It has been claimed, rather frequently in our Presbyterian circles, that our American federal form of government—with city and county local officials, state legislatures and governors, and a national congress, presidency, and judiciary—has been influenced by our Presbyterian form of ecclesiastical government—with local congregational sessions, regional presbyteries, and national synods or general assemblies (sometimes transcending even national boundaries). The concrete evidence for such direct influence, however, is difficult to document. Scholars have traced some influences in North American culture of covenant thinking (Moots, Politics Reformed, 2010), but it is more likely that the idea of republican thinking was in the air being breathed by political thinkers in the late eighteenth century. A more definite contribution from Presbyterianism to the founding of the United States of America is the idea of religious liberty. The ways that this contribution came about provide a stark contrast to the French Revolution that so radically affected European culture only a few years after our American Revolution.
Consider our American founding documents. The Declaration of Independence of 1776, which drew together thirteen British colonies into the “United States of America,” refers to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the “Creator” of all men, “the Supreme Judge of the world,” and “the protection of divine Providence.” While some of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration had deistic leanings (including Benjamin Franklin and drafters Thomas Jefferson and John Adams), there were also among the signers several clearly orthodox and evangelical leaders, including John Witherspoon, Presbyterian president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton and the one clergyman and current educator among the signers. John Adams called Witherspoon “as high a Son of Liberty, as any man in America” (Tait, “John Witherspoon’s Prescription for a Nation Strong, Free, and Virtuous,” 2007). Horace Walpole (1717–1797), a former Whig Member of Parliament whose father, Robert Walpole, was a prime minister in the earlier eighteenth century, said of Witherspoon, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.”
Witherspoon (1723–1794) deserves recognition also because of his possible influence on the political thinking of James Madison, often recognized as the “father of the U.S. Constitution.” Madison, from Virginia, was a student at the College of New Jersey in the early years of Witherspoon’s presidency there (Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison, 2017). Although the specific influence of Witherspoon’s lectures on moral philosophy on Madison is unclear, Madison went on to draft the Bill of Rights of 1791, which included the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .”
Although Thomas Jefferson claimed to Baptists in Connecticut that the U.S. had erected a strong “wall of separation between church and state,” nevertheless while the federal government opposed an establishment of a national church, several of the states continued to have established churches into the early nineteenth century (Esbeck and Hartog, Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833, 2019). Eventually, all the states recognized the inequity of requiring citizens of whatever belief to support one state religion with their taxes, thus respecting liberty of conscience.
Since this religious liberty is sometimes seen mainly as a product of Enlightenment rationalism, it is important to see that American Presbyterians, as early as their adoption of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms Larger and Shorter in 1729, qualified their adoption, “excepting only some clauses in the 20th and 23rd chapters [of the Confession] pertaining to the civil magistrate,” which were eventually amended to remove the civil magistrate from any supervision regarding the teaching or discipline of the church. (If more thorough, the Presbyterian Church might also have amended Q & A 191 of the Larger Catechism, which includes in the Lord’s Prayer petition “Thy kingdom come” that we pray that the church may be “countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate.”)
One might also consider that such religious liberty was supported by the “Father of our Country,” George Washington, who continues to be described by some recognized scholars as a Deist, but who instead exemplified the simple Christian belief of a Virginia planter in the Episcopal Church (Lillback, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, 2006). While it is true that for a time during the Revolutionary War Washington did not take communion in the Episcopal Church, there is evidence that he did take communion before and after the war, and during the war in a Reformed church and in a Presbyterian church. Dr. Lillback suggests that, since the nominal head of the Anglican/Episcopal Church was King George III, Washington, in good conscience, could not take communion in that fellowship while in active rebellion against King George.
Liberty of Conscience has a long pedigree in Christian tradition.
Liberty of Conscience has a long pedigree in Christian tradition. Tertullian, around A.D. 217, wrote, “It is a fundamental right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions: one man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion— to which free will and not force should lead us” (“To Scapula” in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3). Even after the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, his adviser Lactantius wrote: “It is therefore right, especially in a matter on which the whole plan of life turns, that everyone should place confidence in himself, and use his own judgment and individual capacity for the investigation and weighing of the truth, rather than through confidence in others to be deceived by their errors, as though he himself were without understanding” (The Divine Institutes, II, vii, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7).
