Excerpted from "Inventing
a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding"
One of the more popular and enduring accounts of America’s past
is that of its religious founding. Belief that the
British-American colonies were settled largely by religiously
devout people in search of spiritual freedom, that the United
States government was founded in part on religious principles,
that the Founders intended to create a “Christian nation,” and
that America is a specially chosen nation whose success has been
directed by divine providence has resonated in the national
psyche for generations. Versions of this account have existed
since the founding era and have persisted through times of
national distress, trial, and triumph. They represent a leading
theme in our nation’s historical narrative, frequently
intertwined with expressions of patriotism and American
exceptionalism.
Opinion polls indicate that many Americans hold vague, if not
explicit, ideas about the nation’s religious foundings.
According to a 2008 study by the First Amendment Center, over 50
percent of Americans believe that the U.S Constitution created a
Christian nation, notwithstanding its express prohibitions on
religious establishments and religious tests for public office
holding. A similar study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion
in Public Life revealed even higher numbers, noting that
“Americans overwhelmingly consider the U.S. a Christian nation:
Two-in-three (67%) characterize the nation this way.” Other
studies indicate that a majority of Americans believe that the
nation’s political life should be based on “Judeo-Christian
principles,” if the nation’s founding principles are not
already.
Assertions of the nation’s religious origins and of divine
providence behind the crafting of the governing instruments are
especially popular among politicians. In fact, religious
declarations by elected officials are so common today that they
have become routine, if not banal. Frequently, allusions of
God’s providence are ambiguous and are used simply as a
ceremonial flourish, obviating the need for further elaboration.
President Ronald Reagan, who was not a devout churchgoer despite
his support from the evangelical Religious Right, regularly
alluded to the nation’s providential past, remarking in one
speech, “Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this
land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those
people in the world who yearn to breathe free?” One could argue
that Reagan’s embrace of a providential past was uncritical, if
not undisciplined: in his acceptance speech at the 1980
Republican National Convention, Reagan displayed his legendary
disregard for consistency by declaring America to be “our
portion of His creation” while praising the contributions of the
deist Tom Paine! One particularly delicious statement is Dwight
Eisenhower’s iconic remark that “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!” Usually, such rhetoric does little
more than affirm a national “civil religion,” where the nation’s
institutions and its destiny take on an indeterminate,
quasi-sacred quality. Such utterances largely fulfill a
unifying, ceremonial purpose.
Many politicians, however, have gone farther by advancing
specific claims about America’s religious past and its
significance for the present. At times, Reagan embraced a fuller
notion of the myth. In a 1984 prayer breakfast, he declared that
“faith and religion play a critical role in the political life
of our nation,” asserting that the Founders had affirmed this
relationship. “Those who created our country,” Reagan remarked,
“understood that there is a divine order which transcends the
human order.” The Founders viewed the government as “a form of
moral order,” which found its basis in religion. Reagan was not
alone among politicians on the conservative spectrum. In May
2010, former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska
governor Sarah Palin declared on Fox News that people should
“[g]o back to what our founders and our founding documents
meant. They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the
God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments. It’s pretty simple.”
And no modern politician drew more allusions to the nation’s
religious heritage than did George W. Bush. A conservative
evangelical, Bush frequently revealed his belief in America’s
Christian origins, once affirming that “[o]ur country was
founded by men and women who realized their dependence on God
and were humbled by His providence and grace.” The Founders did
more than simply acknowledge their obligation toward God,
however; for Bush, America was specially chosen, “not because we
consider ourselves a chosen nation” but because “God moves and
chooses [us] as He wills.” For Bush, this history had practical
applications for present policies, legitimizing his enlistment
of religious organizations to operate government-funded social
service programs from a “faith perspective” (i.e., the
“Faith-Based Initiative”). It also supported an active religious
(i.e., Christian) voice in the public realm: “The faith of our
Founding Fathers established the precedent that prayers and
national days of prayer are an honored part of our American way
of life,” Bush insisted. As historian Richard T. Hughes has
written about Bush, in his embrace of the myth, Bush “thoroughly
confused the Christian view of reality with the purposes of the
United States.”
Such rhetoric usually receives a pass from the mainstream press,
perhaps because of its ubiquity. On occasion, the press
criticizes a politician for too closely associating the nation’s
history and goals with God’s purpose, but reporters usually
consider such statements as being off-limits for critique.
