“The first thing Congress did was pray. That proves America was founded as a Christian nation.”

VerdictTrue fact, false conclusion

The First Continental Congress did ask a minister to open its sessions with prayer, and on September 7, 1774, he did. But the delegates’ own debate over that prayer shows them working around their religious differences, the Congress later chose chaplains from more than one denomination, and the Constitution written thirteen years later gave Christianity no official status. A praying Congress is evidence of a Christian public culture. It doesn’t show a Christian government.Last checked October 2026

In September 1774, delegates from across the colonies gathered in Philadelphia, unsure whether they were heading toward reconciliation with Britain or war. Early on, they asked a local clergyman to pray for them. He read a psalm asking God to “fight against them that fight against me,” then prayed from the heart. John Adams wrote home that he had never seen “a greater Effect upon an Audience.”

For many Christians, that scene captures something true about the country’s beginnings: its leaders turned to God first. David Barton, the founder of WallBuilders, put the argument sharply: “Now, our first official act of the Founding Fathers completely disproves any notion that they wanted to separate religious principles from public affairs” (The John Ankerberg Show). Ronnie Floyd, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that “America’s fight for independence began with Scripture and with prayer, not with muzzles and gunpowder” (The Christian Post, 2017).

The strongest version of the claim: the men who led the Revolution prayed together, in Jesus’ name, and the same Congress that wrote the First Amendment hired chaplains. Whatever “separation of church and state” means, it can’t mean the founders wanted religion kept out of public life.

Much of that is accurate. The question is what it proves, so we read the Congress’s journal and the letters of people in the room.

What happened in September 1774

The Congress first met on Monday, September 5, at Carpenters’ Hall. Its journal shows two days of organizing: electing Peyton Randolph president, reading credentials, deciding that “each Colony or Province shall have one Vote,” and setting rules for debate (Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 1, pp. 13–27).

On September 6 it resolved that the Rev. Jacob Duché “be desired to open the Congress tomorrow morning with prayers.” On September 7 it thanked him “for performing divine Service, and for the excellent prayer, which he composed and deliver’d on the occasion.”

So the prayer came on the third morning, after the Congress had organized itself. “The first thing Congress did” compresses the timeline, though not by much: prayer was among the first things the delegates arranged.

Duché was an assistant rector of Christ Church and St. Peter’s in Philadelphia, an Anglican clergyman, according to the editors of the Adams Papers. The text of his prayer published by the Office of the Chaplain of the U.S. House asks God to “look down in mercy” on “these our American States, who have fled to Thee from the rod of the oppressor,” and closes: “All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Savior. Amen.”

That’s an explicitly Christian prayer, and there’s no reason to doubt its sincerity or the delegates’. This part of the claim is true.

The debate before the prayer

The best account of how the prayer came about, including the part the claim usually leaves out, is John Adams’s letter to Abigail Adams of September 16, 1774.

“When the Congress first met, Mr. Cushing made a Motion, that it should be opened with Prayer,” Adams wrote. (Thomas Cushing was a Massachusetts delegate.) The motion met resistance: “It was opposed by Mr. Jay of N. York and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina, because we were so divided in religious Sentiments,” Adams continued, listing Episcopalians, Quakers, Anabaptists (Baptists), Presbyterians and Congregationalists, “so that We could not join in the same Act of Worship.”

John Jay was himself a committed Christian (see our page on whether the Founders were devout Christians). His worry was practical: whose form of worship would a mixed assembly use?

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts answered it. In John Adams’s telling, “Mr. S. Adams arose and said he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.” He had heard that Duché “deserved that Character,” and so “he moved that Mr. Duchè, an episcopal Clergyman, might be desired, to read Prayers to the Congress, tomorrow Morning.”

Notice the solution. Nobody proposed a creed or an official church. A New England delegate proposed a Philadelphia Anglican on the strength of his character and patriotism. That’s a coalition of Protestants making room for one another.

The next morning, Adams wrote, Duché read the psalm appointed for the day, Psalm 35, which in the King James Version opens: “Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.” The delegates had just heard “the horrible Rumour, of the Cannonade of Boston,” and Adams thought “It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning.” Then “Mr. Duche, unexpected to every Body struck out into an extemporary Prayer, which filled the Bosom of every Man present.”

Historian John Fea, author of a book-length study of whether America was founded as a Christian nation, reads the prayer as both sincere and political: “Duché’s prayer should be understood as an interpretation of Psalm 35 shaped by this revolutionary moment” (The Way of Improvement Leads Home, 2024).

What became of the chaplain

Congress made Duché its official chaplain on July 9, 1776, days after the Declaration of Independence (Library of Congress). He later told George Washington that “I rashly accepted the appointment,” and that “in the beginning of October 1776” he resigned “after having officiated only two months & three weeks” (Duché to Washington, October 8, 1777).

That 1777 letter, written after the British had occupied Philadelphia and imprisoned him for a time, urged Washington to “represent to Congress the indispensible Necessity of rescinding the hasty & ill-advised declaration of Independency.” Washington sent it on to Congress, calling it “a Letter of a very curious and extraordinary nature” and a “ridiculous—illiberal performance” (Washington to Hancock, October 16, 1777). Duché was “obliged to flee to England in December 1777,” the Washington Papers editors note.

