PREFACE — Faith Before Freedom

Long before the muskets of Lexington and Concord, long before Jefferson’s pen declared independence, a quieter revolution was stirring—in the pulpits, in the meetinghouses, and in the hearts of ordinary believers. America’s fight for liberty began as a struggle of conscience.
The men and women of the thirteen colonies were not of one creed. They were Puritan and Anglican, Quaker and Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Huguenot, and Jew. Yet out of that diversity came a single conviction: that freedom itself was sacred, endowed by the Creator, not by kings.

This book tells the story of how those faiths, once divided by doctrine and distrust, came together under the banner of Providence to form a new nation—a nation under God.

PART I — THE FAITHS THAT FORGED A NATION

CHAPTER 1 — God in the Colonies

When the eighteenth century opened, religion in America was as varied as the land itself.

In New England, Puritan meetinghouses dotted the rocky hillsides, their tall white spires lifting heavenward above stone-strewn fields. To the south, Anglican churches rose beside the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, echoing the faith and authority of England’s crown. In Pennsylvania, Quakers worshiped in reverent silence, while Lutherans, Presbyterians, and German Pietists farmed the fertile countryside. Catholics held Mass quietly in Maryland; Jews gathered in New York’s modest synagogue; scattered Baptists preached in log cabins and homes along the frontier.

Each group brought its own theology—and its own prejudices. Yet all shared one thread: belief in divine order. To the colonists, life was a covenant. They saw themselves as a chosen people in a new Promised Land, bound to honor God in their labor and their law.

A Patchwork of Faith

The Puritans pursued holiness through discipline. The Quakers pursued it through peace. The Anglicans sanctified it with ceremony, while Baptists and Methodists found it through conversion and heartfelt experience. The frontier preacher thundered repentance beneath open skies; the city rector read calmly from the Book of Common Prayer.

Yet whether stern or gentle, liturgical or plain, nearly every colonist could quote Scripture and regarded the Bible as the highest moral authority.

The Seeds of Division

Such abundance of faith often bred suspicion. Puritans jailed Quakers. Anglicans distrusted dissenters. Catholics were barred from public office. Religious liberty was rare and tolerance limited.

Yet persecution forced conversation. When a man’s neighbor prayed differently but plowed the same soil or fought the same winter, dogma met reality. Slowly, often out of necessity, a grudging acceptance began to take root. American tolerance was not born in theory but in daily life—the first fragile shoots of a broader national creed.

CHAPTER 2 — The Puritan Vision: A City upon a Hill

In 1630, aboard the ship Arbella, Governor John Winthrop preached that the Massachusetts colonists must be “as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.”

That single sermon defined the Puritan mission. They believed they had entered into a covenant with God to build a righteous society whose success—or failure—would testify to divine favor.

Covenant and Discipline

Puritan faith was Calvinist. They believed in predestination—that salvation was the gift of God’s grace to the elect—and that moral conduct was the outward sign of that election.

From this theology emerged the New England virtues that would shape American character:

• hard work
• education
• thrift
• community responsibility

To fail morally was not merely to sin; it was to endanger the covenant of the entire community.

Education and the Word

Because salvation required understanding Scripture, literacy became sacred. Within a decade of settlement, the Puritans founded Harvard College “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.”

Sermons often lasted hours. Their laws echoed Mosaic commands. Their zeal, however, also bred rigidity. Those who challenged church authority—Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others—were cast out, becoming unwitting architects of future religious liberty.

The Legacy

For all their sternness, Puritan ideals became part of America’s moral backbone: civic virtue, personal accountability, and the conviction that government is a trust under God. The Puritan town meeting, where free men debated and voted on local matters, foreshadowed the democratic assemblies that would later defy a king.

CHAPTER 3 — Faiths of Conscience: Quakers, Baptists, and the Quest for Freedom

While New England built its holy commonwealth, another spirit moved across the mid-Atlantic—a gentler, freer faith rooted in conscience rather than hierarchy.

The Quakers and the Inner Light

In 1681, William Penn, a devout Quaker, founded Pennsylvania as a “Holy Experiment.”

Quakers believed the Inner Light of God illuminated every soul. From this flowed ideas far ahead of their time:

• spiritual equality of men and women
• opposition to slavery
• refusal to bear arms
• fair treatment of Native peoples

Their simplicity and tolerance drew Mennonites, Lutherans, Baptists, Jews, and countless dissenters, making Philadelphia the most religiously diverse city in British America.

