The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

This distinction is underscored by the Pilgrims’s path to Plymouth. The Pilgrims—Church of England Separatists—left England and fled to Amsterdam and then Leiden in several waves between 1608 and 1609. They spent more than a decade in Holland, and most stayed for good. Some sailed for the new world aboard the Mayflower and the Speedwell and founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 (leaks forced the Speedwell to quickly return to England, never to sail again). The Pilgrims had religious freedom when they settled in the Netherlands after fleeing persecution in England. James Madison described Holland’s civil relationship to religion well: “Holland ventured on the experiment of combining a liberal toleration, with the establishment of a particular creed.”39 This is not the freedom we would expect today, but at that time, the Netherlands was the most tolerant, religiously diverse country in Europe. The Pilgrims selected Holland for the freedom it promised.40 It was where the oppressed fled and were welcomed. Spinoza, Locke, Pierre Bayle (“atheism does not necessarily lead to the corruption of morals”41), Descartes, Hobbes, and Baron d’Holbach all found a Dutch haven from religious persecution, or Dutch printers willing to publish their revolutionary ideas. During the 1600s, the Netherlands published about half of all books produced worldwide.42 Bertrand Russell found it “impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the seventeenth century, as the one country where there wa...