1. Introduction
The American Founders began with a created world, not with government. God, the Creator, made reality. Reality is an order that can be known. Human beings are part of that order, and separate from God. They are not raw material for a planner. They are not sovereign over truth. They are creatures with minds. They can see, judge, promise, err, and owe. Common sense, joined to reason, can grasp a portion of that order, including a portion of morality: life, agency, family, property, honesty, and duty.
Because they are creatures, human beings owe a duty to the Creator. That duty is prior to every government and every political order. No legislature invented it. No majority may cancel it. The individual must be free to discharge it. Rights exist for that reason. They are the claim against other men, including magistrates, that a person may fulfill the duty he already owes. They are therefore pre-political and unalienable. Government does not create them. Government is instituted to secure them.
From that duty follow liberty of conscience and the limits of civil power. From those limits follow self-government. If the duty is forgotten, rights become license or slogans. If the state enforces the duty as if the state were God, rights disappear into coercion.
Michael Novak called this kind of God a God of Rights. That conception appears, often without being named, in the Declaration of Independence and in the Virginia documents in which the argument was stated with the most care. It is not a creed test for citizenship. It is why individual freedom is not a gift of the magistrate, and why self-government is possible.
## 2. Rights Protect Duties
The Founders did not treat this duty as a private feeling. They defined religion as the duty owed to the Creator. Mason wrote it into the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776): “the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” Therefore “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” Madison repeated the definition in the *Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments* (1785). He drew the line of jurisdiction. The duty is prior to civil society in time and in obligation. A man is first a subject of the Governor of the Universe and only then a citizen. For Novak and Jefferson, the content of that duty is acknowledgement: gratitude and worship in spirit and truth, from a creature who knows he did not make the world or himself. Because the duty must be inward to be real, no magistrate can discharge it by proxy, and no law can manufacture it by fear. The right of conscience is the freedom required to do what is already owed.
The order of Mason’s sentence matters. Duty comes first. The right exists so the duty can be discharged. Madison stated why the right is unalienable. First, a person’s opinions follow the evidence contemplated by his own mind and cannot follow the dictates of other men. Second, “what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.” If freedom of religion is abused, “it is an offense against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.”
The same pattern holds beyond religion. Moral realism is the claim that duties are features of the created order, not preferences or products of a vote. A person has a duty to preserve life. The matching right is the right to life. A person has a duty to exercise judgment and agency. The matching right is liberty. A person has duties of family: to form a household, to raise children, to honor parents. The matching rights protect that household from other men and from the state. A person has a duty to provide and to keep what he has justly acquired. The matching right is property. A person has a duty to speak truly and to keep promises. The matching rights are speech and contract. Liberty of conscience is first because the duty to the Creator is first. The others follow from the same rule. The right exists so the duty can be discharged.
Modern talk treats rights as primary and duties as optional. The founding account runs the other way. An individual has a right against other men because he already has a duty that other men did not assign. No legislature created the duty. No majority may stand in for the person who owes it. No church using the civil sword may perform it on his behalf. If another person, church, or state forces the homage, two wrongs are committed at once: an injury to the individual, and an intrusion into a jurisdiction that belongs to God.
Thomas Jefferson made the same point in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Almighty God “hath created the mind free.” Attempts to influence it by punishments, burdens, or civil incapacitations “tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness.” They are a departure from the plan of the Author of religion, “who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either.” Force can produce outward compliance. It cannot produce conviction. A political order that confuses the two trains people to lie.
## 3. The Declaration’s Four Names
The Declaration of Independence names God four times: Nature’s God, Creator, Supreme Judge, and Providence. None of the names is a sectarian title. None is “Trinity,” “Redeemer,” or “Messiah.” The names are public names. Across the Declaration and the Virginia documents Novak finds a wider, “radically Jewish” vocabulary: Creator, Lawgiver, Governor, Judge, and Providence. “For the most part,” he wrote, “these are not names that could have come from the Greeks or Romans, but only from the Jewish Testament.” Scholars often call this Deism and stop thinking. These are not the names of a watchmaker who winds the world and walks away. They name a God who creates persons, endows them with rights, judges intentions, and acts in history.
### Nature’s God
The opening appeal is to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Nature is not a scenic backdrop. It is not a war of all against all. It is an order that can be known. Law is not merely the command of the stronger. There is a standard above kings and parliaments. A people may appeal from a human court to that standard. That is what makes independence an argument rather than a riot. If there is no law above the ruler, the ruler’s will is the last word, and “rights” are whatever he still permits.
