There is an important essay here by Duane Litfin of Wheaton College entitled “America’s Transcendent Tether.”

“What’s more, the Founders regarded this transcendent tether as essential to the type of government they designed for America. As he exited the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was famously approached by a local woman who asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

Why such a provisional answer? Because Franklin understood—as did history, a watching world, and the other Framers—that republican forms of “We the people” government are inherently unstable and fragile. They are founded on the shaky assumption of a “moral and virtuous” populace. The Founders knew that neither legal mandates nor constitutions could create such an electorate, much less maintain it. Only a genuine, widely held obligation to a transcendent Creator’s design and will could produce the virtuous, conscience-bridled voters their new republic required.“

The essay is thorough with Litfin expounding on the transcendent tether in American government, law, and education. He warns of a “calamitous severance” from this tether in the 20th century:

“In one consequential move, official America severed the nation’s historic tether. It was scissored, not by any decision of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” nor by any expressed wish of an increasingly secular “We the people.” The American voters were never consulted. The official severance of the nation’s vertical tether was imposed from above by a small panel of unelected lifetime appointees, namely, America’s Supreme Court . . . Transcendent assumptions that had long been available to shape America were now ruled out of bounds. The nation had gone officially horizontal, creating for the first time at the core of American society a massive, ever-expanding governmental dead zone devoid of all vertical thinking or reasoning. This in turn triggered a relentless, decades-long scrubbing from America’s official business all vestigial vertical connections. Under the guise of neutrality, a literally God-less secularism now became, de jure, official America’s “established religion” (“set of ultimate beliefs,” “worldview”). A constitutive feature of Old America was lost. Our America, the country we know today, was born.”

Citing Romans 1, Litfin explores the devastating effect of removing this transcendent tether on reality, truth, revelation, morality, human nature and human rights. He concludes,

“Of course, America has known trouble before. The divisions of the Civil War, for example, were profound. Yet even as the battle raged, President Lincoln could appeal to America’s transcendent tether—see his Second Inaugural Address, one of the most powerful speeches ever delivered in America—as common ground for both sides. The polarization of today’s America is precisely the result of the absence of any such common ground . . . So there it is: Old America’s transcendent tether is officially gone, so much so that one can scarcely imagine how it could be restored. Thus, there is little profit in spending our semiquincentennial year pining nostalgically for its return. Instead, let us celebrate with enthusiasm and gratitude all that we can about Our America, all the while renewing our commitment to living wisely and faithfully in her midst as the resident aliens Christians are called to be. “

Psalm 33:12 – “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord”