is america a christian nation essay

Is America a Christian Nation? Essay (Critical Writing)

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A good number of American citizens believe that the United States is predominantly a Christian nation. Right-Wing television evangelists and their allies claim that America was initially established on Christian principles, and therefore, the constitution should reflect Christian teachings.

It is worthy to note that several politicians support the sentiment that the United States should be guided by Christian teachings (Americans United 1). Is this assertion accurate? Did the founders of the nation plan to set up a nation that gave special merit to Christianity? Does the Constitution of the United States favor Christianity over other forms of religions?

The response to all these queries is no. The Constitution of the United States is entirely a secular document. The document does not talk about Jesus or Christianity. Religion is only mentioned twice in the constitution. The first mention of Christianity is found in the First Amendment that prohibits laws concerning “establishment of religion” (Americans United 1). The second mention of Christianity is found in Article VI, which bars “religious tests” for public office (Americans United 2).

It is, therefore clear that these two constitution provisions prove that America was not established as a Christian nation. It is important to state that the forefathers did not create a secular nation because they loathed Christianity. Most of them were religious men. Their decision to set up a secular nation was based on the fact that the church-state union was a dangerous partnership.

The founding fathers had first-hand experiences of the tyranny and oppression created by the alliances between the state and religion in Europe. If the founding fathers wanted to make America a Christian nation, they would have included this aspect in the constitution (Americans United 2).

Some political scholars have argued that the United States’ foreign policy is mainly guided by religious teachings. John B. Judis demonstrates this point when he states that President Bush’s second inaugural speech was mainly dedicated to validating the nation’s foreign policy (1). The president’s policy statements claimed that the United States was chosen by God to watch over the world (Judis 1).

President Bush’s speeches in reference to God surpassed those made by his predecessors by far. Nonetheless, it is not unusual when a US president describes the country’s foreign policy in religious terms. There has been a precedent to that effect. During the Second World War, President Roosevelt (in his speech to Congress) asserted that America was striving to maintain its divine heritage.

President John Adams also expressed gratitude to God for protecting United States from World War I. Also; there are many high-ranking US officials who have expressed similar sentiments that the United States was chosen by God to spread freedom in all parts of the world (Judis 1).

The concept that America is a religious nation has been expressed in various ways throughout history. The first concept relates to Abraham Lincon, who stated that the United States was God’s chosen nation. He further claimed that the US was the best gift to the world. The second one relates to the notion that the United States has a divine calling or duty to make the world a better place.

During the debate over the invasion of the Philippines, Albert Beveridge (US Senator) asserted that America was chosen by God to take charge in the emancipation of the world. The third concept is that the US represents forces of good over evil as it dispenses its divine role (Judis 2). When these concepts are assessed together, they create a framework that explains the influence of religion on America’s foreign policy and the nation at large.

Works Cited

Americans United. “Is America A Christian Nation?” 2011. Web.

Judis B. John. The Chosen Nation: The Influence of Religion on U.S. Foreign Policy. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Washington, D. C., 2005. Print.

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Did America Have a Christian Founding?

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Abstract: Did America have a Christian Founding? This disputed question, far from being only of historical interest, has important implications for how we conceive of the role of religion in the American republic. Mark David Hall begins by considering two popular answers to the query—“Of course not!” and “Absolutely!”—both of which distort the Founders’ views. After showing that Christian ideas were one of the important intellectual influences on the Founders, he discusses three major areas of agreement with respect to religious liberty and church–state relations at the time of the Founding: Religious liberty is a right and must be protected; the national government should not create an established church, and states should have them only if they encourage and assist Christianity; and religion belongs in the public square. In short, while America did not have a Christian Founding in the sense of creating a theocracy, its Founding was deeply shaped by Christian moral truths. More important, it created a regime that was hospitable to Christians, but also to practitioners of other religions.

The role of religion in the American republic has been a source of controversy since the nation’s inception. Debates are particularly fierce when they concern religious liberty and the proper relationship between church and state. Arguments on these questions are often framed in the light of the Founders’ intentions, but unfortunately, their views are often distorted.

Did America have a Christian Founding? Two popular answers to this query—“Of course not!” and “Absolutely!”—both distort the Founders’ views. There is in fact a great deal of evidence that America’s Founders were influenced by Christian ideas, and there are many ways in which the Founders’ views might inform contemporary political and legal controversies.

Two Common but Mistaken Answers

According to those who answer “Of course not!” America’s Founders were guided by secular ideas and self, class, or state interests. These scholars do not deny that the Founders were religious, but they contend that they were mostly deists—i.e., persons who reject many Christian doctrines and who think God does not interfere in the affairs of men and nations.

For instance, historian Frank Lambert writes that “[the] significance of the Enlightenment and Deism for the birth of the American republic, and especially the relationship between church and state within it, can hardly be overstated.” Similarly, University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone avers that “deistic beliefs played a central role in the framing of the American republic” and that the “Founding generation viewed religion, and particularly religion’s relation to government, through an Enlightenment lens that was deeply skeptical of orthodox Christianity.” Virtually identical claims are made by Edwin Gaustad, Steven Waldman, Richard Hughes, Steven Keillor, David Holmes, Brooke Allen, and many others. [1]

In addition to asserting that the Founders were deists, these authors regularly contend that they abandoned their ancestors’ intolerant approach to church–state relations and embraced religious liberty. They often concede that some Founders thought civic authorities should support religion but argue that this is irrelevant as Jefferson’s and Madison’s conviction that there should be a high wall of separation between church and state was written into the Constitution and reinforced by the First Amendment. As we shall see, there are significant problems with this story.

The second answer to this question is offered by popular Christian writers such as Peter Marshall, David Manuel, John Eidsmoe, Tim LaHaye, William J. Federer, David Barton, and Gary DeMar. They contend that not only did America have a Christian Founding, but virtually all of the Founders were devout, orthodox Christians who consciously drew from their religious convictions to answer most political questions.

To support their case, these writers are fond of finding religious quotations from the Founders. The rule seems to be that if a Founder utters anything religious, at any time in his life, he counts as an orthodox or even evangelical Christian Founder. Using this methodology, Tim LaHaye concludes, for instance, that John Adams was “deeply committed to Jesus Christ and the use of Biblical principles in governing the nation,” and George Washington, if he was alive today, “would freely associate with the Bible-believing branch of evangelical Christianity that is having such a positive influence upon our nation.” [2] This approach leads to similarly bad history.

What Exactly Would a Christian Founding Look Like?

In order to answer the question “Did America have a Christian Founding?” properly, we must first understand it. Let us begin by considering what, exactly, would constitute a Christian Founding?

One possibility is simply that the Founders identified themselves as Christians. Clearly, they did. In 1776, every European American, with the exception of about 2,500 Jews, identified himself or herself as a Christian. Moreover, approximately 98 percent of the colonists were Protestants, with the remaining 1.9 percent being Roman Catholics. [3]

But this reality is not particularly interesting. These men and women might have been bad Christians, they may have been Christians significantly influenced by non-Christian ideas, or they may even have been Christians self-consciously attempting to create a secular political order.

Second, we might mean that the Founders were all sincere Christians. Yet sincerity is very difficult for the scholars, or anyone else, to judge. In most cases, the historical record gives us little with which to work. And even if we can determine, say, that a particular Founder was a member, regular attendee, and even officer in a church, it does not necessarily mean he was a sincere Christian. Perhaps he did these things simply because society expected it of him.

Third, we might mean that the Founders were orthodox Christians. In some cases—for example, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Roger Sherman, and John Witherspoon—there is abundant evidence that these Founders embraced and articulated orthodox Christian ideas. But the lack of records often makes it difficult to speak with confidence on this issue.

Nevertheless, in light of the many and powerful claims that the Founders were deists, it should be noted that there is virtually no evidence that more than a handful of civic leaders in the Founding era—notably Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and (if we count him as an American) Tom Paine—embraced anything approximating this view. Moreover, a good argument can be made that even these Founders were influenced by Christianity in significant ways—and it certainly does not follow that they desired the strict separation of church and state. [4]

A fourth possibility is that the Founders acted as Christians in their private and/or public lives. Some historians have argued that the Founding cannot be called Christian because some Founders did not join churches, take communion, or remain faithful to their spouses. Moreover, in their public capacity, they did not act in a Christian manner because they did things such as fight an unjust war against England and did not immediately abolish slavery. [5]

In some cases, these critiques do not take into account historical context, such as the difficulty of joining Calvinist churches in 18th century America. In others, they neglect the traditional Christian teaching that even saints sin. If the standard of being a Christian is moral perfection, no one has ever been a Christian. Most egregious, it is profoundly unhistorical to judge the Founders by specific policy outcomes that seem perfectly clear to 21st century Christians.

This is not to say that biblical principles are relativistic, but their applications to specific issues in particular times and places may vary or be unclear. To take a contemporary example, one should be very careful in saying, for instance, that someone is a good Christian politician only if she votes for (or against) tax cuts or national health care.

A final possibility is that the Founders were influenced by Christian ideas. Scholars have spent a great amount of time attempting to discern influence. Book after book has been written about whether the Founders were most influenced by Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, etc.

I believe that this is the most reasonable way to approach the question “Did America have a Christian Founding?” In doing so, it is important to note that nominal Christians might be influenced by Christian ideas, just as it is possible for an orthodox Christian to be influenced by non-Christian ideas. I believe that an excellent case can be made that Christianity had a profound influence on the Founders. [6]

Before proceeding, I should emphasize that I am not arguing that Christianity was the only significant influence on America’s Founders or that it influenced each Founder in the exact same manner. Clearly there were a variety of different, but often overlapping, intellectual influences in the era. [7] The Founders were also informed by the Anglo–American political–legal tradition and their own political experience, and like all humans, they were motivated to varying degrees by self, class, or state interests. My contention is merely that orthodox Christianity had a very significant influence on America’s Founders and that this influence is often overlooked by students of the American Founding.

What Constitutes America’s Founding ?

I have assumed here that America was founded in the late 18th century, but some authors have argued, in the words of Gary DeMar, that our “nation begins not in 1776, but more than one hundred fifty years earlier.” [8] Let us consider three major possibilities that might count as the country’s founding: (1) the establishment of colonial governments in the 17th century, (2) America’s break with Great Britain in the 1770s, and (3) the creation of a new constitutional order in the 1780s and 1790s.

1. America’s Colonial Origins

Few doubt that Puritans were serious Christians attempting to create, in the words of Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, “a shining city upon a hill” (a reference to Matthew 5:14). Puritans separated church and state, but they clearly thought the two institutions should work in tandem to support, protect, and promote true Christianity.

Other colonies, however, are often described as being significantly different from those in New England. Historian John Fea, for instance, contends that “the real appeal of Jamestown was economic opportunity and the very real possibility of striking it rich.” [9] It is certainly the case that colonists were attracted to the New World by economic opportunity (in New England as well as in the South), and yet even in the southern colonies the protection and promotion of Christianity was more important than many authors assume. For instance, Virginia’s 1610 legal code begins:

Whereas his Majesty, like himself a most zealous prince, has in his own realms a principal care of true religion and reverence to God and has always strictly commanded his generals and governors, with all his forces wheresoever, to let their ways be, like his ends, for the glory of God….

The first three articles of this text go on to state that the colonists have embarked on a “sacred cause,” to mandate regular church attendance, and to proclaim that anyone who speaks impiously against the Trinity or who blasphemes God’s name will be put to death. [10]

Early colonial laws and constitutions such as the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and Massachusetts Body of Liberties are filled with such language—and in some cases, they incorporate biblical texts wholesale. Perhaps more surprisingly, tolerant, Quaker Pennsylvania was more similar to Puritan New England than many realize. The Charter of Liberties and Frame of Government of the Province of Pennsylvania (1681) begins by making it clear that God has ordained government, and it even quotes Romans 13 to this effect. Article 38 of the document lists “offenses against God” that may be punished by the magistrate, including:

swearing, cursing, lying, profane talking, drunkenness, drinking of healths, obscene words, incest, sodomy…stage-plays, cards, dice, May-games, gamesters, masques, revels, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, bear-baiting, and the like, which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion…. [11]

An extensive survey of early colonial constitutions and laws reveals many similar provisions. As well, at least nine of the 13 colonies had established churches, and all required officeholders to be Christians—or, in some cases, Protestants. Quaker Pennsylvania, for instance, expected officeholders to be “such as possess faith in Jesus Christ.” [12]

If one is to understand the story of the United States of America, it is important to have a proper appreciation for its Christian colonial roots. By almost any measure, colonists of European descent who settled in the New World were serious Christians whose constitutions, laws, and practices reflected the influence of Christianity. Although some authors refer to this “planting” as a “founding,” such a designation is rare among scholars. Instead, most scholars consider America to have been founded in the late 18th century around one of, or some combination of, two major events: the War for Independence and the creation of America’s constitutional order.

