On the Fourth of July 1776, congressional delegates in Philadelphia adopted the Declaration of Independence, ordering it to be widely proclaimed. Couriers carried printed copies by stagecoach and horseback to every colony, where officials posted them and newspapers circulated the text. The declaration was also meant to be read aloud; Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft includes marks indicating where the reader should pause. Ceremonial public readings took place in Philadelphia and in town squares, courthouses, churches and taverns along the Eastern Seaboard.
Not all listeners agreed with the declaration, and religion was a dividing point. Loyalists who sided with England and the official Church of England dissented on spiritual and political grounds; two-thirds of its ministers left for England after the Revolution began. Members of historic pacifist churches, such as the Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren, faced difficult choices after hearing the call to arms. Even some patriots questioned whether all the truths proclaimed were as “self-evident” as the delegates presumed—for example, that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
The Second Continental Congress appointed a committee of five delegates to write the declaration. Jefferson, the main author, penned the first draft in his rented room in Philadelphia. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin offered suggestions before Congress revised and approved the document. The final text listed 27 complaints against King George III and used four terms for God. In the opening paragraph, Jefferson invoked “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”; Franklin added the phrase that rights were “endowed by their Creator.” Congress added “the Supreme Judge of the world” and “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence” to the final paragraph.
The reference to “Providence” left room for the founders’ differing religious interpretations. More conventionally Christian delegates, like John Witherspoon, believed God intervenes directly in history. Rationalists like Jefferson believed in a creator but rejected biblical miracles and Jesus’ divinity, seeing God’s influence indirectly in nature’s order and human reason. The declaration became a “sacred text” of U.S. civil religion, affirming a generic theism without mentioning Jesus or Christianity. It did not cite the Bible as a source for government policy or declare America a Christian nation; its central purpose was to explain the reasons for separation from Britain.
