Date posted: 11-04-2026
Estimated Reading Time : 9 minutes
On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine men signed a document that has governed this country ever since. Two hundred and thirty-nine years later, most Americans cannot tell you the date.
We are in the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary, and Constitution Day has never been given anything close to the honor it deserves. September 17 belongs beside July 4 as a national holiday.
The reasoning is simple enough. July 4 is the day the country was born, and September 17 is the day the country was formed. One is the declaration that we would govern ourselves, and the other is the instrument by which we have actually done it ever since.
Every other holiday on the calendar commemorates something particular, whether one community’s history, one war or one man. Each is precious, and each deserves its day. There is no more unifying date on the calendar than Constitution Day, however, because the Constitution touches every American every day, without asking anyone’s permission or consulting anyone’s ancestry.
It is the reason this article can be written and the reason you are permitted to read it. In a great many places on earth, what we are doing at this moment is a crime on both ends. Speak the wrong thing, and you can be arrested. Listen to the wrong voice, and you can be arrested. Both the mouth and the ear are policed.
Here, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and religion are held to be given by God. The Constitution exists to secure them. Not to grant them, not to ration them, but to secure what was already ours.
Someone will object that the country hardly needs another federal holiday, and that adding one would only produce another day of retail sales and a long weekend that teaches nobody anything. The objection has merit; that is roughly what has happened to some of the days we already keep.
However, the alternative is what we have now, which is a founding document that a majority of citizens have never read and cannot date. A nation that will not mark the day it agreed on how to govern itself should not be surprised when its people no longer know what was agreed.
What the founders actually did
Our founding was a stranger thing than most Americans have ever stopped to realize.
The founders did not root our rights in themselves. They did not root them in the king, in Parliament, in the majority, or in their own good intentions. They rooted them in Almighty God, and in doing so they put the foundation of American liberty permanently beyond the reach of American politics.
Two men once approached me after a rally and said something I have never forgotten. They told me they were not sure they believed in God at all, but they were glad the founders had put our rights in something other than themselves. Even they could see the architecture. Rights that come from men can be taken back by men.
Follow that premise down, and it does more than justify a break with Great Britain. If my freedom comes from God, I am accountable to Him for how I steward it. If government exists to secure rights that God gave, then government answers not only to the people but to God for standing sentinel over that liberty.
The fingerprint is visible in the opening words themselves: “We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution.” Ordain is a weighty word, the language of something solemnly set apart and established, and these men chose it with care.
About that wall
“Separation of church and state” is swung like a club at Christians who open their mouths in public, so it is worth being precise about where the phrase came from.
It is not in the Constitution. It comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, who feared that government would encroach on their religious liberty, and he wrote to reassure them. The wall he described was there to keep the state from interfering with the church. He was not telling Christians to stay out of government. He was telling government to stay out of the church.
Those who cite Jefferson against us like to point to the so-called Jefferson Bible, as though he were cutting God out of Scripture. David and Tim Barton, working from one of the largest collections of original founding-era documents outside the Library of Congress, tell a different story. Jefferson’s first compilation was titled an abridgement of the New Testament “for the use of the Indians,” a simple primer built from the words of Jesus, not an attempt to strip the miracles from the Bible. He never published it. He called himself “a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus,” and in 1814 he sent fifty dollars to the Bible Society of Virginia, whose whole purpose was putting complete Bibles into people’s hands.
Either way, the modern usage does not survive contact with the letter itself, because the letter says what it says. Whatever his critics make of his faith, a president assuring Baptists that the state cannot touch their worship is not a secularist instructing pastors to be silent about the moral questions of their day.
Most of the founders were Christians, and those whose personal orthodoxy is arguable were still thoroughly formed by Judeo-Christian principles. Donald Lutz, studying the political writing of the founding era, found the Bible cited more often than any other single source.
So is America a Christian nation? Culturally, yes, and there is no reason to apologize for saying so. Legally, no, and it should stay that way. Establish an official religion and somebody must decide whose version counts and who falls outside the line. England had exactly that, which is why the Pilgrims got on a boat. Connecticut kept an established church of its own until 1818, the very thing the Danbury Baptists were up against.
Even the language shows the influence. When the founders wrote of the pursuit of happiness, they did not mean pleasure. They meant human flourishing through virtue, because they understood there was no other road to it. John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
This is prophetic ministry, not politics
The standing objection is that all of this is politics, and that the church should stay in its lane.
Moses was told to go to Pharaoh and say, “Let My people go,” which was an instruction to confront a head of state. Elijah told Ahab to his face that he and Jezebel were leading a nation into idolatry, and was called “troubler of Israel” for it. John the Baptist had crowds and a thriving ministry in the wilderness until he told Herod plainly that he was living in sin with his brother’s wife, and it cost him his head.
Not one of them claimed it was politics and therefore none of his concern.
A church cannot be salt and light while designating whole regions of human life off-limits to both. No light in here. No salt over there. That is not a lane at all. It is a cage, and we walked into it without anyone having to push us.
Where the battle actually is
The fight is not primarily in Washington. We fixate on the president, the Senate, the House, and the federal agencies, and those things matter. But policy touches a family fastest and hardest at the level almost nobody watches.
Who is your state senator? Who is your delegate or state representative, your mayor, your council member, your school board member? Most Americans cannot say, and the people holding those offices know it.
People tell me I am unreasonable for refusing to vote for a candidate who is wrong on life and marriage when the office is something like register of probate. That job has nothing to do with those questions, and the point is a fair one on its own terms.
But nobody stays a register of probate. That office is a platform, and from there it is the legislature, then the state senate, then Congress. What is local today is statewide tomorrow and national the day after. Loving a candidate and praying for him does not require handing him his first step up.
Virginia is watching this happen right now. Three constitutional amendments are on the ballot this November. One would enshrine abortion with few meaningful limits, and opponents warn it could void the state’s parental consent law for minors. Consider what that means for a child who has been used and manipulated by an adult. Another would write same-sex marriage into the Constitution of Virginia, after the courts swept aside what Virginia voters, and voters in more than two dozen other states, had already decided.
The psalmist wrote in Psalm 139 that God saw his substance while it was yet unformed, and that the days fashioned for him were written in God’s book before one of them came to be. Abortion does not only end a life. It vetoes a plan already written.
No president can fix this one. Virginians will have to fix it in Virginia, and whatever state you live in, there is something on your ballot and in your school board minutes that nobody but you can reach. Go to the meeting and read the amendment. Learn the names. Then pray, and follow the logical extension of your own prayer.
The men who signed on September 17 chose the word ordain, and they meant it as more than ceremony. What they ordained, a free people has to keep choosing. That is the whole of the assignment, and it comes due every November.