The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Madison called the Constitution “the great political experiment in the hands of the American people.”39

“I will establish his kingdom forever if he continues resolute in keeping my commandments.” — 1 Chronicles 28:7 “A republic, if you can keep it.” — Benjamin Franklin, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, 17871

Christianity is about ensuring one’s own place for eternity, others be damned—literally. Jesus demanded that his followers “take no thought for the morrow.” And though his justification relied on god’s care for the “lilies of the field” and the “fowls of the air,” we can assume Jesus meant what he said.6 For him, tomorrow was not important because the end of the world was supposedly imminent.

To this day, 41 percent of Americans think Jesus is returning to earth sometime in the next forty years—presumably bringing Armageddon with him.11

In Harper’s Lee’s classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist, Scout, learns that a “Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle…. There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”13

why, Christianity would contribute to a government founded to secure a future for “ourselves and our posterity” when Christian dogma specifically declares that there is no such future.

The governments the bible espouses and those it has bred are theocratic monarchies. The bible is brimming with monarchy.

There is no whiff of representative government in the bible. And when given a chance, the Israelites actually request a king, not a democracy or a republic.20

America’s founders did not reject the Grecian culture that birthed democracy. Quite the opposite: they rejected the bible and looked to ancient Greek city-states and pre-Christian Rome when drafting our Constitution.

John Adams had been ruminating about the structure of government and how to build it since at least 1765, when he wrote “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.” He did not find inspiration in the bible: “Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell.”26 Although Adams studied civil and ecclesiastical government, he failed to mention Christianity when discussing historical examples, going from England to the ancients, to Greece and Rome.27

Constitutional Convention delegate James McHenry of Maryland recorded a wonderful anecdote about a lady who asked Benjamin Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”28 Franklin’s response was the legendary “A republic, if you can keep it.” A republic—res publica—is literally “a public thing,” a thing of the people. Not something divine, not something handed down from on high, and not something that could be maintained without effort—but a thing “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln so beautifully phrased it.29

When James Madison studied government, his primary examples were Greek and Roman. The Federalist Papers, written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, mention the “early ages of Christianity” once, and only to criticize it as part of the feudal system.30 But the papers contain numerous references to Sparta, Carthage, Rome, the Achaean League, Thebes, Crete, Athens, and other federations.31 The

There are not Ten Commandments, but four different sets of Ten Commandments (see comparison tables of four sets on pages 164–65).

The first set was given to Moses on Mount Sinai in chapter 20 of Exodus and later written on stone tablets.8 These are the ten that Heston, DeMille & Co made famous. This set is probably what most people think of as the ten.

Post-slaughter, Yahweh orders Moses to fashion new tablets and gives him the second set of ten commandments in chapter 34 of Exodus.15

The differences between the first two sets of commandments, the Exodus sets, are particularly vexing for believers in the bible’s infallibility because Yahweh says they should be identical, yet they are not. God says that he meant to write the same thing: “The LORD said to Moses, ‘Cut two tablets of stone like the former ones, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets, which you broke.’”21

The third set, issued in chapter 5 of Deuteronomy, is basically the same as the first.22 In the biblical narrative, the third set is really just Moses retelling the story of how he received the first set. But even the retelling is flawed because the sabbath commandments of the third and first sets don’t match.

The fourth set issued later in Deuteronomy is markedly different from the others, but it meets the criteria: they are commandments from Moses set in stone tablets.

This final set is not a list of prohibitions or injunctions; rather, it is a list of people who are cursed, “cursed be” the so-and-sos. Among the cursed are those who make idols or fail to honor their parents,24 but otherwise this bears little resemblance to the other sets. Much of the cursing is directed at sexual behavior.25

FIRST SET Exodus 20:2–17

SECOND SET Exodus 34:11–28

THIRD SET Deuteronomy 5:6–21

FOURTH SET Deuteronomy 27:1–2, 27:15–26

So which ten influenced our founding? The second set, a pact sealed with genocide and requiring the sacrifice, but redeeming, of all first-born males? The final set, cursing anyone “who lies with his mother-in-law”?27

The inter-biblical differences are often more consequential than they first seem.

The KJV says, “Thou shalt not kill,”33 while other translations prohibit “murder.”34 These are not minor differences. The difference between prohibiting murder and prohibiting killing is the difference between outlawing the intentional, premeditated taking of a life and outlawing even killing done in self-defense, in war, or to protect your child.

The various Jewish and Christian denominations have unique interpretations about which directive belongs to which commandment. The chart on page 168 is a simplified summary of these theological differences.43

Mosaic Law actually encompasses some 613 commandments found in the first five books of the Hebrew bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These 613 rules, known as the mitzvot, are as important in Judaism as the Ten Commandments.

