It seems that there is a growing belief that because our Founders were stalwart advocates for religious liberty, and because some of them had very nuanced and sometimes cynical views about organized religion, the United States was somehow conceived to be a secular nation. This belief is not only untrue, but detrimental to an adequate understanding of the underlying political philosophy of the founding, not least of all because it envisions the government as the nation instead of merely the organization through which the nation conducts its civil affairs, and more importantly because it betrays the singular belief that undergirds the entire American experiment: That the rights of man come not from government but from God.
When the Founders crafted the Constitution of the United States, they were not setting about to create a nation; they were setting about to create a system of government. The people of the United States had successfully waged war against Great Britain, formed alliances with foreign powers, brokered trade, and secured national debt before the current system of government was ever established. The Constitution merely created a system of administrative and judicial structures meant to represent the nation and to conduct the affairs of the people of that nation. This is perhaps best evidenced by the opening words to the document itself: “We the people of the United States… establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The United States already existed. Its people created the Constitution to “form a more perfect Union… and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”