The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

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.

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.”

“When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it.” — Oscar Wilde3

“Judeo-” is a sop, a fig leaf, tossed about to avoid controversy and complaint. It is simply a morsel of inclusion offered to soften the edge of an exclusionary, Christian movement.

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.

President John F. Kennedy explained to Yale’s graduating class of 1962 that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears…. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

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.

Christian nationalism operates like a ratchet or a noose, with each violation tightening its hold and making it more difficult to undo. Worse, the violations are used to justify other violations, so the tightening proceeds apace.

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.

Many books have been written about religion’s role in those movements while seeming to ignore religion’s contribution to the need for those movements in the first place.

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.

The founders’ beliefs about the separation of state and church and political science, not their personal religious beliefs, are most important.

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 19882

Civil War colonel, author, and orator Robert Ingersoll best captured the deliberate beauty of this omission: They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all, to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.

Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice from 1812 to 1845, wrote the first definitive commentaries on the Constitution. He explained that the clause was “not introduced merely for the purpose of satisfying the scruples of many respectable persons, who feel an invincible repugnance to any religious test.” According to Story, “It had a higher objective: to cut off for ever every pretence of any alliance between church and state in the national government.”

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

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.”

“In regard to the furtherance of morality, [religion’s] utility is, for the most part, problematical…. Of course it is quite a different matter if we consider the utility of religion as a prop of thrones; for those where these are held ‘by the grace of God,’ throne and altar are intimately associated.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, On Religion: A Dialogue, 18911

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, Monticello, August 6, 18162

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.

Jefferson did not confuse religion and morality. He organized his library into three major divisions by subject: memory or history, philosophy or reason, and imagination or fine arts. There were numerous subcategories, including ethics. Ethics was further broken down into morality and moral supplements. Religion was assigned to the moral supplements section, along with law (see note for link to original image of his divisions outline).33 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.”

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and even Franklin and other founders did not think that religion was the source of morality, but its substitute.

The educated elite, including the founders, achieved morality independent of religion, but they failed to extend the possibility of that achievement to others. They thought religion was needed for the commoners. The enlightened could use reason to discover morality, so they needed no religion other than a bare deism or theism, to which many luminaries ascribed. John Stuart Mill thought that “the world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments—of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete sceptics in religion.”

This, of course, does not prove that religion causes immoral behavior, but it confirms that religion is not required for people to behave morally.

The pagan accused Shenoute of banditry and he responded, “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”52 People who believe they are acting in accord with a higher law are giving themselves a license to do anything. That is, as the physicist Steven Weinberg observed, the real danger of religion: “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

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.