Published Feb. 21, 2010
By Dave Arnold CBC Associate Professor, Tri-City Herald
Was America founded as a Christian nation?
Like so many of our public debates, those who argue on opposite sides tend to speak past each other. In fact, both sides are correct as long as we add some clarifications.
Was America founded as a Christian nation? Answer: No. Was America founded as a nation of Christians? Answer: Yes.
When we speak of a Christian nation, we are not asking if most in fact nearly all of the citizens and founders of the nation were Christians. Indeed they were.
We are asking if the framework of the nation was built on Christian principles. Did our founding documents establish Christianity as a basis for government and for citizenship much in the same way that Israel is a Jewish republic or Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state?
The answer to this question is an unequivocal no.
Our nation did not emerge organically from a common faith or ethnicity, but rather from a set of documents primarily the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation) our first constitution) and our current Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, believed in God, as did all the founding fathers, but Jeffersons faith can only loosely, if at all, be described as Christian. He glorified the teachings of Jesus (which he compiled into the Jefferson Bible), but he did not consider Jesus to be the son of God nor did he accept miracles or anything else in the Bible that conflicted with his belief in a rational universe.
The Articles of Confederation acknowledged the Great Governor of the World, but, leaving aside the proforma Year of our Lord date stamp at the very end of the document, the U.S. Constitution makes no reference at all to religion, a God or a Creator, except in the First Amendment clause prohibiting Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
The religion that was thus encoded in the Constitution was not Christianity, but religious liberty. In fact, the founders established the first modern nation that did not rest upon God or religion as the basis of state authority.
The founders vested the authority of the state in the hands of the people, whose citizenship had nothing to do with their religious convictions. Their ideas about government came from John Locke, Scottish republican thinkers and classical political thought, not the Bible.
In God we Trust did not become our national motto until 1956, two years after Under God was added to our Pledge of Allegiance.
Does this mean the founders were irreligious? Quite the opposite. They simply believed, as James Madison said, that Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.
And they werent merely protecting the purity of religion from the corruption of politics. In arguing against the establishment of religion in Virginia, Madison worried that an established clergy would aid rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty.
If our founding documents do not support the notion of a Christian nation, it also is not accurate to say that the founders were not deeply religious and mostly Christian. Sure, there were a handful of deists, including Benjamin Franklin.
But even Franklin sought to imitate Jesus and Socrates. If not a Christian nation at its founding, the U.S. was, in other words, a nation of Christians whose founders with the support of certain newer denominations such as the Baptists wished to see the free exercise of religion flourish outside the boundaries of state support or control.
And flourish it did. With no particular denomination or doctrine given state privilege, the number of new denominations and congregations exploded in the early republic, leading Alexis de Toqueville to remark in the 1830s that, There is no country in the whole world in which Christian religion contains a greater influence over the souls of man than in America.
The same is true today if the U.S. is compared to other advanced industrial nations. Religion and spirituality of all kinds have prospered in America precisely because our founders did not write them into the social contract.
Could the founders have foreseen that their ideas about religious freedom would be extended to protect even non-Christian religions? Probably not. But neither would they have foreseen that the phrase all men are created equal would be extended to include women, blacks and other nonwhite male property holders.
They lived in a different time, but their vision of religious freedom has been remarkably durable and incredibly effective in keeping our nation from devolving into the kind of sectarian conflict that we witness today in Iraq and other parts of the world.
David Arnold received his Ph.D. in U.S. history from UCLA and he now teaches at Columbia Basin College.
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