On Independence from the Established Church
By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:
Published July 4, 2026
"For the American founders, one of the unalienable rights with which humans have been endowed is the right to gather in worship freely, according to the dictates of conscience, without being molested by the magistrate and without being made by the magistrate to subsidize and support a religion or denomination."In preparing for its 250th anniversary, I reread the Declaration of Independence. What it says and does not say is fascinating. In between hot dogs, slices of apple pie, and before dusk falls and the fireworks commence in earnest, every American ought to reread it today.
Every school child knows (or should know) that Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote the Declaration, borrowing from earlier documents. My interest in this essay is to note the pragmatic approach to religion in the Declaration.1
As Richard Carwardine observes, the signers of the Declaration represented a number of different Christian sects, and several were decidedly non-Christian in their religious sentiments. The author of the Declaration was famously dissatisfied with orthodox Christianity. He produced his own edition of the New Testament, which is known as “Jefferson’s Bible.” Thomas Kidd describes it as “Jefferson’s cut-and-paste edition of extracts from the Gospels.”2 His stated intention for the work was as “an abridgement [sic] of the New Testament for the use of the Indians.”3 Kidd tells us that Jefferson’s second edition was “a polyglot edition, with side-by-side passages in English, French, Greek, and Latin.”4 Though Jefferson rejected orthodox Christianity, especially “Calvinism,” which he dismissed as “demoralizing,”5 he did so as he read the Greek New Testament. Jefferson’s religion was eclectic. He appreciated Jesus’s ethical teaching and did not entirely eliminate the supernatural from his edition of the Gospels. Jefferson was what we would today call a theological liberal. He sat in judgment over Holy Scripture. Jesus was allowed to say and teach what Jefferson approved. He followed a Jesus of his own imagination.
The religious language used in the Declaration, however, was vague enough to accommodate the more orthodox convictions of the only “active clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration,” John Witherspoon.6 Both Deists and the orthodox Christians could agree with Jefferson that governments are subject to the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”7 They could also agree that there are “self-evident truths” (they were not epistemological skeptics nor deconstructionists), that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”8
