The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

“In God we Trust,” “one nation under God,” “God bless America.” These tidbits are not historical so much as they are rhetorical. Their tardiness precludes arguments that they somehow prove the founding ideology, but it is worth analyzing how the verbiage entered the American vernacular because doing so reveals something interesting about Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists take advantage of times of fear and use them to impose their god on everyone. When doing so, they often destroy earlier unifying messages with their new, divisive message. Since the first years of our founding, citizens’ rights have been jeopardized and curtailed by war. Or rather, our rights are curtailed, perhaps even willingly given up, because of the fear of war. During the Quasi-War in 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act “in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and intrigue” that Thomas Jefferson dubbed the Reign of Witches.27 Understandably, no one today points to the ignominious Sedition Act to prove that our nation was founded on the government’s ability to punish speech critical of the government. Government censorship of speech is anathema to our founding principles, despite the Sedition Act’s passage and enforcement a mere seven years after the First Amendment was ratified. It is merely a sad, short-lived example of fear trumping our founding principles. But Christian nationalists ignore this logic and recite these religious idioms, each more delinquent relative to the founding than ...