A Liberty Older Than Locke
Dylan Pahman and John Pinheiro on the Christian roots of the American founding
Was the United States founded as a Christian nation? On one side, a rising chorus on the right answers yes, and reaches for that yes as warrant for a confessional politics the founders would scarcely recognize. On the other, a long-standing tradition on the left answers no, and treats the founding as a wholly secular achievement, an Enlightenment project scrubbed clean of any inheritance older than itself. Both answers are too tidy. Both, in their way, are wrong.
On the newest episode of Acton Line, I sat down with two colleagues who have spent the better part of a decade quibbling with that tidiness: John Pinheiro, the Acton Institute’s Director of Research, and Dylan Pahman, Research Fellow and founder of the St. Nicholas Cabasilas Institute. Their new book, The Christian Roots of American Liberty: A Reader (Acton Institute, 2026), refuses the binary entirely and does so not by mere argument but careful presentation of evidence.
A Sourcebook, Not a Polemic
What distinguishes the volume is its method. Pinheiro and Pahman are not interested in asserting that American liberty is Christian; they are interested in showing it, document by document. Ideas and texts ancient, medieval, and early modern, formed the principles the founders would later take for granted. The editors mostly step aside and let the witnesses speak.
It is a quieter approach and a more durable one. Polemics persuade in the moment; sources outlast the controversies that occasioned them.
The Principles and Their Prehistory
The book is organized around the load-bearing commitments of the American settlement: natural rights and the rule of law, religious liberty, private property, limited government, and representation and consent. None of these was conjured whole cloth in Philadelphia. Each arrived with a prehistory, older than 1776, older even than Locke, stretching back through the schoolmen and the Church Fathers.
There is no shortage of readers that gather the early-modern voices we already know. What Pahman and Pinheiro add is patristic and medieval depth. Irenaeus of Lyons on freedom and judgment sits a few pages from the familiar founders; the conviction that taxes ought not be levied without consent turns out to have a long Christian pedigree. The roots, it emerges, run deeper than our usual histories trouble to dig.
Render Unto Caesar
Lord Acton, as ever, saw the heart of it. He held that when Christ said render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s, those words—spoken days before His death—gave to the civil power “a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged.” The limit on Caesar was a was written into nature and made the charge of the Church before it was a political doctrine. Liberty, in other words, has a longer genealogy than its modern champions are inclined to admit, and a more theological one than its modern critics find comfortable.
That genealogy is precisely what Pinheiro and Pahman have set out to recover. To name the Christian roots of American liberty is not to baptize the state, as the integralists would have it, nor to surrender the founding to secular self-congratulation. It is to understand what we have actually inherited—and therefore what is ours to conserve, or to squander.
A Book for the Semiquincentennial
The timing is not accidental. As the republic approaches its 250th anniversary, Americans of every persuasion will be asked what, exactly, they are celebrating. The Christian Roots of American Liberty is an argument, made in the words of others, that the answer reaches back much further than the fireworks suggest and that the foundation is older, and stranger, and more enduring than either party to our current quarrel tends to allow.
Which returns us to where we began. The question is not whether America was founded as a Christian nation. The better question, the one this book equips us to as, is how deep the roots of our liberty actually go, and whether we still know how to tend them.
Listen to the full conversation with John Pinheiro and Dylan Pahman on Acton Line here: