The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

I know, from

having spoken at many universities throughout the nation during the past twenty years, that large numbers of students attribute the Pledge of Allegiance to the revolutionary era. In fact, the pledge was written in 1892, and the phrase “under God” was not added until 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era. The addition was intended to draw a distinction between pious America and atheistic communism. I well remember the nuns in my parochial school telling us that Russian children could be shot for simply saying the word “God.” Seidel recounts the history of the relatively recent origins of the public sanctimony that many Americans now take for granted, including the routine use of the phrase “God bless America” at the end of presidential speeches—something that was not a commonplace when I was growing up in the 1950s.

Christian nationalists are historical revisionists bent on “restoring” America to the Judeo-Christian principles on which they wish it were founded. They believe that secular America is a myth, and under the guise of restoration they seek to press religion into every crevice of the government. They not only think it appropriate for the government to favor one religion over others, but also believe America was designed to favor Christianity.

History had proven to the framers of the US Constitution that religion is divisive. They separated religion from government to avoid the mistakes of past regimes.

The single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or even political party; it was believing the United States is and should be a Christian nation.

Project Blitz encapsulates the problem 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.

Christian nationalism is not solely about religion. It’s an unholy alliance, an incestuous marriage of conservative politics and conservative Christianity.

PATRIOTISM HAS NO RELIGION.

Unfortunately, there are two Christian nationalist myths we failed to guard against. These two myths encompass all the lesser myths that Trump and Project Blitz feed into. The first is that America was founded as a Christian nation. The claim is demonstrably false as revealed by any number of documents from the time, including America’s godless Constitution, Madison’s Memorial, or the Treaty of Tripoli, which was negotiated under President George Washington and signed by President John Adams with the unanimous consent of the US Senate in 1797, and which says that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”91 Most people with even a modest grasp of US history, law, government, or politics can debunk this divisive fabrication.

Religious beliefs are ideas like any other, though they are defended more fervently and can often seem immune to reasoned argument.

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” — Salman Rushdie,

There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion.

America was the first nation to try this experiment; it invented the separation of state

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.

Regardless of their personal religious beliefs, the founders chose to safeguard liberty by “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”70 And according to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing an opinion in 1948, “Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson’s metaphor in describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a ‘wall of separation,’ not a fine line easily overstepped.”71 Separation is not a one-way street that allows religion to influence government while preventing government from influencing religion; it is a wall preventing religion from tainting government as well. State and church “will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together,” as Madison explained.72

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. There are two falsehoods tangled up in this claim. The first conflates religion with morality, and the second assumes that the founders did the same. Religion gets its morality from us, not the other way around. Even today, many people mistakenly believe that morality cannot exist outside of religion.

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. Often, when the founders spoke of “religion and morality,” they were speaking not of one thing, but of two separate phenomena—religion for the people, morality for them.

The least religious countries: Have the lowest rates of violent crime and homicide Are the best places to raise children and to be a mother Have the lowest rates of corruption Have the lowest levels of intolerance against racial and ethnic minorities Score highest for women’s rights and gender equality Have the greatest protection and enjoyment of political and civil liberties Are better at educating their youth in reading, math, and science Are the most peaceful Are the most prosperous Have the highest quality of life.50 This pattern also exists within the United States. Those states that are the most religious have more societal ills, and tend to: Have the highest rates of poverty Have the highest rates of obesity Have the highest rates of infant mortality Have the highest rates of STDs Have the highest rates of teen pregnancy Have the lowest percentage of college-educated adults Have the highest rates of murder and violent crime.51 This, of course, does not prove that religion causes immoral behavior, but it confirms that religion is not required for people to behave morally.

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.”54 Sins that can be “forgiven” without real punishment, without the victim’s consent, without involving the civil law, are more likely to be committed.

The idea that all people are created equal is not a religious idea; the idea that some people are special or chosen is one that various religious groups have embraced throughout history. The entire Hebrew Bible is about the chosen people. Religion promotes elitism, not equality.

Instead, they carefully selected references that do not specify any religious denomination or sectarian belief. These were deliberate men who knew they were drafting a monumental and historic document; they chose their words carefully.

