American & Religious Freedom – July 5, 2026

Click the Blue Heading to download handout

AMERICA AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

A nation’s 250th birthday, and the responsibility that comes with it

A Nation’s Debt

Our nation is celebrating its 250 year birthday. Both as Americans and Christians, we owe God a great deal of praise and gratitude. In addition, we owe God a great deal of service.

Luke 12:48 (KJV) For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

WAS AMERICA FOUNDED FOR THE PURPOSE OF CREATING A CHRISTIAN NATION?

Pew Research surveyed U.S. adults in September 2022 and asked whether the nation’s founders originally intended America to be a Christian nation. Sixty percent of all U.S. adults said yes. Among U.S. adults who identify as Christian, that number rises to sixty-nine percent. Among U.S. adults who do not identify as Christian, it is forty-four percent.

SOURCE Pew Research Center, “Views of the U.S. as a Christian Nation,” 2022.

Most Americans, including most Christians, believe the founders intended a Christian nation. That belief affects what people expect government to do, whether it should promote prayer, endorse scripture, or otherwise support the church’s work. This lesson examines what the founders actually built, so we can be clear about two things: what the government has the authority to do regarding religion, and what God has assigned to the church alone, the Great Commission of making disciples.

TRUTH

The first permanent English settlement was Virginia in 1607 by the Virginia Company of London. The primary purpose of this settlement was economic prosperity, not religious freedom. King James I of England granted a charter to the Virginia Company, whose investors hoped to find gold and silver, discover a water route to Asia, harvest natural resources, establish profitable trade, and expand England’s influence against Spain.

The charter spoke of converting the Native Americans to God. Virginia established the Church of England as its official church. Baptists were among those who suffered under the government. Baptist preachers were arrested for preaching without a license. They were physically abused, sometimes whipped by mobs, dragged from meetings.

In some colonies, membership in the established church was required to vote or become “freemen” who had privileges to serve in government.

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCHES: NEW ENGLAND

Massachusetts Bay (1630), Connecticut (1636), and New Hampshire (1638) established the Congregational Church by law and supported it through public taxation. Dissenters faced fines and imprisonment for unlicensed preaching, mandatory taxation to support a church they may not have attended, and in Massachusetts Bay, full political rights, including the right to vote, tied directly to church membership in good standing.

In 1651, Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist minister, was arrested in Massachusetts for preaching and baptizing without a license. Fined 30 pounds, he refused on conscience to let friends pay it, and was given 30 lashes with a three-corded whip at a public whipping post in Boston, an injury so severe he could not lie down for weeks afterward. Between 1659 and 1661, Massachusetts Bay hanged four Quakers, Mary Dyer among them, for returning to the colony after banishment. Massachusetts passed laws in 1647 and 1700 forbidding Catholic priests to reside in the colony under penalty of imprisonment and execution.

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCHES: THE SOUTH

The Church of England was established by law in Virginia (1607), Maryland (1692), North Carolina, South Carolina (1706), and Georgia (1758), and in four counties of New York (1693). Colonists paid taxes to support Anglican ministers regardless of their own convictions. Ministers of other denominations required a government license to preach. Virginia required marriages to be performed by the Church of England alone. Several of these colonies required a religious test, an oath affirming the tenets of the established church, to hold public office.

Virginia produced the most extensively documented persecution of any colony. In 1768, John Waller, Lewis Craig, James Childs, James Reed, and William Marshall were arrested in Spotsylvania County for preaching without a license and jailed 43 days. In 1771, an Anglican clergyman rode onto the platform while Waller was praying during worship and thrust the end of a horsewhip into Waller’s mouth. Waller was then dragged from the pulpit and given 20 lashes by the local sheriff. James Ireland, jailed in Culpeper, continued preaching through his cell bars while men outside cut his hands with knives to make him stop gesturing. Historian Lewis Peyton Little documented 72 individual cases of persecution against dissenting ministers in colonial Virginia between 1763 and 1775 alone.

THE COLONIES WITHOUT AN ESTABLISHED CHURCH

Rhode Island (1636), Pennsylvania (1681), Delaware, and New Jersey had no official church. Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams after his banishment from Massachusetts Bay, was the first colony to declare freedom of religion for all faiths. Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn as a Quaker refuge, drew Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, Catholics, and Jews, none required to conform to a state-favored church. In these four colonies alone, a dissenter’s rights, including the right to hold office, carried no requirement of membership in any particular church.

IN OTHER WORDS There was no full equal rights for all religions in nine of the thirteen colonies.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Before looking at what the Constitution says about religion, it helps to look at a different founding document, the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, eleven years before the Constitution.

The Declaration names God four separate times. It opens by grounding human rights in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It states that people are given their rights by their “Creator.” It closes by appealing to God as “the Supreme Judge of the world,” asking Him to witness that the colonists’ cause is just, and by asking for the protection of “divine Providence” in the fight ahead.

The Declaration and the Constitution serve two different purposes. The Declaration justifies breaking from England. The Constitution establishes the government that followed. When the founders wrote the document that actually created the government, they did not tie that government to any religion.

THE CONSTITUTION (1787)

The Constitution contains no reference to God anywhere in its text. It establishes no official religion. It names no denomination. It requires no religious test to hold federal office. The phrase “in the Year of our Lord” appears only in the closing attestation where the delegates signed and dated it, outside the Constitution’s actual text, and was never debated or voted on by the convention.

Article VI, Clause 3, U.S. Constitution (KJV) The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers… shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

THE BILL OF RIGHTS

The first ten amendments to the Constitution.

