How Religious Liberty Sustained America

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, a familiar claim is repeated with growing confidence: Religion is fading from American life. Faith, we are told, has retreated into the private realm. Public Christianity is an anachronism. Modern America, like modern Europe, is supposedly learning to live without God.

 

The statistics appear persuasive at first glance. Church attendance has declined. Denominational loyalty has weakened. Many Americans now describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or as simply unaffiliated. From this, commentators conclude that Christianity no longer shapes the nation’s moral or political imagination. This conclusion is mistaken.

 

What has declined is not belief itself, but institutional trust. What has weakened is not Christianity’s influence, but the willingness of many churches to speak with theological integrity. Remove the fashionable assumptions, and a clearer reality emerges. Christianity didn’t merely accompany the American experiment. It formed it. It constrained power in ways no other civilizational inheritance had managed before. And it continues, even now, to shape American arguments about liberty, justice, and authority — sometimes faithfully, sometimes perversely, but never insignificantly.

 

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From the beginning, the United States presented itself as something unprecedented yet deeply rooted. In recent years, it has become common to claim that America was never truly Christian, that its founding was purely secular, or even rooted in hostility to faith. That claim collapses under scrutiny. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by men who were overwhelmingly Christian — some orthodox, others deists, all formed by the moral language of the Bible. They argued fiercely over theology and shared no single creed. What bound them together was not doctrine, but formation: a common moral grammar shaped by Christianity, whether confessed, inherited, or assumed.

 

The Declaration appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” rather than to kings, bloodlines, or ancestral destiny. It speaks of truths that are self-evident because they are not invented by governments. Human beings, it insists, are endowed with rights. Those rights are not granted by the state. They preexist it. Governments exist to secure them, not redefine them.

 

This distinction is decisive. It is also unmistakably biblical. What mattered to the Founders was inheritance, not theological uniformity. Even those who identified as deists didn’t reject Christianity’s underlying framework. If anything, they assumed it. They rejected ecclesiastical coercion, not biblical anthropology. Their God was still a lawgiver. Their universe was still ordered. Human beings were still morally accountable creatures, not raw material for political experimentation. This is why the Declaration speaks of duties as naturally as it speaks of rights. Liberty, in this framework, is inseparable from responsibility. Free people must govern themselves, or freedom gives way to license and ends in rule by force.

 

Holding elections is not what makes America exceptional. Democracies are common, and many have proven fragile. The American republic is different because it treats liberty as prior to politics. Liberty is not dispensed by government; it precedes it. The purpose of the republic is to preserve a condition already assumed, not to manufacture freedom. That purpose didn’t come from ancient Greece or imperial Rome. It didn’t come from China, Japan, or India. It came from a religious tradition that insisted that power itself is limited.

 

In the Old Testament, political authority is never absolute. Kings rule, but they do not reign as gods. They are anointed, yet accountable. When the prophet Samuel warns Israel about monarchy, he describes, in almost clinical detail, the harms caused by unchecked power, what it costs a people: It takes sons and daughters, fields and flocks, labor and life. The warning is theological as much as political. All power belongs to God. When men claim it for themselves, oppression follows. This principle runs through the Hebrew Scripture with unsettling consistency. Pharaohs are humbled. Nebuchadnezzar is brought low. Even King David, chosen and beloved, is condemned when he abuses his authority. No ruler, however exalted, stands above judgment. No state may absorb the soul.

 

From this vision emerges a concept that modern thinkers later called negative liberty: freedom from domination, from arbitrary rule, from coercion. Liberty is defined as protection against being mastered by another rather than the ability to satisfy every desire. It is restraint, not indulgence. America chose this understanding deliberately.

 

This biblical suspicion of concentrated power explains something that modern readers often miss: why liberty in the American tradition is defensive rather than expansive. It exists to prevent injustice, not to guarantee happiness. The Founders imagined the state as a necessary restraint on fallibility rather than a vehicle for human perfection. This assumption mirrors the Old Testament view of human nature, which is neither naïvely optimistic nor nihilistic. Man is capable of good but prone to corruption. Power magnifies that tendency. Therefore, power must be divided, slowed, and constrained.

 

The New Testament deepened rather than displaced this inheritance. Christ does not arrive as a political revolutionary, yet His teaching quietly undermines every claim to absolute authority. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” He says, “and unto God what is God’s.” With that sentence, political power is relativized. Caesar is not divine. The state has limits. Conscience belongs elsewhere.

 

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This separation between political authority and ultimate allegiance did not exist in most civilizations. In imperial Rome, the emperor was divine. In ancient Greece, the polis subsumed the individual. In much of Asia, cosmic order and political authority were fused. Japan, well into the 20th century, treated its emperor as a god incarnate. When the United States confronted Japan in World War II, American officials struggled to comprehend a system in which surrender was inconceivable because defeat would deny the divinity of Emperor Hirohito.

 

The Founding Fathers did not have Hirohito in mind when they debated religious liberty. Nor were they inspired by Mohammed. Their arguments unfolded within a Christian civilizational context. They weren’t weighing Christianity against Islam or Buddhism. They were negotiating among Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, and Methodists. The disputes were intra-Christian. That context matters, especially now.

 

The idea that rulers themselves are bound by law found early political expression in England. The Magna Carta didn’t create liberty out of thin air. When rebellious barons forced King John to accept limits on his authority, they were invoking an older moral claim: that kings are subject to judgment. Property could not be seized arbitrarily. Justice couldn’t be denied at will. The rule of law, as a concept, emerged from a Christian insistence that power must answer to something higher than itself. These developments unfolded unevenly across Europe, but they found their fullest institutional expression in England. Over time, courts asserted independence. Parliaments constrained monarchs. Still, Europe paid dearly for religious conflict. Sectarian violence and political repression scarred the continent for generations.