Prior to John Witherspoon’s coming from Scotland to become president of the College of New Jersey, Samuel Davies (1723–1771), recognized for his gifted preaching and the conversion of numerous slaves, contended for religious liberty versus the Anglican establishment in Virginia, successfully forming the Presbytery of Hanover in 1755 and working with Congregationalists to oppose the appointment of a bishop from England (Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, 1986). Concerning the slaves, Bonomi writes,
Presbyterian Samuel Davies counted several hundred Negroes in his New Side congregations in Virginia. The added dimension that religion gave to black lives is implicit in Davies’s comment about the slaves’ delight in psalmody: “Whenever they could get an hour’s leisure from their masters, [they] would hurry away to my house . . . to gratify their peculiar taste for Psalmody. Sundry of them have lodged all night in my kitchen; and, sometimes, when I have awaked about two or three a-clock in the morning, a torrent of sacred harmony poured into my chamber, and carried my mind away to Heaven. In this seraphic exercise, some of them spend almost the whole night.” (125–126)
Davies, originally from Delaware and of Welsh heritage, was continuing the battle for religious liberty waged by his Presbyterian predecessor, originally from Northern Ireland, Francis Makemie (c. 1658–1708), who had helped form the first American presbytery in Philadelphia in 1706, before winning legal recognition in New York on the basis of the Toleration Act of 1689 following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, gaining rights to worship for certain Nonconforming churches (For more on Francis Makemie and John Witherspoon, see D. G. Hart, Protestants and Patriots: Presbyterians in the Age of Revolution, 2026.)
America has been providentially a unique and fruitful ground for the spread and flourishing of the faith both here and around the world.
John Witherspoon, as the first moderator of the new Presbyterian General Assembly in 1789, evidently drafted the eight “Preliminary Principles” before the actual adoption of a new Book of Church Order (Cannada and Williamson, The Historic Polity of the PCA, 1997), which was to be consistent with these principles:
1. God alone is Lord of the conscience and has left it free from any doctrines or commandments of men (a) which are in any respect contrary to the Word of God, or (b) which, in regard to matters of faith and worship, are not governed by the Word of God. Therefore, the rights of private judgment in all matters that respect religion are universal and inalienable. No religious constitution should be supported by the civil power further than may be necessary for protection and security equal and common to all others.
2. In perfect consistency with the above principle, every Christian Church, or union or association of particular churches, is entitled to declare the terms of admission into its communion, and the qualifications of its ministers and members, as well as the whole system of its internal government which Christ has appointed. In the exercise of this right, it may, notwithstanding, err in making the terms of communion either too lax or too narrow; yet even in this case, it does not infringe upon the liberty or the rights of others, but only makes an improper use of its own.
3. Our blessed Saviour, for the edification of the visible Church, which is His body, has appointed officers not only to preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments, but also to exercise discipline for the preservation both of truth and duty. It is incumbent upon these officers and upon the whole Church in whose name they act, to censure or cast out the erroneous and scandalous, observing in all cases the rules contained in the Word of God.
4. Godliness is founded on truth. A test of truth is its power to promote holiness according to our Saviour’s rule, “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). No opinion can be more pernicious or more absurd than that which brings truth and falsehood upon the same level. . . . On the contrary, there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty. Otherwise, it would be of no consequence either to discover truth or to embrace it.
5. While, under the conviction of the above principle, it is necessary to make effective provision that all who are admitted as teachers be sound in the faith, there are truths and forms with respect to which men of good character and principles may differ. In all these, it is the duty both of private Christians and societies to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other.
6. Though the character, qualifications, and authority of church officers are laid down in the Holy Scriptures, as well as the proper method of officer investiture, the power to elect persons to the exercise of authority in any particular society resides in that society.
7. All church power, whether exercised by the body in general or by representation, is only ministerial and declarative since the Holy Scriptures are the only rule of faith and practice. No church judicatory may make laws to bind the conscience. All church courts may err through human frailty, yet it rests upon them to uphold the laws of Scripture, though this obligation be lodged with fallible men.
8. Since ecclesiastical discipline must be purely moral or spiritual in its object, and not intended with any civil effects, it can derive no force whatever, but from its own justice, the approbation of an impartial public, and the countenance and blessing of the great Head of the Church. (PCA Book of Church Order, “Preface,” with slight editing from the original draft of 1788.)
Among the consequences of this emphasis on liberty of conscience in both the ecclesiastical sphere and the civil sphere is the removal of support for another’s religion through paying taxes to the state, and the abundant freedom to promote the true faith of one’s own biblical religion. As a result, America has been providentially a unique and fruitful ground for the spread and flourishing of the faith both here and around the world.
We should gratefully sing the final stanza of “My country, ’tis of thee” by Samuel F. Smith (1808–1895; the words were written in 1831, when Smith was a student at Andover Theological Seminary):
Our fathers’ God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King.
Conclusion
This does not mean “Christian Nationalism.” The roots of America’s founding documents are to be found in both biblical principles and classical Enlightenment principles. But religious liberty in America is not to be taken for granted. Presbyterianism was a minority in each of the thirteen colonies, but its defenders contended for their right to worship according to the Scriptures, to conduct Bible studies, to preach the Reformed faith, to share the love of Christ, and to carry out the Great Commission. This is in contrast to the persecuted condition of Christians today in such places as China and Nigeria. How grateful to God we should be for this freedom in America, and how active we should be in taking advantage of it.