Possibly, this is because there is a long history of public
officials from both political parties aligning the national will
with God’s plan. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, our most evangelical
president between Rutherford B. Hayes and Jimmy Carter, once
said, “America was born a Christian nation. America was born to
exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which
are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.” And the
nation’s most beloved president, Abraham Lincoln, regularly
averred that the nation was subject to God’s will, and to his
judgment. Still, not all religious allusions have been the same.
Lincoln’s religious rhetoric was often in the form of a
jeremiad, calling the nation to a moral accountability. Lincoln
was careful not to align God with the Union side during the
Civil War, noting in his Second Inaugural Address that both
sides “read the same Bible and pray[ed] to the same God [while]
invok[ing] His aid against the other.” And Jimmy Carter, a
devout Southern Baptist, also drew a line between supplicating
God’s blessings and sanctifying the nation. Despite the nuanced
rhetoric of some of our political leaders, religious
declarations by politicians perpetuate the impression that
America was specially ordained by God and that the nation’s
governing documents and institutions reflect Christian values.
The resiliency of a belief in America’s religious origins,
particularly of its “chosen” status, is, in part, perplexing.
American religious exceptionalism has not been taught in the
nation’s public schools since the mid-1900s, though the theme
was common in school curricula, either explicitly or implicitly,
for the first 150 years of public schooling. Yet the narrative
persists, much of it from a religious or patriotic perspective,
fueled by popular literature and the media and promoted by
evangelical pastors and conservative politicians and
commentators.
One explanation for the popularity of this account is that the
idea of America’s religious founding has a protean,
chameleon-like quality. For many people, the concept may mean
little more than that America was settled in part by religious
dissenters who helped establish a regime of religious liberty
unmatched in the world at that time. For a related group, it is
the belief that religious perspectives and values pervaded the
colonial and revolutionary periods, and that the
Founders—however they are defined—relied on those values, among
others, in constructing the ideological basis for republican
government. Closely associated with this last understanding is
the sense that people of the founding generation were at ease
with public acknowledgments of and support for religion, and
that the Founders believed that moral virtue was indispensable
for the nation’s well-being. A majority of Americans likely hold
the above views to one degree or another. And all of these
perspectives find degrees of support in the historical record.
The above views, however, do not necessarily involve claims that
America was specially chosen by God in the model of Old
Testament Israel or that promote a form of religious
exceptionalism, that is, a belief in the unique status and
mission of the United States in the world. The embrace of
religious exceptionalism represents the chief ideological break
between the above perspectives and the remainder.
The next view, in level of intensity, shares much in common with
the last perspective but elevates the role of religion from
being one of many ideologies informing the founding era to a
status of prominence. It argues that religion—frequently defined
as Calvinism—was the chief energizing propulsion of the founding
ideology and that the American democratic system cannot be
understood without appreciating its Christian roots. This
perspective often emphasizes the religious piety of the Founders
and their generation, disputing claims that a majority of the
early leaders were religious rationalists or that the populace
was generally non-churchgoing. The final perspective that can be
distinguished under this broad taxonomy includes an additional
claim of a divine intervention in the nation’s creation—that
America was an especially chosen nation and that the Founders
acted as they did due to God’s providential guiding hand. Under
this last perspective, the nation’s past and founding documents
assume an almost sacred quality. As can be appreciated, due to
the variety of potential understandings and fluidity between
perspectives, it can be difficult to decipher what one means
when speaking of America’s Christian heritage or of it being a
“Christian nation.” A vague assertion is likely to resonate with
a large number of people.
Still, a distinctive argument about America’s religious
foundings, one that encompasses the last two perspectives, has
emerged in recent years, finding an audience among religious and
political conservatives. Ever since the nation’s bicentennial,
conservatives have raised claims about America’s Christian
heritage in their efforts to gain the moral (and political) high
ground in the ongoing culture wars. These arguments take on
several forms, from asserting that the Founders relied on a
pervasive Calvinist ideology when crafting notions of
republicanism to claiming that the Founders were devout
Christians and were guided in their actions by divine
providence. As evidence, proponents point to public statements
and official actions during the founding period—for example,
thanksgiving day proclamations—that purportedly demonstrate a
reliance on religious principles in the ordering of the nation’s
political and legal institutions. A plethora of books have been
published that attest to the Founders’ religious piety and to
their belief about the role of religion in civil government.