“If you do not diligently observe all the words of this law that are written in this book, fearing this glorious and awesome name, the LORD your God, then the LORD will overwhelm both you and your offspring with severe and lasting afflictions and grievous and lasting maladies.”46

Every one of the ten would be considered unconstitutional in our system—every single one, including the commandments against killing and thievery.

It is possible, indeed probable, that Christian nationalists are ignorant about the imprecision of their religion’s ten paramount rules. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia admitted as much in a case involving a Ten Commandments monument on government land: “I doubt that most religious adherents are even aware that there are competing versions [of the Ten Commandments] with doctrinal consequences (I certainly was not).”60 And if the country’s leading originalist, a Catholic who believed in the literal existence of the devil, didn’t know which set influenced America’s founding, how would the average Christian nationalist?

most religious Americans are Protestant; so for the purposes of this book, let’s use the Protestant interpretation of the first set to answer, in the next eight chapters, the apparently unanswerable question: which Ten?63

I. “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” — Exodus 20:2–3

“Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” — James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” 17852

It would be difficult to write a law that conflicts more with America’s founding document, the Constitution, than this rule: “I am the Lord your God…you shall have no other gods before me.” First, our Constitution protects every citizen’s freedom to worship as they choose, chiefly by requiring and guaranteeing a secular government. Second, the people, not god, are supreme. The Constitution’s first words are more poetic and quite obviously more reflective of American principles: “We the People.”

The freedom of religion cannot exist without a government that is free from religion (nor can the freedom of religion exist without the freedom to choose no religion at all). True religious freedom depends on a secular government.

Madison penned the greatest defense of religious freedom and secular government in 1785 to oppose a three-cent tax that would support Christian ministers. His “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” examined what churches with civil power—ecclesiastical establishments—had wrought. “In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny: in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people,” wrote Madison. “Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries.” He concluded, “A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.”12

The other framers were familiar with this history, which is partly why most concluded, as Carroll did, that religious freedom is dependent on the government not taking sides on any religious issue, however gently or lightly. They therefore chose, in Jefferson’s words—words later adopted by the Supreme Court to explain the principle underlying the religion clauses—to build “a wall of separation between Church & State.”13

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT is fundamentally at odds with the US Constitution in another respect—the source of power. The Constitution sites power in the people. The Ten Commandments’ authority rests on the claim that they are the words of a god—

Moses was the sole witness to a god actually giving the commandments and may have been a tad delirious (see page161). Rather suspiciously, he had the priests set a perimeter around the mountain to ensure that no other person could see, or not see, his god.14 So even assuming the bible reports these events accurately—a rather large assumption—the divine authorship claim rests squarely on Moses’s word. This is Thomas Paine’s point in the Age of Reason: “When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so.”15 Yet the authority of all the commandments rests tenuously on the claim that this particular god—one of many acknowledged in this very commandment—is supreme.

The Jewish Encyclopedia says that the early Hebrews were “monolatrous rather than monotheistic; they considered Yhwh to be the one God and their God, but not the one and only God.”17 Yahweh was “the national God of Israel as Chemosh was the god of Moab and Milkom the god of Ammon.”18 That there was “no other God in Israel…did not affect the reality of the gods of other nations.”19

The people are not one source of power and god another; “the people are the only legitimate fountain of power,” wrote Madison.22

Hamilton’s statement in The Federalist number 22: “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.”23

Benjamin Franklin thought that “in free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors.” He believed this so strongly that he claimed that leaving public office and rejoining the ranks of the people was a promotion: “For the former therefor...

Writing of the Constitution, our fifth president, James Monroe, explained that “the people, the highest authority known to our system, from whom all our institutions...

Not only are the people supreme, but America is “founded on the natural authority of the people alone without a pretence of miracle or mystery,”26 as John Adams put it. The people are solely responsible for the Constitution. Remember, while defending American ideals during the Revolutionary War, Adams cautioned that it should “never...

The conspicuous absence of a god from the Constitution, and the rather heavy emphasis the founders gave to its first three words—“We the People”— embody its conflict with the first commandment. The framers “formed our Constitution without any acknowled...

As the framers excluded god from the document, the document excludes religion from government—its only references to religion are exclusionary: Prohibiting a religious test for public office.29 Prohibiting governmental interference with religiou...

About one hundred years after the Constitution was proposed and ratified, Pope Leo XIII used the first commandment to declare it “unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, or writing, or of worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man.”34 Leo had the gall to title this order On the Nature of Human Liberty. The shackling of the human mind sanctioned by Leo’s encyclical is sought by most religions and would destroy the freedoms of the First Amendment. The Judeo-Christian first commandment and the US First Amendment fundamentally conflict. They are irreconcilable.