America’s Founders and Natural Law is a review of Kody Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer’s The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding.

Cooper and Dyer’s central thesis is that a “careful analysis of the founding period reveals that ideas central to American founding thought are not only compatible with but presuppose classical natural law and natural theology.” The natural law tradition may be traced back to the ancient world. It refers to the moral law that all persons may apprehend by reason. Most Christian thinkers have embraced this tradition, although they often emphasize that natural law is authoritative because it is a “product of the mind of God.”

Contrary to the many scholars who assert that “most” of America’s founders were deists, Cooper and Dyer recognize that only a few founders were deists, at least as the term is commonly defined. To be sure, a handful of important founders were not orthodox Christians—notably Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams—but the authors argue that their heterodox views did not include rejecting natural law.

There were, of course, early modern political philosophers who were atheistic materialists. Thomas Hobbes is the most prominent example of such a thinker, and the authors acknowledge that some scholars have argued that the only difference between Hobbes and John Locke is that the latter hid his dangerous ideas better than the former. And yet Cooper and Dyer show that the founders routinely condemned Hobbes and that there is little reason to believe that they embraced a Hobbesian Locke (if such a Locke even exists).

...Cooper and Dyer highlight appeals to natural law by James Otis, John Dickinson, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson. In their discussion of them, the authors dispel the common misconception that references to the state of nature or natural rights are evidence that the founders rejected classical and Christian metaphysics and ethics. Although such references could be evidence that an author is an individualistic, materialistic modern, they show that when the founders made them, they did so in a manner that was compatible with traditional Christian thought.
That third paragraph is somewhat odd. True, Hobbes and Locke embraced materialism--it was all the rage early Enlightenment--but they also believed in God and embraced natural law. One of the authors, Kody Cooper, in fact writes about this, see a review of his Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law: "Kody W. Cooper's thesis is that Thomas Hobbes's moral and civil philosophy sits squarely within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law theorizing."