The next time someone tells you America was founded as a Christian nation, you should be able to answer from history, not just instinct. To support history with receipts become a paid subscriber today.
It is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and one message keeps showing up everywhere this anniversary year: the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
But was it, though?
The honest answer is not a flat yes or no.
It depends on what you mean.
If you mean that Christians and their ethics shaped this country, then yes. For most of American history, most people have identified as Christian, and a majority always leaves its mark on a nation.
Saying so is not an endorsement of the faith. It is simply a statement of fact.
But that is almost never what people mean when they wave that banner.
If you mean that the framers set up an official, government-backed church, then no, and they rejected that on purpose.
I walk through the primary source documents in this episode because history keeps the receipts: Article VI of the Constitution. The First Amendment .The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli.
The colonists knew from experience the harm a state church could do.
In 1534, King Henry VIII made himself the supreme head of the Church of England, and the repression that followed over the centuries jailed people for preaching without a license and pushed whole religious communities to colonies on a different continent.
The framers did not want to build the very structure so many colonists were running from.
But…
Saying America was not founded as a Christian nation does not mean faith has no place in politics.
Separating church and state is one matter. Separating faith from politics is another—one that I don’t believe is either possible or even necessarily desirable.
Everyone votes from an ethical framework, including the atheist and the secular humanist.
And if you’re thinking that any mix of faith and politics is always bad for democracy, then I encourage you to study the Black Christian tradition.
This week reminds us to learn the history so we can respond to the assertion that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
But this is just part one.
In part two, we talk about what a faithful response looks like, Dr. King’s vision of the church as the conscience of the state, and concrete steps you can take.
Telling the truth about a nation is not an attack on it. It is one of the deepest ways to love it.
Watch or listen to the full episode, then send it to one person who needs to hear it.
In This Episode
Why “define your terms” is the first move in answering the Christian nation question
The sense in which the claim is true and the sense in which it is false
History has the receipts: Article VI, the First Amendment, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the Treaty of Tripoli
Henry VIII, the Act of Supremacy, and why colonists fled state religion
The difference between the separation of church and state and the separation of faith and politics
The Enlightenment roots of the Declaration
What white Christian nationalists actually mean, and why the slogan works as a permission structure for power
