The U.S. Constitution does not mention anything about the United States being a Christian nation and does not recall Christianity or God at all. It appears just as a document that establishes the structure of the new government of the nation. In the same way, the First Amendment protects the individuals’ rights to practice one’s own religion, but does not mention Christianity at all (“God and the Constitution”, 2007). It states instead that the Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, buy despite of that, it is clear that the foundational documents that preceded the U.S. Constitution were influenced by a Christian worldview. Moreover, many of the founders were professing Christians and showed their faith in public …show more content…
In this context, The Mayflower Compact is to be considered as one of the most important of the founding documents that led to the U.S. Constitution. The document was undoubtedly created with a Christian worldview because it was written by a group of English separatist who want to affirm their religious and civil freedom by establishing the principles of self-government and covenant they learned from their Puritan ideology, founded on the Scriptures. The settlers solemnly agreed to combine into a civil Body Politic, following the example of the church covenant the Pilgrims had made years earlier (McDowell, n. d.). Therefore, The Mayflower Compact and its successive revisions were based upon the idea that the only true law was the law of God as revealed in the Bible, and the Scripture were often quoted as well. These same principles would later become fundamental in the American …show more content…
As a matter of fact, 12 of the 13 original charters on which the colonies were founded make a mention to the spread of the Gospel as one of the reason of their establishment, beside the affirmation of rights and liberties. In the same way, the Declaration of Independence of 1776 showed the deep influence that The Magna Carta had throughout the centuries, and that carried on through the fight against the British taxation and the frontier policy (U. S. Department of State, n.d.). In fact, between 1760 and 1770, the failure of the colonies’ protests against the British actions led to a break point whose motivations where summarized in the Declaration; since then, the American colonists constituted an independent nation, and the laws of nature and the will of God were considered as the source of authority for this decision as well. The members of the Continental Congress understood that it was necessary to found a national government and, after several disagreements, the delegates finally developed the Articles of Confederation in 1777, which represented the first national “constitution” of the United States, but it would not be ratified by all the states until 1781. It established the