One of the statements I hear quite often from many of the more conservative politicians in the United States is that we are a Christian nation. But are we?

This question, and how one tends to answer it, divides many Americans into one of two camps, those of us who believe our country was in fact founded on Christian principles, and those of us who do not. Many, in fact, search for historical evidence to support whichever view they happen to hold which, I would point out, is one of the hallmarks of bad historical research. An objective historian cannot ignore facts that do not support a particular theory simply because he finds the theory to be an attractive one. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the arguments that support the idea that the United States is a Christian Nation, and to determine the degree of their validity.

Arguments Which Support The U.S. is a Christian Nation

The christian beliefs of pre-colonial and colonial immigrants

• The Pilgrims, who were separatists in that they believed that the Anglican Church had not moved far enough from Catholicism;
• The Puritans, who had no intention of abandoning Anglican faith, but took a far more scholarly approach to faith than did the Pilgrims.
• The Quakers, some of whom journeyed to America to spread their beliefs, and others who came here to avoid persecution, although the Puritans in Massachusetts provided early Quakers with all the persecution they could muster.
• The Catholics, whether in Latin America, Canada, Maryland or elsewhere, came primarily to convert people to Catholicism.

The problem with this argument is that these immigrant groups preceded our country’s founding by well over a century. While no one can argue the point that the intent of many early immigrants was to spread Christianity in the New World, this argument clearly puts the cart before the horse.

The Colonial Charters

It is certainly true that Christianity was a major ingredient in Colonial Charters. The Virginia Charter of 1606 and the later charters of Pennsylvania, Carolina, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay Colony and Maryland all indicate that these colonies were in fact founded as Christian entities, many with the express purpose of bringing Christianity to the native populations. References to Christianity are prominent in the Charters of Georgia, Rhode Island, and Delaware. Additionally, the Mayflower Compact of 1620 also reflects the Christian beliefs of the Pilgrims.

It is absolutely true that the colonies were founded as Christian in nature. Some of the colonies in fact persecuted people who did not happen to belong to the same Christian denomination as the majority. In Massachusetts, Puritan Congregationalism was the official religion. If you happened to be a Quaker, or a Catholic, or any other denomination, you were considered a heretic. One only has to examine the way the colonial government treated Roger Williams in order to see this persecution in action. But that does not mean that the United States was a nation founded on religious persecution, any more than the original Colonial Charters indicate that the United States, over 100 years later, would be a nation founded on Christian Principles. It doesn’t rule it out, but it does little to support it, either. We need to understand what happened between the founding of the colonies and the birth of the independent nation we know today. We need to move forward into the late eighteenth century, and take a look at our founding documents.

The Declaration of Independence

Now we come to the most often quoted evidence that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. First, in the preamble:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

and then in the subsequent paragraph:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

On June 11, 1776, a committee of five was selected to draft the Declaration: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livington, and Roger Sherman. Of those five, historical research supports that Jefferson and Franklin were Deists, and that John Adams was a liberal Christian who leaned towards Deism. Thomas Jefferson was ultimately chosen to produce the initial draft.

Deism was, in many ways, the religion of the Age of Enlightenment. The phrase we see in the preamble, where it mentions “Nature’s God” is clearly referring to the Deist concept of a creator, one who can be understood only in light of observable nature, “the creation” (i.e., the Universe). In the second sentence, God is certainly not identified as a Christian God. In fact, one could successfully argue that the phrase ” … by their creator …” purposefully allows the reader to substitute in the deity or deities of their choice.

To understand the founding fathers, it is important to frame them in the proper context. Jefferson’s view of Christ can easily be summarized in his own words:

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

Nevertheless, Jefferson viewed Christ as a moral teacher without equal, going so far as to create his own version of the Bible, an amalgam of Christ’s life, with all supernatural events expunged. The Jefferson Bible is still distributed to new members of Congress. But no serious Christian theologian would classify Jefferson as a Christian, not in any traditional sense of the word. Jefferson had nothing but contempt for the Christian religion. And Jefferson’s good friend John Adams, writing to Jefferson in 1817, said, “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”

The Constitution of the United States of America

Our constitution makes one brief passing reference to religion, the purpose of which is abundantly clear. From Article VI:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

And now we arrive at our constitution’s first amendment, consisting of both a free exercise clause and an establishment clause. It is the establishment clause that prohibits the establishment of a state religion. The theory that the United States is a Christian Nation dies with nary a shudder.

But wait, there are those who argue that the first amendment only has a free exercise clause, and that the establishment clause is nineteenth century judicial activism. Is that possible?

In a word, no. While the concept of a secular government can be traced to English philosopher John Locke, Jefferson certainly made the original meaning of the first amendment absolutely clear in his 1802 letter to the Danbury baptists:

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, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Treaty of Tripoli, 1797

For anyone with a shred of doubt remaining, we need only to turn to Treaty of Tripoli, read in its entirety aloud before the Senate, subsequently ratified by unanimous voice vote on June 7, 1797 and then signed into law by President Adams on June 10, 1797. Article 11 reads:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

What is truly ironic here is that today, over 200 years later, so many Christians in the U.S. fail to understand that it is this simple fact, this “Wall of Separation between Church and State”, that creates the unique fertile breeding ground in America that allows so many different religions, and so many different Christian denominations (over 20,000) to exist at all. This is powerful stuff, and not something to be tampered with.