“in acknowledging Nature’s God, the Creator, and Divine Providence, the Declaration carefully and quite consciously eschewed any invocation of the Christian religion.”6

The founders understood that human rights are more powerful, absolute, and universal than god-given rights. God-given rights depend on geography, varying drastically for residents of Indiana, India, and Iran. God-given rights depend on those claiming to speak for god, as shown by Mohammad, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s interpretations of their respective gods’ will. Women and the LGBTQ have fewer rights in almost every religion because of god’s will. The abolition of slavery, women’s rights, the end of segregation, marriage equality—progress in each was opposed by those claiming to know god’s mind and executing god’s will. Human or natural rights are far less susceptible to the whim of preachers. Simply by virtue of being human, of being born, you have certain inherent, inalienable rights. 76

The god-given rights fallacy is also moral relativism masquerading as moral absolutism.

The religious system of absolute morality is actually moral relativism in disguise, but with an alarming alteration: God-given rights depend solely on a particular individual’s interpretation of god’s word. Perhaps that individual adheres to the interpretation of a higher authority, such as a pope or an author of a holy book. But at the end of the line, a human being is claiming to know “God’s will.” One person’s moral belief is given the authority of divine law. That relativism is far more dangerous because it involves a fallible human being claiming divine sanction.

In other words, what most religions label absolute morality is simply their personal morality given divine sanction.

Franklin Graham, son of and heir to Billy Graham’s evangelical empire, put a face on these statistics less than a month after the numbers were released. In a May 2018 Associated Press interview, Graham said that Donald Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels and the subsequent hush money was nobody’s business: “That’s for him and his wife to deal with. I think when the country went after President Clinton, the Republicans, that was a great mistake that should never have happened. And I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”79 But this was a change for Graham. Almost exactly twenty years earlier, he went after President Clinton. In a 1998 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “Clinton’s Sins Aren’t Private,” Graham wrote, “The God of the Bible says that what one does in private does matter. Mr. Clinton’s months-long extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family. If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”80 It turns out that what the biblical god says depends on the point Graham is trying to make. Deep down, the evangelical concern was not over morality, but over being able to claim a divine sanction for whatever was considered moral. This conception of morality and of human rights is dangerous.

The presidential oath, despite modern trends, does not actually mention god or include a request for a god’s help. The words “so help me God” never appear and were not first used to alter the words of the constitutional oath by a president until nearly 100 years later. The first law that Congress ever passed prescribed congressional oaths for office, and all gods were deliberately edited out of it.86 The presidential oath remains godless, though modern political piety and a disrespect for the Constitution has marred it.

If the Declaration they authored is at all theological, its theology is anti-biblical and anti-Christian.

Exercising poetic license does not make the Declaration religious; nor does it establish a religion. The genius of the document and its poetic language is that readers may read into it what they will. Christians will see the religious references as being about their god, and atheists like me will think “divine Providence” simply means luck. In psychological terms, the founders were playing to people’s confirmation bias—our innate selection and interpretation of evidence to support our existing beliefs. But to claim a national, legal, or governmental foundation on such persuasion or poetry is specious. The references are tools of persuasion, not expressions of a founding faith.

The Pilgrims and the Puritans are often conflated into one sect, when in fact they were two distinct groups.

The Christian nationalist claim gives these colonies even more weight and goes something like this: 1. Christian settlers came to North America seeking religious freedom and established Christian governments—Christian nations—to protect that religious freedom; 2. The United States also has religious freedom; 3. Therefore, America is a Christian nation with a Christian government.37 The Christian nationalists are arguing that a Christian nation is the basis of religious freedom—that a Christian nation is not only compatible with religious freedom, but also a prerequisite. In truth, religious freedom is not possible in a Christian nation or any other theocracy. The concepts are mutually exclusive; each destroys the other.

Fleeing religious persecution is not the same as seeking religious freedom.

The Plymouth Pilgrims and the Massachusetts Puritans were not seeking religious freedom. They were seeking the ability to form a government and a society dedicated to their particular brand of religion. This distinction is crucial. Religious freedom allows citizens to practice any religion so long as it doesn’t infringe on another’s rights. The Mayflower settlers were looking for a place to practice their religion and force others to practice it too. That is not freedom. It is dissent from the ruling religion and a desire to impose your own. They wanted a theocracy.

A tendency toward theocracy is also a tendency toward violence.

The Puritans’s founding principle was intolerance, not tolerance, let alone religious freedom. They understood and even admitted this.

The Puritans and the Pilgrims wanted—and got—Christian nations. They established pure theocracies: strongly religious governments able to stamp out heresy, execute schismatics, and banish all but the meekest.

