The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Matthew Stewart, in Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution (2014), has shown conclusively that the Enlightenment view of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” enshrined in the Declaration was not religious in any Judeo-Christian sense.36 As Stewart points out, Nature’s God, “the presiding deity of the American Revolution, is another word for ‘Nature.’”37 This makes sense. After all, the full phrase is “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Thomas Paine agreed: “As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, are regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature’s God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.”38