A few more quotes, of the thousands that could be quoted:
John Adams:
Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. . . . What a Eutopia – what a Paradise would this region be! (John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856, Vol. II, pp. 6-7)
Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company: I mean hell. (The Works of John Adams, Vol. X, p. 254)
The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity. (The Works of John Adams, Vol. III, p. 421)
John Quincy Adams:
In the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior. The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity. (John Quincy Adams, An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport at Their Request on the Sixty-First Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1837, Newburyport: Charles Whipple, 1837, pp. 5-6)
Elias Boudinot, early president of Congress, signed the peace treaty to end the American Revolution, framer of the Bill of Rights, and the first attorney admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar, in introducing his proposal that Congress should open with a prayer (which proposal as adopted, by the way):
Let us enter on this important business under the idea that we are Christians on whom the eyes of the world are now turned… [L]et us earnestly call and beseech Him, for Christ’s sake, to preside in our councils. . . . We can only depend on the all powerful influence of the Spirit of God, Whose Divine aid and assistance it becomes us as a Christian people most devoutly to implore. Therefore I move that some minister of the Gospel be requested to attend this Congress every morning . . . in order to open the meeting with prayer. (Elias Boudinot, The Life, Public Services, Addresses, and Letters of Elias Boudinot, J. J. Boudinot, editor, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1896, Vol. I, pp. 19, 21)
Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence and a delegate at the Constitutional Convention:
Grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, He had conferred on my beloved country in her emancipation and on myself in permitting me, under circumstances of mercy, to live to the age of 89 years, and to survive the fiftieth year of independence, adopted by Congress on the 4th of July 1776, which I originally subscribed on the 2d day of August of the same year and of which I am now the last surviving signer. (Lewis A. Leonard, Life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, New York: Moffit, Yard & Co, 1918, pp. 256-257)
The 1854 U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. This is from an 1854 report that the Judiciary Committee wrote in response to a private petition to ban Christianity from government:
Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle... In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity... That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants. (Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives Made During the First Session of the Thirty-Third Congress, Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854, pp. 6-9)
As a follow-up, in May 1854, Congress passed the following resolution:
Whereas, The people of these United States, from their earliest history to the present time, have been led by the hand of a kind Providence, and are indebted for the countless blessings of the past and present, and dependent for continued prosperity in the future upon Almighty God; and whereas the great vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it eminently becomes the representatives of a people so highly favored to acknowledge in the most public manner their reverence for God. (Congressional Resolution, 34th Congress, passed in May 1854)
And I could go on and on and on and on. I could also spend may pages quoting founding-era Americans on their belief that God repeatedly intervened, via weather and other means, to help the colonies defeat the British army. In fact, some British soldiers expressed this view as well.
An excellent source on this issue is a book written in 1864 by B. F. Morris titled
Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, Developed in the Official and Historical Annals of the Republic. Morris was a careful scholar and spent years in researching and writing the book. The book is available for free online:
Christian life and character of the civil institutions of the United States developed in the official and historical annals of the republic
Morris says the following in the preface:
The work is not speculative or theoretical, but a series of facts to unfold and establish the Christian life and character of the civil institutions of the United States, in the light of which every American citizen can trace to its source the true glory of the nation, and learn to appreciate its institutions and to venerate and imitate the great and good men who founded them.
It has been a delightful task of patriotism and piety to the compiler to prepare the volume, and to lay it as a grateful offering upon the common altar of his country and of Christianity.
The work has been the labor of years, performed in various States of the Union, and in the capital of the nation, within sight of the tomb of Washington, during the most eventful year of the Rebellion [the Civil War]; and its last pages were prepared for the press in Philadelphia, where so many of the sacred scenes of the Revolution transpired. The volume, therefore, has in its preparation a national feature, and the reader will be impressed with the importance and appositeness of the facts to the present time.
It is also the ardent hope of the compiler that the facts and principles recorded in this volume, and in which, in our early struggle, all denominations of Christians uttered with such harmony their convictions that the only sure and stable basis of our civil institutions was in the Christian religion, may contribute to strengthen the union of patriotism and piety in all parts of the country, to save the nation from the perils of a wicked rebellion, and be the brightest hope of the future.
Care has been taken to give each author credit for his thoughts and language, though in a few instances it may have been overlooked. It was not the desire nor the design of the compiler to elaborate his own views, though they are found in the volume, but to give those of the great leading minds of the republic, both past and present. (pp. 6-7)
The framers never intended to found a godless government, much less a secular nation. They did not want the government to be under the control or influence of one particular Christian denomination over others. They did not want a Baptist-run/controlled government or a Catholic-run/controlled government, etc. But they certainly intended for the government to be friendly and welcoming toward Christianity as a whole. They never dreamed anyone would misread the First Amendment to ban prayer in school or the display of the Ten Commandments in school. If someone had told them that a future Supreme Court would so grossly misread the Constitution, they would have thought the idea far fetched.
Again, liberals, when FDR prayed during his D-Day prayer, broadcast over national radio, that we would preserve and defend "our religion," what religion do you think he had in mind?