2. The War for Independence

On the surface, the War for American Independence appears to be an inherently un-Christian event. The Apostle Paul, in Romans 13, seems to leave little room for revolution: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained by God. Whosoever therefore resists the power, resists the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”

Historically, Christian thinkers have taken this and similar biblical passages to prohibit rebellion against civic authorities. However, in the 12th century, some Christian scholars began to allow for the possibility that inferior magistrates might overthrow evil kings. These ideas were developed and significantly expanded by the Protestant Reformers. John Calvin, the most politically conservative of these men, contended that, in some cases, inferior magistrates might resist an ungodly ruler. However, Reformed leaders such as John Knox, George Buchanan, and Samuel Rutherford of Scotland, Stephanus Junius Brutus and Theodore Beza of France, and Christopher Goodman and John Ponet of England argued that inferior magistrates must resist unjust rulers and even permitted or required citizens to do so.

It is worth noting that all of these men wrote before Locke published his Two Treatises of Government and that this tradition was profoundly influential in America. Indeed, between 55 percent and 75 percent of white citizens in this era associated themselves with Calvinist churches, and members of the tradition were significantly overrepresented among American intellectual elites. [13]

The influence of the Reformed political tradition in the Founding era is manifested in a variety of ways, but particularly noteworthy is the almost unanimous support Calvinist clergy offered to American patriots. This was noticed by the other side, as suggested by the Loyalist Peter Oliver, who railed against the “black Regiment , the dissenting Clergy , who took so active a part in the Rebellion.” King George himself reportedly referred to the War for Independence as “a Presbyterian Rebellion.” From the English perspective, British Major Harry Rooke was largely correct when he confiscated a presumably Calvinist book from an American prisoner and remarked that “[i]t is your G-d Damned Religion of this Country that ruins the Country; Damn your religion.” [14]

The Declaration of Independence, the most famous document produced by the Continental Congress during the War for Independence, proclaims: “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.” As well, this text references “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and closes by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world” and noting the signers’ “reliance on the protection of divine Providence.” The Founders’ use of Christian rhetoric and arguments becomes even more evident if one looks at other statements of colonial rights and concerns such as the Suffolk Resolves, the Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms—to say nothing of the dozen explicitly Christian calls for prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving issued by the Continental and Confederation Congresses. [15]

Some scholars have argued that the use of “distant” words for God or “vague and generic God-language” like “Nature’s God,” Creator,” and “Providence” in the Declaration and other texts is evidence that the Founders were deists. [16] However, indisputably orthodox Christians regularly used such appellations.

For instance, the Westminster Standards (a classic Reformed confession of faith), both in the original 1647 version and in the 1788 American revision, refer to the deity as “the Supreme Judge,” “the great Creator of all things,” “the first cause,” “righteous judge,” “God the Creator,” and “the supreme Law and King of all the world.” The Standards also regularly reference God’s providence and even proclaim that “[t]he light of nature showeth that there is a God….” Similarly, Isaac Watts, the “father of English Hymnody,” referred to the deity as “nature’s God” in a poem about Psalm 148: 10. Jeffry H. Morrison has argued persuasively that the Declaration’s references to “‘divine Providence’ and ‘the Supreme Judge of the World’ would have been quite acceptable to Reformed Americans in 1776, and conjured up images of the ‘distinctly biblical God’ when they heard or read the Declaration.” [17]

It may be objected that Jefferson, the man who drafted the Declaration, was hardly an orthodox Christian, and that is certainly the case. But this is beside the point. As Jefferson himself pointed out in an 1825 letter, the object of the document was not to “find out new principles, or new arguments.... [I]t was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.…” [18] Even though Jefferson believed in a vague, distant deity, when his fellow delegates revised and approved the Declaration, virtually all of them understood “Nature’s God,” “Creator,” and “Providence” to refer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: a God who is active in the affairs of men and nations.

3. The Creation of America’s Constitutional Order

In light of the above discussion, it is perhaps surprising that the Constitution says little about God or religion. Of course, there are hints that America is a Christian nation (e.g., a pocket veto occurs 10 days after a bill is passed by Congress, Sundays excepted ), but these seem to be more than balanced by Article VI’s prohibition of religious tests for federal offices. The only specific mention of God is found in the date the Constitution was written: “in the Year of our Lord 1787.”

What is going on? Some have argued that America began as a Christian country but that the authors of the Constitution recognized that this was not a good thing, and so they created, in the words of Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, a “Godless Constitution.” To reinforce this point, the Founders added the First Amendment to the Constitution, which begins “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” [19]

On the surface, this is a plausible hypothesis, and a few Founding-era documents such as James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” (1785) and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802) seem to offer some support for this view. As we shall see, this interpretation of the Founding is inaccurate even with respect to Jefferson and Madison, and if one looks beyond them to the hundreds of men who attended the Federal Convention of 1787, participated in the state ratification conventions, and were elected to the first federal Congress, it becomes completely implausible. These individuals, without exception, called themselves Christians, and a good case can be made that many were influenced by orthodox Christian ideas in important ways.

This argument is made well in broad strokes by Barry Alan Shain in The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought . It also receives interesting empirical support from Donald Lutz, who examined 15,000 pamphlets, articles, and books on political subjects published in the late 18th century. His study found that the Bible was cited far more often than any other book, article, or pamphlet. In fact, the Founders referenced the Bible more than all Enlightenment authors combined. [20]

If Shain and Lutz make the argument for Christian influence in broad strokes, others have made it in finer strokes through studies of individual Founders. For instance, I have co-edited four books that collectively shine light on 26 different Founders and several major traditions. These books, along with a number of other articles and books on less famous Founders, demonstrate that there is little evidence that the Founders as a group were deists who desired the separation of church and state. [21]

Before discussing the positive influence of Christian ideas on the American Founders, let me briefly suggest the central reason why the Constitution appears to be “Godless.” Simply put, the Founders were creating a national government for a very few limited purposes—notably those enumerated in Article I, Section 8. There was almost universal agreement that if there was to be legislation on religious or moral matters, it should be done by state and local governments. [22]

In fact, states remained active in this business well into the 20th century. It is true that the last state church was disestablished in 1832, but many states retained religious tests for public office, had laws aimed at restricting vice, required prayer in schools, and so forth. Because the federal government was not to be concerned with these issues, they were not addressed in the Constitution. The First Amendment merely reinforced this understanding with respect to the faith—i.e., Congress has no power to establish a national church or restrict the free exercise of religion. [23]

Even though Christianity is not mentioned in the Constitution or Bill or Rights, the Founders of the American republic were influenced by Christian ideas in significant ways. For example:

• Their faith taught them that humans were sinful. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external or internal controls on government would be necessary.” This conviction led them to avoid utopian experiments such as those later pursued during the French Revolution and to adopt a constitutional system characterized by separated powers, checks and balances, and federalism. Many Enlightenment thinkers in this era, by way of contrast, tended to favor a strong, centralized government run by experts. [24]
• They firmly believed that God ordained moral standards, that legislation should be made in accordance with these standards, and that moral laws took precedence over human laws. This conviction manifests itself in their abstract reflections (e.g., James Wilson’s law lectures, parts of which read like St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica ) and practical decisions (e.g., all but one Supreme Court Justice prior to John Marshall argued publicly that the Court could strike down an act of Congress if it violated natural law). [25]
• Similarly, Christianity informed the Founders’ understanding of substantive concepts such as “liberty.” Barry Shain has identified eight different ways in which the word was used in the 18th century. Only one of these is related to the excessively individualistic way the term is often used today. Instead, the Founders were far more likely to see liberty as the freedom to do what is morally correct, as illustrated by United States Supreme Court Justice James Wilson’s marvelous dictum: “Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.” [26]
• America’s Founders believed that humans were created in the imago dei —the image of God. Part of what this means is that humans are reasonable beings. This led them to conclude that we the people (as opposed to the elite) can order our public lives together through politics rather than force. It also helped inform early (and later) American opposition to slavery. [27]
• Faith led many Founders to conclude that religious liberty should be extensively protected. Yet many also thought that civic authorities should encourage Christianity and that it is appropriate to use religious language in the public square. By the late 18th century, some Founders were beginning to question the wisdom of religious establishments, primarily because they thought that such establishments hurt true religion. The Founders’ views on these questions have the most immediate and obvious policy and legal implications, so I will address them in some detail.

The Founders on Church and State

In the 1947 Supreme Court decision of Everson v. Board of Education , Justice Wiley Rutledge proclaimed that “no provision of the Constitution is more closely tied to or given content by its generating history than the religious clause of the First Amendment. It is at once the refined product and the terse summation of that history.” Like many jurists and academics since, he proceeded to argue that the Founders intended the First Amendment to create a strict separation of church and state. As evidence, he relied almost solely on statements by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, most taken out of context and made before or well after the Religion Clauses were drafted. [28]

Yet consideration of a wide range of Founders and their public actions shows that few if any embraced anything approximating modern conceptions of the separation of church and state. Of course, they differed among themselves, but it is possible to identify three major areas of agreement with respect to religious liberty and church–state relations.

Consensus #1: Religious Liberty Is a Right and Must be Protected.

To a person, the Founders were committed to protecting religious liberty. This conviction was usually based upon the theological principle that humans have a duty to worship God as their consciences dictate. A good illustration of this is George Mason’s 1776 draft of Article XVI of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights. It reads:

That as Religion, or the Duty which we owe to our divine and omnipotent Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be governed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Force or Violence; and therefore that all Men shou’d enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the Magistrate….

James Madison, in his first significant public act, objected to the use of “toleration” in the article, believing that it implied that religious liberty was a grant from the state that could be revoked at will. The Virginia Convention agreed, and Article XVI was amended to make it clear that “the free exercise of religion” is a right, not a privilege granted by the state. [29]

Mason’s draft of Article XVI was reprinted throughout the states and had an important impact on subsequent state constitutions and the national Bill of Rights. By the end of the Revolutionary era, every state offered significant protection of religious liberty. The federal Constitution of 1787 did not, but only because its supporters believed the national government did not have the delegated power to pass laws interfering with religious belief or practice. In the face of popular outcry, the first Congress proposed and the states ratified a constitutional amendment prohibiting Congress from restricting the free exercise of religion.

Scholars and jurists debate the exact scope of religious liberty protected by the First Amendment. For instance, it is unclear whether the amendment requires religious minorities to be exempted from neutral laws. (For example, does the Free Exercise Clause require Congress to exempt religious pacifists from conscription into the military?) But at a minimum, it prohibits Congress from, in the words of James Madison, compelling “men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.” [30]

Consensus #2: States Should Have Established Churches Only If They Encourage and Assist Christianity.

In 1775, at least nine of the 13 colonies had established churches. Although establishments took a variety of forms, they generally entailed the state providing favorable treatment for one denomination—treatment which often included financial support. Members of religious denominations other than the official established church were usually tolerated, but they were occasionally taxed to support the state church, and some were not permitted to hold civic office.

After independence, most states either disestablished their churches (particularly states where the Church of England was previously established) or moved to a system of “plural” or “multiple” establishments. Under the latter model, citizens were taxed to support their own churches. Although a few Founders challenged establishments of any sort in the name of religious liberty, most arguments were framed in terms of which arrangement would be best for Christianity.

A good illustration of the last point may be found in two petitions from Westmoreland County that arrived at the Virginia General Assembly on the same day regarding Patrick Henry’s 1784 proposal to provide state funds to a variety of churches. The first supported Henry’s bill, arguing, much like public-sector unions today, that state subsidies are necessary to keep salaries high enough to attract the best candidates into the ministry.

Opponents of Henry’s plan disagreed, responding that assessments were against “the spirit of the Gospel,” that “the Holy Author of our Religion” did not require state support, and that Christianity was far purer before “Constantine first established Christianity by human Laws.” Rejecting their fellow petitioners’ arguments that government support was necessary to attract good candidates to the ministry, they argued that clergy should manifest:

that they are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon them that Office, that they seek the good of Mankind and not worldly Interest. Let their doctrines be scriptural and their Lives upright. Then shall Religion (if departed) speedily return, and Deism be put to open shame, and its dreaded Consequences removed. [31]

This petition was significantly more popular than James Madison’s now-famous “Memorial and Remonstrance,” another petition written to oppose Henry’s plan. Madison’s memorial has often been referenced to shine light on the First Amendment, and it is regularly treated as a rationalist, secular argument for religious liberty. But, as in the Virginia Declaration, Madison argues that the right to religious liberty is unalienable “because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.” As well, he noted that “ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation” and that “the bill is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity.” [32]

America’s Founders were committed to the idea that religion (by which virtually all of them meant Christianity) was necessary for public happiness and political prosperity. This view was so widespread that James Hutson has called it “the Founders’ syllogism.” [33] The key question with respect to particular establishments at the state level was whether they helped or hurt the faith.

Consensus #3: Religion Belongs in the Public Square.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in which he famously suggested that the First Amendment created a “wall of separation between Church & State.” This metaphor lay dormant with respect to the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence until 1947, when Justice Hugo Black seized upon it as the definitive statement of the Founders’ views on church–state relations. [34]

As appealing as the wall metaphor is to contemporary advocates of the strict separation of church and state, it obscures far more than it illuminates. Leaving aside the fact that Jefferson was in Europe when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, that the letter was a profoundly political document, and that Jefferson used the metaphor only once in his life, it is not even clear that it sheds useful light upon Jefferson’s views, much less those of his far more traditional colleagues.

