As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the public political theology of the founding faces fundamental ideological challenges. Progressive politics is marked by a pre-Christian paganism that sees divinity as imanent in the world while conservative politics is increasingly influenced by resurgent forms of Christian, and particularly Catholic, integralism, which seeks to reintegrate elements of spiritual and temporal authority that were separated in the modern era. We consider what relevance the classical Christian natural-law tradition has as we consider the legacy of the American founding today.

Why should the Constitution be considered authoritative and demand our loyalty? The answer to this question is tightly bound up with how we think about popular sovereignty. Crucially, the American colonists reaffirmed the rule of law over the rule of will, whether as it had been theorized both by partisans of absolutist monarchy (e.g., Filmer) or partisans of absolutist democracy (e.g., Rousseau). To understand the Founders’ perspective on popular sovereignty under the rule of law, we contrast it with Rousseau's voluntarist and positivist account and engage with recent scholarship in consitutional theory on popular sovereignty. The chapter then reconstructs the founders' account of sovereignty taking inspiration from Orestes Brownson.

Recent scholars have argued that the American founding represents a decisive departure from the classical Christian natural-law tradition. In contrast, the thematic chapters in this volume argue that the background assumptions of American public life during the founding were derived from and compatible with the classical Christian natural-law tradition that developed from the long engagement of Christianity with classical political philosophy, hitting its highwater mark in medeival scholasticisim and retaining its influence through the dominant theological traditions in the North American colonies.

Prevailing scholarly interpretations cast James Wilson's Lectures on Law (1790–1791) at the College of Philadelphia as paradigmatic of the founding era’s allegedly rationalist, heterodox natural theology. Yet Wilson’s Lectures point in quite the opposite direction: to a vision of the founding era jurisprudence that was self-consciously rooted in a divinely created and rationally intelligible moral order that was both complemented and presupposed by Christian revelation. So understood, Wilson’s Lectures bring into focus the limitations of the common scholarly conventions and categories that contrast enlightenment and religion, reason and revelation, or Nature’s God and the God of Abraham. In Wilson’s Lectures, these are not “either/or” categories but are rather presented together in a synthesis that emerged from the long Christian engagement with the natural-law tradition.

From the founding on, a dominant stream of American political thought and statesmanship has understood the polity in providentialist terms. Revolutionary leaders espoused belief in a particularly providential God, which is what we would expect if they also held to a classical Christian conception of natural law rather than the pantheistic naturalism alleged by modern scholars. We take our investigative cues from the providentialist proclamation by the Continental Congress that bookended the Revolutionary War, and we then engage in historical case studies of key players and events in American counterintelligence and French diplomacy. These case studies show that prominent actors in the war affirmed core tenets of classical theism: the existence of a creator God who providentially governs the cosmos and the destiny of men. According to these key participants engaged in espionage and diplomacy, the providential creator was also a moralistic God of justice who favored the side of liberty such that the revolutionary actors saw themselves carrying out the divine will on the world historic stage in obedience to the dictates of right reason.

In this chapter, we argue that Thomas Jefferson affirmed the core of classical philosophical theology. Jefferson understood Nature’s God to be a creating, particularly providential, and moralistic being, whose existence and causal relation to the world was essential to the foundations of natural-rights republicanism. For Jefferson, belief in such a God was warranted on the basis of reason, and thus is akin to the propositions that Thomas Aquinas called the preambula fidei. Jefferson’s theology was essential to natural-rights republicanism in that God’s creation and ordering of man to happiness grounded the moral law, human moral equality, and the natural right of property. Jefferson did not adhere to the major tenets of orthodox Christianity as presented in the religion’s earliest creeds, but he nonetheless affirmed the existence of a God of Nature whose attributes included being a providential, moralistic creator. And while Jefferson can appear at times as a philosophical dilettante with scattered thoughts, Jefferson developed a natural theology that has surprising continuities, and some important discontinuities, with the classical natural-law tradition.

The pamphlets written during the great transatlantic debate spanning the 1760s and early 1770s are a window into the theoretical frame of the American mind in the years leading to the Declaration of Independence. The shared background assumptions of those pamphlets include the existence of a providential God whose governance of the world was an essential premise in their natural-law theories of morality and law. Most of the leading lights of the patriotic pamphleteers held their natural-law principles within a Christian frame, and the pamphlets they wrote in the 1760s and 1770s cast light on the ideas the colonists put forward, with one united voice, in the Declaration of Independence. This chapter highlights major contributors to the pamphlet debates, with particular attention given to two influential pamphleteers, James Otis and John Dickinson.

Was the American revolutionary argument justifiable on classical, Christian natural-law and just war principles? This question is not merely of quaint historical interest but also has been the subject of scholarly discussion in recent years on the basis of Thomistic natural-law and just war principles. Moreover, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the debate between the patriots and the loyalists over whether resistance could be justified on biblical grounds. In this chapter, we argue that the American revolution was justifiable on the grounds of Thomistic jurisprudence. We then turn to reconsider the case for revolution in light of Christian Scripture with particular attention to how Romans 13 was interpreted in the Christian tradition and in the American colonies.