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The founders unlike, perhaps more contemporary American politicians, aren't eager to sort of throw out certain kinds of labels or cues or phrases that identify them in a certain way to their audience in terms of their religious belief. They are quite reticent.

One of the things that I'm particularly struck by is how often they talk about human nature and they are convinced that for the experiment and self-government to succeed, it has to get human nature right. As George Washington puts it, we have to take human nature as we find it, not as we wish it were or hope it would be. And Madison, like most of the prominent founders, are not hesitant to describe human nature as they see it. In fact, they write about it constantly. They mention it in their private correspondence. To come back to Madison, he's going to say famously in one of his Federalist essays, "Self-love is sewn into the nature of man." That's such a memorable phrase. And it really captures the way that a lot of that generation understood human nature. The framers of the Constitution, for example, would have said that men and women are capable of

great acts, of virtue, of self-denial for the common good. But they never for a moment thought that that was our default. They never for a moment thought that that came naturally. Self-interest, they would have said, is the motivating force that is always preeminent. And we can work against that, but it's always there in the forefront or the back of our minds. And I would argue from a particular Christian perspective that whatever the source of that conviction was, whether it was from their study of history or from their reading of Scripture or other sources, I think their description of human nature pretty closely corresponds to what we find in the Scripture and what the church has taught for centuries.

I believe you can make an excellent case that the men who drafted and ratified the US Constitution were profoundly influenced by their Christian faith. And thank goodness they were, because it led them to adopt a variety of things like limited government, enumerated powers, separation of powers, checks and balances, because of their Christian convictions. In this case, the idea that all was sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Everyone's a sinful, even Christians are continuing to struggle with the old man within. So we want to carefully restrict and restrain the power of the national government.

They were all convinced to a person that humans are sinful and therefore the national government government need to be limited as a matter of law enumerated powers Article 1 Section 8 that the power that existed at the national level needed to be separated the separation of powers and there needed to be checks and balances. All these things were informed by Christian ideas. Now this is not a uniquely Christian idea. You could be a peasant in ninth century China and conclude that humans are bad or wicked or sinful or self-interested. However you want to state it. But in the American context the context in which 50 to 75 percent of Americans are Calvinists 98 percent Protestants 2 percent Roman Catholics. These folks are growing up learning about the fall and implications of the fall. I think the most obvious explanation for why they believe that men were not angels was because of their Christian convictions.