Is the U.S. Constitution a Christian document?

VerdictFalse

From the ratification debates of 1788 to a congressional report in 1874, the Constitution’s critics and supporters described it the same way: a frame of government that does not acknowledge God. The clearest evidence comes from the people who wanted it to. In 1864 a movement of Protestant ministers and laymen organized to amend it, and its own published history called the omission a “religious defect” that “was not unnoticed at the beginning.”Last checked October 2026

The claim, stated fairly

The claim rests on things that are true. Most Americans in 1787 were Protestant Christians. Several states required officeholders to profess Christian or Protestant faith (Center for the Study of the American Constitution); Delaware’s 1776 constitution had them declare “faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost” (Founders’ Constitution). The federal Constitution itself gives the president ten days to sign or veto a bill “(Sundays excepted),” and it is dated “in the Year of our Lord” 1787 (National Archives transcript). Two years later President Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving.

Gary DeMar of American Vision, a Christian publisher, states the conclusion directly: “Christianity served as the foundation for the political edifice we know as America” (American Vision, 2009). On this view the framers didn’t need to write Christianity into the document, because everyone understood it was there.

That is a serious argument, and it makes a checkable prediction. If everyone understood the Constitution as Christian, people at the time should have described it that way. So we looked at how they did describe it.

What the text says

The Constitution never mentions God, Jesus Christ or Christianity. Its one direct statement about religion in the original text is a limit: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” (Article VI). The presidential oath, written out word for word in Article II, contains no appeal to God. The word “Lord” appears once, in the date (National Archives).

What the Senate said about this in 1797 is covered on our Treaty of Tripoli page. The question here is how readers understood the document from the start.

How the founding generation read it

Critics noticed, 1788

Luther Martin, a Maryland delegate to the Philadelphia Convention who opposed ratification, told his state legislature that the ban on religious tests “was adopted by a great majority of the convention, and without much debate.” He added that “there were some members so unfashionable as to think that a belief of the existence of a Deity, and of a state of future rewards and punishments would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers” (Genuine Information, 1788).

At North Carolina’s ratifying convention that July, William Lancaster pointed out what the missing test meant for the presidency: “Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it” (Founders’ Constitution). In the language of the day, Catholics and Muslims could be president.

Supporters noticed too

William Williams of Connecticut, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, sat in his state’s ratifying convention and supported the Constitution. In a letter printed in Hartford’s American Mercury on February 11, 1788, he said he had wished the document would require “an explicit acknowledgment of the being of a God, his perfections and his providence,” placed as “the first introductory words of the Constitution.” He even drafted that preamble: “We the people of the United States, in a firm belief of the being and perfections of the one living and true God…” He still judged the Constitution “too wise and too necessary to be rejected” (Founders’ Constitution; newspaper text, Center for the Study of the American Constitution).

Ministers noticed, and Washington answered, 1789

On October 28, 1789, the Presbyterian ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire wrote to President Washington. They had never missed a religious test, they said, “But we should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some Explicit acknowledgement of the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent inserted some where in the Magna Charta of our country.”

Washington didn’t dispute their reading. He explained it: “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation, respecting religion, from the Magna-Charta of our country” (Washington to the Presbyterian Ministers, 2 November 1789, Founders Online).

A pastor’s alarm, 1800

During the 1800 election a pamphlet attributed to the New York minister John Mitchell Mason warned Christians against Thomas Jefferson. It said: “The federal Constitution makes no acknowledgement of that God who gave us our national existence, and saved us from anarchy and internal war. This neglect has excited in many of its best friends, more alarm than all other difficulties” (The Voice of Warning to Christians, ConSource).

Each of these readers saw the same thing. Several of them wished it were otherwise, and none of them described the Constitution as a Christian document.

The movement that tried to change it

The Civil War turned that wish into a campaign. In February 1863 a convention for prayer at Xenia, Ohio, drew representatives of eleven denominations from seven states. A layman named John Alexander laid before it a paper “calling attention to this defect,” the Constitution’s silence about God. By 1864 a national association had formed, and it asked Congress to rewrite the preamble to begin (the printed memorial sets the new words in brackets):

“We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, and His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government…”

By 1873 the association, later known as the National Reform Association, said it existed to secure an amendment that would “suitably acknowledge Almighty God as the author of the nation’s existence and the ultimate source of its authority, Jesus Christ as its Ruler, and the Bible as the fountain of its laws, and thus indicate that this is a Christian nation.” Its president that year was a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, William Strong.

Its own history, printed that year, makes the key admission in its first paragraph: “The religious defect of the Constitution of the United States was not unnoticed at the beginning.” As proof it quotes Luther Martin, the 1789 Presbyterian address and John M. Mason, the same witnesses cited above. It adds a contrast the framers could not have missed: before the national Constitution, “no similar instrument of government had been framed by any portion of the American people without an explicit acknowledgment of Almighty God and the Christian religion” (Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment, 1873, pp. 2, iii–vi, xi).

People don’t spend decades campaigning to add something everyone already understands to be there.

