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The essential argument of The Founding Myth is that one might as well describe the United States as a nation founded on Hammurabic-Judeo-Christian-Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-humanist values as on the values of the Hebrew and Christian bibles. This is, of course, a ridiculous statement—but not as obviously ridiculous to many Americans as a claim to national legitimacy based on the oxymoronic Judeo- Christianity.
Another important point of The Founding Myth is that many of the pieties Americans now take for granted and attribute to the founders are really artifacts of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Above all, he makes the vital point that when faith is politically weaponized, religion itself is “weakened and tainted.” He recalls Benjamin’s Franklin’s argument—as incisive today as it was more than 200 years ago—that when “a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support [it], so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
From a scholarly standpoint, as noted in a 1992 Newsweek article, “the idea of a single ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is a made-in-America myth.”9 One Jewish theologian stated the problem plainly: “Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity, and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism.”10 “Judeo-Christian” is slippery because it is more a political invention than a scholarly description. It originated at the close of World War II when Christian exclusivity was too threatening.
Eisenhower was probably the first president to use the term, explaining to a Soviet general in 1952 that the American “form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept.”12
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. To them, America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles, and promoting that belief is a religious duty.24
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 Framers and the citizens of their time intended…to guard against the civic divisiveness that follows when the government weighs in on one side of religious debate; nothing does a better job of roiling society,” wrote the Supreme Court in 2005 when examining the origins of the religion clauses of the First Amendment.25
(Thomas Jefferson thought the idea that the Ten Commandments or Christianity was the foundation of English Common Law an “awkward monkish fabrication” and a “fraud.”74)
When James Madison protested Patrick Henry’s proposed three-penny tax to fund Christian ministers, he wrote a landmark in American history and law: the “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” (1785).
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.90
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
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So do Christian nationalists.93 They abandon their earlier obscurantism, the first myth, in favor of a new one: the subtler argument that our nation is founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Christian nationalism hinges on this second myth and, unlike the first, it is broadly accepted.
America was not founded on Judeo-Christian principles. In fact, Judeo-Christian principles, especially those central to the Christian nationalist identity, are thoroughly opposed to the principles on which the United States was built. The two systems differ and conflict to such a degree that, to put it bluntly, Christianity is un-American.
It may seem that this book blames all of society’s ills on religion, but that is simply because I am focusing on the side of the ledger that is typically ignored.
This book will treat religion like any other idea: not with contempt, but not with undue respect either. Christian nationalism has succeeded in part because of Americans’ ingrained unwillingness to offend religious sensibilities. But catering to these sensibilities limits our search for the truth, as does religion itself. There is strength in throwing off those self-imposed restraints.
If no original source could be found, the point cannot be found in this book.
The founders’ beliefs about the separation of state and church and political science, not their personal religious beliefs, are most important.
When Weems published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington in 1800, it was a commercial venture. He wrote what people wanted to read.
Weems expanded the initially small pamphlet in those subsequent editions. One addition is the book’s most well-known story—that Washington couldn’t tell a lie about a cherry tree. Ironically, given its moral, the story is untrue.11
By the seventeenth edition, another Weemsian fable was added: General Washington praying in the Valley Forge snow.12 According to Weems’s story, “in a dark natural bower of ancient oaks,” Washington was discovered praying aloud, “on his knees at prayer.”13 The story was repeated and reprinted with no regard for truth; its proliferation accelerated during the nation’s religious revival from 1820 to 1860.
The Valley Forge prayer scene has been painted by Lambert Sachs (c. 1854); Henry Brueckner (c. 1866); J. C. Leyendecker (1935); and Arnold Friberg (1975). It appeared on stamps in 1928 and in 1977. The George Washington Memorial Chapel was founded in Valley Forge in 1903 partly to commemorate “the inspiring image of a solitary and steadfast Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge.”18 The US Capitol’s Congressional Prayer Room, built in 1955 (see page 280), features a stained-glass window depicting the scene. Ronald Reagan called the image of Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley
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For all its ubiquity, there is no historical evidence to support the tale. Weems designed the story to portray a devout Washington. In Lengel’s enlightening book Inventing George Washington, he writes, “Over and again, Weems emphasized Washington’s Christian upbringing, frequent prayers, and spiritual dependence on God.”20
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 duri...
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On the rare occasions when Washington actually attended church (perhaps twelve times a year pre-presidency and only three times in his last three years), Washington refused to take communion, even though his wife did.22 Bishop William White off...
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The bishop concluded in another letter that no “degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which would prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”24
Washington refused to have a priest or religious rituals at his deathbed, a startling lapse if he were truly devout. 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
If he was religious, Washington was exceedingly private about those beliefs, even in personal letters and papers. He mentions Jesus perhaps once in ninety volumes of letters and papers, and never in private correspondence.26 The ostentatious show Weems invented...
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Though interesting, the battle over what the founders personally believed is irrelevant to the claim that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. That the founders had personal beliefs about religion and god does not prove that they used those principles to found a nation. Nor should we make the mistake of assuming that their religious beliefs were static throughout their lives. People’s beliefs change.
The religious faith of the founders is irrelevant for another reason: they made it irrelevant when they erected a “wall of separation” between religion and the government they created.35
Two facts illustrate the founders’ intentions to build this wall. First, our Constitution is deliberately godless. There are no references to gods, goddesses, or divine intervention.40 The omission was not an oversight. Supernatural power was rejected in favor of the natural power contained in the first three words: “We the People.”
The second fact is that our Constitution’s only references to religion are exclusionary. It excludes the state from involving itself in reli-gion (the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause) and excludes religion from involving itself in the state (the First Amendment’s “establishment” clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”).
Divorcing religion from government offices was so important that the US Congress edited the word god out of its oath of office. The first bill Congress passed under the Constitution that President George Washington signed into law in June 1789 was “An Act to regulate the Time and Manner of administering certain Oaths.” As originally proposed, it had two clauses mentioning god: “in the presence of Almighty GOD” and “So help me God.”44 Neither made the final cut, and the oath remains godless until 1862 (see chapter 24).
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 and church.
That [separation], more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice…. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.47
In the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published the same year that America declared independence, historian Edward Gibbon wrote that “the various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”49
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
Hamilton “sounded a theme that was to resonate straight through the Revolution and beyond: that the best government posture toward religion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church,” according to Ron Chernow, who is Hamilton’s biographer as well as Washington’s.57
“And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”60 Madison argued that the separation existed as much to protect religion as to protect government.
For Madison, the tendency of government and religion to mix and corrupt each other is so great “that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded against.”63
THAT THE FOUNDERS SOUGHT TO BUILD this wall of separation does not necessarily mean that they were personally irreligious. One can be religious and endorse this separation. Indeed, many minority religious sects favored separation at the founding.
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
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Jefferson rewrote the New Testament using a razor, editing out the supernatural and salvaging what he considered worthy lessons from a mortal man. By his own admission, he excised “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.”17 It was, Jefferson wrote, like pulling “diamonds” from “dunghills.”18
A MORE INSIDIOUS RATIONALE underlies the Christian nationalist claim about the founders: the myth that only Christians are moral. 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.25
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.
Like Washington, Adams suggested that any religion, not only Christianity, can replace morality.
Jefferson did not confuse religion and morality.
Religion was not morality, but a substitute or supplement. He wrote explicitly about this distinction: “On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”34
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and even Franklin and other founders did not think that religion was the source of morality, but its substitute.
