June 15, 2012 |
Once they begin to circulate, falsehoods—like counterfeit currency—are
surprisingly tenacious. It doesn’t matter that there’s no backing for
them. The only thing that counts is that people
believe they have backing. Then, like bad coins, they turn up again and again.
One counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is
the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. It’s one of
the Christian Right’s mantras and a favorite talking point for
televangelists, religious bloggers, born-again authors and lobbyists,
and pulpit preachers. Take, for example, the Reverend Peter Marshall.
Before his death in 2010, he strove mightily (and loudly) to “restore
America to its traditional moral and spiritual foundations,” as his
still-active website says, by telling the truth about “America’s
Christian heritage.” Or consider WallBuilders, a “national pro-family
organization” founded by David Barton, whose mission is “educating the
nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country.” Called
“America’s historian” by his admirers, Barton is a prolific writer of
popular books that spin his Christian version of American history. And
then there’s Cynthia Dunbar, an attorney and one-time professor at
Liberty University School of Law. She’s another big pusher of the
Christian America currency. Her 2008 polemic
One Nation Under God proclaims
that the Christian “foundational truths” on which the nation rests are
being “eroded” by a “socialistic, secularistic, humanistic mindset” from
which Christians need to take back the country.
Unlike some of the wackier positions taken by evangelicals—think
Rapture—the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation has
gone relatively mainstream. This is the case largely because the
media-savvy Christian Right is good at getting across its message. A
2007 First Amendment Center poll revealed that 65 percent of Americans
believe the founders intended the United States “to be a Christian
nation”; over half of us think that this intention is actually spelled
out somewhere in the Constitution. Conservative politicians sensitive to
the way the wind blows are careful to echo the sentiment, or at least
not to dispute it, even if they’re not particularly religious
themselves. Recent GOP presidential aspirants Sarah Palin, Michele
Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry championed the claim with gusto.
Even John McCain, who usually left the Bible-thumping to his Alaskan
running mate, jumped on the bandwagon in his failed 2008 bid for the
presidency by assuring a Beliefnet interviewer that “this nation was
founded primarily on Christian principles” and that he personally would
be disturbed if a non-Christian were elected to the highest office in
the land.
So the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is
widespread. In the currency of ideas, it’s the ubiquitous penny. But
like an actual penny, it doesn’t have a lot of value. That so many
people think it does is largely because they don’t stop to consider what
“founded as a Christian nation” might signify. Presumably the intended
meaning is something like this: Christian principles are the bedrock of
both our political system and founding documents because our founders
were themselves Christians. Although wordier, this reformulation is just
as perplexing because it’s not clear what’s meant by the term
founders. Just who are we talking about here?
There are three primary candidate groups, and each is regularly invoked
by the Christian Right. Some say that the founders of the nation were
the Puritans, the “original settlers” of the New World. (Never mind that
they’re not the original English settlers; that honor goes to the
ragtag and much less prudish Jamestown lot.) Others contend that the
real founders of the country were the people who actually lived in the
colonies at the time of the revolution. But the most widely recognized
candidates are the men at the center of the struggle for independence
and the subsequent formation of the republic who have since been
enshrined as the “Founding Fathers.”
Puritans as Founders
Cynthia Dunbar is among those who believe that the Puritans who began
migrating to New England in the first half of the seventeenth century
are our nation’s founders. In her
One Nation Under God,
she applies John Winthrop’s famous 1630 city-on-a-hill rhetoric about
the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s destiny to the United States. “We as a
nation were intended by God,” she writes, “to be a light set on a hill
to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying
world.” To clinch her argument, Dunbar appeals to the Mayflower Compact,
a covenant signed by slightly fewer than half of the original Mayflower
Pilgrims in 1620. Quoting the part of the Compact that reads, “Having
undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith
... a voyage to plant the first colony,” Dunbar comments that “this is
undeniably our past, and it clearly delineates us as a nation intended
to be emphatically Christian.”
No less an authority than Alexis de Tocqueville shares her sentiment, although in a less heavy-handed way. In his
Democracy in America(1835
and 1840), he argued that the basic principles upon which the American
experiment is based—equality and democracy—were inspired by Puritan
covenants such as the Mayflower Compact. They established communities in
which local independence, the “mainspring and lifeblood of American
freedom,” could flourish, thus preparing the way for a “completely
democratic and republican” form of national government.