### Creator
Rights are “endowed by their Creator.” They are not manufactured by society. They are not a privilege of blood or church membership. Because they are endowed, they are unalienable. A person cannot sell them. A parent cannot confiscate them. A government cannot invent their opposite and call it progress. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness name the field in which a person discharges the duties of a moral agent: preserving life, exercising judgment, forming a family, holding property, speaking truth, keeping promises. “Pursuit of happiness” is not a hunt for pleasant feelings. It is closer to what Aristotle called eudaimonia: a life well lived, the flourishing of a moral agent over a whole life. Happiness in that sense is activity in accord with virtue, not a mood the state can deliver. Government is instituted to secure these rights, not to redefine them.
### Supreme Judge
The signers appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.” Human courts see outward action. They do not see motive. The founding generation knew that rebellion can be ambition dressed as liberty. They placed their intentions before a Judge who sees the inner forum. That appeal is not decoration. Conscience is answerable to God. No earthly tribunal has the last word on the heart.
### Providence
They conclude with “a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” Providence is not fatalism. It is the claim that history is not meaningless and that liberty is not an accident. A people may act, suffer, and fail, and still have reason to hope that the order of things is not hostile to honest self-government. Without some such reliance, politics collapses into force plus rhetoric.
The four names describe a moral universe in which individuals are creatures with agency. There is a standard above the ruler, and a Judge above the faction that holds office. Limited government follows from that. Consent of the governed is the republican form given to the same fact: persons can judge, so they can authorize and replace rulers. Judgment is possible only if there is truth to judge by.
## 4. Five Characteristics of a God of Rights
Not every idea of God will support this structure. A god who is a stone, a storm, a tribe, or an unaccountable Will can demand ceremonies. He cannot ground unalienable rights of conscience. After quoting Virginia’s definition of religion, Novak asks the question the definition forces: “Which particular God is it who cares about what happens in our conscience? Not only what we do externally, but what goes on in our hearts. And not our hearts, exactly, but our minds, for we are moved to recognize these duties ‘by reason and conviction.’” Even Madison and Jefferson, he adds, “grounded religion liberty in the nature of a Jewish-Christian God of Rights.” Then he isolates five characteristics.
1. “God is defined as Spirit and Truth, not a thing, not a snake, nor rain, nor tree, nor stone, but logos and mind, where mind is understood as insight (light) and judgment.”
God is not a force of weather, a sacred object, or a tribal mascot. Logos means the world is intelligible. Mind means insight and judgment are possible. Rights rest on the possibility that truth can be recognized. They do not rest on raw submission to power.
2. “He is a judge of consciences, and not merely of outward action.”
Human authority can reach visible conduct. God reaches the inner act of judgment itself: motive, conviction, the suppression or acknowledgment of light. Outward compliance without inner assent is not the same thing as righteousness. A political order that treats the visible performance as the whole of religion has already mistaken the forum it is competent to govern.
3. “For Whom conscience is not coerced.”
The decisive judgment is inner, so it cannot be produced by force. Coercion can change behavior. It cannot change the verdict of conscience. A God who judges conscience cannot be served by methods that treat conscience as something to be broken or programmed. Faith extracted by fear is not faith. It is a public lie about a private act.
4. “For Whom acceptance by women and men must be free, and judgments are based in evidence for mind, not submission of will.”
Assent is an act of mind, not an act of crushed will. Evidence, reasons, and insight are the proper mode of approach. This rejects both “believe because I command it” and “believe against the light you actually have.” Error is possible. Delayed or incomplete seeing is not automatically rebellion. The standard is truth presented to mind, not uniformity of profession.
5. “Who allows for personal liberty, variation, dissent, difference. Some people see ‘light’ later than others. Only God judges.”
Earthly authorities may restrain harm. They may not claim the office of final judge over another person’s seeing. A God of Rights does not need a civil inquisition to complete His work.
These five points do one piece of political work. They make limited government follow from the nature of God rather than from taste. A God who is Mind, who judges the inner forum, who does not coerce conscience, who requires free assent on evidence, and who alone judges the timing of insight cannot be represented by a state or a church that treats dissent as something to extinguish.
Novak is careful about what this does and does not require of a citizen. “Clearly, it is not necessary for any American citizen to hold that the Jewish/Christian God is true. But it is necessary to understand the nature of the God to whom the Founders turned in grounding rights.” The five characteristics map that nature. They are not a creed test.