The Puritans imposed the death penalty for worshipping other gods, blasphemy, homosexuality, and adultery.68 It is out of this society and this mindset that the terrible idea of a Christian nation founded on Christian principles lodged itself in the American psyche. And it is this intolerant legacy that must be abandoned. That is what a Christian government looks like: exclusive, exclusionary, divisive, hateful, severe, and lethal. It resembles modern theocracies in the Middle East.

All of this happened more than 100 years before the American Revolution and the drafting of the US Constitution. When the framers, like James Madison, surveyed history, they eschewed theocracy and intolerance, condemning the “torrents of blood” spilled in the name of religion.69 Jefferson looked back on the “millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, [who] have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”70

“For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.”

Jefferson observed that those fleeing persecution “cast their eyes on these new countries as asylums of civil and religious freedom; but they found them free only for the reigning sect.”

When our nation was founded, it rejected the intolerance theocracy breeds. We had, as Jefferson would say in his inaugural address, “banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered.”75 One of our founding principles is religious freedom. And a Christian nation is hostile to that ideal. A Christian nation would destroy that which has made America so strong, as it did in these Christian colonies. America’s foundation deliberately eliminated religious intolerance. But it also shied away from tolerance, reaching instead for a higher ideal—true freedom.

find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.” — Thomas Jefferson to William Short, on the bible, 18203

God’s law is unchangeable. American law is not. The Constitution is not perfect. The framers knew this, and none left the Convention having secured everything they wanted. In his closing address to the Convention, Franklin consented “to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”25 Adams, writing a few years later as vice president, was more specific: “The Constitution is but an experiment, and must and will be altered.”26 These were not men acting with the certainty of religious conviction. They were thoughtful, reasonable men aware that they, and other delegates, were governed partly by passion and self-interest. And so, certain mostly of their own fallibility, they crafted a provision to alter—to amend—the Constitution. They would take advantage of Article V almost immediately, to write and pass the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights. The Constitution has been altered twenty-seven times and nearly always improved. The glaring exception to this steady improvement was partly due to religious groups, such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which advocated for the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition, and which was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment.

This lack of influence makes sense because Christian nationalists have never convincingly answered a basic question: How, precisely, did the bible influence American political thought and America’s founding? The question is even more pressing knowing that the founders did not cite the bible when writing and debating the Constitution. It is assumed that our government was founded on biblical principles, on Judeo-Christian principles. Because this answer is assumed, few bother to explain which specific Judeo-Christian principles and ideas were so influential to America’s founding. Instead, we get vague assertions from men like Tim LaHaye, a Christian nationalist author and co-author of the popular Left Behind series, who lauds “the Christian consensus of our Founding Fathers and the Biblical principles of law that have provided the freedoms we’ve enjoyed for over two hundred years.”40 These partial answers rely on emotion and desire, not on history or fact, and therefore fail to truly answer anything.

Our country is based on clear principles that are attained by reason, not on a text that repeatedly contradicts itself.

Christian nationalists make many claims, but perhaps the most arrogant is that America is a Christian nation because we were founded on the Golden Rule.2 For argument’s sake, let’s assume that this is true. The assumption doesn’t improve the Christian nationalist’s position, because the Golden Rule is not Christian.

The Golden Rule exists in nearly every society and also appears, in one form or another, in many religions,

Therefore, Judeo-Christianity’s “Golden Rule” cannot be said to have had any unique impact on the nation’s founding—especially given that influential founders such as John Adams knew it was not unique to Christianity. One reflective Sunday, Adams wrote in his diary that Christianity included the rule but did not invent it: “One great advantage of the Christian religion is, that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations,—Love your neighbor as yourself, and do to others as you would that others should do to you,—to the knowledge, belief, and veneration of the whole people.”21 According to Adams, the Golden Rule is not a Christian principle: it is a universal principle, a “principle of the law of nature and nations.” Christianity was one vehicle to disperse this universal idea, not its origin.

Empathy, compassion, guilt, forgiveness, morality, and responsibility cannot be claimed as the monopoly of one religion. They are, to borrow from Christopher Hitchens, part of our “elementary human solidarity.” Arguing that the Golden Rule influenced America’s founding does nothing to prove that we are a Christian nation, but it does help show the arrogance of Christian nationalism.