The Baptists and the Freedom of the Soul

South of New England, Baptists waged their own revolution—not against empire, but against enforced religion. They preached that faith must be voluntary and that baptism was for believers, not infants.

In Virginia, Baptist preachers were jailed for preaching without Anglican permission. Their petitions, written behind prison bars, helped inspire the young James Madison and shaped Jefferson’s arguments for separating church and state.

Roger Williams and Rhode Island

Banished from Massachusetts for insisting that “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” Roger Williams founded Providence on the radical principle that conscience belonged to God alone.

Rhode Island became the first colony to guarantee complete religious freedom—no state church, no enforced doctrine, no penalties for belief or unbelief. This tiny colony became the model for what would eventually become the First Amendment.

CHAPTER 4 — The Anglican Dilemma

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Church of England was the most powerful religious institution in the southern colonies. Its spires rose over tobacco fields in Virginia, rice plantations in the Carolinas, and the young settlements of Georgia.

Parish vestries collected tithes, built chapels, paid clergy, and—by law—every freeman supported them. Anglicanism was not merely a faith; it was the spiritual arm of empire.

The King’s Church in a Land of Liberty

Anglican authority flowed from London through bishops and ultimately to the crown itself. This created profound moral tension:
How could one honor God while pledging obedience to a monarch who claimed divine right over both church and realm?

In Tidewater Virginia, wealthy planters filled the pews. The Book of Common Prayer, polished woodwork, and clergy in vestments radiated the order of English civilization. But in the backcountry and among small farmers, a new spirit stirred—a hunger for a faith that spoke more to the heart than to hierarchy.

Clergy Between Two Masters

Many colonial rectors were English-born and Oxford-trained. They believed rebellion was treason against both king and church. Jonathan Boucher of Maryland preached loyalty so fiercely he carried pistols into the pulpit.

Others, born in America, felt conscience pulling in another direction. When war erupted, men like Samuel Seabury and Charles Inglis were branded Tories; churches were shuttered; some clergy fled to England or Canada.

Even committed patriots struggled. George Washington, an Anglican vestryman, refused communion during the war because the liturgy required prayers for King George—words he could not speak while fighting for independence.

Faith and Revolution

The irony is striking: the same church that taught obedience also taught the worth of the individual soul before God.

Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee—Anglican sons of Virginia—came to believe that allegiance to conscience must outrank allegiance to any crown. Henry’s cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” echoed not rebellion but conviction born in the pews.

A Church Transformed

After the Revolution, Anglicans could no longer pray for the king. They reorganized as the Protestant Episcopal Church—retaining ancient liturgy but shedding political oaths. Bishop William White of Pennsylvania and Bishop Seabury of Connecticut ensured apostolic succession continued without royal oversight.

The king’s church became the people’s church, a symbol of the new republic: order balanced with liberty.

CHAPTER 5 — Catholics, Jews, and the Outcasts of Empire

Colonial society, like its religion, formed a hierarchy. Those outside the Protestant mainstream—Catholics, Jews, and smaller sects—often lived in the shadows of tolerance. Yet when revolution came, these “outsiders” proved as loyal to liberty as any Puritan, Anglican, or Quaker.

Catholics in a Protestant World

Anti-Catholic sentiment ran deep in several colonies. Laws barred Catholics from office, limited their worship, and fueled suspicion of their loyalty. Yet Maryland’s early experiment in toleration and the commitment of prominent Catholic families sustained the faith.

During the Revolution, Catholic contributions became essential:

• Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration, was one of its strongest supporters.
• Father John Carroll, later the first American Catholic bishop, ministered to soldiers and advocated for unity.

For a persecuted minority, the Revolution offered not only independence but dignity.

Jews in the New World

Jewish communities in Newport, New York, and Charleston were small but influential. They brought commerce, learning, charity, and ancient tradition to the colonies.

Though often excluded from political life, they embraced the patriot cause. After the war, when the Jews of Newport welcomed President Washington, his reply became one of the nation’s most beautiful declarations of religious liberty:

“To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The Quiet Strength of Smaller Flocks

Moravians, Huguenots, Mennonites, Pietists, and numerous small sects contributed quietly but profoundly. Though rarely in political power, they shaped colonial morals, work ethic, and community life.

When independence came, they fought, prayed, and sacrificed beside their neighbors. Their loyalty proved that liberty belonged not to the majority, but to all.

CHAPTER 6 — A Fire in the Fields: The Great Awakening

By the early 1730s the colonies were wealthy, expanding, and outwardly religious—but spiritually exhausted. Church attendance had become routine. Sermons were polite, moral, and predictable. Christianity had settled into a comfortable rhythm.

