America’s identity, laws, culture, and moral compass have been profoundly shaped by Christian values for over four centuries. From the Mayflower Compact of 1620, which declared the Pilgrims’ voyage was undertaken “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” to the present day, Christianity has provided the ethical and philosophical foundation that made the American experiment possible. Undeniably, the Bible is the rock on which this nation was built. Far from being a mere historical footnote, these values remain indispensable for the nation’s cohesion, prosperity, and moral clarity today.
          The Declaration of Independence asserts that human beings “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” This is not a secular or deistic abstraction; the Founders overwhelmingly operated within the Christian assumptions about human dignity. The idea that every person possesses inherent worth because they are made in the image of God (imago Dei) was revolutionary in a world dominated by divine-right monarchies and caste systems.
          John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” By “religious,” Adams and the other Founders primarily meant Protestant Christianity, which emphasized individual conscience, personal responsibility, and voluntary virtue—the very traits required for self-government.
          Christianity, particularly in its Reformation theology, taught that authority comes from God but is delegated to human beings who are accountable to Him. This produced two revolutionary ideas:

• Government is not absolute; it is under divine law.

• Individuals have direct access to moral truth through conscience and Scripture, not solely through the state or a priestly class.

          These concepts directly birthed the American system of limited government, checks and balances, and constitutionally protected rights.
As historian Mark David Hall has documented, the sermons of colonial pastors—especially during the Revolutionary era—were saturated with citations from Deuteronomy and Romans 13, framing resistance to tyranny as a biblical duty when rulers violate God’s law.
          Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America (1835) that Christianity functioned as the foremost political institution in the United States, not because it held state power, but because it shaped morals. Churches were schools of civic virtue where Americans learned self-discipline, charity, honesty, and community responsibility—traits essential for a free society to function without descending into chaos or authoritarianism.
          The great reform movements that define America’s moral progress—abolition, women’s suffrage, child-labor laws, and the Civil Rights Movement—were overwhelmingly led and staffed by devout Christians applying biblical principles. William Wilberforce, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King Jr. all framed their activism in explicitly Christian terms: human equality before God, the prophetic call to justice, and redemption through sacrificial love.
          When transcendent moral standards rooted in a personal, righteous God, are abandoned, societies historically drift toward either hedonistic decay or totalitarian control to enforce order. Christian values provide an external, unchanging reference point that protects both individual dignity and societal order. The 20th century’s worst atrocities—Nazism, Soviet Communism, Maoist China—all emerged in environments that explicitly rejected Christian ethics in favor of materialist or racially supremacist ideologies.
          America’s Christian heritage continues to supply the moral vocabulary that allows citizens to say, “This is wrong,” even when a majority or the state declares otherwise. Without it, rights become mere preferences granted (and revocable) by the government rather than endowments from the Creator.
          At the practical level, Christian teachings on marriage, family stability, sexual fidelity, forgiveness, and the work ethic have consistently correlated with better life outcomes.
          Decades of social science data show that regular religious practice is one of the strongest predictors of marital stability, mental health, charitable giving, and lower rates of crime and substance abuse.
          In a time of epidemic loneliness, family breakdown, and declining trust in institutions, the Christian emphasis on covenantal relationships, sacrificial love, and transcendent purpose, and community offers a proven antidote that no government program has been able to replicate.
          America has never been a theocracy, nor should it become one. The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty—itself a fruit of Christian political theology—remains one of the nation’s greatest achievements. Pretending that the United States can long endure after severing itself from the Christian moral tradition that birthed and sustained it is historical amnesia.
          Christian values are not important to America because they are old or culturally familiar. They are important because they have proven uniquely capable of sustaining both ordered liberty and human flourishing across centuries and continents. A nation that forgets this does so at its own peril. As G.K. Chesterton wryly observed, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything.” America’s future depends on remembering what made its past exceptional, what the true greatness of America came from.