The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

The founders’ beliefs about the separation of state and church and political science, not their personal religious beliefs, are most important. The Declaration of Independence and even its quasi-religious language, examined next, are opposed to biblical law. Then we’ll step back and survey colonial history, where we find true Christian nations—the colonies—founded on Christian principles. Those Christian governments were so tyrannical that they became examples for the founders of how not to build a nation. Next, we turn to the bastion of Judeo-Christian principles, the bible, and compare some of its fundamental principles—the Golden Rule, obedience to god, crime and punishment, original sin, redemption through Jesus’s sacrifice, faith, and biblical governments—to America’s founding principles. The comparison is disastrous for Christian nationalists.

The book concludes with a look at some unavoidable American verbiage: “in God we trust,” “one nation under God,” and “God bless America.” These are not founding principles, but simply relics of Christian nationalists’ using government offices to promote their religion during times of fear, strife, and diminished civil rights.

“There is a fierce custody battle going on out there for the ownership of the Founding Fathers.” — Joseph Ellis, historian and author1 “From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 19882

“The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” — George Washington circular, June 8, 17833

When Weems published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington in 1800, it was a commercial venture. He wrote what people wanted to read. And it worked. Far more sensationalist than truthful, the book sold well, going through some eighty editions.10 Weems expanded the initially small pamphlet in those subsequent editions. One addition is the book’s most well-known story—that Washington couldn’t tell a lie about a cherry tree. Ironically, given its moral, the story is untrue.

the seventeenth edition, another Weemsian fable was added: General Washington praying in the Valley Forge snow.12 According to Weems’s story, “in a dark natural bower of ancient oaks,” Washington was discovered praying aloud, “on his knees at prayer.”13

its proliferation accelerated during the nation’s religious revival from 1820 to 1860. That revival, referred to as the Second Great Awakening, was itself an indication that the founding generation was not as religious as Christian nationalists often argue: only those who are asleep can awaken.

McGuffey, Christianity was “the religion of our country…. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions.”15 He warned teachers and parents to avoid “teaching to our pupils the crude notions and revolutionary principles of modern infidelity.”16 As Edward G. Lengel, editor of Washington’s papers, noted, “In retelling Weems’s stories, McGuffey simplified their morals and turned them into generic Sunday school lessons, putting Washington’s piety on constant display.”17 McGuffey’s work led to other displays of Washington’s conjured piety. The Valley Forge prayer scene has been painted by Lambert Sachs (c. 1854); Henry Brueckner (c. 1866); J. C. Leyendecker (1935); and Arnold Friberg (1975). It appeared on stamps in 1928 and in 1977. The George Washington Memorial Chapel was founded in Valley Forge in 1903 partly to commemorate “the inspiring image of a solitary and steadfast Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge.”18 The US Capitol’s Congressional Prayer Room, built in 1955 (see page 280), features a stained-glass window depicting the scene. Ronald Reagan called the image of Washington kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge “the most sublime picture in American history.”19

For all its ubiquity, there is no historical evidence to support the tale. Weems designed the story to portray a devout Washington. In Lengel’s enlightening book Inventing George Washington, he writes, “Over and again, Weems emphasized Washington’s Christian upbringing, frequent prayers, and spiritual dependence on God.”20 But historical facts tell us of a different Washington. He was a man of little or no religion with a strong character that, had he been religious, would have prevented showy religious displays. Washington “avoided referring to Jesus Christ in his letters, attended religious services irregularly, did not kneel during prayer, and often dodged out of church before communion,” according to Lengel.21

On the rare occasions when Washington actually attended church (perhaps twelve times a year pre-presidency and only three times in his last three years), Washington refused to take communion, even though his wife did.22 Bishop William White officiated in some of the churches Washington occasionally attended. When asked specifically if Washington was a “communicant of the Protestant Episcopal church,” White wrote, “truth requires me to say, that Gen. Washington never received the communion, in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant.”23 The bishop concluded in another...

Washington refused to have a priest or religious rituals at his deathbed, a startling lapse if he were truly devout. As historian Joseph Ellis put it, “there were no ministers in the room, no prayers uttered, no Christian rituals offering the solace of everlasting life…. He died as a Roman stoic rather than a Christian saint.”