The First Amendment (1791) (KJV) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, orprohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This amendment limited Congress alone. States kept their own established churches for decades afterward. New Hampshire kept its Congregational establishment until 1817. Connecticut kept its until 1818. Massachusetts kept its until 1833, forty-two years after ratification.

MARYLAND: TOLERATION, NOT LIBERTY

In 1649, Maryland’s colonial assembly passed the Toleration Act, granting freedom of worship to Trinitarian Christians, Catholics and most Protestants, but excluding Jews, Muslims, atheists, and anyone who denied the Trinity. This was toleration: a permission granted to some.

This toleration proved temporary. After England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688, Maryland established the Church of England by law in 1692. Catholics, the people Maryland had been founded to protect, were taxed to support a church not their own and barred from public office.

PROPOSITION Religious Toleration is not Religious Liberty.

JOHN LELAND

A Baptist minister wrote: “The liberty I contend for is more than toleration… all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.” Leland demanded a right belonging to everyone, Baptist or not, Christian or not.

By 1788, the Constitution had been written and said nothing about protecting religious liberty. Leland had enough support among Virginia’s Baptists to contest James Madison for a seat at Virginia’s ratifying convention. The two men met. Leland withdrew his opposition. Madison agreed to press for a bill of rights guaranteeing religious liberty once the Constitution was ratified. Madison kept his word. The result, in 1791, was the First Amendment.

Leland’s conviction became the text of the amendment itself.

PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOL

June 25, 1962: Engel v. Vitale. The New York State Board of Regents wrote an official prayer for public schools and recommended it be recited at the beginning of each school day.

The Regents’ Prayer (1962) (KJV) Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country. Amen.

Ten families sued, and the Supreme Court struck the prayer down. Within four months, 57 constitutional amendments had been introduced in Congress to overturn the ruling.

June 17, 1963: Abington School District v. Schempp. A Pennsylvania law required at least ten verses of the Bible to be read at the beginning of each public school day, along with the Lord’s Prayer. The Court struck down this practice as well, along with Murray v. Curlett from Maryland.

The popular account of these rulings casts them as a victory for secularism over faith. The actual record shows something different. The Baptist Joint Committee, representing Baptist churches, filed briefs supporting both decisions. When Congress held hearings on amendments to overturn the rulings, the Baptist Joint Committee testified against the amendments, alongside the National Council of Churches, the Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Congress attempted to pass a prayer amendment repeatedly over the following decades, in 1966, 1970, 1971, 1984, and 1998, and every attempt failed to reach the two-thirds majority the Constitution requires. The 1998 attempt fell 61 votes short, 224 to 203.

Baptists who supported these rulings were not anti-prayer, not anti-God, and not anti-Bible. They understood something more complicated than most Americans realize about religious liberty: protecting your own right to worship according to conscience sometimes requires protecting that same right for every other religion, and for those who claim no religion at all. A government with the authority to write, mandate, or endorse Christian prayer today holds the same authority to endorse a different religion’s prayer tomorrow, or to forbid Christian prayer altogether. A religious community favored by the government in one generation is one election away from being outside it in the next.

England had changed its official religion four times in a century and a half. Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1534. Mary I burned nearly 280 Protestants for refusing to recant. Elizabeth I pressured Catholics and Puritans alike to conform. James I drove Baptist founder Thomas Helwys into exile and then into a prison cell where he died. Virginia proved the same danger closer to home. In 1774, a young Madison wrote to a friend that he was deeply disturbed to learn that several Baptist preachers were jailed in a neighboring county for publishing their religious opinions.

The framers of the Bill of Rights knew this history, from England and from their personal experience. They wrote the First Amendment to protect their own generation and every generation after them from the same fate.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1. Did the courts get it right? 2. Is it right, or even safe, for the government to endorse a particular religion? 3. Is it safe for government to write and require prayers of citizens?

THE GREAT COMMISSION

Matthew 28:18-20 (KJV) And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER 1. According to Matthew 28:18-20, what is the responsibility of every disciple of Jesus Christ? 2. According to the same text, what is God’s plan to make disciples and expand His Kingdom? 3. According to the same text, what is the role of government in making disciples and advancing God’s Kingdom? 4. Does the Bible issue any commands or responsibility on the public schools to make disciples, or advance the Kingdom of God?

Every disciple is to make other disciples. We are not to limit our efforts to specific groups, cultures, races, or nations. Neither are we to expect the government or public schools to make disciples of Jesus.

God’s plan for making disciples and expanding His Kingdom is that every disciple of Jesus is responsible for making other disciples.

PRAY FOR THOSE WHO GOVERN

1 Timothy 2:1-2 (KJV) I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.

A court ruling against government-sponsored prayer or Bible reading in public schools is not a referendum on Christianity. It is the application of a constitutional rule barring government from endorsing any religion, a rule that protects Christians in places where they are the minority just as it protects other faiths where Christians are the majority. Reading every such ruling as a contest between heroes and villains misses what is actually being decided. As well as distracting us from pursuing the Great Commission ourselves.

PROPOSITION America is a nation built to protect religious freedom for every citizen, and that freedom is what allows Christians to worship according to scripture and fulfill the Great Commission.

The Great Commission belongs to the church. It was never given to Congress, to the courts, or to the public schools. When Christians look to the government to make disciples, promote prayer, or advance the kingdom of God, they are asking the state to do what only the church has been given the responsibility to do. The work is fulfilled one disciple at a time, by Christians who take the Great Commission as seriously as their forefathers took the freedom to pursue it.

FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION God never called us to make a Christian nation, He called us to make disciples of Jesus Christ.

America & Religious Freedom  |  Independence Day Sermon Handout  |  Page 1