…

There were 55 men who assembled in what we now call the Constitutional Convention. Research shows that 50 to 52 of those men were members in good standing of Trinitarian churches. Many of them were even presidents and founders of Bible societies. Certainly, Benjamin Franklin was not a Trinitarian, nor a member of such a church. Yet after weeks of wheel-spinning at the convention, on June 28, 1787, Dr. Franklin delivered a speech, asking them how it is that they had forgotten “to seek God's help.“

Franklin said, "In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor."

He went on to say, "I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth---that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" He asked that they pray…

It was in everything that they wrote. They held strong religious beliefs and they believed rights came from God not man and not the government they established.

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams (The Works of John Adams, ed. C. F. Adams, Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1851, 4:31) as stated in an address on October 11, 1798 to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the militia of Massachusetts