Although these books are usually weak on historical scholarship,
they project a degree of authority by frequently “disclosing”
previously “unknown” historical data, purposely ignored
(allegedly) by professional historians. The common theme, as
expressed by popular evangelical author Tim LaHaye (of the Left
Behind series), is that an orthodox “Christian consensus”
existed at the time of the founding and that the Founders
intended to incorporate Judeo-Christian principles into the
founding documents. As another writer summarizes the claim:
The history of America’s laws, its constitutional system, the
reason for the American Revolution, or the basis of its guiding
political philosophy cannot accurately be discussed without
reference to its biblical roots.
Connected to this central theme is a second common claim: that
scholars, judges, and the liberal elite have censored America’s
Christian past in a conspiracy to install a regime of
secularism. Public school textbooks and college history courses
generally avoid references to America’s religious heritage,
creating the impression in the minds of students that that past
did not exist. LaHaye calls this omission a “deliberate rape of
history,” asserting that “[t]he removal of religion as history
from our schoolbooks betrays the intellectual dishonesty of
secular humanist educators and reveals their blind hostility to
Christianity.” This account is promoted in textbooks published
for private evangelical schools and Christian homeschoolers,
with the popular God and Government asserting that there is “a
staggering amount of religious source material that shows the
United States of America was founded as a Christian nation.” But
tragically, “[f ]or generations the true story of America’s
faith has been obscured by those who deny the providential work
of God in history.”
Likely no person has written more about America’s Christian
past, or has done more to promote ideas of a distinct Christian
nationhood, than David Barton, a self-taught “historian” who is
the darling of conservative politicians such as Newt Gingrich,
Mike Huckabee, and Glenn Beck. Barton asserts that “virtually
every one of the fifty-five Founding Fathers who framed the
Constitution were members of orthodox Christian churches and
that many were outspoken evangelicals.” According to Barton,
these men believed that God intervened directly in the founding
process and intended for Christian principles to be integrated
into the operations of government. Even though scholars
overwhelmingly criticize his writings, particularly his
methodology of cherry-picking quotations of leading figures,
Barton’s interpretation commands a large following. Religious
and political conservatives, predisposed to distrust the liberal
academy, remain impressed by Barton’s massive collection of
historical documents demonstrating a “Christian consensus” at
the founding.
One scholar sums up this overall phenomenon:
The number of contemporary authors on the quest for a Christian
America is legion. The Christian America concept moves beyond a
simple and fundamental acknowledgement of Christianity’s
significance in American history to a belief that the United
States was established as a decidedly Christian nation. Driven
by the belief that separation of church and state is a myth
foisted upon the American people by secular courts and scholars,
defenders of Christian America historiography claim they are
merely recovering accurate American history from revisionist
historians conspiring to expunge any remnant of Christianity
from America’s past.
In characterizing the issue in such dire terms for people of
faith, it is little wonder that the claim of America’s special
religious past continues to resonate.
To a degree, these proponents—I will term them
“religionists”—are not tilting at imaginary windmills. For more
than sixty years the dominant legal interpretation of the
nation’s constitutional founding was that the Founders intended
to establish a “high wall of separation between church and
state,” as Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black declared in 1947.
The model was Thomas Jefferson’s metaphorical Wall, and its
scripture was James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, not
those annoyingly contrary actions like the First Congress’s
appointment of a chaplain in 1789. The high point—or low point,
depending on one’s perspective—came in 1962 and 1963, when the
Supreme Court struck down nonsectarian prayer and Bible reading
in the nation’s schools, practices that had extended back to the
beginnings of American public education and that were viewed by
many as affirming the nation’s gratitude to a beneficent God.
Even though the high court never held that public schools could
not teach about the nation’s religious heritage if done from an
academic perspective, rather than from a devotional one—with the
Court going out of its way to reaffirm that a “[child’s]
education is not complete without a study of comparative
religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the
advancement of civilization”—most curriculum planners avoided
addressing this contentious subject. For many religious
conservatives, the Supreme Court’s embrace of a secular-oriented
jurisprudence of church-state separation was unsettling and went
against their understandings about the nation’s religious
heritage.
Religionists have also rightly perceived hostility to Christian
nation claims from the secular academy. For years, the scholarly
historical canon maintained that the Founders relied chiefly on
rational Enlightenment norms, not religious ones, when
fashioning the nation’s governing principles. Lawyer and
historian Leo Pfeffer led the way for the “secularist”
interpretation in the 1950 and 1960s, to be followed by scholars
such as Leonard Levy, Gordon Wood, Jon Butler, Frank Lambert,
Geoffrey Stone, and Isaac Kramnick and R. Lawrence Moore in
their popular book, The Godless Constitution. While these
scholars acknowledge the importance of religious thought and
movements during the revolutionary period, they see a variety of
ideological impulses that influenced the founding generation.
