The Constitution and Religious People

(from 84Rules)

John Adams once said, “Our constitution is only fit for a moral and religious people. It is wholly unsuited to the governance of any other kind.”

Perhaps that quote merely sounded like Christian bravado over the years, but today, we may be witnessing the true meaning of those words.

The Constitution was originally written so that people of all faiths could come to the New World and worship according their own conscious. But the deeper meaning is that they were free from having any particular religion forced upon them by the state. John Adams envisioned such a nation growing in North America.

What neither he nor any other Founder envisioned was that atheistic movements would spring up and threaten to drown out the faithful from the public scene. The reason that Adams said that our Constitution was “wholly unsuited to the governance of any other kind” was because the Constitution contained no controls over those who would reject morality and decency in favor of hedonism and self-indulgence.