Ellis Sandoz on the American Founding
Philosophical and Religious Dimensions of the American Founding (1995), reposted at First Principles:
The foundation of the American regime was deeply influenced by the rationalist mood of Enlightenment thought, primarily in its English and Scottish aspects. But it began and remained more fundamentally an antimodernist recovery and rearticulation of Western and English constitutionalism on the classical and medieval patterns identified with the seventeenth century of Sir Edward Coke, a principal figure of the Elizabethan Renaissance, and of John Locke, himself a principal enlightener. Moreover, all aspects of the political, constitutional, and philosophical debate were strongly conditioned by an ethics and ontology grounded in the ample range of religious convictions of an American Protestant Christianity dominated by Dissenter or Nonconformist perspectives.