When Jesus Met Jefferson

Commentary

by

Elevate the Discourse | July 1, 2025

There’s an irony in how American Christians celebrate the Fourth of July. On the one hand, they light sparklers, sing the national anthem in church services, and offer prayers for “freedom” with a capital F. On the other hand, if you dropped an 18th-century founder like James Madison into one of these services, let’s say the kind where there are red, white, and blue balloons tied to the baptismal font and someone in a polo shirt reads the Declaration of Independence before the offering, he’d likely be confused and horrified.

Madison, Jefferson, and their cohort, those powdered-wig-wearing, deist-leaning, Enlightenment-spouting political philosophers, were not exactly evangelical Christians. They were bookish thinkers who were allergic to orthodoxy. They were part of a radical intellectual vanguard that believed reason and liberty, not divine mandate, were the bedrocks of governance. They believed in natural rights, but not necessarily in the supernatural God that modern American Christianity often seems to require.

Yet, here we are, in 21st-century America, where the Fourth of July has become a kind of religious observance, a patriotic liturgy. It features ritual fireworks and sacramental hamburgers. Independence Day often feels like a second Veterans Day in many American churches. Soldiers are thanked. Flags are waved. Occasionally, a bald eagle flaps across a PowerPoint slide. Beneath all that spectacle, there’s a missing document, the Declaration of Independence, a text crafted by nerds.

Yes, nerds, not warriors. The authors of the Declaration of Independence were bookish, nervous, restless men with ink-stained fingers and expensive educations, who sat in hot rooms in Philadelphia in 1776, debating Locke and Montesquieu. Jefferson famously wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” a phrase more Greek than Galilean.

The founders’ religion, if we can call it that, was rationalism. Their God was often impersonal, distant, a kind of celestial watchmaker. Contrast that with contemporary American Christianity, which leans hard into personal salvation, moral absolutism, and cultural tribalism. For the founders, liberty was sacred. For many modern Christians, liberty is instrumental, a means to an end, a tool to ensure their kind of country, with their values, enshrined in law.

This is what social psychologists call “motivated reasoning.” We take symbols and retrofit them to serve our needs. We forget that the Declaration of Independence was once a radical, even subversive document. Today, it’s a prop between sermons and country songs. We forget that the founders weren’t trying to make a Christian nation. They were trying to make a free one.

This gets us to the real problem: a kind of collective amnesia. We’ve turned a holiday about ideas into a holiday about identity, being American, and being right. In that transformation, we’ve lost something precious. The Fourth of July wasn’t about military might or religious dominance. It was about dissent, intellectual courage, and the belief that humans could govern themselves without a king or a theocracy.

Cultural legacies shape our perception. The Fourth of July is one of those legacies: a national myth calcified into ritual. We no longer remember that Independence Day is less about flags and more about footnotes, those little citations to Rousseau, Paine, and Hobbes. The scaffolding of freedom is philosophical, not just patriotic.

The next time you’re at a church service that plays “God Bless America” between scripture readings, remember this: the most dangerous thing the founders ever did wasn’t picking up muskets. It was picking up pens. They weren’t martyrs or messiahs. They were nerds who had the audacity to write that liberty was self-evident. That’s the kind of faith that changed the world.

Maybe what America needs isn’t a revival of religion but a revival of reason, not a return to patriotic fervor but a return to the courage of ideas.

The Rev. Richard Bryant, an ordained elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, is an educator, writer, and recovering preacher. He writes about theology and language on his blog, Elevate the Discourse, from which this essay is republished.