Al Mohler Wages War on the Constitution, Part Two

Al Mohler wants to change the Constitution.

In a recent column, I posted a video from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler saying the framers made a mistake by not including explicitly Christian language in the Constitution. At the time, a commenter, Joseph Bianchi, said this about my post:

The striking thing about Mohler’s “error” is that it’s a Baptist saying it. The no-religious-test clause and the disestablishment that followed weren’t imposed on the Baptists, they were substantially won by them. Isaac Backus, John Leland, the Danbury Baptists whose letter drew Jefferson’s “wall” metaphor: dissenters who’d been jailed and taxed under colonial establishments, and who understood from the wrong end of the boot that a state-endorsed church is a captured church. Mohler is nostalgic for the very arrangement his own tradition fought to escape.

Which is why I’d push past “he’s wrong about the history” to the appetite underneath it. I just write about this! A gospel confident in its own authority doesn’t need the Constitution to name it. The demand for acknowledgment is what you reach for once you’ve quietly traded the faith’s content for its utility to power—you want the sign, not the Lord; the endorsement, not the thing endorsed. Mohler calling non-establishment an “error” is that substitution at the scale of a founding document: he wants Caesar to write the church into the supreme law, which is precisely the move that hollows the church out.

The framers didn’t sever the Constitution from Christianity as an oversight to be lamented. They declined to make the church a franchise of the state - and a tradition that once knew the difference is now led by men who’ve forgotten it.

It is hard to improve on these observations. Truly, “Mohler is nostalgic for the very arrangement his own tradition fought to escape.” After the Constitution was written, Jefferson begged Madison to amend the Constitution with a bill of rights. Serving in France at the time, Jefferson wrote numerous letters to numerous people back home pushing the idea of a listing of rights which he felt were missing in the Constitution. Madison, with the voices of Virginia Baptists in his ears, eventually agreed and introduced a bill of rights in Congress.

The difference now is that Mohler wants to be on top. Before the Bill of Rights, Baptists were the dissenters. Now, Mohler wants protestant Christians to be in the dominant, established position. Read his position as delineated in a new book from Canon Press.

This is taken from a tweet so I am trusting that it is an accurate quote from the book.

𝐌𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐨 ⛪︎ 🌲@MichaelCarlino

"Put straightforwardly, I believe the framers of the Constitution of the United States made a crucial error in failing to include a formal acknowledgment of Christianity within the text of the Constitution itself. I believe this has allowed a dangerous and destructive secularism

9:51 PM · Aug 9, 2026 · 3.22K Views

6 Replies · 8 Reposts · 43 Likes

"Put straightforwardly, I believe the framers of the Constitution of the United States made a crucial error in failing to include a formal acknowledgment of Christianity within the text of the Constitution itself. I believe this has allowed a dangerous and destructive secularism to undermine our national experience and our most basic constitutional understanding. I believe this failure endangers the entire constitutional structure and robs the Constitution of any explicit ontological foundation or authority.

Under this scheme, robbed of ontological and transcendent grounding, the Constitution becomes merely a social compact that invokes nothing beyond, beneath, or above the consent of the governed. There are thus only procedural protections against a different population of the governed overthrowing the entire moral and political structure of the Constitution, while claiming to act in ways consistent with constitutional order. That is insanity. At the very least, formal acknowledgment of Christianity would have to be removed in order for the most extreme revisions to be made. If nothing else, that would force honesty into the experiment.

The formal acknowledgement I urge upon this new constitutional convention is not premised upon universal theological agreement or any claim of universal Christian devotion or confession. It is premised upon the necessity of metaphysical foundations and ontological affirmations that are basic to the constitutional structure. Such a constitutional convention should also recognize the utility and fairness of such formal acknowledgment. It would allow non-Christians, specifically Jewish citizens, to enjoy full citizenship and comprehensive participation in the political order, retaining the full measure of religious liberty and requiring only their formal acknowledgment of the Christian foundations of the republic, its constitution, and its laws.

But this acknowledgment must be substantial. It will not be enough to acknowledge the Christian affirmation of theism, but must also require the acknowledgment of the Christian affirmations concerning the lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Holy Scriptures. Again, this wording is specific and important.

I would not compel belief in God, confession of Christ, or affirmation of the authority and inspiration of the Bible. If coerced, these affirmations of belief on the part of non-Christians would be false.

I see no constitutional gain and great spiritual risk in any system that encourages (or even requires) false professions. I would insist upon the acknowledgement of the essentially Christian character and foundational convictions of the national government. That acknowledgment would be legally basic to citizenship in the nation, but must be explicitly required of those who would hold public office or public trust. By extension, the authority of laws and statutes would be similarly situated within this explicit acknowledgment."

—Albert Mohler

So Mohler wants to have a Constitutional Convention (via Article 5, I assume) and change the Constitution to make the US a protestant Christian nation. If he has his way, your citizenship will depend on your affirmation of America as a Christian nation. In essence, protestant Christianity will be the law of the land. As the Constitution stands now, this is unAmerican.

Let’s keep in mind who this is. Albert Mohler is the president of the largest Baptist seminary in the nation. He has enormous influence. Many people may not know it but there is an active organization advocating for just such a convention. Twenty states have voted for such an application; it takes 34 to call such a convention. Fifteen state legislatures are currently considering an application.

Nothing is going to happen tomorrow. But pretend we are in season one of a drama series and the plot includes a blockbuster finish where the fate of the nation is in the balance. We are in the series and have a part to play. Advocate and vote accordingly.

To purchase The Christian Past That Wasn’t (and you need this book), go to Christianpast.com.