Then, without warning, a fire swept the land.

Whitefield, Edwards, and the Thunder of Revival

The Great Awakening began quietly in New England but soon surged southward. Preachers like Jonathan Edwards called men and women to a personal encounter with God. His famed sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God jolted sleepy congregations awake.

Then came George Whitefield, an Anglican evangelist with a voice that could carry to 20,000 people in an open field. He crossed the Atlantic seven times, preaching in barns, courthouses, pastures, marketplaces—anywhere souls would listen.

What he preached was radical:

• salvation through new birth
• repentance of the heart, not mere ritual
• the equal worth of every soul before God
• the rejection of spiritual tyranny

Thousands wept, shouted, fell to their knees. Entire towns paused labor to hear him. The revival became the first mass movement shared by all thirteen colonies.

A People Awakened

The Great Awakening produced consequences no one yet realized:

• It taught ordinary colonists that they could question religious authority.
• It elevated individual conscience above imposed church control.
• It encouraged self-governance within congregations.
• It weakened the idea that hierarchy—whether clerical or civil—was necessary for order.

In short, revival taught the colonists how to stand, so that when the time came, they knew how to stand against a king.

Seeds of Liberty

From revival meetings to tavern debates, a new confidence filled the people. They discovered a shared spiritual identity that transcended colony, denomination, and class.

Before the colonies united politically, they united spiritually.

The Great Awakening gave America a soul before it had a nation.

 

CHAPTER 7 — A Common Faith for a Common Cause

By the 1750s, the revival fires had cooled, but their embers still glowed. These embers would ignite once more as political tensions with Britain increased.

The Rise of a Shared Moral Language

Though colonists still worshiped in different ways, they now held a common vocabulary of faith:

• Providence
• liberty of conscience
• the dignity of the individual
• moral accountability
• resistance to tyranny

These ideas were preached in Puritan meetinghouses, Quaker gatherings, Baptist riverbanks, Anglican chapels, and frontier revivals alike. When Britain tightened its grip after the French and Indian War, colonists did not respond merely as citizens—but as believers.

The Pulpit as the People’s Parliament

Colonial ministers began preaching sermons that tied Scripture to the political moment. They warned against moral corruption, governmental overreach, and violations of God-given rights.

Sermons on “public virtue” and “Christian liberty” circulated in pamphlets. Preachers argued that resistance to tyranny was obedience to God. In many towns, the Sunday pulpit became more influential than any assembly hall.

A People Drawn Together

As tensions escalated—through taxes, troops, and trade restrictions—former rivals found themselves shoulder-to-shoulder.

• Baptists who once opposed Anglicans joined them in protesting British authority.
• Presbyterians who distrusted Congregationalists stood together for liberty.
• Quakers, though pacifist, defended the principles of conscience.

The colonies were not yet united in government, but they were increasingly united in belief.

Faith prepared the soil for freedom.

 

CHAPTER 8 — Sermons of Liberty

Before independence was ever declared, it was preached.

The “Black Regiment” of Patriot Clergy

British officers coined the term “the Black Regiment” to describe the American clergy who wore black robes and thundered patriot messages from the pulpit. Their sermons shaped public opinion far more deeply than newspapers or pamphlets.

Some of the most influential:

• Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, who preached that resisting tyranny was a biblical duty.
• John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and signer of the Declaration, who trained dozens of patriot leaders.
• Samuel Davies, whose revival preaching stirred courage among Virginia frontiersmen.
• George Duffield, chaplain to the Continental Congress, who prayed boldly for victory while British officers sat in the pews.

Scripture as Political Argument

Ministers compared King George III to Pharaoh, Herod, and even Nebuchadnezzar. They invoked the Exodus, the prophets, and the teachings of Jesus to explain why liberty was a sacred right.

They warned that moral corruption could destroy the colonies from within. They proclaimed that God governed nations and judged their rulers.

The Power of the Pulpit

No institution in colonial America spoke with more moral authority than the church. When ministers aligned themselves with the patriot cause, they brought entire communities with them.

The Revolution began in sermons long before it began in Congress.

 

CHAPTER 9 — Providence and the Continental Army

When war finally erupted, America faced impossible odds. It had no navy, little money, few weapons, and an army made up of farmers, blacksmiths, and boys.

But it had something the British did not: a belief in Providence.

Washington’s Faith and Leadership

George Washington did not wear his faith on his sleeve, but he lived it. He prayed daily, read Scripture, and trusted Providence when all earthly hope vanished.

