Founding Fathers thought and reasoned. The Founders of this nation never denied social obligations incumbent on individual members of society. They recognized that individual liberty was cradled in the larger responsibility of preserving the general welfare. The modern atomization of individual liberty into a selfish assertion of "rights" above the welfare of the community never entered their minds, for they understood every right presupposes responsibilities. The Founders accepted the necessity of sacrifice for the sake of the community, and to that end, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They lived in such a context that our modern craving for selfish interests would have been intolerable to them.

As they forged a new form of civil government to preserve the general welfare, the Founding Fathers were concerned about the accumulation of excessive power by government. Their recent experiences with British tyranny left them with a great distrust of centralized authority. The Constitution was so written as to restrict the accumulation of powers by civil government. But these limitations of power were not based on Enlightenment philosophy (though that influence was part of contemporary political thought). Rather, this founding principle of the Constitution was the Biblical acknowledgment of God's supreme right over the lives of men, a right that even a legitimate civil government has no authority to transgress -- not because a government would be robbing the people of their rights, but because the government would be robbing God of His!
The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence state:
"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness..."
This statement about "equality" is not rooted in egalitarian philosophy, but in the belief of our equal value and worth to our Creator. Because we were created by God in His own image, we belong to Him. Because we belong to Him, He has certain rights over us that no State has a right to transgress. The Declaration was written to affirm God's right over His creatures in opposition to a king who attempted to be god to his subjects.
Although we may have no rights that we can assert before God, He Who owns us has given us rights before one another, and has ordained civil government to protect His people from injustice (Romans 13:1-7). For example, God set a legal restraint on our right to do to others what we want when He commanded, "Thou Shalt not Murder." Capital punishment was prescribed as an instrument of just human government because God determined that no man has the right to infringe upon the life of another (Genesis 9:6). Capital Punishment is God's response to a man robbing God of his possessions!
The framers of the Constitution did not reason from a purely secular understanding of liberties but looked to the Old Testament for a godly pattern
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