Founding Values from the Bible

You often hear of our nation’s founding values being referred to as “Judeo-Christian” values. This is because the large majority of our founders were Christians and most of their values came straight from the Bible.  These values came from both the Old Testament books (valued by Christians and Jews), as well as the New Testament books (valued by Christians). 

After reading more about our heritage, I came up with eighteen values that our founding founders embraced, which ROC is encouraging Americans to continue to embrace today.  Some of these values are unique to America and certainly; the combination of all of them is unique.  Of the eighteen values, I have linked fifteen of them directly back to the Bible so that you can see that these “Judeo-Christian” values actually did and do come directly from the Bible.  Most of our early founders would have known these Bible verses well, but they probably would have known them out of the King James Version of the Bible.  I decided to use the New International Version (NIV) because of its easy readability, but you could find the King James Version on the Internet if you would prefer reading that version. 

The values that I choose to highlight for our founding values are the following.

If you click on each value, you will be able to see many Bible verses that address that particular value.  You can find Bible verses connected to all of these founding values except for three of them: “Free Markets”, “Religious Freedom” and “Limited Government”.  I believe that these three values came from our founder’s experiences under the British government, the experiences they or their ancestors had in their countries of origin and the experiences they had here in America before, during and after the Revolutionary War.  They understood what worked and what didn’t work in societies and they knew what they cared about the most.

Three of our most important founding values can be seen on every American coin: “Liberty”, “Unity” and “In God We Trust”.  (Go to www.prageruniversity.com and click on American Trinity).  The first two of these three values aren’t mentioned as much in the Bible as some of the other values listed above, but they definitely can be found in the Bible.  The third value, “In God We Trust”, of course, can be found throughout the Old and New Testament, more times than can be mentioned on this website.  All of the founding values were planted in the hearts of our founders somewhere along the way.   I suspect that they became even more defined after having lived through the enormous challenges they experienced throughout the Revolutionary War and the time leading up to the signing the Constitution.

Sally Pitts
Centennial, Colorado