Jefferson issued calls for prayer and fasting as governor of Virginia, and in his revision of Virginia’s statutes, he drafted bills stipulating when the governor could appoint “days of public fasting and humiliation, or thanksgiving” and to punish “Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers.” As a member of the Continental Congress, he proposed that the nation adopt a seal containing the image of Moses “extending his hand over the sea, caus[ing] it to overwhelm Pharaoh,” and the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” He closed his second inaugural address by encouraging all Americans to join him in seeking “the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old….” And two days after completing his letter to the Danbury Baptists, he attended church services in the U.S. Capitol, where he heard John Leland, the great Baptist minister and opponent of religious establishments, preach. [35]

The point is not that Jefferson was a pious man who wanted a union between church and state. His private letters make it clear that he was not an orthodox Christian, and his public arguments and actions demonstrate that he favored a stricter separation between church and state than virtually any other Founder. Yet even Jefferson, at least in his actions, did not attempt to completely remove religion from the public square, and what Jefferson did not completely exclude, most Founders embraced.

This point may be illustrated in a variety of ways, but a particularly useful exercise is to look at the first Congress, the body that crafted the First Amendment. One of Congress’s first acts was to agree to appoint and pay congressional chaplains. Shortly after doing so, it reauthorized the Northwest Ordinance, which held that “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” [36]

More significantly for understanding the First Amendment, on the day after the House approved the final wording of the Bill of Rights, Elias Boudinot, later president of the American Bible Society, proposed that the President recommend a day of public thanksgiving and prayer. In response to objections that such a practice mimicked European customs or should be done by the states, Roger Sherman, according to a contemporary newspaper account:

justified the practice of thanksgiving, on any signal event, not only as a laudable one in itself, but as warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple, was a case in point. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion; and he would agree with the gentleman who moved the resolution. [37]

The House agreed, as did the Senate, as did the President. The result was George Washington’s famous 1789 Thanksgiving Day Proclamation. The text of his proclamation is worth quoting at some length:

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor… I do recommend…the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be…. And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our national government a blessing to all the People…. [38]

Similar proclamations were routinely issued by Presidents Washington, Adams, and Madison. Jefferson, it is true, refused to formally issue such proclamations, yet as Daniel L. Dreisbach has pointed out, he “employed rhetoric in official utterances that, in terms of religious content, was virtually indistinguishable from the traditional thanksgiving day proclamations.” [39]

America’s Founders did not want Congress to establish a national church, and many opposed establishments at the state level as well. Yet they believed, as George Washington declared in his Farewell Address, that of “all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” [40] Moreover, almost without exception, they agreed that civic authorities could promote and encourage Christianity and that it was appropriate for elected officials to make religious arguments in the public square. There was virtually no support for contemporary visions of a separation of church and state that would have political leaders avoid religious language and require public spaces to be stripped of religious symbols.

Conclusions

So did America have a Christian Founding? History is complicated, and we should always be suspicious of simple answers to difficult questions. As we have seen, there is precious little evidence that the Founders were deists, wanted religion excluded from the public square, or desired the strict separation of church and state. On the other hand, they identified themselves as Christians, were influenced in important ways by Christian ideas, and generally thought it appropriate for civic authorities to encourage Christianity.

What do these facts mean for Americans who embrace non-Christian faiths or no faith at all? Although the Founders were profoundly influenced by Christianity, they did not design a constitutional order only for fellow believers. They explicitly prohibited religious tests for federal offices, and they were committed to the proposition that all men and women should be free to worship God (or not) as their consciences dictate.

As evidenced by George Washington’s 1790 letter to a “Hebrew Congregation” in Newport, Rhode Island, the new nation was to be open to a wide array of individuals who were willing to assume the responsibilities of citizenship:

All [citizens] possess alike liberty and conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. …May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy. [41]

Yet it does not follow from this openness that Americans should simply forget about their country’s Christian roots. Anyone interested in an accurate account of the nation’s past cannot afford to ignore the important influence of faith on many Americans, from the Puritans to the present day.

Christian ideas underlie some key tenets of America’s constitutional order. For instance, the Founders believed that humans are created in the image of God, which led them to design institutions and laws meant to protect and promote human dignity. Because they were convinced that humans are sinful, they attempted to avoid the concentration of power by framing a national government with carefully enumerated powers. As well, the Founders were committed to liberty, but they never imagined that provisions of the Bill of Rights would be used to protect licentiousness. And they clearly thought moral considerations should inform legislation.

America has drifted from these first principles. We would do well to reconsider the wisdom of these changes.

The Founders believed it permissible for the national and state governments to encourage Christianity, but this may no longer be prudential in our increasingly pluralistic country. Yet the Constitution does not mandate a secular polity, and we should be wary of jurists, politicians, and academics who would strip religion from the public square. We should certainly reject arguments that America’s Founders intended the First Amendment to prohibit neutral programs that support faith-based social service agencies, religious schools, and the like. [42]

Finally, we ignore at our peril the Founders’ insight that democracy requires a moral people and that faith is an important, if not indispensable, support for morality. Such faith may well flourish best without government support, but it should not have to flourish in the face of government hostility.

— Mark David Hall, Ph.D., is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University. He is the author or co-editor of eight books, including The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church–State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2009 ) and The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Among his numerous essays is First Principles Essay No. 26, “Justice, Law, and the Creation of the American Republic: The Forgotten Legacy of James Wilson” (The Heritage Foundation, June 1, 2009).

View the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics microsite.

[1] Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 161; Geoffrey R. Stone, “The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?” University of California Law Review , Vol. 56 (October 2008), pp. 7–8; Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 193; Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 50–57; Steven J. Keillor, This Rebellious House: American History and the Truth of Christianity (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1996), p. 85; David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 163–164; Brooke Allen, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), p. xiii.

[2] Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Fleming H. Revell, 1977); John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1987); Tim LaHaye, Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Brentwood, Tenn.: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1987), pp. 90, 113; William J. Federer, America’s God and Country (Coppell, Tex.: FAME Publishing, 1994); David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, & Religion , 4th ed. (Aledo, Tex.: Wallbuilder Press, 2005); and Gary DeMar, America’s Christian Heritage (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003).

[3] Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Harmony Books, 1993), pp. 28–29.

[4] For further discussion, see Mark David Hall, “Faith and the Founders of the American Republic: Distortion and Consensus,” in Faith and Politics: Religion in the Public Square , Proceedings of the Maryville Symposium, Vol. 3, 2010 (Maryville, Tenn.: Maryville College, 2011), pp. 55–79.

[5] See, for instance, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1983), pp. 19, 53–54, 95–100.

[6] Alan Gibson provides an overview of scholarly attempts to understand the intellectual influences on America’s Founders in Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates Over the Origins and Foundations of the American Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). Like many other scholars, he almost completely neglects the possibility that Christian ideas may have had an important influence in the era.

[7] I discuss ways Christian influence may have interacted with other intellectual traditions, especially Lockean liberalism, in “Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: The Influence of the Reformed Tradition on the American Founding,” a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 2010. A revised version of the paper will be published as a book chapter with the same title in Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, ed., Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

[8] DeMar, America’s Christian Heritage , p. 13.

[9] John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), p. 82.

[10] Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church–State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2009), p. 84. I have modernized spelling and punctuation in all quotations.

[11] Ibid. , pp. 86–119.

[12] Ibid. , p. 118. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey did not have established churches. New York had establishments in select counties. Most colonies had religious tests for office, and all had laws encouraging and protecting Christianity and Christian morality.

[13] Some scholars argue that Locke’s political philosophy is sharply at odds with earlier Protestant resistance literature, but I believe it is best understood as a logical extension of it. In any case, the American Founders clearly thought Locke’s ideas were compatible with orthodox Christianity. For further discussion, see Hall, “Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos: The Influence of the Reformed Tradition on the American Founding.” An excellent example of Protestant resistance literature is Stephanus Junius Brutus, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos , ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975), Vol. 1, p. 426.

[14] Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 41; Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 173; John Leach, “A Journal Kept by John Leach, During His Confinement by the British, In Boston Gaol, in 1775,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register , Vol.19 (1865), p. 256.

[15] Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , p. 220. For a discussion of these and other statements of colonial concerns, see Mark David Hall, The Old Puritan and a New Nation: Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (book mss. under review), chapter 3.

[16] See, for instance, Holmes, Faiths of the Founding Fathers , pp. 47, 65; Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? , pp. 131–33, 136.

[17] Westminster Standards, 1: 10; 5: 1, 2, 6; 19: 5; 23: 1; 1: 1, 7; 5; and 21: 5. See also The Works of the Late Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts (London, 1753), Vol. 4, p. 356, and The Windham Herald ,April 15, 1797, p. 4. Such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely. Jeffry H. Morrison, “Political Theology in the Declaration of Independence,” paper delivered at a conference on the Declaration of Independence, Princeton University, April 5–6, 2002. I am grateful to Daniel L. Dreisbach for pointing me to the language of the Standards.

[18] Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 656–657.

[19] Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , p. 433.

[20] Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review , Vol. 78 (March 1984), pp. 189–197.

[21] Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark D. Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison, The Founders on God and Government (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) (containing essays about George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Witherspoon, Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, George Mason, and Daniel and Charles Carroll); Dreisbach, Hall, and Morrison, The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) (containing essays about Abigail Adams, Samuel Adams, Oliver Ellsworth, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Thomas Paine, Edmund Randolph, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, and Mercy Otis Warren); Dreisbach and Hall, Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (containing eight thematic essays and profiles of John Dickinson, Isaac Backus, John Leland, Elias Boudinot, Gouverneur Morris, and John Hancock); Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights (a massive collection of primary source documents on religious liberty and church–state relations in the Founding era). See also John E. O’Connor, William Paterson: Lawyer and Statesman, 1745–1806 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), and Marc M. Arkin, “Regionalism and the Religion Clauses: The Contribution on Fisher Ames,” Buffalo Law Review , Vol.47 (Spring 1999), pp. 763–828.

[22] Even Thomas Jefferson observed: “Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious disciple, has been delegated to the General [i.e., federal] Government. It must then rest with the States, as far as it can be in any human authority.” Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, January 23, 1808, in Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , p. 531. The Founders did think legislators should take religion and morality into account when the national government is acting within its enumerated powers. See, for instance, the debates in the first Congress over the assumption of state debts and excise taxes in Documentary History of the First Federal Congress , 14 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972–2004), Vol. 10, pp. 568, 581; Vol. 13, pp. 1419–1424; Vol. 14, p. 247.

[23] The U.S. Supreme Court has used the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the First Amendment to state and local governments. For a good discussion of this process and different ways the Court has interpreted the religion clauses, see Henry J. Abraham and Barbara A. Perry, Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the United States , 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 29–91, 221–325.

[24] Barry Alan Shain, “Afterword: Revolutionary-Era Americans: Were They Enlightened or Protestant? Does it Matter?” in Dreisbach, Hall, and Morrison, The Founders on God and Government , pp. 274–277. This characterization of Enlightenment thinkers is truer for members of the Continental or Radical Enlightenment than for those associated with the British and/or Scottish Enlightenment.

[25] Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, eds., Collected Works of James Wilson , 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2007), pp. 498–499; Scott Douglas Gerber, ed., In Seriatim: The Early Supreme Court (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

[26] Shain, Myth of American Individualism , pp. 155–319; Hall and Hall, Collected Works of James Wilson , p. 435.

[27] For a good discussion of this issue, see Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), pp. 131–146.

[28] Associate Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, in Everson v. Board of Education , 330 U.S. 1, 33 (1947); Mark David Hall, “Jeffersonian Walls and Madisonian Lines: The Supreme Court’s Use of History in Religion Clause Cases,” Oregon Law Review , Vol.85 (2006), pp. 563–614.

[29] Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , p. 241.

[30] Ibid. , p. 427.

[31] Ibid. , pp. 307–308.

[32] Ibid. , pp. 309–313.

[33] Specifically, the syllogism refers to the connection between virtue and morality, republican institutions, and religion—and by religion the Founders meant some version of Christianity. See James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington: Library of Congress, 1998), p. 81.

[34] Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , pp. 528, 533–534.

[35] Ibid. , pp. 251, 229, 530; Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 21–22.

[36] Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , pp. 236–238, 441–475.

[37] Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, Vol. 11, pp. 1500–1501.

[38] Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , pp. 453–454.

[39] Ibid., pp. 215–237, 446–472, 530; Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation , p. 57.

[40] Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights , p. 468.

[41] Ibid. , p. 464. Peter Lillback and Jerry Newcombe identify nine scriptural references in this letter, including one to Micah 4:4 (“while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid”), which was Washington’s favorite biblical passage. See Peter Lillback and Jerry Newcombe, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Providence Forum Press, 2006), pp. 321–322. See also George Washington to the Society of Quakers, October 1789, Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series , Vol. 4: September 1789–January 1790, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), p. 266, and George Washington to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America, March 15, 1790, in Bruce Frohnen, ed., The American Republic (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2002), pp. 70–71.

[42] Such claims were made by dissenting justices in Bowen v. Kendrick , 487 U.S. 589 (1988), and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris , 536 U.S. 639 (2002).

Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Political Science

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Many believe the founders wanted a Christian America. Some want the government to declare one now

FILE- President Joe Biden, with from left, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and House Speaker Mike Johnson of La., pray and listen during the National Prayer Breakfast, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2024, at the Capitol in Washington. Johnson has spoken in the past of his belief America was founded as a Christian nation. Biden, while citing his own Catholic faith, has spoken of values shared by people of “any other faith, or no faith at all.” (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

FILE - Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Faith & Freedom Coalition Policy Conference in Washington, Saturday, June 24, 2023. Large numbers of Americans believe the founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation, and such views are especially strong among Republicans and are being voiced by Trump’s supporters. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

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The U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention Christianity or any specific religion. The Declaration of Independence famously proclaims that people’s rights come from a “Creator” and “Nature’s God” — but doesn’t specify who that is.

Yet large numbers of Americans believe the founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation, and many believe it should be one.

Such views are especially strong among Republicans and their white evangelical base. Already such views are being voiced by supporters of Donald Trump amid his bid to recapture the presidency.

The idea of a Christian America means different things to different people. Pollsters have found a wide circle of Americans who hold general God-and-country sentiments.

But within that is a smaller, hardcore group who also check other boxes in surveys — such as that the U.S. Constitution was inspired by God and that the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation, advocate Christian values or stop enforcing the separation of church and state.

For those embracing that package of beliefs, it’s more likely they’ll have unfavorable views toward immigrants, dismiss or downplay the impact of anti-Black discrimination and believe Trump was a good or great president, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey.

This latter group reflects a movement widely called Christian nationalism, which fuses American and Christian values, symbols and identity and seeks to privilege Christianity in public life.

The idea of Christian nationhood fills Americans’ need for an origin story, a belief that “we’ve come here for something special, and that we’re here for God’s work.”

It creates a sense of “national innocence,” so adherents resist confronting uglier parts of U.S. history, he said.

The belief connects to other beliefs past and present, from the Manifest Destiny doctrine that justified continental conquest to Trump’s America First and Make America Great Again slogans, said McDaniel, a co-author of “The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics.”

Trump has echoed some of these ideas, vowing to bar immigrants who “don’t like our religion.”

Many conservatives and Republicans embrace the idea of Christian national origins, even as many reject the “Christian nationalist” label.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has proclaimed that America is and was founded as a Christian nation and that Thomas Jefferson was “divinely inspired” in his writing of the Declaration of Independence, according to a 2015 sermon that drew wider attention with his recent election as speaker.

WallBuilders, an organization Johnson credits for its “profound influence” on him, has spread materials claiming that “revisionist” historians have downplayed America’s Christian origins, but the group has been widely criticized for historically dubious claims.

A lawsuit on its behalf is challenging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s refusal to run its bus ads touting the purported beliefs of founders.

Vocal supporters of Trump have described current politics as spiritual warfare for the destiny of a country that former Trump aide Steve Bannon described as the “New Jerusalem” and conservative activist Charlie Kirk said was founded by “courageous Bible believing Christians.”

Recent Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky Republican Party platforms proclaim the country was founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles.

The Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, said he doesn’t identify as a Christian nationalist, but does believe America was founded as a Christian nation.

“I’m not claiming that all of our founders were Christians,” he said in an interview. “Some were deists, some were atheists, but the majority were Christians. I’m also not saying that non-Christians shouldn’t have the same rights as Christians in our country.”

But he said “there’s a case to be made that the Judeo-Christian faith was the foundation for our laws and many of our principles.” He cited founder John Jay — the first Supreme Court chief justice — asserting it was Americans’ duty “in our Christian nation, to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

Jeffress said he doesn’t believe America is privileged by God but, as with any nation, “God will continue to bless America to the extent that we follow him.”

Anthea Butler, chair of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said history precludes any idea of a Christian nation.

“It doesn’t mean that Christians weren’t a part of the founding of this nation,” said Butler, a historian of African American and American religion. “What it does mean is that if you believe that America is a Christian nation and you happen to subscribe to Christian nationalism as a part of that, you’re buying into a myth.”

That America-as-a-Christian-nation idea is “a trope of exclusion,” she said, centering American history on white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as “the ones that are willing and should be running the country both then and now.”

That justifies viewing others as “heathens,” including the enslaved Blacks and the Native Americans whose land was being taken.

Those arguing for a Christian America are generally not historians and not really talking about history — they’re talking politics, said John Fea, author of the 2011 book “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”

“They appeal to a false view of the founding, or at least a partial view of the founding, to advance political agendas of the present,” said Fea, a history professor at Messiah University, a Christian university in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. “These agendas are built on a very weak historical foundation.”

The belief in America’s Christian origins is mainstream.

Six in 10 U.S. adults said the founders intended America to be a Christian nation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. About 45% said the U.S. should be a Christian nation. Four in five white evangelical Protestants agreed with each assertion.

By some measures, Democratic President Joe Biden might be seen in that category, citing the importance of his Catholic faith and calling for God’s blessings on America and its troops — but also invoking shared values “whether you’re Christian, whether you’re Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other faith, or no faith at all. ”

One-third of U.S. adults surveyed in 2023 said God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians to set an example to the world, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)/Brookings report.

Such surveys have found a smaller, more ardent group of believers in Christian nationhood. In another survey, PRRI identified about 10% of Americans as the most committed adherents.

The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office, and its First Amendment bars congressional establishment of any religion, along with guaranteeing free exercise of religion.

Defenders of Christian nationhood can point out that several of the 13 original states funded Protestant churches at their origins, though within a few decades all had followed Virginia’s example in halting the practice. They can point to Christian rhetoric by some founders, such as John Jay, Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams.

But several key founders would never pass a test of orthodoxy. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin viewed Jesus as a great teacher but not as God.

“Could you find stuff where John Adams talks about religion being the foundation of the republic, like George Washington said in his farewell address?” asked Fea. “Are there states where Christianity was privileged? Yes, you can find all those things. You can also find things to show the Constitution wants to keep religion and government separate.”

Some secular activists today advocate for an opposite view — that U.S. founders sought to banish religion from public life. Fea said that also goes too far: “When you’re dealing with the 18th century, nuance and complexity is essential,” he said.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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Was America Ever Christian?

Founding, awakening, and a common myth.

Allen Guelzo

Distinguished Research Scholar, Princeton University

ABSTRACT: The idea of a “Christian America” holds both myth and significant meaning. On the one hand, American history offers little evidence of a distinctly Christian founding; many of the Founders, in fact, actively opposed Christianity and sought its disenfranchisement in the new republic. On the other hand, the decades after the Founding saw a surge of Christian faith throughout the country. By the eve of Civil War, America could justifiably be called a “Christian nation,” but its Christianity was cultural, not political, the result of vigorous local and national enterprises rather than governmental action.

John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833) had no confidence that America was, or ever had been, a Christian republic.

Six months after the close of the War of 1812 — a war that he had violently opposed — Randolph wrote to Henry Middleton Rutledge that Virginia was “the most ungodly country on the face of the earth, where the Gospel has ever been preached.” And it was, as far as Randolph could see, as much “the case elsewhere in the U.S. . . .” The blame for this could be easily assigned: the influence of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment “infidelity.” His generation had been “a generation of free thinkers, disciples of Hume & Voltaire & Bolingbroke, & there were very few persons, my dear Rutledge, of our years who have not received their first impressions from the same die.” 1

Randolph’s unhappiness will come as a surprise to many Christians who have assumed that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation,” or that Judeo-Christian values played a prominent role in its early life, or that — explicitly or implicitly — Christianity deserves to be recognized as having a special status in the foundations of American life and law. The conviction that an American civil religion exists, and is founded on Christianity, has been fed by images of Washington kneeling in the snows at Valley Forge to pray, by the so-called “black-coat regiment” of chaplains exhorting Revolutionary soldiers to battle against the unholy armies of King George, and by the appeal of the Declaration of Independence to “Nature and Nature’s God” and the “Creator” who has fashioned everyone with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But Rutledge was not merely playing the curmudgeon. Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), who entered Yale College in the 1790s, found — in the heart of old Puritan Connecticut — that

the college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical, and rowdies were plenty. Wine and liquors were kept in many rooms; intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common. . . . Most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, etc., etc. 2

Ashbel Green, who attended Princeton in the 1780s, also found that “open and avowed infidelity” was the order of the day, and “produced incalculable injury to religion and morals throughout our whole country; and its effect on the minds of young men who valued themselves on their genius, and were fond of novel speculations, was the greatest of all.” 3

But it was more than just the Enlightenment that dislocated American priorities at the birth of the republic. It was also the idea of a republic itself. To the extent that the Enlightenment banished all notions of hierarchy from the physical universe, it likewise banished all ideas of hierarchical government, and with it all the apparatus associated with such government, including religion. With no need for a monarchy, a republic based itself entirely upon human longings, human morals, and human consent — not divine ones. Fisher Ames, a Massachusetts congressman, was disgusted by the secular optimism of republican ideas, since they encouraged “the dreams of all the philosophers who think the people angels, rulers devils,” and that “man is a perfectible animal, and all governments are obstacles to his apotheosis. This nonsense is inhaled with every breath.” 4

Nor is there any reliable evidence that Washington knelt in the snows of Valley Forge to pray. To the contrary, Washington never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ once in all his voluminous correspondence, and referred to God as a more-or-less providential force who more-or-less made events happen from a distance. 5 John Adams snarled at the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as an affront to republican reason and caricatured the incarnation as the belief that “that great principle, which has produced this boundless Universe . . . came down to this little ball, to be spit-upon by Jews; and untill this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.” 6 And even though Thomas Jefferson appealed to a “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, the term Creator was as specific as Jefferson cared to get on the subject. More significantly, the federal Constitution banned the imposition of any “religious Test” for holding national office (article 6), and made no reference to a God or a Creator at all. “That very constitution which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish,” complained John Monck Mason, the Presbyterian pastor and provost of Columbia College, “does not so much as recognize his being! . . . Even the savages whom we despise” set “a better example.” When Alexander Hamilton was asked about this omission years later, his reply was the perfect echo of John Randolph’s estimate of Virginia: “I declare,” said Hamilton to Princeton’s Samuel Miller, “we forgot.” Or maybe worse. When the aged Benjamin Franklin exhorted the Constitutional Convention to open their sessions with prayer, his motion was met with a polite refusal, since the public might conclude that a call to prayer signaled that the Convention was in so much peril that it had no hope apart from divine intervention, and “the alarm” such a suggestion would arouse would “be as likely to do good as ill.” 7

Unevangelical America

Perhaps our problem in Christianizing America’s origins lies in too strict a definition of Christianity. Even if the Founders gave no direct sanction to religious belief, surely the fact that so many of the original British colonies that became the United States originally had legal establishments of Christian churches, and that so many of them were designed by their founders as religious societies and refuges, means that there was a deep and latent Christianity of a general sort at the time of the Founding.

But a latent Christianity is not always a deep one, and it is not hard to find places in early America where Christianity was exceedingly thin on the ground. Charles Woodmason, a Church of England missionary in South Carolina, was appalled in the 1760s at the “open profanation of the Lords Day in this Province. . . . Among the low Class, it is abus’d by Hunting fishing fowling, and Racing — By the Women in froliking and Wantonness. By others in Drinking Bouts and Card Playing — Even in and about Charlestown, the Taverns have more visitants than the Churches.” Woodmason found that “there are no Clergy in North Carolina,” which (as he discovered) meant that “thro’ want of Ministers to marry and thro’ the licentiousness of the People, many hundreds live in Concubinage — swopping their Wives as Cattel, and living in a State of Nature, more irregularly and unchastely than the Indians.” 8 Even in the more demure atmosphere of Pennsylvania, the German Lutheran missionary Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was shocked at how quickly his fellow German emigrants lost any sense of Christian identity in the free air of the New World:

During this past fall [1749] many ships have again arrived with German people who spread out in crowds scattered throughout the country. It is almost impossible to describe how few good and how many exceptionally godless, wicked people have come into this country every year. The whole country is being flooded with ordinary, extraordinary, and unprecedented wickedness and crimes. 9

Much of this religious indifference was shaken by the outburst in the 1740s of what became known in America as the Great Awakening, a tremendous revival of religion centered mostly in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. But the Awakening was also comparatively limited in time and space: it lasted only from about 1740 till 1742, and passed almost completely over Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, Georgia, and even parts of New England. It might not, in fact, have created much of permanent effect had it not found an enormously talented and ingenious spokesman in the person of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Then, in 1775, came the American Revolution and another opportunity for Christianity to assert itself. Many of the Presbyterian and Congregational clergy who had supported the Awakening now swung enthusiastically behind the Revolutionaries. John Witherspoon, the Presbyterian president of Princeton College and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, announced that “the separation of this country from Britain has been of God” and called on “the Presbyterian body” to rally to “the cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature.” 10 “Call this war . . . by whatever name you may,” added a Hessian captain in the British army in 1778, “but call it not an American Rebellion, it is nothing more or less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian rebellion.” 11

