by John Ellis
July 4th is upon us. For many Americans, it’s a High Holy Day complete with a baptism of cheap beer, communion with hotdogs, and a doxology of fireworks as they celebrate the founding of what they believe is the greatest nation on earth. There is a large subset within those celebrants who ratchet up the sacrosanct ante. For them, the United States of America is not only the greatest nation on earth but is also specially commissioned by God to be a beacon on a hill from which his Light shines into a rebellious world. They believe America was founded as a Christian nation.
Other Americans, though, insist, often with as much religious fervor as the other side, that America was founded as a secular nation. With proof texts culled from primary sources, the antagonists in the debate draw hard lines in the sand. Avowed Christian nationalists like David Barton go to great lengths to highlight quotes (sometimes he just makes the quote up if he can’t find one) that prove that the Founders consciously and deliberately crafted a Christian nation. Speaking for the opposite side, Katherine Stewart, in her otherwise insightful book, declares, “America’s founders explicitly and proudly created the world’s first secular republic.”[1] Both insist that the other side is betraying the Founding Fathers’ vision and ruining America because both sides of the debate operate in the epistemic land of absolutes. For my part, I think the competing beliefs are both right and wrong.
The Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin taught that truth is dialogical. In this view, truth is frequently a paradox held together by a conversation created by the tension of seemingly contradictory claims. Epistemological investigations should include a humility that doesn’t seek to either reconcile competing claims or solve the problem via a Hegelian dialectic ending in a synthesis. There are limits to this, of course, but for many subjects/topics Bakhtin is correct that we need to listen with an ear to understanding that truth is multifaceted and resists being constrained by a bounded set of propositional statements. The debate over whether America was founded as a Christian nation is a great example of this.
To help see this, we need to first recognize that the question of whether America was founded as a Christian nation or not is anachronistic; the French Revolution had yet to happen, for example. The question would have puzzled the majority, if not all, of the colonists in 1776 and again later as Americans in a fledgling nation heading into the momentous May of 1787. The Founders weren’t trying to create a Christian nation because that thought would’ve been a tautology for them. On the flipside, they also weren’t trying to create a secular nation because at the time such a thing really only existed in the minds of a few French philosophes and had yet to make inroads into the thoughts, much less the practice, of the vast majority of those living in what we now call the Western world.
Here’s a thought experiment: If you could travel back in time to Philadelphia in 1787 and were to ask the delegates at the Constitutional Convention if they were creating a Christian nation, how do you think they’d respond? Likewise, if you were to wander the streets of Philadelphia in 1787 and were to ask people you passed if they lived in a Christian nation, what kind of answers do you think you’d receive?
The responses would be framed by puzzlement. The notion of their society, including the polis/state, existing somehow separately from a/the deity wouldn’t have made sense to them. Keep in mind, even their “atheists” were deists[2]. While the seeds of secularism were certainly present, and even beginning to sprout, at the time of the Constitutional Convention the belief that humans were beholden to a Divine Watchmaker, at the least, was still deeply entrenched in life. To be clear, this didn’t equal religiosity; precious few Americans bothered to attend church at the time.[3]
The economist Benjamin Friedman writes in his masterful book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that, “the [18th century] creators of modern economics lived at a time when religion was both more pervasive and more central than anything we know in today’s Western world. … Indeed, the very distinction between the religious and the secular is a modern concept, unknown throughout most of human history.”[4] Granted, Friedman is talking about the likes of Adam Smith and David Hume, two 18th century intellectual giants who never even visited America, but his point underlines my contention: secularism, as defined by Charles Taylor[5], had yet to bloom in the Western world. Even David Hume, the most ardent of religious skeptics of his age, and possibly one of the few bona fide atheists outside of France in the 18th century, didn’t operate in a secular space. And his good friend, the deist Adam Smith, created the field of economics within the framework of religion because no other framework existed at that point. The “conversations” of thinkers like Hume and Smith were like a super-fertilizer, to use a poor simile, spread over the seeds of secularism planted (unwittingly) by the likes of Grotius, Descartes, and Locke. Those seeds were soon to flower but had yet to do so in 1787. The Founding Fathers dialogically operated within a fulcrum point in history. Their “conversations” were both secular and sacred. This is why there are plenty of pull-quotes from the era that can be forced into service by both sides of the debate.
