On June 10, 2026, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Anthony Schmidt, Director of Collections at the Bible Museum in Washington, D.C., advanced the idea that the Bible is not only a guide for personal religious instruction but should also serve as a guide for public life, government, law, and national identity. These arguments go beyond the spiritual dimensions of individual faith. They assert that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws should be rooted in the text of the Bible. Such claims move beyond the historic role of government in protecting religious liberty and instead open the door to greater governmental involvement in promoting and enforcing religious beliefs.
Keven Roberts and Anthony Schmidt expressed the following:
• Kevin Roberts: “For too many generations in our country’s history, recently, we have forgotten the importance of faith to our Founding Fathers” (Video).
• Anthony Schmidt: “You know it’s an important element of the story; the Founders read the Bible. That’s something that often gets lost. For the Founding Generation, the Bible was part of daily life. It functioned as a religious text, of course. You could hear it in churches and synagogues, but it was also a civic and political text as well. It was quoted in the halls of power by some of the leading spokesmen of the generation” (Video).
• Kevin Roberts: “Explain what we’ve lost when we don’t refer to the Bible, not just in religious settings, but in secular, civic settings.” (video).
• Anthony Schmidt: “We lose an aspect of our history that was important to the Founders and important to the subsequent generations. So founders like even Thomas Jefferson, but on the other side, Boudinot, Samuel Adams, John Jay, and folks like this, of that nature, it really appeals to the implications of the Bible as a civic text. So to understand this type of history is to understand the Founders in a much deeper and nuanced way. For me, if we remove that aspect of history, you’re losing quite a bit of the depth and the understanding you get when you see the full picture” (video).
• Kevin Roberts: “The bottom line is this: Our Founders wanted a Christian nation. They wanted an American people, generation after generation, that honored eternal truths. And that’s in fact what we got” (video).
The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States. It created the federal government, set the rules for how it operates, and placed limits on its power to help protect the freedoms and rights of the American people. And yet the Constitution itself contains no references to Christianity, Jesus Christ, or the Bible as the nation’s legal authority. Instead, it prohibits religious tests, rejects the establishment of religion, and protects religious liberty for all people.
This directly challenges the claim promoted by many Christian nationalist movements that America was founded as a Christian state similar to the church-state unions of Europe’s past. Instead, it reinforces the nation’s original commitment to religious neutrality in matters of faith. The Founders intentionally avoided establishing, promoting, or privileging one religious tradition over another while also protecting the right of every individual to freely practice their religion without government interference.
What was once a government committed to protecting liberty of conscience for all is now being influenced by organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, which have called for the restoration of blue laws and the establishment of Sunday as a universal day of rest for society. [1] Whenever religious advocacy groups begin to petition the state to endorse or enforce a particular brand of radical Christianity, such behavior inevitably places pressure on those whose beliefs differ, thereby undermining freedom of conscience.
True religious liberty is not preserved by imposing Christian uniformity through law but by protecting the right of every individual to live according to their convictions, free from government interference or coercion. The historical record is clear: the United States was founded on the principle of religious liberty, not religious establishment. When that boundary is crossed and when the state begins to elevate religious traditions, it departs from its original design and puts liberty at risk.
“Our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near” (Testimonies, Vol. 5, p. 451).
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