When patriots spoke of “Nature’s God” and “Creator” in the Declaration, every colonist knew which God they meant. It was the God preached from American pulpits who “make of one blood all nations” and who calls even kings to account.

Decades before Jefferson drafted the Declaration, ministers from across the 13 colonies preached natural rights and the equal standing of all men before God. In 1638, in the newly formed Connecticut Colony, a Puritan minister named Rev. Thomas Hooker delivered an audacious sermon for its time. He stood before the colony’s General Court and declared that “The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people” and that “The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance.” In the 17th century, a minister telling civil authorities that the government owed its existence to the governed, by God’s design, was seditious. Hooker grounded his argument in scripture and Puritan covenant theology. Consent was God’s idea first.

The notion spread through New England Congregationalists, whose approach to church governance was already relatively democratic. Congregations elected their own pastors and elders. All believers, not just a clerical elite, had a say under God. In practice and preaching, the colonists were rehearsing for 1776 by applying biblical principles to governance long before Jefferson and the Founders memorialized them in the Declaration.

Arguably the most influential of these was Rev. John Wise of Massachusetts, a Congregationalist minister who fought tyranny in his own life. In 1687, when royal governor Edmund Andros imposed taxes without colonial consent, Wise helped lead a citizen’s revolt. For his trouble, he was jailed by the Crown yet was not silenced. By 1710 he published The Church’s Quarrel Espoused, and in 1717 A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches, works that laid out biblical arguments for equal natural rights, government by consent, and the just limits of authority. Wise drew on scripture, the Enlightenment philosophy available to him, and the writings of English jurist Richard Hooker, an earlier theologian who also influenced Locke. The result was a theological treatise on liberty so influential it was reprinted in 1772 on the eve of the Revolution.

Its words are strikingly close to the Declaration. Wise wrote, “Every man must be acknowledged equal to every man,” and “The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights—his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc., without injury or abuse done to any.”

Sound familiar? Jefferson’s Declaration would announce that governments are instituted to secure people’s rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The overlap is no coincidence. There was not much in Jefferson’s first draft that Wise hadn’t already preached from his pulpit decades before. The compass that guided the Founders, and later Abraham Lincoln, toward liberty and justice did not arise by accident. It was set by centuries of Judeo-Christian teaching on the worth of the human person.

Founding Father John Adams later admitted as much. Writing in 1822, Adams reflected on the Declaration’s origins and said: “There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before . . . Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet . . . printed by the town of Boston before the first Congress met.” The pamphlet Adams meant was pastor John Wise’s. A key Founder freely acknowledged that the intellectual substance behind “all men are created equal” had been percolating in American discourse, placed there largely by dissenting preachers wielding Bibles and sharp pens.

The religious revival of the mid-1700s known as the First Great Awakening further democratized the colonial mindset. Evangelists like George Whitefield traveled the colonies. He preached to thousands, saying that all people, regardless of their class or color, must be “born again” in Christ. Rich merchants and poor farmers stood shoulder to shoulder, equally in need of grace. This spiritual leveling reinforced the message that no one stood above another in the eyes of God. When Whitefield preached in the South, even enslaved Africans gathered at the edges to listen. Americans became increasingly convinced that liberty and equality were part of God’s plan.

By the 1770s, patriot preachers openly linked the “sacred cause” of American liberty with God’s will. Ministers cited Old Testament stories of the Israelites escaping Pharaoh’s slavery and declared that God likewise intended Americans to escape British tyranny. The language of the day mixed biblical Israel with political liberty interchangeably.

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