He ordered chaplains for every regiment, issued calls for fasting and prayer, forbade profanity, and encouraged moral discipline in the ranks.

To him, victory would depend as much on divine favor as military strategy.

Miracles on the Battlefield

The Continental Army survived through events many saw as supernatural:

• The fog that saved Washington’s troops after the Battle of Long Island.
• The storm that halted British advances at key moments.
• The frozen Delaware River turning navigable just long enough for Washington’s crossing.
• The French alliance arriving precisely when the army was near collapse.

To the colonists, these were not coincidences but signatures of Providence.

Faith at Valley Forge

At Valley Forge, hunger, disease, and cold nearly destroyed the army. Yet Washington’s men built chapels from logs and held prayer meetings in the snow.

Suffering forged a deeper unity. The ragged army that emerged from Valley Forge was not just stronger—but spiritually hardened for the trials ahead.

 

CHAPTER 10 — Declarations of Faith and Freedom

As war intensified, the colonies confronted the question no longer avoidable: should they remain subjects of the crown or become a new nation?

The Continental Congress Seeks Divine Guidance

Before debating independence, Congress opened with prayer. They sought God’s guidance in their deliberations and frequently proclaimed days of fasting, repentance, and thanksgiving.

The political cause was wrapped in spiritual conviction.

The Declaration of Independence

Jefferson’s document was political in structure, but spiritual in foundation. It invoked:

• Laws of Nature and Nature’s God
• unalienable Rights endowed by their Creator
• a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence

The Declaration was not merely a break from Britain—it was a statement that liberty came from God, and therefore no earthly king could rightfully take it away.

A Covenant of Liberty

When the signers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, they understood the weight of that oath. Forty-two were active church members. Many saw the Declaration not just as a political contract but as a solemn covenant before God.

 

CHAPTER 11 — The Birth of Religious Liberty

Victory at Yorktown did not end the struggle. The new nation had to define what freedom would mean in law.

The Great Debate

Some states had established churches; others enforced religious tests for office. The new republic risked repeating the old world’s errors.

Baptists petitioned Madison for liberty. Presbyterians demanded equal rights. Catholics asked for protection. Jews sought assurance that citizenship would not require conversion.

Madison, Jefferson, and the Virginia Model

Virginia became the testing ground for true religious freedom.

Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, declaring that coercion of conscience was “a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.”

Madison shepherded it through the legislature.
This statute became the blueprint for the First Amendment.

The First Amendment

In 1791, the United States enshrined into law what the colonies had learned through conflict:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

It was the first time in history that a nation guaranteed full liberty of conscience to all people—not by toleration, but by right.

Religious liberty became the cornerstone of American identity.

 

CHAPTER 12 — One Nation Under God

When the guns of Yorktown fell silent and the peace of Paris was signed in 1783, the people of the new United States looked upon a land scarred by war yet rich with promise.

A Nation Built from Many Faiths

The colonies had begun as thirteen rival regions—Puritan, Anglican, Quaker, Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Jewish. They ended as one people bound by a shared belief that liberty came from God.

Their unity was not accidental.
It had been forged by:

• revival
• conscience
• persecution
• sermons
• war
• and Providence

Faith as the Foundation of Freedom

America did not become a free nation first and a faithful nation second. It became free because it was faithful—faithful to conscience, to Scripture, to self-governance, and to the conviction that no earthly king could claim authority over the human soul.

The American Miracle

Out of division came unity.
Out of oppression came liberty.
Out of thirteen scattered colonies rose a republic grounded in the belief that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with rights no government may take away.

It was, and remains, a nation under God.

EPILOGUE — The Covenant Renewed

The Republic endures because the covenant endures — not written in marble or parchment alone, but in the hearts of those who still believe that liberty is holy.
Each generation must choose anew: to remember the faith that birthed freedom, or to lose both.

For the Revolution was not the end of belief but its beginning —
the moment when a scattered people, divided in creed yet united in conscience, became one nation under God.

 

Endnotes

PREFACE — Faith Before Freedom
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1835]), 305–06.
2. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), in Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 195–212.
3. The Declaration of Independence (Philadelphia, 1776).
4. Scripture citations here and throughout are KJV: Rom. 13:1–2; Gal. 5:1; John 8:36.

CHAPTER 1 — God in the Colonies
1. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).
2. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939).
3. 1 Pet. 2:9 (KJV).
4. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. 3 (Boston: William White, 1854), 146–51.
5. Deut. 7:9 (KJV).

