The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Claiming that a god plays a role in human equality lets people who claim to know god’s will be “more equal than others,”62 to borrow from George Orwell.

Jefferson is saying that most people are not sophisticated enough to ponder moral questions, so they should adhere to religion. This belief actually undercuts the Christian nationalists’ claims because it means that Jefferson, as a member of the elite, along with the other founders, did not need religion and would not have needed it to draft the Declaration.

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.

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...

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.

God-given rights are not sacred, self-evident, or inherent: they are fragile, exclusive, and used to favor the chosen few. That was not the intent or legacy of the Declaration.

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.

Some colonies had Christian governments—indeed, some were settled for that purpose. But when the founders were inventing America, they rejected the example of colonial governments established on Judeo-Christian principles, viewing them as examples of what to avoid.

Christian nationalists have a stable of colonial history and quotes they cite in support of their myth.7 But by definition, each argument relies on a time when the United States was but an outpost of a Christian king’s estate. Two hackneyed, yet well-accepted “proofs” are: 1. The Continental Congress prayed; therefore America was founded on Christian principles, and 2. The Pilgrims came to this continent seeking religious freedom and established a Christian duchy; therefore America is a Christian nation.

As president, John Adams issued calls for prayer and thanksgiving, but thought they might have been responsible for his failed 1800 reelection bid: “Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion.”9

Christian nationalists see this prayer as evidence of a deeply religious body doing god’s work, but it was strategic piety. John Adams recorded that Joseph Reed said, “We never were guilty of a more Masterly Stroke of Policy, than in moving that Mr. Duché might read Prayers.”12 Policy, not piety. The Continental Congress was a political body debating politics, not religion. And just like the strategic piety in the Declaration, this pious move has no bearing or influence on our founding principles.

They did not pray during the Constitutional Convention. The delegates thought the sole motion for prayer so “unnecessary” that they didn’t even bother to vote on it.13

Duché is the man Christian nationalists choose as a standard bearer for claiming that our country belongs to their god—a man who abandoned American independence, labeled our soldiers cowards, and slandered the founders. But to the Christian nationalist, facts matter less than being able to claim that at one time, when the colonies were still colonies, an Anglican preacher was selected for political reasons to say a prayer for the same men he would later denigrate.

Currently, Congress pays close to a million dollars a year for two clergymen and their staff, whose only job is to pray once a day over their proceedings.35 This is unconstitutional, as the only framers, including Madison, Father of our Constitution, to offer a legal opinion on government prayer argued.

This is not quite true. 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.

As Jefferson explained 150 years later, the first English settlers may have been fleeing persecution, but when they gained power “they shewed equal intolerance in this country.”38

Pierre Bayle (“atheism does not necessarily lead to the corruption of morals”41),

Freely practicing, or not practicing, one’s religion was a right the Dutch extended to all. This freedom meant that the Pilgrim elders could not enforce their beliefs with the help of civil law. And living with ungodly non-Pilgrims degraded their followers’ faith. They wanted religious uniformity, not freedom. They wanted a government based on their god, on their religion, and to meld the civil and religious authority into one alliance. They wanted theocracy—they just wanted the “right” theocracy.

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].57

Washington also noted that that government cast aside “toleration” in favor of a natural right: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”58

Although tolerance might be adopted as a Judeo-Christian principle in some enlightened circles, religious freedom cannot be. Religion at its heart is a claim to hold the ultimate truth.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth were no better. The Mayflower Compact is often used to show America’s Christian principles, but it actually shows Christian intolerance.65

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. Few settlers wanted to permanently join this harsh monoculture after experiencing it.

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.

The insufferable Puritan theocracy declined after King Charles II revoked the colonial charter and passed the Toleration Act of 1689.

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

After surveying this bloody history, the founders decided to build a wall that would forever separate state and church. They disestablished religion and abolished religious tests for public office. They invented the secular state.

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.

