This isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but perhaps some of the following excerpts will help to explain my point. (My apologies for the length.)
First, from British author Paul Johnson (author of A History of Christianity and A History of the Jews), comes this portion of a lecture given at the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York:
"So American freedom and independence were brought about essentially by a religious coalition, which provided the rank and file of a movement led by a more narrowly based elite of Enlightenment men. John Adams, who had lost his original religious faith, nonetheless recognized the essential role played by religion in unifying the majority of the people behind the independence movement and giving them common beliefs and aims:
One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbor as yourself, and do to others as you would have that others should do to you—to the knowledge, belief, and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women, and men are all professors in the science of public as well as private morality…The duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy.
What in effect John Adams was implying, albeit he was a secularist and a nonchurchman, was that the form of Christianity which had developed in America was a kind of ecumenical and unofficial state religion, a religion suited by its nature, not by any legal claims, to be given recognition by the republic because it was itself the civil and moral creed of republicanism.
Hence, though the Constitution and the Bill of Rights made no provision for a state church—quite the contrary—there was an implied and unchallenged understanding that America was a religious country, that the republic was religious not necessarily in its forms but in its bones, that it was inconceivable that it could have come into existence, or could continue and flourish, without an overriding religious sentiment pervading every nook and cranny of its society. This religious sentiment was based on the Scriptures and the Decalogue, was embodied in the moral consensus of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and manifested itself in countless forms of mainly Christian worship.
Since American religion was a collection of faiths, coexisting in mutual tolerance, there was no alternative but to create a secular state entirely separated from any church. But there was an unspoken understanding that, in an emotional sense, the republic was not secular. It was still the City upon a Hill, watched over and safeguarded by divine providence, and constituting a beacon of enlightenment and an exemplar of conduct for the rest of the world.
This is what President Washington clearly intended to convey in the key passage of his farewell address of 1796. Though he was careful to observe the constitutional and secularist forms, the underlying emotion was plainly religious in inspiration. He implied, indeed, that the voice of the American people was a providential one, and that in sustaining him both as their general and their first President, and enabling the republic to be born and to survive and flourish, it had been giving expression to a providential plan:
Profoundly penetrated by this idea, I shall carry it with me to my grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing vows that heaven may continue to you the choicest token of its beneficence—that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual—that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained—that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue—that in fine the happiness of the people of these states, under the auspices of liberty, [may be preserved] by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing, as will acquire to them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection, and adoption of every nation, which is yet a stranger to it.
In Washington’s world view, then, the city was still upon a hill, the new nation was still elect, its creation and mission were providential, or as he put it, “sacredly maintained,” under heaven, the recipient of a unique “blessing” in the historical plan of the deity for humanity. That is not so far from Governor Winthrop’s view, though so much had happened in the meantime; and it would continue to be the view of the American majority for the next century and a half."
Now, part of a judgement issued by the Supreme Court of Delaware:
“Long before Lord Hale declared that Christianity was a part of the laws of England, the Court of Kings Bench, 34 Eliz. in Ratcliff’s case, 3 Coke Rep. 40, b. had gone so far as to declare that “in almost all cases, the common law was grounded on the law of God, which it was said was causa causans,” and the court cited the 27th chapter of Numbers, to show that their judgment on a common law principle in regard to the law of inheritance, was founded on God’s revelation of that law to Moses.”
State v. Chandler, 2 Harr. 553 at 561 (1837)
From Of Rights and Duties: A Jeffersonian Dialogue by Paul Grimley Kuntz (as published in Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Vol.38, No.3, p.224):
“Mr. Jefferson, as Secretary of State, reported to the Cabinet of President Washington that relations between nations are statements of reciprocal “rights and obligations.” Isn’t that what we now mean when we say that our system is not merely one of liberty but “liberty under law” or “ordered liberty?” What Jefferson meant by duties was rooted in the Ten Commandments of Moses. If the “Jefferson Bible” means anything, in the version of the Decalogue revised by Jesus, “The love of God…is but a branch of our moral duties, which are generally divided into duties to God and duties to man.” Yet this does not, Jefferson adds, rule out the morality of the atheist. The full statement of the basis of the moral commandments is found in the second table of the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness,” which Jefferson found necessary and universal, and resting on the nature of obligation between persons in society.”
(Incidentally, Kuntz uses as a source for this Thomas Jefferson Writings, a compilation of letters written by Jefferson.)
From Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order, Pepperdine University Press, 1977:
"So the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, are not a set of harsh prohibitions imposed by an arbitrary tribal deity. Instead, they are liberating rules that enable a people to diminish the tyranny of sin; that teach a people how to live with one another and in relation with God, how to restrain violence and fraud, how to know justice and to raise themselves above the level of predatory animals…
The Law is not merely the decree of a monarch who may pretend to divine powers—that the Israelites learned. The Law is not merely a body of convenient customs and usages that men have developed for themselves. The Law is not the instrument of oppression by a class or a hierarchy. For the true Law is derived from the Covenant that God has made and reaffirmed with his people. The Law is revealed to save man from self-destruction; to redeem man from sin and its consequences; to keep man from becoming a Cain, his hand against every man’s; to enable man to resemble the God in whose image he was created.
Throughout western civilization, and indeed in some degree through the later world, the Hebraic understanding of Covenant and Law would spread, in forms both religious and secular. The idea of an enduring Covenant, or compact, whether between God and people or merely between man and man, took various styles in various lands and ages; it passed into medieval society through Christian teaching, and became essential to the social order of Britain, from which society most settlers in North America came. This concept and reality of Covenant was not confined to those American colonies—notably the New England settlements and Pennsylvania—which were fundamentally religious in their motive. Like the people of Israel and Judah, the Americans broke solemn covenants repeatedly; but like Israel, America nevertheless knew that without a covenant, the people would be lost…
A principal difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was this: the American revolutionaries in general held a biblical view of man and his bent toward sin, while the French revolutionaries in general attempted to substitute for the biblical understanding an optimistic doctrine of human goodness advanced by the philosophes of the rationalistic Enlightenment. The American view led to the Constitution of 1787; the French view, to the Terror and to a new autocracy. The American Constitution is a practical secular covenant, drawn up by men who (with few exceptions) believed in a sacred Covenant, designed to restrain the human tendencies toward violence and fraud; the American Constitution is a fundamental law deliberately meant to place checks upon will and appetite. The French innovators would endure no such checks upon popular impulses; they ended under a far more arbitrary domination…
The New England Puritans not only ordered their commonwealth by the Ten Commandments and the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but constantly drew parallels between themselves and the people of Israel and Judah. The Puritans thought of themselves as experiencing afresh, under God, the tribulations and the successes of the Hebrew people. “For answers to their problems,” says Daniel Boorstin, "they drew as readily on Exodus, Kings, or Romans, as on the less narrative portions of the Bible. Their peculiar circumstances and their flair for the dramatic led them to see special significance in these narrative passages. The basic reality in their life was the analogy with the Children of Israel. They conceived that by going out into the Wilderness, they were reliving the story of Exodus and not merely obeying an explicit command to go into the wilderness. For them the Bible was less a body of legislation than a set of binding precedents.
New England’s intellectual leadership, which would give that region an influence over the United States disproportionate to New England’s population, transmitted this understanding of the Hebrew patrimony far beyond the New England colonies."
