The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Christian nationalism poses. First, it seeks to alter our history, values, and national identity. Then it codifies Christian privilege in the law, favoring Christians above others. Finally, it legally disfavors the nonreligious, non-Christians, and minorities such as the LGBTQ community, by, for instance, permitting discrimination against them in places of public accommodation or in employment.

(That Jefferson could write of freedom so eloquently and condemn slavery in fervent and revealing terms here and elsewhere, while at the same time owning slaves and fathering children with the slaves, who then became slaves themselves, is a paradox of cowardice.

He was one of America’s greatest intellects, excelled at communicating grand ideas in simple and poetic terms that enthrall us centuries later, but failed utterly and in terrible ways to practice some of those ideas.)11

Thomas Paine explained this in The Rights of Man: Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it.

The one is the Pope, armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the Pope selling or granting indulgences. The former is church and state, and the latter is church and traffic [as in trade or commerce].

Criticizing the system that claims to punish you for your thoughts is the first step against totalitarianism.

a law

If the Ten Commandments were truly moral, there would be no need to edit these displays to fit today’s standards.

Everything is permitted if a god commands it: subjugating women, prohibiting two consenting adults from happily marrying,

In the United States today, religiously motivated child murder is not a mainstream Christian family value; it has died out, but not altogether. In fact, devout parents can still get away with child murder in some states. In Virginia, West Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, Arkansas, Washington, and Idaho, laws for negligent homicide, manslaughter, and capital murder have religious exemptions.

This means that if a child is sick the parent can pray instead of seeking real help. Insulin might save the diabetic child, but parents can substitute prayer. They can pray until their child dies. And not suffer any consequences. Many other states, nearly forty, have religious exemptions to child abuse and neglect laws.

These faith-healing exemptions are new; most date only to the mid-1970s.29 American common law (law made in the courts through precedent in the absence of explicit legislation or statutes) rejected the attempts to claim religion as a defense for killing...

There are cemeteries in Idaho filled with children born to a mother and father who consider themselves “Followers of Christ,” a sect that, like Christian Scientists, considers...

Over about a decade, children born to parents in the Followers of Christ had an infant mortality rate that was ten times greater than that of Idaho as a whole.32 Advocates from groups such as Child Healthcare Is a Legal Duty estimate that nearly 200 childre...

Religion did exactly what the framers feared: it poisoned the political system. Incidentally, this fear was not confined to the founders; nor is it an issue the left and right need disagree on. The father of the modern conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, recognized and feared the inflexibility of religion in politics in 1994 when he famously insisted, “If and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem.

Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.”

Goldfield dates the launch of religion’s political invasion to the 1844 presidential race between Democrat James K. Polk and Whig Henry Clay, and James Birney of the Liberty Party: “From then on, political parties paraded their religious bona fides and attacked opponents as infidels.

The country’s first major religious political party, the Liberty Party, founded in 1839, gained prominence then and used spiritual blackmail to win votes by telling citizens to “vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.”

Fear is a friend to those who would violate inalienable rights, including the right to a secular government.

On December 9, 1863, Secretary Chase approved the final language: “In God We Trust.”66 Congress made the change official a few months later when it passed a new coinage bill, though it did not actually vote on the new language—it simply gave the Mint director, Pollock, the power to fix the shape, motto, and devices of the coins, with the approval of the Treasury secretary.67 So, at the advice of a proselytizing preacher, two government officials—one with a religious agenda so all-consuming he was trying to amend the Constitution to honor his god—deliberately used the time of “national peril and danger,” when people were too busy dying for the Constitution to protect it from a rear-guard assault, to promote their personal religion. Even if this addition were not decades after the founding, it’s hard to see how three men betraying a founding principle—keeping state and church separate—is itself a founding principle. Watkinson, Pollock, and Chase took advantage of a fearful, distracted nation and abused their government offices to impose their personal religious beliefs on all citizens.

THERE IS A PERVERSE IRONY IN THREE MEN choosing to promote the world’s most divisive force, religion, when fighting a...

To choose something so quintessentially divisive to replace a unifying sentiment in the middle of a war that actually sundered the nation show...

