“It is extremely frustrating to write history today because so much effort must go toward correcting the countless distortions that have been inserted into accounts of our heritage by militant secularists who twist facts to suit their narrow anti-religious political agendas.”

So writes Benjamin Hart near the end of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty. Anyone who is aware of recent trials on religious liberty or church-state separation issues must commiserate. Secularists have buried our real heritage and fabricated an idol in its place. Despite the difficulty and frustration, however, Hart has done an admirable job of exposing the true roots of American liberty, roots that drink deep not of the heady spirit of the French Enlightenment but of the Spirit in the Old and New Testaments; roots that grow despite religious persecution through the ages, and that culminate in the vision of the Protestant (especially Puritan) dissenters who fashioned a new order.

Hart’s chief thesis is that liberty stands only on the foundation of a common faith in the God and morality of the Bible, and that it withers to the extent that secular pluralism supplants that faith. The outline of his argument appears in the first chapter: Christian morality is essential to social order; a consensus about higher law is essential to a government by law rather than by men; the higher law is God’s law revealed in Scripture and nature and passed on to Americans in English common law; secular/agnostic pluralism, because it refuses to embrace this higher law, strikes at the root of both social order and individual liberty, leaving nothing but the state to define right and wrong; hence secular pluralism, which dominates American political life today, leads inexorably to tyranny. Therefore, “What is needed today is less of a revolution than a reformation in American thinking” in which the Christian roots of our order and liberty are reaffirmed.

By reference to the covenants and civil codes of the colonies. Hart proves compellingly that the founders of our country intended “to live under laws spelled out clearly in the Bible,” not under laws founded only on the whim of human sentiment. He urges us to place the Declaration alongside Deuteronomy (particularly chapter 8), saying, “The parallels and the obvious connection between the two documents are startling.” But they should not be surprising to anyone intimately familiar with the heavy use of Deuteronomy by the Puritans in constructing their understanding of the commonwealth, an understanding that largely determined the shape of American political philosophy and hence of both the Declaration and the Constitution.

Many readers will be shocked—some pleasantly, others unpleasantly, perhaps—to see the extent to which explicitly theological notions shaped our founders’ vision of the civil order. Yet there is no denying the constant appeal to Scripture, to God and His laws, to the gospel, to Christ as King and His Church as Kingdom that form the warp and woof of their political writing, including their colonial and state charters and constitutions. And the propensity among modern historians to discount the sincerity of these beliefs, chalking the language up instead to some sort of “cultural Christianity,” simply cannot stand the test of historical investigation: over and over the most important figures, from Bradford and Cotton and Witherspoon and the Mathers to Washington, write passionately of their fidelity to Christ and the gospel, to the Bible and the Bible’s God, and to seeing those objects of their faith exalted through their lives, both public and private.

There are some disturbing weaknesses in the book, comprised mainly of inconsistencies and errors of fact. Most errors of fact are minor (if obvious). He tells us, for instance, of an “astounding [Supreme Court] decision in 1962 banning all religious expression from the public schools.” However later decisions might have extended the ruling in Engel v. Vitale, the Court did not go so far in that case. “America’s federalist political order was patterned after the loose confederation of self-governing local churches of the first century” and “[t]he Christianity of Scripture is decidedly anti-institutional,” he writes. Yet the Old Testament is replete with instructions regarding societal structures, especially of family and church and state, the three chief seats of government; the New Testament has more than a little to say about the structure of church government; and we know of at least one ecumenical council in the New Testament (Acts 15) whose function was more like that of modern presbyteries than of congregationalist churches. (It seems to me that Hart consequently exaggerates the effect of congregationalist ecclesiology on American political philosophy and underestimates the effect of presbyterianism.)

“Calvin himself was a socialist,” Hart writes bluntly, without definition or proof Where we do find a definition of “socialist,” it is someone who denies property rights. Yet Calvin expressly wrote that civil government properly “provides that each man may keep his property safe and sound.”

More important are three other weaknesses. Through most of the book. Hart lauds separation of church and state but fails to define it. He finally makes things clear late in the book, where he discusses competing ideas of separation of church and state more fully and explains that what the founders meant was that no denomination could be made the official religion of the federal union. He is right, but he could have prevented a good deal of confusion by explaining this earlier.

Showing a more libertarian than Christian or conservative view. Hart concludes that civil government is “a necessary evil.” The Puritans, however, basing their view on Romans 13, saw it as a God-ordained good that was easily corrupted by corrupt men. Too easily does Hart accept the notion (expressed by Madison) that if men were angels they would need no form of government, for government is needed not only by the fallen but also by the finite, and there are degrees of authority even among the angels, according to St. Paul (Ephesians 1:21; Colossians 1:16).

Finally, Hart asserts, “It is on private property that all other freedoms rest. For if the government can seize one’s home, money, or possessions, the individual has no means of resisting the whims of kings, ministers, courtiers, or other agents of the state.” But it has long been the testimony of Christians that when they have stood firm in the faith despite the confiscation of their property and even of their physical lives, they have found themselves free to preach and live without fear of persecution precisely because they held their faith and the freedom it gave them more dear than property or life. “Let goods and kindred go,” wrote Luther in A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, “this mortal life also; the body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still!” That attitude made the blood of Christians seed, in Tertullian’s memorable metaphor. “Do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul,” Christ said; “but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Christian liberty is more fundamental than either (physical) life or property, and for the fearless Christian—that is, the one who fears Cod so much he has no fear left for man—it is something that cannot be taken away by any means. We need not transform property into the fundamental right in order to defend its legitimacy as a right.

[Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty, by Benjamin Hart (Dallas: Lewis and Stanley) 384 pp., $18.95]