The famous historical anecdote of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” helps expose the paradoxes that existed at the birth and early development of the United States of America. I suspect, though, that most people, on both sides of the debate, have little knowledge of what happened and the phrase’s place and evolution in American jurisprudence.
On January 1, 1802, Baptist pastor John Leland showed up at the White House with a 1,200+ pound wheel of cheese. A gift to President Thomas Jefferson, the wheel of cheese had one of Jefferson’s favorite sayings writ large on it: “Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.” Never mind that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (not to mention the Apostle Paul and Jesus himself) would’ve believed that the quote actually urges disobedience to God, it was a sentiment shared widely by the various iterations of Republicans (not the current political party) existing at the time. The “rebels” of the Whiskey Rebellion held tightly to it. As did George Washington who squashed their rebellion against his tyranny (a result of the Enlightenment’s autonomous epistemology is that we rarely see ourselves as other than the hero of every story). The tyranny that Leland and the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut believed Jefferson stood against was the government’s establishment of churches.
Leland and Jefferson had a long history together. As an itinerant preacher in Virginia, Leland was instrumental in Jefferson and Madison’s successful fight to disestablish religion in the Commonwealth. For Baptists, the disestablishment of religion was personal considering that they were one of the more persecuted denominations by the controlling denominations in the various colonies and then states. So, in 1802, Jefferson was lauded as their champion with a by-then-rotting wheel of cheese that was displayed at White House functions for the next two years to the chagrin of visiting dignitaries’ noses, I’m sure.
The same day he received the massive gift, Jefferson sat down and began writing the famous Danbury letter. It went through several drafts and edits, which has given those on both sides of the debate much fodder to battle over[6]. The important section of the published letter says this:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only & not opinions, 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.”
Published in 1802, it wasn’t until 1879 that the letter’s famous words were introduced into American jurisprudence. Writing the majority opinion for the Supreme Court’s decision in Reynolds v. United Stated, Chief Justice Morrison Waite appealed to Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” as a basis for the ruling.
As Brigham Young’s personal secretary, George Reynolds had been hand-picked by the Elders of the Mormon Church to challenge the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862. The case made its way through the Utah Territory’s courts landing on the Supreme Court’s docket in 1878. Chief Justice Waite employed Jefferson’s words to highlight the Danbury letter’s contention that, “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only & not opinions.” Waite argued that the federal government had the right to legislate religious actions but not beliefs. In other words, George Reynolds could believe that bigamy was commanded by God all he wanted; he just couldn’t act on it.
The modern notion of separation of church and state was introduced into American jurisprudence in 1947. Justice Hugo Black, author of the majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, added the words “high and impregnable” to Jefferson’s “separation of church and state.” Since 1947, and especially since 1962 and 1963, the contemporary debate over separation of church and state, now framed within Charles Taylor secular age, has been increasing in urgency and fury. I don’t believe that the two sides in the debate have enough common ground to ever reach a compromise. It’s all or nothing for both. But I want to return to 1802.
Before the days of press releases and the telegram, Presidents published letters that contained policy goals, defense of positions/actions, and words intended for the entire nation. Just because Jefferson’s letter was addressed to the Danbury Baptist Association doesn’t mean it was written for their eyes only. He was speaking to everyone.