But the war took a more severe toll on church life than anyone expected, and what made the cost of the war harder to bear was the meager recognition the new republic gave to the parsons and the churches that had supported it. The political leadership of the Revolution — Washington, Jefferson, Adams — marched to the rhythm of the Enlightenment, leaving its Christian advocates somewhere far behind. “The late contest with Great Britain, glorious as it hath been for their country, hath been peculiarly unfortunate for the clergy,” wrote Peter Thacher, a Massachusetts parson, in 1783. “Perhaps no set of men, whose hearts were so thoroughly engaged in it, or who contributed in so great a degree to its success, have suffered more by it.” 12 Everywhere, old forms of traditional Christianity seemed to be on the defensive. New Jersey eliminated all state funding for churches in 1776, and New York followed suit in 1777; in Massachusetts, the new republican constitution of 1780 maintained public taxation for church purposes, but it now allowed taxpayers to choose which church they wished to support. 13

Building a Wall

It was Virginia that became the test case for how much — or how little — public recognition Christianity was going to be left with in the new republic, and it was mostly going to be little. At the urging of the great Revolutionary orator Patrick Henry, Virginia led the fight to strip the Church of England of its legal status as the state church of the colony, but it still provided afterward for the levying of church taxes and the distribution of them among the various churches in Virginia. 14 This half measure did not satisfy Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. Both of them were relentless in their determination to force Christianity off the public square of Virginia republicanism: in 1779, as governor of revolutionary Virginia, Jefferson withdrew state funding for the two professorships in divinity at the College of William & Mary, and in 1785, Madison persuaded the Virginia legislature to drop all public funding for religion. 15

That, in turn, set the stage for Jefferson’s and Madison’s attitudes toward public religion on the federal level. Madison, representing Virginia in the first federal Congress in 1789, was responsible for composing the provision in the first amendment that committed Congress to making “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” And while this seems on the surface to describe no more than a hands-off attitude toward public religion, one member of the House of Representatives feared that it cloaked “a tendency to abolish religion altogether.” 16 And Madison’s subsequent use of the amendment makes it clear that he intended it as a significant disfranchisement of Christianity in the American republic. In 1790, Madison opposed counting ministers as ministers on the federal census, and he opposed the hiring of chaplains for Congress and for the American military as “some sort of alliance or coalition between Government & Religion.” 17

Jefferson, acting on the same principles, believed that instead “of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children,” it would be better for Virginia educators to teach so that children’s “memories may be here stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history,” and he was trying as late as 1818 to prevent the new University of Virginia from even allowing a classroom to be used for Sunday worship. 18 Jefferson summed up his attitude toward public religion very succinctly in 1802, replying to a letter from the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ . . . thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” 19 The image of a “wall of separation” was not intended as a compliment: it was meant to convey the shutting-out of religion from public discourse.

Deists, Unitarians, and Masons

If any religion looked to be ascendant in the new republic, it was not Christianity, but Deism — the simplistic belief of a clockmaker God who wound up the universe and then let it tick away on its own, without any personal intervention. The Revolutionary veteran and Vermont republican Ethan Allen pushed Deism into public debate by publishing a crude but highly effective tract, Reason the Only Oracle of Mankind (1785), in which he freely attacked reliance on the Bible and the “superstitions” of prayer and miracles. Allen was followed by an even better-known veteran of the Revolution, Thomas Paine, who had made himself into a republican hero in 1776 with his famous anti-monarchy pamphlet, Common Sense . Paine was in an incessant ferment of revolution, and joined ranks with Deism by publishing The Age of Reason in 1794 (a second part followed in 1796). Paine was even cruder than Allen, and even more effective: “What is it that we have learned from this pretended thing called revealed religion? Nothing that is useful to man and everything that is dishonourable to his Maker,” Paine yelled. “What is it that the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder.” 20

“If any religion looked to be ascendant in the new republic, it was not Christianity, but Deism.”

A more complacent and elitist version of Deism was Unitarianism. Like Deism, Unitarianism was an English development, but it caught on in a big way in America after the Great Awakening as an alternative religion for New Englanders who could not stomach Jonathan Edwards and the Awakeners. William Ellery Channing declared in his famous 1819 Baltimore sermon, “Unitarian Christianity,” that “we believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God.” Hence, Jesus Christ was not God, and did not share any divine attributes with God. Channing immediately hedged by adding that Unitarians continued to believe that Jesus was nevertheless “the Son of God . . . the brightness of the divine mercy,” whose death provides atonement and salvation. But Channing firmly rejected that idea that Jesus was also divine. God was a “Unity,” and shared nothing of his attributes with Jesus (thus the term Unitarian ). 21

The purposes that Unitarianism served in New England were just as often served elsewhere in the new republic by Free Masonry. Free Masonry had its origins in the peculiar hunger of the Enlightenment for a religious ritualism that could be squared with the glorification of reason. Although Free Masonry developed out of the fraternities, guilds, and lodges of Scottish and English stonemasons in the 1600s, by the eighteenth century it had become a secretive order for wealthy and aristocratic English-speaking male elites, and it developed rituals and a quasi-theology that allowed it to offer upper-class Anglo-Americans a fashionable and restrictive version of republican religion. The secrecy that shrouded the American Masonic lodges makes it nearly impossible to estimate the number of American Masons; but that secrecy also gave it an alluring sense of esoteric and mysterious ritual and republican brotherhood, and prominent Americans from Washington and Franklin to Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson found themselves drawn to the Masons.

All of them together — Masons, Deists, Unitarians — thought they were the wave of the future. Thomas Jefferson, surveying the scene in 1822, rejoiced “that in this blessed country of free enquiry and belief, which has surrendered [its] creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests . . . there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.” 22 What is amazing about that prophecy is how clearly Jefferson should have seen, even in 1822, that such a likelihood had already disappeared. The United States may not have been a Christian republic at its start, but it soon became one.

Revival and Republican Virtue

Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism between 1780 and 1860. Instead of traditional Christian denominations fading into a Unitarian future, they embarked on a voyage of aggression, expansion, and empire-building that easily outstripped the overall growth of the entire American population. The Congregationalists jumped off from 750 congregations in New England in 1780 to spread across upstate New York, northern Ohio, and into lower Michigan, and by 1860 had grown to 2,200 congregations; the Presbyterians, who counted about 500 congregations in 1780, counted 6,400 in 1860; the Methodists, who had hardly existed as a denomination in the 1780s, included nearly 20,000 congregations in 1860, while the Baptists, who had only 400 congregations in the United States in 1780, included 12,150 in 1860. Even Roman Catholics, who had organized only about 50 congregations and missions by 1780, had grown to 2,500 congregations in 1860. Between 1780 and 1820, American religious denominations built 10,000 new churches, and by 1860, they had quadrupled that number. 23 How, in the name of Thomas Jefferson, had this unlooked-for result occurred?

“Instead of republicanism absorbing religion, religion co-opted and absorbed the energies of republicanism.”

Two major reasons explain the sudden explosion of Christian influence in American life. The first is the resiliency of revivals. The writings of Jonathan Edwards on the Awakening of the 1740s were developed by his pupils into a full-blown blueprint for fresh waves of revival. Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), upon taking over the presidency of Yale College in 1795, aggressively beat down the “infidelity of the Tom Paine school” that Lyman Beecher had found there as a student. Beecher recalled that the students challenged Dwight by handing him

a list of subjects for class disputation . . . [and] to their surprise he selected this: “Is the Bible the word of God?” and told them to do their best. He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly [in the college chapel] for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head. 24

This “Second Great Awakening,” which is variously dated between 1800 and 1825, could not be contained to New England. Edwardsean preachers and converts followed the out-migration of New Englanders to New York and Ohio, and there, influential outposts of Edwardsean revivalism sprang up, to the point where western New York was home to so many revivals that it was referred to as “the burned-over district.” Of course, the revivals spun off a number of unlooked-for variations — Mormonism, the Shakers, the Millerites, Matthias the Prophet — but their energy was palpable, and even the variations were testimony to revivalism’s pervasiveness.

The second force that moved Christianity to the front of American culture’s attention was the need of republics for virtue. Every good republican knew that republics were politically fragile: lacking the old monarchical cement of patronage or hierarchy, republics depended for their existence solely on the virtue — the disinterested benevolence and self-sacrifice — of their people. But where was virtue to come from? The French Revolution had demonstrated that the ethics of the Enlightenment were no protection from the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. What then could guarantee the virtue of republican nations? The answer to that question was promptly offered by John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith, as the two successive Presbyterian presidents of Princeton College before and after the Revolution: only religion can guarantee virtue, and therefore the promotion of Christianity is a prerequisite to keeping the American republic virtuous and prosperous. “To promote true religion,” argued Witherspoon, “is the best and most effectual way of making a virtuous and regular people”; by contrast, added Smith, let “infidelity” and atheism prevail, and virtue would “cease to exist, and the bonds of society, which are effectually maintained only by the public morals, would hasten to be dissolved.” The proper conclusion, then, would be that even in a republic, the government should offer sponsorship to Christianity, and “the magistrate . . . enact laws for the punishment of profanity and impiety.” 25

Despite Jefferson’s and Madison’s best republican efforts to close the door on Christianity, their efforts were frequently undone by the courts, who had more than a little concern about virtue. The great Supreme Court justice Joseph Story declared that Christianity was in fact a necessary component of the English common-law tradition, and offered the “only solid basis of civil society.” 26 And in 1844, writing as an associate justice of the Court, Story upheld the decision of the lower federal courts in the case of Vidal v. Girard’s Executors , which permitted the breaking of the will left by the notorious Philadelphia banker and atheist, Stephen Girard, in order to permit religious teachers onto the grounds of a school that Girard had founded in Philadelphia and into which he had declared, by the terms of in his will, a clergyman should never be permitted to enter. Story declared that this was “derogatory and hostile to the Christian religion, and so is void, as being against the common law and public policy of Pennsylvania.” 27 By defining virtue as Christianity, Christianity could be treated as a necessary part of the republic’s life, and allowed the public role that Jefferson and Madison had struggled to prevent.

Cultural, Not Political, Christianity

The results of the Second Great Awakening, and the co-optation of virtue, paved the way, in 1835, for Alexis de Tocqueville to remark, “There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” And it was, continued Tocqueville, “a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.” 28 Charles Grandison Finney, the most famous revival preacher in America since Edwards, rushed to claim that his own Presbyterianism was but “Church Republicanism,” and even Episcopalians like Calvin Colton declared that “the genius of the American Episcopal Church is republican.” 29

But this was not a political achievement. In 1864, proponents of a “Bible amendment,” which would have inserted an explicit recognition of Christianity into the Constitution’s preamble, came close to getting Abraham Lincoln’s presidential endorsement. 30 But only close. Christian America would, instead, be culturally Christianized. Still, for those who believe that politics lies downstream of culture, this was no small accomplishment, and all the more significant for the fact that the Constitution provided a comparatively spare and noncommittal framework for governing the republic, thus allowing for a Christian culture to enjoy vast sway in the nineteenth century.

Nor was the achievement of a Christian America the gift of the American Founders, or a part of the design of the American republic. That Christianity in America arrived at a place of commanding influence in American life in the years before the Civil War was the product of ceaseless cultural energy by Christians themselves in the decades after 1800. Never again, wrote the literary critic Alfred Kazin, “would there be so much honest, deeply felt invocation of God’s purpose.” 31 If that influence has seemed to wane, then perhaps the solution will lie in the renewal of that energy, that invocation, that culture, rather than in a myth.

