The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

“A man by the name of Pollock was once superintendent of the mint at Philadelphia. He was almost insane about having God in the Constitution. Failing in that, he got the inscription on our money, ‘In God we Trust.’ As our silver dollar is now, in fact, worth only eighty-five cents, it is claimed that the inscription means that we trust in God for the other fifteen cents.” — Robert Ingersoll, interview with Secular Review, 18841

Evangelical Christianity invaded and polarized the political debate in the decades leading up to the Civil War, limiting the potential political solutions.11 It turned the democratic process, which relies on compromise, into a battle over sacrosanct issues of faith. Religion did exactly what the framers feared: it poisoned the political system.

Goldfield dates the launch of religion’s political invasion to the 1844 presidential race between Democrat James K. Polk and Whig Henry Clay, and James Birney of the Liberty Party: “From then on, political parties paraded their religious bona fides and attacked opponents as infidels. The campaigns themselves came to resemble religious revivals as much as political exercises. Religion was not only an issue itself, it permeated other issues of the day, especially slavery.”

Webster found it curious that believers failed to realize how unconvincing religious arguments are to everyone else: “They do not remember that the doctrines and miracles of Jesus Christ have, in eighteen hundred years, converted only a small portion of the human race; and among the nations that are converted to Christianity, they forget how many vices and crimes, public and private, still prevail, and that many of them—public crimes especially, which are offences against the Christian religion—pass without exciting particular regret or indignation.”20

By exposing “the African race” to “the humanizing influence of Christianity” through their bonds, the slavers believed they were doing the slaves a favor—they were saving Africans by enslaving them.39 The slave owners justified enslaving an entire race using the perceived superiority of Christianity.

“In the context of the Pledge, the statement that the United States is a nation ‘under God’ is an endorsement of religion. It is a profession of a religious belief, namely, a belief in monotheism. The recitation that ours is a nation ‘under God’ is not a mere acknowledgment that many Americans believe in a deity…. To recite the Pledge is not to describe the United States; instead, it is to swear allegiance to the values for which the flag stands: unity, indivisibility, liberty, justice, and—since 1954—monotheism. The text of the official Pledge, codified in federal law, impermissibly takes a position with respect to the purely religious question of the existence and identity of God.” — US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 20022

AN OSTENSIBLE PARADOX OF STATE-CHURCH SEPARATION is that citizens living under secular governments tend to be more religious than citizens in countries with established churches.

In America’s wild marketplace, religion must be at least partly about marketing. It should come as no surprise that during the golden age of American marketing—the Mad Men era—religion was quite literally sold to the country. In his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse convincingly shows that the wave of public piety in America, which peaked in the 1950s, was the result of a coordinated corporate strategy. The campaign was launched during the 1930s and 1940s as a response to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the regulation it prompted.4

More than sixty years later, “One nation, indivisible” became “one nation, under God, indivisible.” This change places religion, history’s most belligerent, contentious force, smack in the middle of the unifying sentiment. It literally divides the indivisible with religion.

obtained today if we were faced squarely with the issue.”55 Religion preys on fear. With the ground prepared by Madison Avenue advertising, it was easy for religious leaders to capitalize on the national fear of communism and nuclear death. If mutually assured destruction was truly assured, Christians would be happy in the afterlife with Jesus, while the godless communists would burn twice. As one author put it, “Americans, being Christians, believed in life after death and [were] self-confident that if even the world itself were destroyed in a righteous cause, they would go to their heavenly reward. Communists, by contrast, were atheists, held out no hope of life after death, and would be correspondingly less willing to escalate a confrontation all the way to nuclear exchange.”56

William Shirer’s prediction about witch-hunting proved prescient. Conformity was soon valued more highly than civil rights. During this era, Congress passed the Alien Registration or Smith Act of 1940, the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, and the Communist Control Act of 1954. All were designed to punish nonconformists. Any thinkers not strictly orthodox—i.e., American, capitalist, and Christian—were suspicious.

Watergate, like the Civil War and Red Scare, was a moment of national turmoil. This time however, piety was being used to distract the masses and, as is so often the case, to cloak a criminal in the mantle of religion.

Reagan’s supplications are now standard practice for every president. With this speech, Reagan inaugurated a modern strain of Christian nationalism.

I’ll confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest—I’m more afraid not to—that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer. [about ten seconds of silence] God bless America.

Reagan “ended 90 percent of his major addresses by requesting divine guidance. George H. W. Bush also did so in 90 percent of his speeches, and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush followed suit 89 percent and 84 percent of the time, respectively.”

Religion is a cheap shorthand for tribal allegiance, but it also has the power to distract from important issues that actually affect governance. Nixon asked people to pray for him and ended with “God bless America” to remind the nation that he was religious and therefore moral, and either innocent or deserving of forgiveness. It was an emotional ploy, but his final note would ring in American history.

During the campaign, it became clear that he was not familiar with the bible, as the “two Corinthians” gaffe and his inability to name a favorite bible passage show.11 Whenever he spoke of religion he seemed uncomfortable and, above all, insincere. Trump was simply exploiting religion, casting it about like a net to snare voters, and, as we saw in the discussion of religion’s role in leading to the Civil War, to immunize his policies from criticism.

injecting religion into politics is an “unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”13

America succeeded as an experiment because it was based on reason. If we abandon reason in favor of faith—or if our elected leaders commit this sin—we are asking to regress.

Ben Franklin cautioned, “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 obliged to call for the help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

This is not because all religion is correct or because all religion worships the same god under different guises, but because all religion is man-made.

Christian nationalists have successfully persuaded too many Americans to abandon our heritage, to spurn our secular foundations in favor of their myth. It is time to reclaim that heritage and refute these myths. We need to remind Americans that our Constitution demands an absolute separation between church and state, as John Kennedy said. We must raise hell when the wall of separation between state and church is breached. We must, as Madison warned, take “alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”12