Unlike his predecessors Washington and Adams, Jefferson refused to designate certain days of the year for thanksgiving. As a proponent of the disestablishment of religion, Jefferson was defending himself against accusations that he was an atheist and “an enemy of the religion of Christ,” in the words of the Dutch Reformed pastor William Linn.[7] After Jefferson was elected, devout federalist Christians in New England began burying their Bibles in unmarked hiding spots because Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, had warned that if Jefferson were elected, “we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, the vessels of the sacramental supper borne by an ass in public procession, and our children chanting mockeries against God.”[8]
While not technically a deist, Jefferson was still susceptible to the hyperbolic handwringing of the few devout Christians in the country. Keep in mind, at the time, even the non-devout would’ve been troubled by those accusations (including Jefferson himself). The Danbury Baptists, though, as well as other Baptists, found in ally in Jefferson. As law professor Daniel Dreisbach explains, “The issue of foremost importance to the Baptists was whether ‘religious privileges’ (and the rights of conscience) are rightly regarded as ‘inalienable rights’ or merely as ‘favors granted’ and subject to withdrawal by the civil state. The Baptists, of course, believed that religious liberty was an inalienable right, and they were deeply offended that the religious privileges of dissenters in Connecticut were treated as favors that could be granted or denied by the political authorities.”[9]
While Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian, he also wasn’t an atheist. And his letter was intended to give an explanation for why he refused to declare a day of thanksgiving while also defending himself against the accusations that he was an enemy of religion. His voice, and not just in the Danbury Letter but his entire life, was paradoxical. Rejecting the miracles of the Bible as well as Jesus’ deity while trumpeting the priority of human reason, Jefferson also believed in the importance of religion in the polis. Two days after writing the letter, he attended a church service in the Capital in which Leland preached to both Houses of Congress. That’s a paradox that’s next to impossible for us to hold; the tension is too great for us. It’s why the current debates attempt to reduce Jefferson and his fellow Founders to absolutes. But here’s a contemporary paradox for those who believe that America was founded as a Christian nation: their religion is more informed by “Jefferson’s secularism” than by the religion of the Puritan federalists in New England who hid their Bibles.
For me, there is a more important question to consider that helps answer the question of whether America should be considered a Christian nation: Why would the Founding Fathers have found the thought of creating a Christian nation a tautology? I don’t mean what made it a tautology for them. I mean what historical structures created that tautology?
Two of the most important historical truths that I’m afraid many Christians in America fail to truly grasp is that the biggest mistake the Church made was allowing Constantine and Theodosius to marry her to cultural power and prestige. Likewise, the biggest mistake of the Reformation was failing to initiate the divorce. The thought of creating a Christian nation would’ve been a tautology for the Founders because Christianity and power were inextricably connected in the 18th century. The rise of secularism since then has created a power struggle in society that Christians shouldn’t be engaged in to begin with. Power in the here and now is not the birthright for those who follow King Jesus; being hated and persecuted is. King Jesus’ words, not mine.
Any claims to be a Christian nation in the here and now is rebellious. It uses Christianity as a tool of power which leads to oppression because taking what’s not ours is sin. Sin begets more sin.
So, was America founded as a Christian nation? Yes. Was America founded as a secular nation? Yes (the epistemologies, anthropologies, and ethics were decidedly the seeds of secularism, even though those things had been created/defended by professing Christians – they had bought the lie of autonomy and power). Within that syncretism lives the idolatrous problem exhibited by white evangelicals in 2023. They don’t want God’s Kingdom. They want their own kingdom dressed up to look like God’s Kingdom. They want Babylon.
Soli Deo Gloria
[1] Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 128.
[2] Including Thomas Paine who was a deist, contrary to those who believe he was an atheist. David Hume was likely a legit atheist, but he died in 1776 and was Scottish anyway, having never been to the New World. He influenced the Founders, though, so it’s fair that I mention him as a likely exception to my claim.
[3] According to Roger Finke and Rodney Stark in their seminal book The Churching of America, the number of churchgoers in 1776 was a paltry 17%. By the Civil War, it had risen to 37%. And it wasn’t until the 20th century that over half of Americans were churchgoers.
[4] Benjamin Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), xi, 16.
[5] While acknowledging and interacting with the more common understanding of secular as the absence of religion/God from the public square, Taylor’s program operates with a much more robust (and useful) definition of secular: believing in God is now an option, as is not believing in God. It’s no longer a societal given that a deity – a Divine Watchmaker – stands behind reality. We now live in a contested age, meaning that all of us living in the 21st century West are secular, even those of us who are Christians.
[6] It’s almost as if Jefferson didn’t give a single thought to our contemporary debates.
[7] William Linn, Serious Considerations on the Election of a President (1800), 28.
[8] Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis in Political Sermons of the Founding Era: 1730-1805 ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), 1382.
[9] Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 33.
Practically Known Theology 