John Randolph, in Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 330.  ↩

Charles Beecher, ed., Autobiography, Correspondence etc., of Lyman Beecher (New York: Harper & Bros., 1865), 1:43.  ↩

Rev. Ashbel Green to W.B. Sprague, April 10, 1832, in W.B. Sprague, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Glasgow: William Collins, 1832), 408.  ↩

Fisher Ames to Timothy Pickering, November 5, 1799, in Works of Fisher Ames: With a Selection from His Speeches , ed. Seth Ames (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 1:263.  ↩

John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), 173; Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 158; Edward G. Lengel, Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder in Myth and Memory (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 13.  ↩

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 10:415.  ↩

“Divine Judgments,” in The Writings of the Late John M. Mason, D.D. (New York: Ebenezer Mason, 1832), 1:50; Benjamin Franklin Morris, Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1864), 248; Benjamin Franklin, June 28, 1787, in “Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 as reported by James Madison,” Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States , ed. C. Tansill (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1927), 295–97.  ↩

Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant , ed. Richard J. Hooker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 15, 47, 61.  ↩

Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, The Notebook of a Colonial Clergyman , eds. Theodore Tappert and J.W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 39.  ↩

John Witherspoon, “The Dominion of providence Over the Passions of Men” (1776) and “Thanksgiving Sermon” (1782), in The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1802), 3:37, 79.  ↩

Johann Heinrichs, in Charles A. Hanna, The Scotch-Irish: Or, The Scot in North Britain, North Ireland, and North America (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1902), 1:155.  ↩

Peter Thacher, in The Works of Nathanael Emmons , ed. Jacob Ide (Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1861), 1:131.  ↩

Leonard W. Levy, “No Establishment of Religion: The Original Understanding,” in Judgments: Essays on American Constitutional History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 196–201.  ↩

Thomas S. Kidd, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 167–74.  ↩

Robert Polk Thompson, “The Reform of the College of William and Mary, 1763–1780,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115, no. 3 (June 1971): 208; Richard Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 164–65.  ↩

Peter Sylvester (NY), “Freedom of Conscience,” August 15, 1789, in Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856 (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 1:137.  ↩

James Madison to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison: Fourth President of the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1865), 3:274.  ↩

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Trenton: Mathew Carey, 1803), 200–201, and “Rockfish Gap Report of the University of Virginia Commissioners,” August 4, 1818, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 13:217–18.  ↩

Thomas Jefferson to Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, and Stephen S. Nelson, a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association in the State of Connecticut (January 1, 1802), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 36:254–56.  ↩

Paine, The Age of Reason , ed. Moncure D. Conway (1896; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 186.  ↩

William Ellery Channing, “Unitarian Christianity,” in Unitarian Christianity And Other Essays , ed. Irving H. Bartlett (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 15, 16.  ↩

Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , ed. A.E. Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 15:385.  ↩

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 270.  ↩

Beecher, Autobiography , 1:30.  ↩

John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy and Eloquence (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1810), 112, 114; Samuel Stanhope Smith, in Fred Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783–1837 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 19.  ↩

Joseph Story, “The Value and Importance of Legal Studies,” August 25, 1829, in The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story , ed. W.W. Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1852), 528.  ↩

Vidal et al v. Girard’s Executors, in Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, January Term, 1844 , ed. B.C. Howard (Philadelphia: T. & J.W. Johnson, 1844), 197.  ↩

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , trans. Henry Reeve (London: Longman, Green, 1862), 1:355.  ↩

Charles Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Lectures (Oberlin, OH: James Steele, 1840), 1:246; Calvin Colton, The Genius and Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (London: J.S. Hodson, 1853), 172.  ↩

Morton Borden, “The Christian Amendment,” Civil War History 25, no. 2 (June 1979): 155–67.  ↩

Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (New York: Knopf, 1997), 132.  ↩

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45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation’

• 3. Views of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’ and opinions about ‘Christian nationalism’

Table of Contents

• Views about how major parties, Biden administration approach religion
• Partisanship, religion and views of U.S. as ‘Christian nation’
• 1. Religion in public life
• 2. Religion and the Supreme Court
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Most Americans think the founders of America intended for the U.S. to be a “Christian nation,” more than four-in-ten think the United States should be a Christian nation, and a third say the country is a Christian nation today. However, Americans’ views of what it means to be a Christian nation are wide-ranging and often ambiguous. To some, being a Christian nation implies Christian-based laws and governance. For others it means the subtle guidance of Christian beliefs and values in everyday life, or even simply a population with faith in something bigger.

Many Americans are unfamiliar with the concept of “Christian nationalism,” and among those who have heard of it, more people express an unfavorable view of Christian nationalism than say they have a favorable impression of it. Nevertheless, like the descriptions of Christian nation, Americans’ views of Christian nationalism envision varying levels of Christian influence on the nation, ranging from strict theocratic rule to merely embracing moral values such as helping others.

This chapter explores these and other findings regarding the public’s views of the U.S. as a Christian nation and of its attitudes toward Christian nationalism.

Americans are divided about Christianity’s role in the country, have diverse ideas about what it means to be a ‘Christian nation’

The survey asked half of respondents whether they think the founders “originally intended” for the United States to be a Christian nation, whether the country “is now” a Christian nation, and whether it “should be” a Christian nation. 4

Most adults (60%) say the founders of the United States originally intended for it to be a Christian nation. A third say the U.S. is currently a Christian nation. And more than four-in-ten Americans (45%) say the country should be a Christian nation.

Compared with non-Christians, Christians are much more likely to say the founders intended for the U.S. to be a Christian nation (69% vs. 44%) and that it should be a Christian nation (62% vs. 16%). However, Christians are less likely than non-Christians to say the U.S. currently is a Christian nation (30% vs. 40%).

Eight-in-ten White evangelical Protestants (81%) say the country’s founders intended it to be a Christian nation, making them the Christian group most heavily inclined toward this view. Black Protestants (57%) and Hispanic Catholics (54%) are the least likely Christians to hold this view, though half or more in both of these groups also say the founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation.

The vast majority of White evangelical Protestants (81%) say the U.S. should be a Christian nation, as do roughly two-thirds of Black Protestants (65%). Only about a third of Hispanic Catholics (36%) share this view.

There also are sizable differences between political parties on the place of Christianity in the United States’ national identity. Two-thirds of Republicans and independents who lean toward the GOP (67%) say the U.S. should be a Christian nation – more than double the share of Democrats and Democratic leaners with the same view (29%). Republicans are also far more likely than Democrats to say the founders intended for the country to be a Christian nation (76% vs. 47%), and they are less likely to think the country is presently a Christian nation (29% vs. 39%).

Additionally, perspectives vary substantially on these questions among Americans of different age groups. About three-quarters of Americans ages 65 and older (73%) think the founders intended for the U.S. to be a Christian nation, compared with half of those ages 18 to 29. And roughly six-in-ten Americans ages 65 and older think the U.S. should be a Christian nation, compared with about a quarter of adults under 30. Similar shares across age groups think the country is currently a Christian nation.

Respondents who received these questions were also asked the open-ended question, “In your own words, what does the phrase ‘Christian nation’ mean to you?” Overall, Americans express widely varying ideas of what being a Christian nation means.

A third of Americans (34%) express in some way that being a Christian nation involves the general guidance of Christian beliefs and values in society . Within this category, some say it specifically means people having faith in God (11% of all respondents) or Jesus Christ (7%), while others say a Christian nation is one in which the majority of the population is Christian (7%). These types of descriptions are much more common among those who say the U.S. should be a Christian nation compared with those who think the U.S. should not be a Christian nation (48% vs. 23%).

One respondent with this understanding defines a Christian nation as “people that believe in God and follow his word and beliefs.” Another says, “A nation that loves God and others with no discrimination.” Many respondents also express some version of “in God we trust” or “one nation under God.”

Another 12% of the public describes a Christian nation in terms of being guided by beliefs and values, but without specifically referencing God or Christian concepts . They describe a Christian nation as one where, for example, “Overall, the nation as a whole has a basic faith and believes all people, regardless of race or creed, be treated equally. A solid belief in our humanity and willingness to act upon it.” Others reference “tolerance, morals and ethics,” “caring and loving,” “a nation of faith,” and “love all. No matter of differences.” One-in-five Americans who think the U.S. should be a Christian nation (21%) express this understanding, compared with only 4% of those who do not think the U.S. should be a Christian nation.

About one-in-five Americans (18%) describe a Christian nation as having Christian-based laws and governance . Those who think the U.S. should not be a Christian nation are far more likely than those who think the U.S. should be a Christian nation to express this view (30% vs. 6%).

Often, these descriptions are negative. One respondent describes a Christian nation as “being controlled by only people of the Christian faith.” Others say, “To me it means theocracy,” or that a Christian nation means “imposing incredibly selective and often untrue to their own faith ‘rules’ on everyone else, out of a perverse need to control others and feel better about themselves.” One respondent describes a Christian nation as “one whose laws are in line with the Christian faith at the exclusion of other values or opinions.”

In addition to negative views about theocracy, another 11% use other specific negative terms to describe the concept of a Christian nation, including 5% who mention things like bigotry, persecution or White supremacy, and 3% who mention authoritarianism or similar ideas. Virtually all respondents in this category say the U.S. should not be a Christian nation.

At the same time, however, many Americans express positive views of a Christian nation with Christian-based governance. For example, one respondent said, “A nation that honors God and Jesus Christ, and doesn’t make laws that fly in the face of what God has said, and certainly doesn’t persecute Christians for following what they believe the Bible tells them about issues such as homosexuality and abortion being sinful.”

A notable theme throughout respondents’ descriptions of a Christian nation is their ambiguity. It is often unclear exactly how much institutional influence and control people attribute to Christianity in their responses. For example, respondents describe a Christian nation as “a nation that upholds the teachings of God through Jesus Christ,” “a nation that follows biblical values,” and one that “follows the principles of Christianity upon which it was founded.” Responses like these do not clearly spell out whether Christianity would hold an official and privileged place, or rather serve as a more general source of moral guidance. Only responses that specifically mention laws, policies, governance or other national leadership are coded in the “Christian-based laws/governance” category.

Some respondents convey awareness that “Christian nation” can take on a variety of meanings. According to one, “It should mean they follow the teachings of Christ. However, now it can mean extremist, money-loaded, White nationalists pushing their agenda.” Another claims, “It should mean that the nation is guided by the teachings of Christ, but most Christian politicians wish to exploit religion in a manner Christ would not approve.” Several respondents suggest that its meaning recently changed: “I used to think it was a positive view, but now with the MAGA crowd, I view it as racist, homophobic, anti-woman.”

Similarly, some respondents see the idea of a Christian nation as a political tool. As one respondent says, “To me it means pandering to a subset of our population to get money and votes.” Other descriptions in this category include “ruled by religious propaganda,” “pretending to be Christian, but yet not being Christian, in order to gain politically,” “being used for political purposes,” and “a bunch of hypocrites who use God as a shield to do/say whacky, zany things and everyone’s supposed to brush it off.”

Another 1% of Americans associate the idea of a Christian nation with the notion that America was founded on Christian principles , and that Christian morals and values are a part of its heritage and culture.

Apart from these descriptions, 1% of Americans associate the idea of a Christian nation with conservative groups , such as Republicans, evangelicals and the right wing.

More have negative than positive view of ‘Christian nationalism,’ and many are unfamiliar with the term

The half of survey respondents who were not asked the questions about America as a “Christian nation” were instead asked about their familiarity with the term “Christian nationalism.”

Overall, 45% of Americans say they have heard at least a little about Christian nationalism, including 5% who have heard or read a great deal about it, 9% who have heard quite a bit, 17% who have heard some and 14% who have heard a little.

Non-Christians are more likely than Christians to be familiar with the term (55% vs. 40%), with atheists (78%) and agnostics (63%) being the most familiar.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to have heard or read about Christian nationalism (55% vs. 37%), and younger adults are more likely than older Americans to have familiarity with the term.

U.S. adults who say they have at least a little familiarity with Christian nationalism are more likely to have an unfavorable than favorable view of it. A quarter of U.S. adults (24%) have an unfavorable view of Christian nationalism, while only 5% say they have a favorable view of the concept. An additional 8% say they have neither a favorable nor unfavorable view of Christian nationalism, and a similar share (9%) say they have heard at least a little about it but do not know enough to have an opinion or decline to answer.

In every religious group analyzed in the survey, 10% or fewer say they have a favorable view of Christian nationalism. Atheists (74%) and agnostics (56%) are especially likely to have an unfavorable view of it.

Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to have an unfavorable view toward Christian nationalism (39% vs. 9%). And younger Americans are more likely than older Americans to view Christian nationalism unfavorably.

The reasons for Americans’ opinions toward Christian nationalism become clearer in light of their understandings of Christian nationalism. Respondents who said they had heard or read at least a little about Christian nationalism were asked the open-ended question, “In your own words, what does the phrase ‘Christian nationalism’ mean to you?” In general, those with differing feelings toward Christian nationalism express different ideas about what the concept means.

Overall, 13% of U.S. adults offer explanations of Christian nationalism that involve Christianity playing a dominant and institutionalized role in society – for example, basing American governance and laws on Christian beliefs and principles, or establishing a theocracy. Respondents in this category describe Christian nationalism as wanting America to be an “officially Christian nation” made of Christian people, “imposing Christian beliefs on American citizens,” giving Christianity a “privileged” place over other identities, or “excluding” or “persecuting” non-Christians.

These views are most prevalent among Americans with unfavorable opinions toward Christian nationalism, with 42% in this group describing Christian nationalism in this way. One respondent defines Christian nationalism as “elevating one religion above another. It is making this a theocracy and not giving people freedom to practice their religion or giving them freedom from religion. It is dangerously wrapping one religion and love for America together. It is weaponizing the flag.” Another describes the concept as “a group of people who not only want to impose their religious views on you through policies and laws, but also feel if they don’t get their way they are somehow being discriminated against. And they view their religious views as patriotic, which is asinine.” One of the more detailed responses, which captures the sentiments of several respondents with unfavorable views, claims:

“Christian nationalism is the belief that a nation should become a theocracy whose leaders all practice publicly the tenets of a single, lobotomized interpretation of Christianity – a creed wielded by its government as a means of social control and manipulation. Religion and nation fuse in the minds of its leaders, transcend all other concerns, then crush all opposition, foreign and domestic. Faith, fear and rage reign as one.”

As conveyed in the above quote, 2% of all Americans say that Christian nationalism is essentially a tool strategically used by leaders to help appeal to American citizens or to help certain Americans justify their political views . In their telling, it involves using familiar beliefs, concepts and phrases from Christianity as a cover-up for what are really sociopolitical attitudes. One respondent explains that Christian nationalism is “a political movement that uses Christian values as camouflage” and another calls it “totally wrapping up political behavior in religious clothes.” Another 2% of Americans describe Christian nationalism as the blending or mixing up of faith and politics so that they are indistinguishable .

