The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Christianity used fire and the sword to purify citizens elsewhere in colonial America. In 1565, Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, founder of St. Augustine, Florida, and his zealous Catholic missionaries slaughtered 111 French Huguenots on the Florida coast for refusing to convert to Catholicism. Two weeks later, Menéndez slaughtered another 134 Huguenots, again for refusing to convert. Lest anyone doubt the religious motives of the murderers, Menéndez hung the corpses from trees with a sign proclaiming that they were killed, “not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.”46 Pope Pius V personally commended Menéndez for doing “all that was requisite” to extend “our Holy Catholic faith, and the gaining of souls for God” and also for converting “the Indian idolaters.”47 In the American Southwest, conquistadors and Franciscan monks forcibly converted thousands of Natives while trying to extend the “Holy” Catholic faith by extirpating the Native religion. European settlers were not practicing religious freedom, but religious violence.