“We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities…. [McCarthy] didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’” — Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, 19541

Since Jesus became the original ad man for hell, Christianity has been comfortable using fear to intimidate and to force conformity.

Historian J. Ronald Oakley has referred to the first half of the 1950s as “The Age of Fear and Suspicion.”49 Nuclear war and communism were the main fears. The atomic bomb was designed to be an American monopoly that would guarantee the nation’s safety for the foreseeable future. When President Truman announced in September 1949 that the Russians had unexpectedly developed the bomb too, fear spread. Then Mao and the Communists seized power in China, also in 1949.

In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, dragging the United States into another conflict halfway around the globe; Congress overrode Truman’s veto to pass the McCarran Internal Security Act, which forced communists and communist groups to declare themselves; the Rosenbergs were arrested for spying; Truman was nearly assassinated; and Senator Joseph McCarthy made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming to have a list naming either 57 or 205—it’s unclear— communists in the State Department.50 By 1953, McCarthy’s rhetoric and stature and increased, Stalin’s death had destabilized a nuclear superpower,...

Religion preys on fear.

With the ground prepared by Madison Avenue advertising, it was easy for religious leaders to capitalize on the national fear of communism and nuclear death.

Eisenhower, Graham, Schwarz, McCarthy, the Knights of Columbus, Madison Avenue, the anti–New Deal businesses, and the rest were rededicating this country, not to founding principles, but to a very vague religion. “True Americans” no longer believed in American principles. They believed in being Christian, though most were unsure what that meant in the theological sense.

Even the Supreme Court was not immune to the plague of shallow religious nationalism. In April 1952, the court decided that releasing children from public school classes to receive religious education did not violate the Constitution.

God bless America.

this phrase is strategic piety.

Religion is a cheap shorthand for tribal allegiance, but it also has the power to distract from important issues that actually affect governance.

When religion is used as a political weapon, it becomes weakened and tainted. And this is the flip side of the state-church separation coin.

Nixon, Reagan, and Trump’s abuse of religion for political gain signals to every other politician that lying about religion is perfectly acceptable.

Voters are not just asking to be lied to—they are demanding it.

Religious voters are willingly handing over the tools of their own manipulation, and they may come to regret it. Typically, the majority religion is content to let itself be corrupted by politics, so long as it is in the majority.

But as soon as it becomes a minority it seeks to buttress the...

THE MARRING OF AMERICAN CURRENCY, the religious revision of the pledge, and the diversionary religious blessing of America are not evidence that we are a Christian nation or founded on Christian principles. They are catchphrases. They are slogans Christian nationalists can remember even when they can’t name a single gospel or right protected by the First Amendment.

Religion is the millstone around the neck of American exceptionalism because religious faith denies experience and observation to preserve a belief.

It is for this reason that it is unlikely to contribute to progress,6 though it will take credit for what science, rationality, experience, and observation have accomplished. America succeeded as an experiment because it was based on reason.

If we abandon reason in favor of faith—or if our elected leaders commit this sin—...

Not to some golden age, but to a time “when religion ruled the world…called the Dark Ages,”7 to a...

By seeking to graft his religion on to the structure of the American government, the Christian nationalist is simply showing his religion to be “a bad one.” Not only bad, but also, according to Thomas Jefferson, erroneous, for “it is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”10 Christian nationalism, by its very existence, admits the weakness of Christianity’s truth claims, the frailty of a morality based on supernatural authority, and the shortcomings of an antiquated book. As with the Catholic wedding, Christian nationalists’ attempt to co-opt the power and prestige of the American Enlightenment for their own ends says far more about their insecurity and the genuine blindness of their faith than it does about America’s founding.

faith is “the evidence of things not seen.”

all religion is man-made.

There are some universal human principles that the human authors of religion can’t help but put into their religion. Don’t steal, kill, or lie; treat others as you’d like to be treated; help those who can’t help themselves. But these are not religious principles. These are universal human principles, and we must jettison the religious from the humane. Humans need saving, but they need to be saved from religion.