None of this cheapens the 1774 prayer; its meaning comes from the delegates who joined in it.

On October 1, 1777, Congress appointed two chaplains at once: William White, Duché’s successor at Christ Church, and George Duffield, pastor of Philadelphia’s Third Presbyterian Church. The Library of Congress says choosing chaplains of different denominations was meant to “prevent any single denomination from monopolizing government patronage.”

What the founders did with congressional prayer later

The Constitutional Convention, 1787. When Benjamin Franklin moved on June 28 that the Convention open each day with prayer, the motion never came to a vote. Madison’s notes record Hugh Williamson’s explanation for the lack of a chaplain (“The Convention had no funds”) and that the adjournment “was at length carried, without any vote on the motion” (Avalon Project). The Constitution the Convention produced never mentions God, as our page on whether the Constitution was understood as a Christian document shows.

The First Congress, 1789. The new Congress went back to chaplains quickly. The Senate elected Samuel Provoost, the Episcopal bishop of New York, on April 25, 1789 (U.S. Senate), and the House chose its chaplain on May 1. A law paying chaplains was enacted September 22, 1789, three days before Congress reached final agreement on the language of the Bill of Rights. James Madison served on the House committee that considered the matter and voted for the pay bill. (The Supreme Court laid out these facts in Marsh v. Chambers, discussed below.)

Madison later had second thoughts. In private notes from his retirement, published in 1946 as his “Detached Memoranda,” he asked whether congressional chaplains were “consistent with the Constitution” and answered: “In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative.” He added: “Could a Catholic clergyman ever hope to be appointed a Chaplain?” (The Founders’ Constitution). In an 1822 letter to Edward Livingston, he wrote that “it was not with my approbation, that the deviation from it took place in Congress, when they appointed Chaplains to be paid from the national Treasury.”

Those later views sit awkwardly beside his 1789 vote, which is a reminder that the First Amendment’s authors didn’t all agree on what it allowed.

Engaging the counterargument: “The Supreme Court upheld legislative prayer because the founders did it”

In Marsh v. Chambers (1983), the Supreme Court upheld Nebraska’s practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer by a state-paid chaplain, a Presbyterian minister named Robert E. Palmer. Chief Justice Warren Burger’s opinion rested on history, including this very story: “the Continental Congress, beginning in 1774, adopted the traditional procedure of opening its sessions with a prayer offered by a paid chaplain.” It even quoted Jay and Rutledge’s objection and Samuel Adams’s reply. Its reasoning: “To invoke Divine guidance on a public body entrusted with making the laws is not, in these circumstances, an ‘establishment’ of religion or a step toward establishment; it is simply a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.”

In 2014, in Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Court held that such prayers need not be generic: “An insistence on nonsectarian or ecumenical prayer as a single, fixed standard is not consistent with the tradition of legislative prayer” as the Court had described it.

On that much, the claim’s defenders are right. What the cases don’t say matters just as much:

  • They concern one practice. Marsh rested on what it called the practice’s “unique history.” Justice William Brennan’s dissent said the Court was “carving out an exception to the Establishment Clause,” and Town of Greece warned that Marsh “must not be understood as permitting a practice that would amount to a constitutional violation if not for its historical foundation.”

  • They set limits. Marsh left prayer content alone where there was “no indication that the prayer opportunity has been exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.” Town of Greece said prayers that “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion” could change the analysis.

  • The Nebraska chaplain himself adjusted. A footnote in Marsh records that Palmer “removed all references to Christ after a 1980 complaint from a Jewish legislator.”

The Court’s defense of legislative prayer, then, treats it as “a tolerable acknowledgment” of widely held belief. That’s close to what Samuel Adams proposed in 1774, and a long way from a Christian state.

Engaging a second counterargument: “It still shows the founders were Christians who wanted God in public life”

Mostly, yes. Many delegates were sincere Protestants, and public prayer was normal in their world. A fair account says so plainly.

But that’s a claim about the people, and the claim’s conclusion is about the government. The founding generation could pray in Congress and still write a Constitution with no religious test for office and no mention of God, then add a First Amendment barring any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Faced with their own differences in 1774, the delegates looked for a prayer every Protestant in the room could join, and left the question of which church was true alone. That instinct is the one the founders wrote into law. For more founding-era documents on that point, see our page on the Treaty of Tripoli.

The takeaway

The First Continental Congress prayed, sincerely and in Jesus’ name, and both houses of Congress still have chaplains today. Those are true facts. But the delegates argued about the prayer before they agreed to it, settled the argument by reaching across denominations, and went on to build a government that favored none of them. The prayer shows a Christian people. It doesn’t make a Christian nation in any legal or constitutional sense.

Related claims

Sources

Primary

Secondary and advocacy

  • John Fea, “250 years ago today the First Continental Congress opened with prayer. What should we make of that?” The Way of Improvement Leads Home, September 7, 2024. Link

  • David Barton, “Was America Founded on Christian Principles? Program 6,” The John Ankerberg Show. Link

  • Ronnie Floyd, “America’s Fight for Independence Began With Prayer,” The Christian Post, July 4, 2017. Link

Further reading

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