The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Plenty of historians and authors have focused on the cleanup while ignoring who made the mess.

This book will treat religion like any other idea: not with contempt, but not with undue respect either.

The Argument in Brief

The founders’ beliefs about the separation of state and church and political science, not their personal religious beliefs, are most important.

Then we’ll step back and survey colonial history, where we find true Christian nations—the colonies—founded on Christian principles. Those Christian governments were so tyrannical that they became examples for the founders of how not to build a nation.

Next, we turn to the bastion of Judeo-Christian principles, the bible, and compare some of its fundamental principles—the Golden Rule, obedience to god, crime and punishment, original sin, redemption through Jesus’s sacrifice, faith, and biblical governments—to America’s founding principles.

Then we scrutinize each of the Ten Commandments to see how they stack up against Amer...

The book concludes with a look at some unavoidable American verbiage: “in God we trust,” “one nation under God,” and “God bless America.”

Usage Note

For this book, I chose to quote the New Revised Standard Version. When a particular bible is written about, its name will be capitalized; otherwise it will not.

Refusing to capitalize god is not a mark of disrespect; it is simply an assumption that one religion is not more true than another. It treats religions equally.

Assume that I’m referring to the major founders or a majority of the founders, and by all means, disagree with me.

PART I

THE FOUNDERS, INDEPENDENCE, AND THE COLONIES

1

Interesting and Irrelevant, the Religion of the Founders

Weems was interested in profit, not accuracy.

That revival, referred to as the Second Great Awakening, was itself an indication that the founding generation was not as religious as Christian nationalists often argue: only those who are asleep can awaken.

Ronald Reagan called the image of Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge “the most sublime picture in American history.”19

But historical facts tell us of a different Washington. He was a man of little or no religion with a strong character that, had he been religious, would have prevented showy religious displays. Washington “avoided referring to Jesus Christ in his letters, attended religious services irregularly, did not kneel during prayer, and often dodged out of church before communion,” according to Lengel.21

As historian Joseph Ellis put it, “there were no ministers in the room, no prayers uttered, no Christian rituals offering the solace of everlasting life…. He died as a Roman stoic rather than a Christian saint.”25

The prayer story, as historian François Furstenberg notes, “almost certainly sprung from Weems’s imagination.”

This facile, reflected glory is why the fraudulent scene hangs in the Capitol prayer room, why Reagan gushed over a lie, and why all a politician need do is claim to be a prayerful Christian and he is suddenly Washington’s equal.

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and others are invoked in the attempt to claim this nation as Christian because they were Christian. This spiritual wrangling has a checkered history, with each generation repeating the falsehoods of the earlier, including Weems’s.

That the founders had personal beliefs about religion and god does not prove that they used those principles to found a nation.

Major Premise The founders were all devout, Jesus-has-risen Christians.

Minor Premise The founders established this nation.

Conclusion Therefore, this nation is a Christian nation founded on Judeo...

They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone.

Divorcing religion from government offices was so important that the US Congress edited the word god out of its oath of office.

Americans should celebrate this “great American principle of eternal separation.”48 It’s ours. It’s an American original. We ought to be proud of that contribution to the world, not bury it under myths.

George Washington promised “that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny…. Every man…ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.”51

Washington thought that religion was best left to the private sphere. He defended the Constitution’s godlessness. The government would “give every furtherance” to “morality and science,” which might incidentally advance religion, but religion was a personal, not a government matter.55

Madison argued that the separation existed as much to protect religion as to protect government.

“Pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution” were the “fruits” of fifteen centuries of established Christianity, Madison wrote.

According to the bishop at least, infidel principles, not Judeo-Christian principles, influenced the Father of the Constitution.

State and church “will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together,” as Madison explained.72

2

“Religion and Morality”: Religion for the Masses, Reason for the Founders

“It was not fabricated in the Loom of France, nor are the materials english, but they are the product of our own American soil, raised and Nurtured, not by the gentle showers of Heaven but by the hard Labour and indefatigable industry and firmness of her sons, and watered by the Blood of many of them.”13

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read,” Jefferson wrote.

The argument is that the United States was created by Christians for Christians because only they are moral,24 that Christianity is required for a moral society.

Religion gets its morality from us, not the other way around.

For many founders, religion was not the source of morality; they thought it was a substitute for morality: a substitute for those who didn’t have the time and education to discover moral truths on their own.

Like Washington, Adams suggested that any religion, not only Christianity, can replace morality.

The educated elite, including the founders, achieved morality independent of religion, but they failed to extend the possibility of that achievement to others. They thought religion was needed for the commoners.

To be fair, Franklin and the other founders did not have the data we possess today. Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society is, the better off it is. We now know that religion is not necessary for a society to succeed.

Paine wrote, “Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.”

People who are more likely to question the political status quo are more likely to question religion, and vice versa.

If the founders had been bible-beating believers, they might never have thought to revolt against an empire and declare independence.