Still, most scholars vigorously dispute religionist claims about
the “centrality of religious ideas” behind the Revolution, of
the “fact of a substantial spiritual dimension to our founding,”
or that “Revolutionary-era political thought was, above all,
Protestant inspired.”
A third position has emerged recently in this debate, one that
could be termed an “accommodationist” approach. This movement
has been led chiefly—though not entirely—by scholars with
conservative religious or political leanings. Their scholarship
has sought to document the diversity in religious sentiment,
particularly forms of Protestant orthodoxy, among members of the
founding generation, including those within the political
leadership. In addition, accommodationists have worked to expand
the pool of influential Founders, arguing that the church-state
views of icons Thomas Jefferson and James Madison “are among the
least representative of the founders.” They criticize the
accepted canon as a “selective approach to history” that
“distort[s] . . . the founders’ collective views on religion,
religious liberty, and church state relations.” The book titles
promoting this interpretation are revealing: The Forgotten
Founders on Religion and Public Life; and Forgotten Features of
the Founding. Like religionist writers, this perspective
frequently emphasizes the Founders’ personal religious piety and
their commitment to a public virtue. It asserts that the
Founders could be both professing Christians and political
rationalists and committed to a moderate scheme of church-state
separation. These scholars frequently side with the religionists
regarding the Founders’ belief in divine providence and their
reliance on “higher” norms when conceptualizing legal rights and
liberties. In contrast, accommodationists generally agree with
secularist scholars about the variety of ideological impulses
that informed the founding period, although they usually place
more weight on religious statements and actions by the Founders.
This latter emphasis means that accommodationist scholars are
closer to religionists in asserting the primacy of religious
thought during the founding period. While this effort to expand
on the diversity of thought during the founding period is
commendable, it often becomes blurred by corresponding efforts
to marginalize the impact of leading Founders who held heterodox
religious views (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin).
While most, though not all, accommodationist scholars are not
agenda driven, their conclusions often confirm the claims of
Christian nationalists like LaHaye and Barton. In particular,
the religionist position has drawn support from conservative
legal scholars who have criticized the Supreme Court’s
“separationist” interpretation of church-state relations,
particularly the Stone-Warren-Burger Courts’ reliance on the
writings of Jefferson and Madison. As one leading scholar,
Harold Berman, writing in the mid-1980s, maintained:
[Prior to the 1940s] America professed itself to be a Christian
country. Even two generations ago, if one asked Americans where
our Constitution—or, indeed, our whole concept of law—came from,
on what it was ultimately based, the overwhelming majority would
have said, “the Ten Commandments,” or “the Bible,” or perhaps
“the law of God.”
Berman bemoaned that since that time, America’s public
philosophy had “shifted radically from a religious to a secular
theory of law, from a moral to a political or instrumental
theory, and from a communitarian to an individualistic theory.”
A decade later, Yale law professor Stephen Carter charged in his
missive, The Culture of Disbelief, that there was a pervasive
disregard of faith in the popular culture, one that was
perpetuated by a secular-leaning elite. Other scholars with
evangelical leanings have more willingly embraced parts of the
religionist argument—chiefly that religion was a leading factor
inspiring and motivating the Founders—thus validating major
claims of the popular religionist writers.
This renewed attention to the nation’s Christian foundings has
not gone unnoticed by sympathetic politicians and officials,
such as the members of the Texas State Board of Education, and
conservative judges such as William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia,
and Clarence Thomas. This narrative has impacted the content of
social science curriculum in Texas schools and the judicial
interpretation of First Amendment jurisprudence. Justices have
cited the nation’s religious heritage in upholding legislative
prayers and displays of Christian crosses and the Ten
Commandments on government property. During the Cold War, the
justices once declared that “[w]e are a religious people whose
institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Conservative justices
have dusted off that statement, while adding “that the Founding
Fathers believed devoutly that there was a God and that the
unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly
evidenced in their writings, from the Mayflower Compact to the
Constitution itself.” Religion, Chief Justice Rehnquist
concluded, “has been closely identified with our history and
government.” Armed with this historical ammunition, religious
and legal conservatives give notice that the accepted
interpretation of the nation’s non-religious founding is
contestable territory.
Excerpted from “Inventing
a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding”
by Steven K. Green. Published by Oxford University Press.
Copyright 2015 by Steven K. Green. All rights reserved. |