Some U.S. adults – again, particularly those with unfavorable views of Christian nationalism – also describe Christian nationalism using other negative attributes . These include: “radical” or “extremist,” “hypocritical,” “cult”-like or “fanatical,” “fascist” or “authoritarian,” “misogynistic,” “hateful” or “angry,” “ignorant,” “anti-democratic,” and “[falsely] believing they are under attack.” This group makes up 30% of those with unfavorable attitudes toward Christian nationalism.

This also includes 3% of all Americans (13% of those with negative attitudes toward Christian nationalism) who describe Christian nationalism as White supremacist and racist. One respondent says Christian nationalism means “White dudes who are scared to lose power to women and minorities hiding behind a Bible they don’t even believe in to retain power.”

A similar share of U.S. adults (3%) describe Christian nationalism as the positive influence of faith and morals in society, with roots in Christianity . This view is especially common among those with a positive impression of Christian nationalism (27%). People in this category tend to view the Christian faith as a general “guide” for society, and say Christian nationalism connotes values, such as “family,” “unity” and “fellowship and goodwill to all.” One respondent describes Christian nationalism as “patriotic Christians who believe in God, family and country, morality and kindness.” Another respondent describes it as “a national consciousness centered on biblical precepts.”

A small share of the public (2%) – including 9% of those with favorable views of Christian nationalism – describe Christian nationalism with reference to the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and has always had a distinct Christian heritage . For some, this includes America being favored by God. One of the more detailed responses states:

“It is the belief that the American nation is, and has always been, defined by and identified with Christianity, and the government should take an active role to hold on to that truth. Instead, our elected leaders – at all levels – have bowed to cultural, societal change, removing Christian principles from our daily life. How’s that working out? Gun violence is rampant, total disregard for traditional families, by which the trickle-down effect is gender confusion, rampant mental illness and fatherless homes where babies are taught to have more babies. Kick God out of school and look what you get. The ills of this nation today lie almost entirely at the doorstep of the liberal Democratic Party.”

Finally, a small number of respondents (fewer than 1%) claim that Christian nationalism is a concept made up by liberals and/or the media to insult Christians . One respondent says that Christian nationalism is “some gobbledygook made up by progressives trying to create a boogeyman that they hope most people will fear.” Another calls it a “derogatory term used by the left to push their White supremacy conspiracy theories.” And a respondent who views Christian nationalism favorably says that “Christian nationalism these days is a political term used to vilify anything with a slight Christian lean by those who oppose Christianity in general when America itself was founded on the ‘word of God.’”

One respondent conveys how Christian nationalism is used as a tool by American citizens and leaders on both the political left and right:

“It seems to be an inappropriate mixing of faith and governance in the imagination of those who cannot stand our previous president. The evangelical right has gotten too enamored with political influence, which the political right is happy to exploit. The progressive left uses the term as a pejorative to denigrate the Trump wing implying that only religious leftists are suitable for involvement in national politics. It seems mostly a lie used for political advantage. Which is sort of how politics works.”

Respondents also associate Christian nationalism with particular groups and public figures . Those mentioned include: conservatives and the right wing, evangelicals, fundamentalist Christians, Republicans, former President Donald Trump and the “MAGA cult,” and Southerners. A handful of respondents also suggest that Christian nationalism is a newly emerging party or group of its own.

As with Americans’ views of “Christian nation,” ambiguity is a recurrent theme throughout respondents’ descriptions of Christian nationalism. Their views fall along a spectrum, from strict theocratic rule on one end to a loose embrace of morals, such as helping others, on the other end. It is often unclear exactly how much control and influence Christianity has in their descriptions. For example, respondents describe Christian nationalism as “living under the beliefs of Christian values,” “religion having a major impact on the political process,” and “the promotion of Christian ideals within the political sphere.”

Though Americans with unfavorable views of Christian nationalism often describe it in a dominant way and those with favorable views often describe it as a positive influence, sometimes their views transcend these categories. For example, a considerable portion of those with favorable views of Christian nationalism describe it as a form of Christian dominance in society (11%).

In addition to the 55% of Americans who are unfamiliar with the concept of Christian nationalism (or declined to say whether they have heard of it), 18% say they have heard at least a little about it but also say they do not know how to describe Christian nationalism, and an additional 2% give answers too ambiguous to understand.

• A randomly selected half of respondents received the survey’s questions about being a “Christian nation,” while the other half of respondents received the questions about “Christian nationalism.” No respondents received both groups of questions. See Topline for complete details. ↩

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Is america a christian nation what both left and right get wrong.

Americans love their history, but seldom think historically. The problem is not that they don't pay enough attention to history. Americans spend millions each year on heritage vacations and history books. Politicians and pundits use history to justify their views. The problem is a common propensity to mangle the past to suit current needs, a sort of indoctrination by historical example. Too many believe that the study of distant societies and events is worthless unless it is somehow useful to prove a current point. So what do they do when the past disappoints? Or when historians tell them something in the past that doesn't conform to the way they view the world? Ideally, when this happens they should follow the evidence and do their best to tell stories that reflect the past in all its complexity. But this is hard to do. Consider the current debate over the relationship between Christianity and the founding of the United States. Over the last two years I've given several public lectures that tried to answer the question of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation. I never know how my audiences will respond to my presentation, especially since I am a Christian who teaches at a church-related college. But I'm sure that most are more interested in having their answer to this question confirmed by historical data than in being confronted with a past that they find uncomfortable. Those who insist that America was founded as a Christian nation run roughshod over the historical record. They use the words of the Founding Fathers to support Republican jeremiads on the moral decay of American life. If only this country could return to its Christian roots, they say nostalgically, everything would be okay. And how do they demonstrate that America was founded as a Christian nation? By selectively choosing texts from the writings of the Founders without any effort to explore them in the context of the 18th-century world in which they were written. Just because John Adams and George Washington quoted from the Bible or made reference to God does not mean that they were trying to construct a Christian nation. Granted, the Founding Fathers were the products of a Christian culture, but most of them were never comfortable with the beliefs that defined this culture. Very few of them would qualify for membership in today's evangelical churches. Even so, the leaders of the Christian Right have demonstrated that they can find a useable past in the words of the Founders. A recent survey by Vanderbilt University's First Amendment Center found that 74 percent of Republicans and 50 percent of Democrats believe that the U.S. Constitution established a Christian nation. Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy, recently deceased evangelical leaders who led in promoting the idea that America is a Christian nation, did their work well. But before we go too far in condemning the Christian Right on this front, let's remember that the secular left is not immune to errors of historical thinking. While evangelicals misinterpret the references to God in the words of the Founding Fathers, their critics simply have no idea what to make of those same quotations. Since they can't fathom why people today would make religious faith an essential part of their everyday lives, they have little interest in making sense of past worlds where such beliefs were important. Such approaches to history seldom enable us to better understand the past. Thinking historically does not mean that people cannot learn from the past -- they should and must. But they should be careful how they use historical examples. Exploring the past requires a concern for what it was really like. The past is like a foreign country. Those who enter it as guests should try to understand its foreignness in a way that respects our dead ancestors who inhabit it. We must not invade the past with the goal of remaking it into our own image. The past may not always be useful when we want to invoke it. But only when we confront it head-on, without preconceived agendas, will we be able to learn from it and let it transform us. This is the lesson that both the Christian Right and some of its secular opponents need to take to heart.

Related Links McCain says Constitution established US as a Christian country

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Holier Than Thou

Politics and the pulpit in america, by james morone.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

By kevin m. kruse.

Americans have been arguing about the role of religion in government since the earliest days of the republic. In 1789, soon after taking office, President George Washington declared a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer.” God had bestowed a republican government on the United States, said Washington, and the nation ought to express its gratitude. Just 12 years later, President Thomas Jefferson abruptly canceled the ritual. The First Amendment, explained Jefferson, erected a “wall of separation between church and state.”

Jefferson’s wall could have used a better contractor. Today, there is hardly an aspect of American political life untouched by religion. God seems to be everywhere. The nation’s official motto is “In God We Trust.” The phrase is printed on the nation’s money, affixed behind the Speaker’s dais in the House of Representatives, and engraved over the entrance to the Senate. The Pledge of Allegiance declares a nation “under God,” and—sorry, Jefferson—the National Day of Prayer is back (the first Thursday in May); there is even a National Prayer Breakfast (the first Thursday in February). When they address the nation, U.S. presidents almost always conclude with a request that “God bless America.”

All this religiosity isn’t exactly ecumenical: a majority of Americans consider the United States a “Christian nation.” In his fine new book, Kevin Kruse declares that, whatever the public may think today, the founders had no intention of establishing a religious (much less a Christian) republic. For the most part, they agreed with Jefferson and believed in separating church and state.

What, then, explains the religiosity of American politics? Kruse traces its origins back to the 1930s. Conservative business leaders had trouble gaining traction against the New Deal and eventually discovered that moral claims generated more popular enthusiasm than calling for free markets. The business leaders funded a national movement led by religious figures such as James Fifield, Jr., a Congregational minister who preached that the New Deal, with its emphasis on collective responsibility, had introduced a “pagan statism.” Together, these men of the world and men of the cloth engineered a spiritual revival designed to shake Americans free from creeping collectivism.

Whatever the American public may think today, the founders had no intention of establishing a religious (much less a Christian) republic.

This pro-business, anticommunist, politicized Christianity seemed to find its political champion when Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952. But Eisenhower recast the movement (Kruse implies he hijacked it) as a more ecumenical, all-American consensus that would unite the nation in the Cold War struggle against the godless Soviet Union. Eisenhower set the agenda, and Congress—Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals—eagerly followed. Many of the most familiar manifestations of religion in government—the legislatively mandated allusions to God in the country’s official motto, on its money, and in its Pledge of Allegiance—emerged during the Eisenhower era.

Kruse masterfully excavates this tale. But it is only one episode in a larger story that runs through U.S. history, and Kruse’s book raises questions that lie beyond the scope of his study: Exactly how does religion operate in U.S. politics? What came before and after the mid-twentieth-century period that Kruse focuses on? And what’s likely to happen next in American religious politics?

GOD'S COUNTRY

Most rich nations long ago evolved from mostly religious to mostly secular. Today in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, fewer than 20 percent of citizens say they regularly attend church. In contrast, 40 percent of Americans say they attend services weekly, and 70 percent say they go a few times a year. The most familiar explanation for this disparity is the vibrant religious marketplace in the United States. In contrast to nations with an official church supported by taxes, the U.S. religious scene has always been open to anyone who can draw a paying congregation. 


The result—locked into law by the U.S. Constitution’s protections against the establishment of an official religion—is a land of many creeds. And that, in turn, has an important political ramification: there is a religion to support every perspective. Across U.S. history, churches have inspired revolutionaries and reactionaries, abolitionists and slaveholders, liberals and conservatives. Kruse’s story focuses on the Eisenhower administration co-opting a right-wing religious revival and rendering it palatable to a broad political center. But today, religion reflects polarization rather than consensus: African American churches bus their largely Democratic congregants to the polls, while white evangelical preachers warn that it would be a sin against the Almighty to cast a “blue” vote. Many foreign observers find this astonishing; most Americans see it as perfectly normal.

Are you there, God? The Obamas at the National Prayer Breakfast, February 2012.

The United States is also different from other developed countries in a less familiar way: Americans don’t mind meddling clerics. As the political scientist Anna Grzymala-Busse has recently shown, people in most rich nations condemn religious involvement in politics. Even in highly churched states, such as Croatia, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal, between 70 and 90 percent of the public rejects religious efforts to influence government. Americans have been much slower to object (although impatience has been on the rise). The difference might stem, once again, from the multiplicity of U.S. religious politics; in contrast to places where religion stoutly supports the ancien régime, in the United States, every political faction draws on religion.

In broad historical terms, religion cycles through American politics in three great steps. First, preachers denounce a rising tide of secularism, false religion, and the government policies that encourage them. Occasionally, these jeremiads leak into mainstream culture and the mass media begin to reverberate with a warning: Change your ways, Americans, or there will be hell to pay.

The second phase begins when a powerful politician—during the twentieth century, usually a president—answers the religious call and champions the crusade, ushering the religious reformers and their ideas into his or her political coalition. The reformers win some changes but grow disillusioned when the reforms fail to live up to expectations. Politicians make unreliable moralists, leaving the churches to rediscover an ancient truth: religious life, devoted to fundamental principles, sits awkwardly in the world of power and political expediency.

In the final stage, after achieving some goals and seeing others watered down or cast aside, the movement begins to come apart, as every coalition (and revival) eventually does. Fervor wanes. The religious battalions get tired of compromising and drift away from politics—until a new generation of activists springs up and the cycle begins again.

BIG TENT REVIVAL

That cycle has shaped three religious revivals during the past 80 years: think of them as the Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan dispensations. In each case, a president seized on a powerful religious movement and used it to rewrite the American relationship between politics and faith. 