## 5. What Individual Freedom Is
Individual freedom is not the absence of every restraint. In any society, force is sometimes used: by government, by associations, and by individuals. The question is when force is justified. A free society applies force to protect persons in the discharge of their duties and rights. An authoritarian society applies force to produce belief, gratitude, or a required vision of the common good.
Freedom is independence aligned with morality, not a maximum number of approved choices. An authority can multiply options while destroying agency. It can feed, house, school, and instruct a population that no longer judges for itself. Common Sense Realism, set out in *Foundations of a Free Society*, holds that ordinary sense and reason can know a portion of reality, including basic morality: life, individual agency, family, private property, honesty, and duty. Those goods are not sectarian inventions. They are the field in which a person lives a moral life of his own accord.
Self-government has two layers, and they depend on each other. The first is government of the self: a person capable of judging, promising, repenting, and bearing consequences. The second is government by consent: a people capable of electing, limiting, and replacing rulers. If the state occupies the inner forum, voting and representation become a show. If the inner forum is treated as sovereign over truth itself, “conscience” becomes another word for appetite, and the first layer collapses. The founding solution is neither. Conscience is free from human coercion because it is not free from reality or from God.
Judgment has to be developed. A child does not start with it complete. A free people need persons who can tell truth from flattery, duty from appetite, and a real injury from a wounded pride. If that faculty atrophies, the second layer of self-government has nothing to stand on.
That is why the inner Judge matters for ordinary life, not only for worship. If the only audience is the policeman, men ask what they can get away with. If conscience is answerable to God, virtue when no one is watching is rational. A people who strive for that virtue become a high-trust people. Contracts can be short. Neighbors can be believed. Officials can be few. A people who strive only for what they can get away with become a low-trust people. Every promise needs a guard. Every market needs a monitor. The state grows because character has already failed. Force can punish the visible cheat. It cannot manufacture the unseen habit that makes force less necessary.
That is why liberty of conscience carries the other liberties. Speech is the public working of judgment. Association is the joining of persons who have judged together. Property is the material means of an independent life. Family is the first school of duty. If the magistrate may program conscience, each of these becomes a concession. If conscience is used as a license to harm others, each is consumed by the strongest faction.
## 6. The Limit of Human Jurisdiction
The founding argument draws a line between two forums. The inner forum is belief, conviction, the yes or no offered to truth. It is not the magistrate’s. The outer forum is action that touches other persons’ bodies, property, contracts, and peace. That is the magistrate’s proper concern.
Freedom of religion is therefore not an unlimited license to act. It is immunity of conscience from coercion, plus a strong presumption in favor of peaceful practice. The presumption yields where practice violates the equal rights of others or the minimum conditions of civil peace. Human sacrifice, enslavement, forced marriage, the punishment of exit, and the use of a congregation as cover for fraud or sedition are not protected “exercises.” They are harms. Restraining the hand is not judging the heart.
The opposite error is just as common. A state may claim to protect public order while occupying the inner forum: punishing blasphemy as such, requiring a profession, forbidding delayed insight, or treating dissent itself as a breach of the peace. That is the state playing God. Madison had already assigned the accounting for abuse of this freedom. It is rendered to God, not to man.
The same line explains why the Constitution could omit a sectarian name for God without becoming an atheist document. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is a limit on Caesar. Limited government is not secularism in the modern sense of banishing the Creator from public reason. It is the refusal to let civil power complete a task that does not belong to it.
## 7. Which Faiths Can Bear This God
Two questions must be kept apart. The first is civil: who is protected by American law? The second is theological: which account of God can ground that law? The comparisons in this section follow Novak. A citizen need not hold that the Jewish and Christian God is true. He does need to understand the God to whom the Founders turned when they grounded rights. The rights of conscience cover those who reject the story. It does not follow that every doctrine of God can generate the doctrine.
The test is the five characteristics. Can the tradition say that God is Spirit and Truth; that He judges consciences, not merely rites; that conscience is not coerced; that assent follows evidence for the mind; and that only God judges delayed seeing? Where it cannot, it may still contain truths. It cannot be the theological ground of American self-government.
On that test, several accounts fail, and they fail for different reasons.
Hinduism and the older pantheisms fail the first mark. God is not Logos and Mind, separate from the world and judging the inner forum. The divine is power, cycle, or thing. Buddhism may not require a God at all. In Novak’s phrase, such traditions can be “satisfied by outward obeisance. Do your duty, and no one inquires into what your secret thoughts may be.”
