The Rededicate 250 rally on the National Mall in Washington on May 17 featured a who’s who of Republican politicians and Trump administration officials, religiously inflected patriotism and a legion of Christian nationalists — all of it framed by some very bad history. As the nation’s 250th birthday approaches, it’s important to set the record straight.
The organizers touted the nine-hour “prayer festival” as “a national jubilee of prayer, praise & thanksgiving,” one that propagated the fiction that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
That, of course, is demonstrably false. The First Amendment itself — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — refutes the notion that the founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation.
The proposal that church and state should be discrete entities was a novel idea late in the eighteenth century when the new nation was being formed. The founders were well aware of the religious conflicts that had roiled England and Europe — the Thirty Years’ War, the Wars of Religion and the English Revolution — and they wanted to avoid that kind of contestation.
In addition, they confronted the extraordinary religious diversity already present in the colonies, from Baptists and Congregationalists in New England, the Quakers, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterians and Jews in the Middle Colonies and Anglicans, Baptists and Moravians in the South. If the United States were to establish a state religion, which would it be?
The founders in their wisdom decided against any established religion, including a generic designation of Christianity, as Patrick Henry had proposed in Virginia. James Madison led the charge against Henry’s proposal, and its defeat provided a template for the nation itself, thereby securing the right of religious liberty.
As Madison observed, “This freedom arises from that multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”
These convictions, later encoded into the First Amendment, constitute America’s best idea. The First Amendment has shielded the government from religious factionalism, but religion has also flourished in the United States as nowhere else precisely because the government has stayed out of the religion business.
Christian nationalists, however, want to change that by asserting that the United States is a Christian nation.
Christian nationalism also relies on the specious claim that the founders themselves were Christians, even evangelical Christians. This is so ludicrous that it barely bears refuting. Suffice it to say that with the (remotely) possible exceptions of John Witherspoon, Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and Benjamin Rush, a physician, no founder would qualify for membership in any of the churches now advocating Christian nationalism.
Those who trumpet the Christian origins of the United States also fail to reckon with the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate on July 7, 1797. Article 11 of the treaty reads in part, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion. . . .”
Christian nationalists, however, are undeterred by history. Republican supermajorities in various states are providing taxpayer funds for religious education, once a bright line marking the separation of church and state. Tragically, the Supreme Court, which has infinitely more regard for the Second Amendment than the First Amendment, is complicit in blurring the line of separation with its approval of public funding for religious schools.
And this is the camel’s nose under the tent. If some of the more extreme Christian nationalists prevail, they will outlaw not only abortion but divorce and same-sex marriage. Some seek to write the Apostle’s Creed into the Constitution, allow only one vote per household and restrict office-holding to Christians.
America’s best idea, the separation of church and state, which has ensured both political stability and religious vitality, is under attack as never before in our history.
As we approach the nation’s 250th birthday, the volume of lies about the nation’s “Christian” origins is likely to increase, so it’s important to recall Sandra Day O’Connor’s final church-state decision: “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”
Randall Balmer teaches at Dartmouth College and is the author of America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State.