Separation of God and Government
at the Signing of the U.S. Constitution?

At each point in the recitation of American History by the Holy Trinity Court, we need to ask ourselves, Is this when America came to believe that Government should be divorced from God?

At this point it might be said that there were some who believed that the government could be or should be secular, without any connection to Christianity. Madison and Jefferson would be the first names mentioned.

But neither of them believed that government could be divorced from Christian morality. Both of them believed that human government was obligated to contain itself within limits set by God.

Jefferson's views are here.

Madison's are here.

Even if either of these men had some hidden desire to evade the authority and Providential care of God, they never came "out of the closet" with this belief, because the contrary view so completely dominated the nation.

Clinton Rossiter on the Moral Basis of American Government

The Founding Fathers on Religion and Morality in Government (off site)

The Founders did not ultimately believe in "pluralism."

Though non-Christian religionists were free to believe whatever they wanted.

Compare the modern definition of "separation of church and state": a state which does not endorse religion over atheism, or one religion (Christianity) over another (Hinduism, the Aztec religion, etc.).

It is often said that many of the Framers of the Constitution were atheists or deists. This is not true. Not a single member of the Constitutional Convention was an atheist, and none were deists in the sense that they denied that God personally intervenes in human history, or in the sense that our nation owes a duty of obedience to Him.

In short, at this time, nobody believed in "the separation of church and state" in the sense that government had a Constitutional duty to ignore the claims of the God of the Bible and be "secular."