One Nation under God

Every summer I take a few of my children on a cross-country drive. Since we had already crossed all 49 land-connected states and exhausted the national parks circuit, I wanted a different assignment. We had seen deserts, mountains, forests and the oddities that decorate the empty miles in between. This time, I wanted to understand the country through the men who built it.

I mapped a route from Hyde Park to Yorba Linda and informed my sons Jess and Rocky that their summer would involve several thousand miles and every presidential home and library we could reach. They were not thrilled until they realized the alternative was staying home with their mother. They got in the car.

The trip took us from Massachusetts to Texas, from Virginia to California. We even included the home of Jefferson Davis in Biloxi because American history does not become less true when it makes you uncomfortable.

The landscapes were familiar. The voices were not. Inside these homes and archives, we encountered the presidents in their own words — not the slogans printed on textbooks, but their private letters, drafts, confessions. What surprised us most was how often they spoke of God, and how different their faith sounded from the Christianity shouted in parts of American politics today.

America has always been religious and “In God We Trust” is not a mantra but a mission statement. But the Founders’ religious vocabulary bears no resemblance to today’s populist “Christ is King” rhetoric. In fact, that particular phrase, increasingly used as a political identity marker, is the one sentiment you will not find in the speeches or writings of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison or Lincoln.

Washington invoked Providence constantly yet never mentioned Jesus in a public address. Jefferson sliced the miracles out of the New Testament with scissors because he admired the ethics but rejected the supernatural. Adams was a theological outlier even in his own time. Madison treated sectarian language like a live grenade. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, one of the greatest religious meditations ever delivered by an American president, is woven out of Deuteronomy and the prophets, not the Gospels. My yeshiva-educated sons recognized the sources before I did.

None of this made these men any less Christian. It made them Christians who understood exactly what Europe had become when religious doctrine defined political belonging. They chose another path: a republic grounded in virtue rather than creed. Separation of Church and State was not a slogan for them; it was the architecture of a country that would belong to all its citizens.

The Founders did not treat Hebrew Scripture as ornament. It shaped their political conscience. Several could read the Bible in the original Hebrew. James Garfield would often quote Tanach in Hebrew on the House floor. They revealed how deeply the Jewish story sat inside the American moral imagination.

America became the greatest Diaspora home Jews have ever known not because the Founders designed it that way, but because their theology was ethical, humble, and critically Providential. They created a society where Jews could walk in the front door rather than the side entrance. A nation with no state church, no religious tests, and no mandated creed is not an accident. It is the product of a worldview that trusted God but distrusted anyone who claimed religious ownership.

Somewhere past Knoxville, my sons asked the obvious question: How could such devout men speak constantly about God yet almost never invoke the figure at the center of Christian theology? By the time we reached Monticello, the answer had taken shape.

Their religion rested on Providence, a God who governs history, judges nations and calls men to account, but does not demand doctrinal uniformity. This is a biblical God, but not a sectarian one. That distinction, more than any constitutional clause, is what opened the American door to Jews.

Its intellectual roots blossomed in Philadelphia but were initially planted in Amsterdam. A Jewish philosopher named Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated for questioning the structure of religious authority. His arguments shook Europe’s theological foundations to the core. The Founding Fathers did not subscribe to Spinoza’s conclusions and would have rejected them.

The thinkers they admired though, including Locke, Hume, Voltaire, the Scottish Enlightenment, were very much inspired by Spinoza. They inherited a world in which faith had been separated from dogma, and where religion’s moral power no longer depended on enforcing doctrine.

The result was unprecedented, a nation shaped by faith without being governed by it. A republic under God rather than under theology.

Two and a half centuries later, the pattern is clear. The United States has elected presidents from nearly every Protestant stream and only two Catholics. No sect has ever claimed ownership of the republic. And the state honors God not by imposing belief but by protecting dignity.

My children know America is not perfect. Anyone who has sat with me through a 600-mile stretch of interstate knows I complain far too much to believe in national sainthood. Even so, the Founders left behind a blueprint of religious humility unmatched in world history. They created space for all.

 We saw the proof on the road. As we approached the George Washington Bridge and watched Manhattan rise across the Hudson, I asked my sons what united the presidents we had studied. They told me that these men disagreed on nearly everything, yet they all understood their role in a moral republic under God, a God they invoked but never presumed to own.

That is the American miracle. And to a Jewish father and his sons crossing the continent in safety and pride, it still feels like Providence.

Philip Gross is a Manhattan-born, London-based business executive and writer. He explores issues of Jewish identity, faith, and contemporary society through the lens of both American and British experience.