“I 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

Shakespeare offers far greater insights about humanity—“Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind”; and better rules for living—“This above all; to thine own self be true.”5

Using biblical stories to communicate an idea does not necessarily indicate that biblical theology influenced the underlying idea or that the speaker adheres to a biblical religion.

Lincoln’s use of the “house divided” metaphor when he accepted the Republican nomination to be Illinois’s senator is a perfect example: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’

According to Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, Henry Herndon, Lincoln chose the metaphor, which appears several times in the Christian gospels, because he “want[ed] to use some universally known figure expressed in simple language as universally well-known, that may strike home in the minds.”8 Lincoln didn’t quote the bible because he believed it to be divine revelation.

Even quoting the bible is not necessarily an indication of the writer’s beliefs about that book. Thomas Paine quoted extensively from the bible in Common Sense because he was writing to a people who were familiar with biblical stories, like 1 Samuel 8. Paine made a biblical argument for revolution.

we know that the modern idea of separation of powers did not come from the bible. It came from Montesquieu, who never mentioned or referred to the bible in his discussion of three separate branches of government.21

Judeo-Christian principles have nothing to do with separation of powers.

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.

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

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 bible has been edited, rewritten, excised, supplemented, translated, retranslated, and mistranslated so many times that claims of immutability are laughable. Yet about thirty percent of Americans, many of them Christian nationalists, believe the bible is the literal, inerrant word of their god.31

Lutz points out something even more striking: the bible was hardly cited in the constitutional debates. In 528 writings published during the formative years of the American Constitution (1787–88), there were thirty-three citations to the bible, or about one in every sixteen publications.36 Lutz concluded that when looking for biblical influence in the framing of our founding document, “the Bible’s prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say.”37

But there is something still more striking. When Lutz separated the Federalists (those arguing for the Constitution and a central, federal government) from the Anti-Federalists (those arguing against the Constitution), he discovered that the Federalists never cited the bible—not once. Put simply, those who argued for and supported the Constitution were not influenced by the bible.38

But what about unpublished writings—for instance, what about citations to the bible during the Constitutional Convention, which was conducted mostly by voice and the proceedings of which the delegates voted to keep secret? At the Constitutional Convention the bible was briefly mentioned once, by Franklin, during a debate over a proposed property requirement for public of...

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 found...

If the bible takes both sides of an argument, it cannot be said that either side is a principle of that document. If the bible says “children should eat peas” and also “children should not eat peas,” it takes no lucid stance on pea-eating.

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, including “Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and the rest of the world’s major religions,” according to one ethicist.5 Not only is the Golden Rule more widespread than Christianity, but it predates Christianity by hundreds and even thousands of years: 1. “Now this is the command: Do to the doer to cause that he do.” ~Ancient Egypt (c. 2040–1650 BCE)6 2. “Don’t do yourself what you disapprove of in others.” ~Pittacus of Mytilene, Ancient Greece (c. 640–568 BCE)7 3. “Never do ourselves what we blame others for doing.” ~Thales of Miletus, Ancient Greece (c. 624–545 BCE)8 4. “To those who are good (to me), I am good; and to those who are not good (to me), I am also good; and thus (all) get to be good.” ~Laozi, China (sixth century BCE)9 5. “Do not impose on others what you do not desire others to impose upon you.” ~Confucius, China (551–479 BCE)10 6. “What I disapprove of in the actions of my neighbor, that—as best I can—I will not do.” ~Herodotus, Ancient Greece (fifth century BCE)11 7. “If people regarded other people’s families in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own family to attack that of another? For one would do for others as one would do for oneself.” ~Mozi, China (c. 470–391 BCE)12 8. “Do not do to others the things that anger you when you experience them from others.” ~Isocrates, Ancient Greece (c. 436–338 BCE)13 9...

The dates in the list opposite and above suggest that, if anything, Judaism and Christianity probably borrowed the rule from Ancient Greece. The Golden Rule is not a Judeo-Christian principle. It is a universal human principle.

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.