The Founding Fathers' Basis for the Constitution

It would be nice to ask the Founding Fathers what their thoughts were when writing the Constitution and if they based the Constitution on Judeo-Christian beliefs, but since we cannot, we must depend on their writings and on the Constitution itself. Judeo-Christian values are a body of beliefs that both Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Bible share: the concept that humans are created equally in God’s image (from Genesis), liberty (from Exodus), and moral responsibility (The Ten Commandments). They recognized the Judeo-Christian concept of equality of men before God and the law, but not government enforced economic equality, which is not a Judeo-Christian concept.

Among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were James Madison, who stated that he saw the completed Constitution as written by the "finger of that Almighty Hand," and Benjamin Franklin, who declared that "God governs in the affairs of men." The Founding Fathers unanimously stood in opposition to tyranny and injustice by stating that our rights came from God, not rulers. Even though the government created by the Founding Fathers was secular, the society was based on Judeo-Christian values.

The Founding Fathers did not separate church and state, as many believe is in the Constitution, but they were careful to include God in all the documents and did not separate God from state. They included Biblical morality, but avoided the tyranny of a state church as was present in so many other countries, from which some of them had fled. The delegates stated in the Attestation Clause of the Constitution that they concluded the work "in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven," which placed a religious punctuation mark on the end of the Constitution.