In the early twentieth century, what came to be known as the Social Gospel movement rose up in the mainline Protestant churches and called on Christians to focus on economic injustice. Its adherents demanded fair wages, aid for the poor, the prohibition of liquor, women’s rights, child labor laws, and steps to drastically reduce economic inequality. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt used the movement to define his policies and denounce his enemies. For example, Roosevelt introduced his plan for Social Security in what he described as a “Sunday sermon.” Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all condemn the “unbrotherly . . . distribution of wealth,” preached Roosevelt, yet the “spirit of Mammon” has crowded out the “eternal principles of God and justice.” The Roosevelt administration touted the president’s agenda as not merely sound policy but also “the Christian thing to do.”

Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan all seized on powerful religious movements and used them to rewrite the American relationship between politics and faith.

Roosevelt and the New Dealers were selective when it came to putting the Social Gospel into practice, casting aside Prohibition and mostly ignoring the women’s agenda. But they crafted a highly religious attack on wealth and privilege. “The moneychangers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” said Roosevelt in his first inaugural address. “We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths,” to “social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” Future Democrats would invoke the Social Gospel—President Barack Obama regularly uses the term—but they would leave out the harsh bits about Mammon and the moneychangers; in these Gordon Gekko times, Roosevelt’s Christian rhetoric sounds radical.

Kruse offers an excellent guide to the next part of the story: a conservative Christian backlash against the New Deal’s version of the Social Gospel. Conservative ministers warned that collectivism offered no path to salvation, public works did not amount to worship, and a faith focused on material matters squandered all of religion’s awe and transcendence. The critique slowly gathered adherents and, as Americans began to turn rightward after World War II, swelled into a national revival.

When Eisenhower took office in 1953, he championed conservative religious ideals, seeing in them the potential to unify Americans during the Cold War. He began his first inaugural address by asking, “Would you permit me the privilege of uttering a little private prayer of my own?” For over a minute, the president beseeched God for cooperation and understanding among people “of differing political faiths.” A month earlier, he had made his most famous religious declaration: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Liberal intellectuals hooted: “a very fervent believer in a very vague religion,” scorned the theologian William Lee Miller. But Congress eagerly signed on to Eisenhower’s ceremonial deism and churned out one emblem of “Christian America” after another, with almost no opposition. Even the American Civil Liberties Union declined to object as the U.S. government infused itself with symbols of Christianity.

But the symbols were the easy part. The limits of this national revival came into focus when policymakers got down to practical details. Most Americans agreed that schoolchildren ought to pray, but exactly which prayers should they say? Faith tugged local officials toward Christian prayer in Mississippi, Mormon prayer in Utah, and nondenominational prayer in New York—which evangelicals denounced as no prayer at all, since it failed to mention Jesus. Finally, in 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and declared that all school prayers breached Jefferson’s wall and were unconstitutional. A similar effort to mandate the presence of Bibles in schools collapsed when different faiths insisted on different translations.

THE GREAT CHRISTIAN COMMUNICATOR

The chaos of the 1960s buried whatever remained of the establishmentarian religious consensus that had thrived during the 1950s. White Americans (outside the South, at least) came to cheer Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Christian nonviolence but were baffled by the rising black Muslim leaders who challenged King. Meanwhile, a new generation of Jeremiahs condemned the hedonistic American people and the immoral state that ruled them. When Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 (still yet to be ratified) and the Supreme Court struck down abortion restrictions in 1973, the religious right rushed back into politics. The Moral Majority became the most visible organization preaching an increasingly popular sermon: pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-morality, and pro-American. The movement soon found a formidable champion in California’s governor, Ronald Reagan. 


When Reagan accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1980, he stopped in the middle of his acceptance speech and went off script, deftly alluding to some shadowy authority that might punish him for performing a forbidden act. “I have thought of something that is not part of my speech and I’m worried over whether I should do it,” he said, before plunging on: “We begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.” The following month, Reagan addressed a national gathering of evangelical and fundamentalist ministers. “I know you can’t endorse me,” he said, again referencing a wall that unjustly separated church and state (and prevented the tax-exempt religious groups from directly aiding his campaign). “But,” Reagan added, “I want you to know that I endorse you.”

Joel Osteen gives the invocation before Annise Parker is publicly sworn in as mayor of Houston, Texas, January 2010.

The Reagan administration introduced religious reforms, changed the tone of American politics, and, inevitably, disappointed its more ardent evangelical supporters. Before Reagan’s tenure, roughly half of all presidential addresses ended with an invocation of God; after him, the number soared to around 90 percent. By drawing Christian fundamentalists into the governing coalition, Reagan committed his party to a fierce attack on abortion, a soft endorsement of biblical inerrancy, and a tough, moralizing stance on bad behavior of every sort. Two existing policies—the “wars” on drugs and crime—became centerpieces of his policy agenda. Crime and poverty, said the president again and again, were not the results of racism or hard times, as the old Social Gospel suggested. Echoing Fifield’s message, Reagan insisted that individuals be held accountable for their own actions. Owing in great part to policies put in place during the Reagan years, the number of Americans behind bars rose fivefold during the 1980s and 1990s.

Reagan’s framing of public policy in moral terms continued to shape politics long after he’d left office. Christian conservatives had no fondness for President Bill Clinton, but on some issues, Clinton hewed fairly closely to the moralism of the Reagan era—for example, ending traditional welfare, which critics had denounced for promoting laziness and promiscuity, and embracing a law-and-order agenda that funded the hiring of around 100,000 new police officers across the nation. The George W. Bush administration even more explicitly embraced moral and religious themes, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when Bush spoke unabashedly about crusades and evildoers.

In the coming years, a full-throated new "social gospel" might rise out of the country’s black churches.

Yet despite its political influence on three decades of U.S. politics, the religious right never quite savored victory. Its most cherished goals—ending abortion, restoring traditional families, cleaning up the culture—remained out of reach. And during the Obama years, the moral and religious climate has shifted even more firmly away from conservative Christian ideals: consider, for instance, the spread of same-sex marriage and the decriminalization and even legalization, in some places, of marijuana. Young people have turned decisively away from organized religion; according to a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center, more than a third of Americans under age 33 do not identify with any church—an unprecedented figure. The trend is particularly stark within Christianity: only 71 percent of Americans now describe themselves as Christian, reflecting a drop of nearly eight percentage points in the past seven years alone. For those reasons, Christian conservatism, although hardly a spent force, will likely wane as a political movement, as the religious politics of the United States seem to have reached another inflection point.

FAITH NO MORE?

Religious ideas emerge and gain momentum over years before finding a political champion. What might the next phase of Christian politics in the United States look like? Two very different possibilities stand out. 


First, a full-throated new social gospel might rise out of the country’s black churches. Most Americans got their first taste of this possible future in 2008, when they heard snippets of a sermon by Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, including the infamous line “Not ‘God Bless America’: God damn America!” But the media storm that engulfed Wright blew right past the preacher’s old-fashioned message: God has grown wrathful over his chosen people’s iniquity and will continue to punish them unless they change their ways. The country’s transgression, as Wright described it, was the traditional Social Gospel sin: “treating our citizens as less than human.” The solutions, Wright insisted, lay in the familiar agenda of racial and social justice.

Although both the left and the right repudiated Wright himself, the next dispensation may very well flow out of majority-black churches like Wright’s. African Americans represent the single most churched group in the nation. Historically black denominations present a fully developed religious vision that draws on both the Social Gospel and the legacy of the civil rights crusade. Outrage over police killings of unarmed black men has produced huge protests all over the country during the past year and could very well spark a powerful 
moral movement.

So-called prosperity preachers and libertarians might find common ground around the idea that individuals should save themselves, without drug wars or welfare programs.

Black religious fervor would be especially formidable if it forged an alliance between African Americans and Hispanic Americans, another group with high rates of church attendance. Both groups bear the brunt of militarized policing and harsh sentencing; both have rallied for social justice, a living wage, and better government services. Together, they compose around 30 percent of the U.S. population. Although there are undeniable tensions between the communities, less likely partners have forged religious coalitions in recent times. The challenge will be finding effective leaders to foster such an alliance and bring it 
to political power.

Another very different possibility lies in the “prosperity gospel.” Many contemporary American pastors have cast aside their hellfire sermons and started focusing instead on personal fulfillment—and riches. God will show you how to “move forward into your bright future,” declares the megachurch minister Joel Osteen. The hip-hop artist Mary J. Blige offers a more ecstatic version of the message. “My God is a God who wants me to have things,” she told an interviewer in 2006. “He wants me to bling!”

The prosperity gospel mixes the Christian ideal of individual salvation with the bootstrapping ethos of Horatio Alger, then adds a touch of New Age blather. It would neatly complement the rising libertarian movement in the United States. Prosperity preachers and libertarians might find common ground around the idea that individuals should save themselves, without drug wars or welfare programs. Prosperity-gospel Christians could provide a moral grounding for the nascent political coalitions around libertarians such as U.S. Senator Rand Paul—pulling together young people cheering legal marijuana and economic conservatives calling for cuts to entitlements.

Kruse’s thoughtful book illustrates a kind of life cycle of American religious politics: fervent social movements rise up, crest with presidential support, and then slip away, leaving behind rituals, rhetoric, rules, and reforms. It is, of course, impossible to know the next turn of the cycle. But if history is a reliable guide, the next moral moment is already stirring somewhere in the culture and waiting for a coalition to push it toward political power.

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• JAMES MORONE is John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. His most recent book is The Devils We Know: Us and Them in America’s Raucous Political Culture. Follow him on Twitter @profjimmorone .
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A few weeks back a Speakout by a Brookings resident and well-recognized political scientist took on the issue of the United States as a Christian nation. His missive was in response to one of our more prolific speakouters who believes that our nation was built on and remains to this day a Christian nation.

I’ve given both authors’ epistles a lot of thought and I decided — God help me — it’s time for me to weigh in.

As near as I can determine from my readings on the history of the first founders of the early colonies in North America, they came here seeking freedom to practice their brand of Christianity. They believed in freedom to practice religion — as long as it was their religion.

Throughout the history of our nation, a variety of Christian beliefs and religions would flourish and become one the underpinnings holding up the colonies and later the United States of America. Fast forward to the Founding Fathers and the role of religion in drafting the Constitution of the United States of America.

I have a pocket edition of “The Constitution of the United States (with Index, and The Declaration of Independence)” that I keep close at hand and refer to on a need-to-know basis. It has some “Selected Quotations” that include such topics as “Observing the Hand of Providence” and “Guarding Virtue & Freedom.”

Benjamin Franklin has “much faith in the general government of the world by Providence,” which he sees as “that omnipotent, omnipresent and beneficent Ruler.” Under “Guarding,” he notes: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

John Adams writes: “ Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

George Washington weighs in with: “The federal Constitution (adoption process) … will demonstrate as visibly the finger of Providence, as any possible event in the course of human affairs can ever designate it.”

I trust that those reading these ramblings of mine recognize that the Constitution, in the First Amendment (one of 10 recognized as the Bill of Rights), stipulated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: … .”

Add to that a piece of Article VI, which says that … “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Pure wisdom by the Founding Fathers in those two brief statements relative to the role of religion in the document that drives our democratic republic.

“E pluribus unum” (Out of Many One) was pretty evident in the melding together of 13 colonies, with their varietal mix of local cultures and Christian religious denominations, into one nation.

At the same time, I suspect by design, their approach to those many multiple  Christian denominations was “ex uno multis” (out of one many). With “no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the exercise thereof,” there was little possibility that the United States would ever have a state religion, such as the kingdom from which it departed still has.

In 1956, the U.S. Congress coined and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law a new official motto for our nation: “In God We Trust.” Do we really?

That same year I remember the Pledge Of Allegiance changing “from one nation indivisible … “ to “one nation, under God, indivisible … . ” Did those two words cement our United States as a Christian nation?

I guess I find it hard to believe that if the United States is the Christian nation so many of us purport it to be, how is it we fail so miserably in the Corporal works of Mercy uttered by Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew 25: 31 through 46?

“Hungry and you gave me something to eat”: how can the richest nation in the world have millions of people, especially children, facing “food insecurity”? It’s wonderful that we have “backpack programs,” food banks, and drive-through distribution of food. The people who participate in such efforts are being “Christlike,” regardless of their religious beliefs — or lack of them.

Meanwhile, South Dakota has been one of those few states that turned down millions of dollars for food benefits. For kids. Why?

“A stranger and you invited me in”: I suppose in some way this could be tied to our issues with illegal aliens entering our nation from south of the border. A tough one: but I relate it to the issue of our own people legally here but unable to find adequate housing to the point where they are forced into homelessness. Again, like hunger, how can this be happening in the world’s richest — and Christian — nation?

“Sick and you looked after me”: And we will when you’re sick or injured, using the best talent of health-care professionals, tools and technology in the world. But who’s going to pick up the tab? Aye, there’s the rub.

Because unlike other nations in the Western industrialized world, we don’t have a single-payer universal health-care system that covers all its citizens. Does any other such nation have a health care system that in a worst-case scenario can wipe out your savings and drive you into penury?

I find it ironic that other openly secular first-world nations, such as France, take better care of the social needs of their citizens than does the United States, a purportedly Christian nation. And things could get worse.

The religious and moral underpinnings of America, while never perfect in the secular, Christian — or a mix of both  — nation that we are, upheld the democratic republic that was put in place by our Founding Fathers.

“If you can keep it,” Franklin said. Can we?

Have a nice day.

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