This sounds good on a first run-through. But the problem is that both
Dunbar and de Tocqueville miss important points. The Mayflower Compact
that Dunbar thinks establishes the nation on a Christian footing is
clearly more political than religious. She quotes from the document’s
preamble, which in fact
does contain
conventional references to God, but ignores the purely secular meat of
the document. Signatories bind themselves “into a civil body politic”
for the sake of enacting “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts,
constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most
meet and convenient for the general good of the colony”—period. The
Mayflower Compact may ceremonially invoke God, but its substance is
religiously neutral. And even in its opening reference to God, there’s
not a breath of anything specifically Christian.
De Tocqueville gets it right when he claims that the Puritans
established self-regulating local communities. But he overplays his hand
when he says that these are prototypes of democratic and republican
forms of government, because the sorry truth is that the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was more theocratic than democratic. Repression of religious
dissent—including the public execution of Quakers and harsh restrictions
on dress, behavior, and “secular” forms of entertainment—are
representative of the oppressive bigotry that characterized Puritan
settlements. It’s difficult to see any common denominator between
Puritan polity and the principles of the early Republic except the bare
fact that both advocated “just and equal laws.” But the salient point of
comparison is not, of course, the mere advocacy but rather the
contentof
those laws, and the theocratic drift of the Puritan ones obviously
clashes with the republic’s careful separation of church and state. The
conclusion is obvious: the Puritans may have founded the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, which historically preceded the United States, but they
didn’t found the United States. To claim otherwise is to fall victim to
one of the oldest fallacies on the books,
post hoc ergo propter hoc, the hasty assumption that because A precedes B, A causes B.
Christian Majority as Founders
So much for the Puritans. What about the second candidate group, the
people who actually lived in the colonies when the United States was
born and consented to its creation? Weren’t they by and large Christian?
And if so, wouldn’t the general will have been that the new nation
reflect prevailing Christian beliefs and values? (Televangelist D. James
Kennedy once threw his weight behind this assertion by bizarrely
arguing that because the colonial Jewish population was so small, the
Christian population had to have been overwhelmingly large.)
This is a reasonable question. But the answer isn’t as apparent as some
members of the Christian Right believe, because the issue is more
complicated than they allow. (The tendency to oversimplify is one of the
movement’s defining characteristics.) It’s not obvious that most
late-colonial residents were “Christian” in the narrow sense meant by
present-day evangelicals. In the final quarter of the eighteenth
century, American religious sensibilities were in flux. Because
membership in religious denominations was voluntary—a welcome reaction
to the earlier Puritanical repression of religious choice—inherited
membership and denominational allegiance were weak. Laypeople hopped
from one sect to another in such numbers and with such frequency that
Richard Hofstadter calculated in his 1974
Anti-Intellectualism in American Lifethat
upwards of 90 percent of Americans were unchurched during the
revolutionary and early republic years. Historian James MacGregor Burns
agreed, noting in his 1983
The Vineyard of Liberty that the years immediately following the Revolution were a “wintry season” for Christianity in America.
What this suggests is that it is misleading to speak of Christian
belief from that period as a uniform, monolithic set of principles and
doctrines (just as it’s misleading to so characterize modern-day
Christian belief, by the way), because people either migrated from
denomination to denomination or rejected affiliation altogether. Adding
to the confusion was the plurality of Christian interpretations that
they had to choose from. There were Quaker, Dunker, Baptist, Moravian,
Methodist, Lutheran, Shaker, German Reformed, Anglican,
Congregationalist, and Roman Catholic beliefs. Moreover, there was a
spectrum of theological opinion within each of these denominations,
ranging from the extremely conservative to the extremely liberal.
Quakers, Moravians, Baptists, Shakers, and Dunkers were explicitly leery
of attempts to marry religion and politics, but even those
denominations that accepted in principle a connection disagreed on its
specific parameters. In short, Christians’ attitudes about the role
their faith should play in the governance of the new nation were all
over the map.
To illustrate just how ambiguous the label “Christian” could be,
consider the example of James Madison, who was consecrated Episcopal
bishop of Virginia in 1790. (No, not
that Madison.
The bishop shared a name with his cousin, the fourth president of the
United States.) Even though he shepherded one of the most populous
Episcopal dioceses in the country, Madison was criticized even during
his lifetime for being something of a freethinking Deist. Clearly
influenced by the Enlightenment era’s emphasis on natural science—he
taught the subject for years at the College of William and Mary—Madison,
as one of his fellow bishops delicately put it, was thought to
“philosophize too much on the subject of religion” to be entirely
orthodox. Despite his Church of England connection, Madison was also a
patriot during the revolution, ardently championing political equality
and democracy. But it’s difficult to tell whether his reasons for doing
so are attributable to Christian conviction or his study of political
theorists such as John Locke. Both influences are intermingled in his
writings and sermons.
Madison was by no means unique. Many of his formally Christian
contemporaries held similarly heterodox views that would be quite
unacceptable to today’s Christian Right. As I argued in my 1998
Benjamin Franklin and His Gods,
Americans in the late colonial and early republic years were often
caught in a worldview clash between Christianity on the one hand and the
Enlightenment on the other. Some reacted by clinging to their Christian
faith and blasting Enlightenment “infidelity” with jeremiads, while
others, as Jonathan Edwards grumbled in 1773, “wholly cast off the
Christian religion and are professed infidels.” College students at
Yale, Princeton, Harvard, King’s (present day Columbia), William and
Mary, and Dartmouth gleefully embraced, at least for a while, the
Enlightenment’s anti-biblical religion of Deism. In the 1790s, thanks
largely to the efforts of Deist crusader Elihu Palmer, militant
Deism—which rejected miracles, revelation, the authority of Scripture,
and the divinity of Jesus—enjoyed a spurt of rather astounding
popularity. But many people who lived at the founding of the nation
tried to steer a middle course that combined, even if awkwardly at
times, elements from both Christian and Enlightenment worldviews. This
made for any number of nuanced possibilities when it came to Christian
commitment, all of them much more complex than the Christian Right would
prefer to acknowledge.
Christian Founding Fathers
Since colonial and early republic Christians were no more uniform in
belief than today’s Christians are, we can dismiss the claim that the
United States was intended to be Christian because the general
population at the time of independence was Christian. But what about the
position that the leaders in the struggle for independence—names that
every American kid immediately recognizes—were Christian and intended
the republic to reflect their religious convictions? This is the
argument to which the Christian Right most commonly appeals. Marshall,
Barton, and Dunbar champion it with gusto, as do dozens of other
evangelical authors such as John Eidsmore (
Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers, 1995); Tim LaHaye of apocalyptic
Left Behind series fame (
Faith of Our Founding Fathers, 1994); and Gary DeMar (
America’s Christian Heritage, 2003). As we’ve seen, it’s also received wisdom for a majority of Americans.
The problem, as scholar after scholar has pointed out—how often must it
be repeated before the reality breaks through the myth?—is that
it simply isn’t true.
The Founding Fathers weren’t all Christian. Some, of course, were:
Patrick Henry (Episcopalian), John Hancock (Congregationalist), John Jay
(Episcopalian), and Sam Adams (Congregationalist), for example, were
all devout and pretty conventional Christians. But the big players in
the founding of the United States—such men as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams,
and probably Alexander Hamilton—weren’t. Each of them was much more
comfortable with a deistic understanding of God than a Christian one.
For them, the deity was an impersonal First Cause who created a
rationally patterned natural order and who was best worshiped through
the exercise of reason and virtue. Most of them may have admired the
ethical teachings of Jesus (although Paine conspicuously did not), but
all of them loathed and rejected the priestcraft and superstition they
associated with Christianity.
Despite this, the Christian Right insists on adopting these men (aside from Paine) as
Christian founders.
The usual justification is that each of them (again, except Paine)
belonged to an established Christian denomination. But as we’ve already
seen, formal membership by itself wasn’t then (or now) a fail-safe
measure of an individual’s religious beliefs. As David Holmes
compellingly argues in his 2006
Faiths of the Founding Fathers,
other factors—such as the way in which the founders referred to God,
opinions they expressed in personal correspondence, and their
involvement in church life—must be considered as well. None of the
founders, for example, used conventional Christian language when writing
or speaking about God. Instead, the terms they favored—
Supreme Architect, Author of Nature, First Cause, Nature’s God, Superattending Power—were
unmistakably deistic. (One of the Christian Right’s most telling blind
spots is its failure to pick up on the founders’ obviously non-Christian
nomenclature.) Another indicator of their lack of conventional
Christian commitment is the fact that while all of them had been
baptized as infants, an initiation that of course made them nominally
Christian, none who were members of denominations that offered the
sacrament of Confirmation sought it as adults. Moreover, they generally
did not take Communion when it was offered, nor did they typically
involve themselves in church activities. Even when they did, it was no
clear signal that they were orthodox Christians. George Washington, for
example, served on the vestry in several Episcopalian parishes. But he
avoided Confirmation and Communion, never used give-away Christian terms
such as
Lord or
Redeemer,
and rarely even referred to Jesus by name. Finally, none of them gave
the slightest hint in their personal letters or diaries that they
considered themselves committed Christians.
