America’s Constitution, as written in 1787 by the Founders, nowhere required any person to accept the divinity of Christ, but it clearly presumed the moral, political (especially individual liberty and separation of powers), and civilizational values of Christianity.

America was (and to a large degree remains) a nation of Christians, but not a Christian nation. To appreciate how deeply this was the case, consider the views of the three authors of “The Federalist Papers,” the universally accepted authoritative explanation of the Founders’ thinking on how they expected the new government they established with the Constitution to function and why.

Written originally as a series of newspaper columns under the nom de plume of “Publ ius,” the work was especially crucial to gaining adoption of the Constitution in New York and Virginia. Without adoption in those two states, the Constitution might not have become America’s founding law. The three men behind Publius included Virginia’s James Madison, New York’s Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, also from New York.

Madison is the one among the trio who is widely seen as a deeply perceptive political theorist and became known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his decisive role at the Constitutional Convention and during the subsequent debates in each of the 13 states on adoption. He would later become the fourth President of the United States.

While his private spiritual beliefs cannot be known with certainty, especially in his later years, it is quite clear that Madison always saw a direct link between belief in God and the happiness of man: “The belief in a God who is all-powerful, wise, and good is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.” And he described Christianity as “the best and purest religion.”

Concerning the multiple controversies that erupted during the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote in Federalist 37 that “the real wonder is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted and surmounted with a unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected. It is impossible for any man of candor to reflect on this circumstance without partaking of the astonishment. It is impossible for a man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand, which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the Revolution.”

Whatever his private beliefs, as president, according to Library of Congress historian James Hutson, Madison “followed Jefferson’s example by attending [Christian] services in the House of Representatives, making a grand appearance when he arrived in his coach and four.”

Next comes Hamilton, who would go on to be the first secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington. He would die tragically in a duel with political opponent Aaron Burr during a campaign for governor of New York. Hamilton viewed Christianity as the antidote to the war and savagery that has plagued humanity for eons:

“How clearly is it proved by this that the praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity — war, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism — war resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.”

Hamilton considered that despotism was an inevitable result of the loss of morality, stemming from the decline in religious practice. “The politician who loves liberty sees … a gulf that may swallow up the liberty to which he is devoted. He knows that morality overthrown (and morality must fall without religion), the terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of man and confine him within the bounds of social duty.”

He also viewed God as the ultimate source of all human liberty, contending that “the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Jay, who would be appointed by George Washington as the nation’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice, wrote only five of the numbers in The Federalist Papers. He also negotiated the treaty bearing his name that restored friendly trade relations between Britain and its former colonies.

Jay was quite open about his faith, saying of the Scriptures that “the Bible is the best of all books, for it is the word of God and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and in the next. Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.”

In the year following his resignation from the high court, Jay wrote to a friend, declaring, “I have long been of the opinion that the evidence of the Truth of Christianity requires only to be carefully examined to produce conviction in candid minds.”

And more than a decade later, Jay wrote of being asked by a philosopher “if I believed in Christ. I answered that I did, and that I thanked God that I did.”

Do these quotes prove the Constitution was handed down by God from on High? No, of course not. And neither do they suggest the Founders intended to establish anything remotely resembling a regime resting on religious endorsement and direction. What these quotes clearly do provide is solid evidence that the major spiritual influence on the Founders’ generation was the Christian faith.

If only to provide one simple, but crucially important illustration of how Christian influence on the political structures we know today as those of Western Civilization, including especially the Constitution, consider this statement by Jesus found in the Gospel of Mark at 12:17:

“Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they marveled at him.”

In an ancient world in which the universal standard was that everything was subject to Caesar, that new core political structural principle articulated by Jesus Christ represented the foundation of what we today call limited government and with it, individual freedom.