Congress answers, 1874

The petitions reached Congress. On February 18, 1874, Rep. Benjamin F. Butler reported for the House Judiciary Committee on a petition seeking “an acknowledgment of Almighty God and the Christian religion” in the Constitution. The committee said the framers had acted “in full realization of the dangers which the union between church and state had imposed upon so many nations of the Old World,” and had decided “that it was inexpedient to put anything into the Constitution or frame of government which might be construed to be a reference to any religious creed or doctrine.” It recommended no action and asked that the petition “be laid upon the table” (House Report No. 143, 43rd Congress).

One caution in fairness to the other side: the committee claimed the subject had been “most fully and carefully considered” in 1787. The surviving record is thinner than that; Martin said the test ban passed “without much debate.” The committee was right about the outcome and generous about the deliberation.

Sidebar: the Mint director and the amendment convention

“In God We Trust” grew from the same wartime soil, and one man links the two. On November 20, 1861, after appeals from devout citizens, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase wrote to the director of the Mint, James Pollock: “No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense.” He asked for a motto “expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible this national recognition.” In December 1863 Pollock proposed “OUR COUNTRY; OUR GOD” or “GOD, OUR TRUST,” and Chase suggested “IN GOD WE TRUST,” which first appeared on the two-cent coin authorized April 22, 1864 (House Report 112-47, quoting Treasury records). Pollock, a former governor of Pennsylvania, ran the Mint in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission).

On November 29, 1864, the amendment movement met at the West Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia (Presbyterian Historical Society), and its record notes that “Ex-Governor Pollock presided” (Proceedings, p. xi). Chase was already answering appeals for a motto in 1861, before the association existed, so the coin was never the association’s project. Both grew from one wartime conviction: that the nation should declare a faith its founding document left unstated. Our page on the national mottos covers the motto’s later history.

Engaging the counterargument

The strongest version of the claim, as its defenders make it, has three parts. The framers assumed Christianity and saw no need to state it. The Sunday clause and the date line show that assumption. And the framers left religion to the states, many of which were openly Christian.

Much of that is fair. The Constitution was written in a Christian society, and the Sunday clause and “Year of our Lord” reflect its customs. The federalism point is also real: Delaware’s Trinitarian oath was still in force in 1787.

But each part ends up confirming the verdict:

Assumed is not written. The claim says the Constitution was understood as Christian. The record shows readers, friendly and hostile, understanding it as a document that left God out. Washington called it “the absence of any regulation, respecting religion.”
The states show it was a choice. The framers’ generation knew how to write a Christian test, because their own states had them. The amendment movement made exactly this point in 1873.
The movement’s premise contradicts the claim. DeMar’s own article quotes John Alexander’s 1863 paper calling “the neglect of God and His law, by omitting all acknowledgment of them in our Constitution,” “the crowning, original sin of the nation, and slavery as one of its natural outgrowths” (citing historian Steven K. Green’s research). DeMar then imagines the framers seeing America today and asks: “would they have rethought their decision only to make passing reference to the lordship of Jesus Christ”? Alexander calls it an omission; DeMar calls it a passing reference at most. Both describe a deliberate decision about what to leave out of the text.

The takeaway

Plenty of founding-era Americans hoped their country would be a Christian one, and some worked for a century to make the Constitution say so. That effort is the best evidence that the Constitution, as written, never did. The people closest to it, from Washington to the ministers who wrote to him, understood its silence about God as a fact, whether they welcomed it or regretted it.

Related claims

Sources

Primary

U.S. Constitution, Articles I (§7), II (§1), VI and the attestation clause. National Archives transcript
Center for the Study of the American Constitution, “Religious Tests and Oaths in State Constitutions, 1776–1784.” csac.history.wisc.edu
Delaware Constitution of 1776, Art. 22. The Founders’ Constitution
Luther Martin, Genuine Information (1788). The Founders’ Constitution
William Williams, letter in the American Mercury, February 11, 1788. The Founders’ Constitution · Center for the Study of the American Constitution
William Lancaster, North Carolina Ratifying Convention, July 30, 1788. The Founders’ Constitution
George Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3, 1789. Founders Online
George Washington to the Presbyterian Ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, November 2, 1789, with their address of October 28, 1789. Founders Online
[John Mitchell Mason], The Voice of Warning to Christians (1800). ConSource
Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, with “an Account of the Origin and Progress of the Movement” (New York, 1873). Internet Archive text
House Committee on the Judiciary, Acknowledgment of God and the Christian Religion in the Constitution, H. Rept. 43-143, February 18, 1874. GovInfo
House Report 112-47 (2011), history of “In God We Trust” quoting Treasury Department records. GovInfo

Secondary

Gary DeMar, “The National Reform Association,” American Vision, September 16, 2009. americanvision.org
Presbyterian Historical Society, “Philadelphia, Arch Street Presbyterian Church” (history of the West Arch Street congregation). history.pcusa.org
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, “Governor James Pollock.” phmc.state.pa.us

“The Constitution was always understood as a Christian document.”