The obvious conclusion is that it’s a stretch to call the leading
founders “Christians,” particularly of the evangelical sort. Most of
them may not have been contemptuously anti-Christian (although Paine
certainly was, with Jefferson a close second), but neither did they have
much use for Christianity. They had so little regard for its central
tenets, in fact, that they couldn’t square it with their consciences to
salt their public statements with even an occasional Christian phrase.
In this way they displayed an integrity that few vote-hungry politicians
in our day feel moved to emulate. Revealingly, only a handful of their
contemporaries seemed particularly bothered by their obvious
indifference to Christianity, and those who made a big deal of it
generally did so more for political reasons—as when Federalists attacked
the “infidel” Jefferson in the presidential elections of 1800 and
1804—than from any sense of outraged orthodoxy. Then as now, what
pretended to be a religious battle was often a political one.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which the founders intentionally used
non-Christian language is in their drafting of the nation’s two defining
documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
In the Constitution, no mention whatsoever of God is made except in the
document’s date (“Done ... in the year of our Lord ...”), an
inexplicable oversight if its framers intended it to lay the foundation
for a Christian nation. The Declaration of Independence
does use
religious language, but the religion is obviously Deism rather than
Christianity. God is referred to as “Nature’s God,” the “Creator” of the
physical “Laws of Nature” in addition to the “unalienable [moral]
Rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To interpret the
document as even suggestively Christian is sheer fantasy or worse. On
the contrary, both it and the Constitution clearly serve as precedents
for the famous passage in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli—one which the
Christian Right loves to hate—which affirms that “the Government of the
United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian
religion.” The treaty, which sealed a routine diplomatic agreement
between the U.S. and the Muslim state of Tripolitania, was unanimously
ratified by the Senate and publicly endorsed and signed by President
John Adams. That it was passed without debate or dissent attests to the
fact that neither the president nor senators found its denial of a
Christian foundation to the nation objectionable.
The claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, therefore,
just doesn’t ring historically true. But as with all counterfeit coins,
there’s enough genuine metal mixed in with the paste to fool
unsuspecting consumers. To deny the obviously false claim that the
founders of the United States intended it to be Christian doesn’t imply
that certain sentiments and values held by Christians played no role in
the nation’s founding. As we’ve seen, the Puritans endorsed equality and
self-government. Baptists and Quakers, probably because of their
sometimes savage persecution by Puritans, championed the separation of
church and state. Deistic nominal Christians, such as Bishop James
Madison, embraced the political ideals of tolerance and republicanism.
But none of these beliefs are uniquely Christian, and in fact they’re
much more obviously at home in Enlightenment liberal thought than
eighteenth-century orthodox Christian theology. One
could have
held them as a Christian, but holding them didn’t necessarily mean one
was a Christian. Such beliefs could just as well have been held by a
Deist or even a thoroughgoing secularist. Nonetheless, to the extent
that some Christians held them, it is undeniable that Christian-owned
principles were part of the convergence of beliefs that defined the new
nation. This is, however, a far cry from saying that the nation was
explicitly built upon Christian principles.
But let’s concede, just for the sake of the argument, what is patently false: that the nation in fact was founded
on Christian principles and intended by its founders to be Christian.
The obvious perplexity that then arises is why the Christian Right is so
convinced that a “socialistic, secularistic, and humanistic mindset”
has jerked the nation up by its Christian roots. The founding documents
framed by our “Christian” forebears are still venerated today. The same
protection of religious liberty endorsed by our “Christian” founders is
still fiercely championed by political leaders and the courts. So what’s
been uprooted? What’s been lost that our “Christian” founders put in
place?
The answer, of course, is that nothing has been lost, and the Christian
Right knows it. What evangelicals really want is something that never
was, and that’s an explicitly sectarian statement of commitment to
Christ worked into the warp and woof of national law and public policy.
What they want is the Christian theocracy that the founders explicitly
rejected. For all their political thundering against the intrusive ways
of “big government,” what evangelicals yearn for is strict legal
codification of their version of Christian values. What never occurs to
the Christian Right is that if the founders in fact had been Christians
intending to create a commonwealth faithful to Jesus’s teachings, the
United States today would be a nation quite different from what
evangelicals think it should be. There would be no standing army, no
divide between rich and poor, no ethnic hatred or closed borders, no
persecution of religious dissent, no national chauvinism, a lot less
holier-than-thou finger-pointing, and a lot more forgiveness and
compassion.
Now, that would be a shining city built on a hill.
Kerry Walters, William Bittinger
Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, is the
author or editor of twenty-five books, including Revolutionary Deists:
Early America’s Rational Deists, a 2011 Choice Outstanding Book; a
critical edition of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (Broadview, 2011); and
Atheism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2010).
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