CHAPTER 2 — The Puritan Vision: A City upon a Hill
1. Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity.”
2. “Charter of 1650,” in The Founding of Harvard College, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 329–33.
3. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London: 1644), esp. 1–12.
4. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638, ed. David D. Hall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 321–55.
5. Prov. 14:34 (KJV).

CHAPTER 3 — Faiths of Conscience: Quakers, Baptists, and the Quest for Freedom
1. William Penn, Frame of the Government of Pennsylvania (1682), in The Papers of William Penn, vol. 2, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 212–33.
2. Penn, Charter of Privileges (1701), ibid., 588–94.
3. Isaac Backus, A History of New England with Particular Reference to the Baptists (Boston: 1777), vol. 1.
4. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, passim.
5. James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (1785), in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 2, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Putnam, 1901), 183–91.
6. Gal. 5:13 (KJV).

CHAPTER 4 — The Anglican Dilemma
1. The Book of Common Prayer (London: 1662).
2. Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London: 1797).
3. George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: American Stationers, 1834–37).
4. Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” March 23, 1775, in Patrick Henry: Writings and Speeches, ed. David J. Vaughan (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2001), 85–92.
5. Gal. 5:1 (KJV).

CHAPTER 5 — Catholics, Jews, and the Outcasts of Empire
1. Maryland Toleration Act (1649), in William Hand Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland, vol. 1 (Baltimore: 1883), 244–46.
2. Letters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland Historical Society Collection (Baltimore: MHS, 1915).
3. Congregation Shearith Israel (1654); Touro Synagogue (1763): institutional histories and charters.
4. Haym Salomon to Robert Morris, correspondence (1777–81), in The Papers of Robert Morris, 1781–1784, ed. E. James Ferguson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973–99).
5. George Washington, “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport,” Aug. 18, 1790, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 6 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 284–86.
6. Rom. 2:11 (KJV).

CHAPTER 6 — A Fire in the Fields: The Great Awakening
1. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974), 7–17.
2. George Whitefield, Journals of George Whitefield (London: 1739).
3. Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991).
4. On college foundations: Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 245–58.
5. John 8:36 (KJV).

CHAPTER 7 — A Common Faith for a Common Cause
1. Samuel Davies, “Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a Good Soldier” (1755), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 1:393–418.
2. Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (Boston: 1750).
3. Jacob Duché, Prayer before the Continental Congress, Sept. 7, 1774, in Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1904), 26–28.
4. 2 Cor. 3:17 (KJV).

CHAPTER 8 — Sermons of Liberty
1. Peter Muhlenberg sermon, Woodstock, VA, Jan. 21, 1776, in Alfred Nevin, Encyclopedia of the Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publishing, 1884), 547–48.
2. John Witherspoon, “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men” (1776), in Sandoz, Political Sermons, 2:1235–62.
3. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia: 1776).
4. George Washington, “Circular to the States,” June 8, 1783, in Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 1 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 134–42.
5. Gal. 5:13 (KJV).

CHAPTER 9 — Providence and the Continental Army
1. George Washington: General Orders, 1775–1781, in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985–).
2. John Gano, Biographical Memoirs of the Late Rev. John Gano (New York: Southwick, 1806).
3. Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of Some of the Adventures... (Hallowell, ME: Glazier, 1830).
4. William White, Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (Philadelphia: S. Potter, 1820).
5. Prov. 21:31 (KJV).

CHAPTER 10 — Declarations of Faith and Freedom
1. Declaration of Independence (1776).
2. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788), Query XVII.
3. John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, in The Adams Papers: Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 3–4.
4. Benjamin Franklin, Speech, Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787, in Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 451–52.
5. Ps. 127:1 (KJV).

CHAPTER 11 — The Birth of Religious Liberty
1. Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 545–47.
2. Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance” (1785), in Writings of James Madison, 2:183–91.
3. The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776–1826, ed. James Morton Smith (New York: Norton, 1995), 1:521–39.
4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 305–10.
5. 2 Cor. 3:17 (KJV).

CHAPTER 12 — One Nation Under God
1. George Washington, First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789, in Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 2 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987), 142–50.
2. Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863, in Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 7 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 17–18.
3. Pledge of Allegiance, 1954 amendment, 68 Stat. 249.
4. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, ch. 17.
5. Ps. 33:12 (KJV).

EPILOGUE — The Covenant Renewed
1. George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept. 19, 1796, in Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1849), 698–706.
2. John Quincy Adams, An Oration on the Declaration of Independence (New York: Harper, 1837).
3. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks upon signing the bill to include “under God” in the Pledge, June 14, 1954, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954, 564–65.
4. Deut. 8:11–14 (KJV).