Islam names a Creator distinct from the world, and still fails the fourth mark. Acceptance is submission of will, not assent of mind to evidence. “In Islam, omnipotence requires unbounded will, not limited by laws. Submission, not reason, is essential.” Where the magistrate is assigned the care of inner uniformity, it fails the third mark as well.
Rabbinic Judaism can fail the fifth mark when communal law is treated as the last judge of belief, and dissent from that law is a matter for coercion of the inner forum. The Jewish Scriptures give the paper its names for God. A politics that finishes God’s judgment of the heart does not.
Catholic integralism fails the third and fifth marks. It asks the civil sword to suppress religious error and to complete the church’s teaching office. *Dignitatis Humanae* (1965) rejects that use of the state: the person is not to be forced to act against his own beliefs in religious matters, and the civil power lacks competence over the inner act of faith. A church may still teach. It may not conscript Caesar to judge the heart.
What can bear the God of Rights is the discovery isolated in the Jewish and Christian Bible. Every story is a story of “what happens in the arena of the human will.” “Liberty is the reason God made the universe.” God “wanted at least one creature to be able, not as a slave but as a free woman and man, to reciprocate His proffered friendship.” Historic free-church Protestantism, especially the Baptist rule that God alone is Lord of the conscience, matches the five characteristics with unusual clarity. So do Jewish and Christian streams that keep the inner forum out of the magistrate’s hands.
Persons remain protected even where their theology cannot generate the argument. The conception “is intended to be applied to all human individuals, far beyond the ranks of Jews and Christians: to Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, etc.” Compatibility is about the source of the law, not about the civil standing of persons. The teaching judges the failures. The failures do not rewrite the teaching.
## 8. Eternal Vigilance
A republic can keep the outer forms of the founding (elections, courts, a bill of rights) after it has discarded the inner logic. Rights then float. They attach to whatever cause is strongest. Conscience becomes a demand that other people pretend. Duty becomes an accusation aimed at one’s opponents. The Creator becomes a mascot for a faction, or an embarrassment to be edited out of the Declaration. When duty to the Creator is forgotten, men stop asking what they owe and start asking what they can get away with. That is how a high-trust republic turns into a supervised population.
The correction is not a new established church. It is the recovery of a few self-evident relations. Persons are creatures with minds. Minds are made for truth, not for programming. Duties to the Creator, and the natural duties that common sense can see (life, agency, family, property, honesty), are prior to civil society. Government exists to secure the rights that protect those duties. It does not exist to save souls, manufacture virtue on demand, or decide which insights may arrive late.
Self-government begins where that line is kept. It ends where either the state or a private power claims jurisdiction over conscience. The God of Rights is the name for the limit that makes a free people possible. Only God judges the heart. Caesar may police the street. Between those two sentences lies the American idea of liberty.
Jon grew up in Illinois, computer science school in California, career as software developer, now in Florida after the lockdowns. He is a Common Sense Realist / Second Enlightenment advocate. You can find him on X at
## Notes
1. Michael Novak, “The Jewish and Christian Principles of the Founders,” in Daniel N. Robinson and Richard N. Williams, eds., *The American Founding: Its Intellectual and Moral Framework* (New York: Continuum, 2012). Unless otherwise noted, quotations of the five characteristics and of the Virginia definition are from that essay.
2. The comparisons among religions in §7 follow Michael Novak, “The Faith of the Founding,” *First Things* (April 2003), and “The Jewish and Christian Principles of the Founders.” The self-abnegating application of the rights to Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists is from Michael Novak and Jana Novak (his daughter and co-author), “Faith of Our Fathers,” American Enterprise Institute (October 25, 2006). See also Michael Novak, *On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding* (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002).
3. Virginia Declaration of Rights, art. 16 (June 12, 1776); James Madison, *Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments* (1785); Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777/1786); Declaration of Independence (1776); Second Vatican Council, *Dignitatis Humanae* (December 7, 1965).
4. Jon Guerin, “Foundations of a Free Society,” *New Discourses* (August 18, 2025). Quotations in §5 on objective reality and on freedom as “independence aligned with morality” are from that essay. Common Sense Realism is defined there as the claim that ordinary sense and reason can know a portion of reality, including the basic moral goods of life, individual agency, family, private property, honesty, and duty.
Reidian it was. Well done.