 

Many early Americans were the heirs of that exhaustion. They fled enforced uniformity. They crossed an ocean not to abandon Christianity, but to practice it freely. When they built their new society, they refused to nationalize faith while also refusing to banish it. The Constitution reflects this balance. It is remarkable not because it imagines human beings as virtuous, but because it assumes the opposite. Power is divided. Authority is checked. Liberty is preserved by restraining rulers, not trusting them.

 

This is why the Constitution reads less like a manifesto and more like a restraint system. It doesn’t proclaim human goodness, but it does anticipate human abuse. The separation of powers, federalism, and judicial review aren’t merely clever mechanisms; they’re moral judgments embedded in law. They assume that no individual, faction, or institution should be trusted with unchecked authority. This skepticism is biblical. It reflects an anthropology shaped by Scripture rather than utopian theory.

 

The constitutional amendments that followed sharpened this commitment. Due process. Innocent until proven guilty. Protection against unreasonable searches. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of speech. These are not abstractions. Quite the opposite. They are defenses against tyranny. They rest on the assumption that the state is not the final arbiter. The First Amendment, in particular, is often misunderstood. It doesn’t exile religion from public life. Instead, it prevents the state from coercing belief. Faith, in the Christian understanding, must be freely chosen or it is meaningless. Conscience cannot be commanded without being destroyed.

 

When Americans later confronted slavery, it was not secular ideology that supplied the most powerful moral critique. It was Christianity. Abolitionists didn’t argue merely from efficiency or progress. They argued from Scripture. They insisted that every human being bore the image of God and that bondage was an offense against both man and the Creator. The same pattern appeared in struggles against segregation and in movements for women’s legal equality. Christian language, Christian reasoning, and Christian imagery animated these efforts. They were imperfect. They were often resisted by other Christians. But the vocabulary came from the same source. Christianity has always constrained power by reminding the powerful that they are not gods. That constraint still matters, even when it is imperfectly applied.

 

The Christian voting bloc played a decisive role in the election of Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2024, not because he embodied Christian virtue, but because many believers saw him as a barrier against an aggressively secular political culture. When he survived an assassination attempt, a significant portion of the Christian public interpreted it as providential. Such interpretations discomfit secular observers, but they reveal how deeply biblical categories still shape American instinct.

 

Christian influence is also visible among the young. On college campuses once dominated by credentialed cynicism, students now cite Old and New Testament passages at public events. Before his assassination, Charlie Kirk spoke unapologetically about faith, framing Christianity not as rebellion or nostalgia, but as a source of order, discipline, and meaning. Charlie is gone, and his loss is profound. The mission, however, continues. His wife, Erika, has carried it forward with quiet authority and a courage that deserves recognition.

 

Even ideological disputes on the American right increasingly turn on biblical interpretation. Arguments over immigration, foreign policy, and national obligation often ask not only what is strategic, but what Scripture permits. Should the United States maintain unconditional alliances? What does the Bible say? Can a nation erase its borders in the name of compassion? Again, Scripture is invoked. The debate over whether Jesus was a refugee — and the insistence that, if He was, it would obligate Christians to oppose border enforcement — reveals how easily theology is repurposed for contemporary policy arguments.

 

What’s striking is that even movements hostile to Christianity cannot escape it. American progressivism doesn’t resemble the militantly atheist communism of China or Cambodia. It is saturated with Christian language, however distorted. Christ is recast as a socialist. Scripture is reread through racial, sexual, or ideological lenses. Every cause demands a gospel. The distortion is obvious, but it reveals something important. Even those who wish to dismantle America’s foundations feel compelled to appeal to Christian authority. The Bible still exerts gravitational pull.

 

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That pull cannot sustain endless corruption. When churches become activist hubs and sermons become political lectures, believers disengage. Eighty percent of Americans still profess belief in God, yet less than a third attend church regularly. However, as noted earlier, Christianity has not lost its relevance. Many churches, though, have abandoned theological fidelity, and that has driven worshippers away. Congregations want formation, not activism masquerading as faith. Catholic youth, in particular, are returning to traditional liturgy, drawn by reverence, discipline, and continuity.

 

There is a widening gap between church leadership, often politically progressive, and congregations that are markedly more conservative. The assumption that American churches are uniformly right-wing falls apart on contact with reality. If anything, the imbalance has long tilted the other way. Much of the institutional church leadership has spent decades absorbing the language of progressive politics, often more fluently than the language of theology. The Founding Fathers, were they to wake today, would be appalled by this confusion. They would recognize in it the same temptation they sought to restrain: the urge to fuse righteousness with power. Yet they would also be heartened. They would see Americans who refuse to surrender judgment, who insist that liberty is not self-justifying.

 

America has experienced repeated religious revivals. They were disruptive events. They unsettled complacency, challenged authority, and reordered public life. There is no reason to assume that such renewal is confined to the past.

 

At 250 years, the American experiment remains unfinished. Its endurance has always rested on a vital insight: Liberty does not sustain itself. It requires limits that power alone cannot supply. Christianity provided those limits, and it can do so again. As an American citizen, I am deeply grateful for that inheritance. Whether America chooses to recover it will shape not only what kind of nation it becomes, but the kind of republic it remains.