If he was religious, Washington was exceedingly private about those beliefs, even in personal letters and papers. He mentions Jesus perhaps once in ninety volumes of letters and papers, and never in private correspondence.26 The ostentatious show Weems invented is simply not in keeping with Washington’s strong, silent character. As Ron Chernow, Washington’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, notes in Washington: A Life: Some of Washington’s religious style probably reflected an Enlightenment discomfort with religious dogma, but it also reflected his low-key personal style. He was sober and temperate in all things, distrusted zealotry, and would never have talked of hellfire or damnation. He would have shunned anything, such as communion, that might flaunt his religiosity. He never wanted to make a spectacle of his faith or trade on it as a politician. Simply as a matter of personal style he would have refrained from the emotional language associated with evangelical Christianity. This cooler, more austere religious manner was commonplace among well-heeled Anglicans in eighteenth-century Virginia.27

The Weemsian myth is disrespectful, particularly when one understands how Washington worked ceaselessly to perfect his own character, because the fable reflects Weems’s character, not Washington’s. As W. W. Abbot, another editor of Washington’s papers, explains, “More than most, Washington’s biography is the story of a man constructing himself.”28 Washington worked tirelessly to better himself. He woke early, studied etiquette and sought to improve his own manners, deliberately mastered elegant penmanship, fastidiously attended to his personal appearance, and carefully weighed options before deciding. He personified measured self-control, silence, and thoughtful deliberation, though he was apparently a sight to behold when he lost his temper. The character Weems portrays is a shade. Those who would honor Washington ought to condemn these myths and remember what Abigail Adams said on his death: “Simple truth is his best, his greatest eulogy.”29

The prayer story, as historian François Furstenberg notes, “almost certainly sprung from Weems’s imagination.”30 But Weems was not writing to capture Washington’s true character.31 He wanted to capitalize on the name and death of a greater man, to write about what people wanted to buy. But the story survives for reasons other than Weems’s initial pecuniary interest: by imbuing Washington’s hard-won character with the kind of ostentatious piety he shunned, it dragged the incomparable leader down to an imitable level. “Perhaps sensing something too stern and difficult about the real Washington, Weems tried to humanize him through treacly fables,” suggests Chernow.32 This facile, reflected glory is why the fraudulent scene hangs in the Capitol prayer room, why Reagan gushed over a lie, and why all a politician need do is claim to be a prayerful Christian and he is suddenly Washington’s equal.

Though interesting, the battle over what the founders personally believed is irrelevant to the claim that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. That the founders had personal beliefs about religion and god does not prove that they used those principles to found a nation. Nor should we make the mistake of assuming that their religious beliefs were static throughout their lives. People’s beliefs change. Two of my good friends, authors Dan Barker and Jerry Dewitt, were once preachers and are now atheists. It is unlikely that at age fifty-eight Washington had the same beliefs he’d held at eighteen. Even were we to concede, for the sake of argument, that the founders were all Christian, the logic required to prove the Christian nationalist argument is flawed: Major Premise The founders were all devout, Jesus-has-risen Christians. Minor Premise The founders established this nation. Conclusion Therefore, this nation is a Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles.

One’s personal theistic beliefs do not “own” the other ideas generated by one’s mind. By that same logic, blue jeans would be “Jewish Blue Jeans” because the inventors of the pants, Jacob W. Davis and Levi Straus, happened to be Jewish. If we follow this illogic—that a person’s religion informs all their other ideas—why limit it to religion? Why not argue that America is a nation of hair-powderers and wig-wearers? And why limit the logic to suggesting that religion informs the nation? Why not claim that the founders built a Christian outhouse or planted a Judeo-Christian vegetable garden? Of course, designing a nation is different from designing a pair of jeans, but religion cannot be assumed to influence either. Those religious beliefs must be examined and compared against the principles that informed the design. To argue that the founders were Christian is irrelevant because it does not answer the ultimate question about Christianity’s influence on America’s founding. And even if the founders were all Christian and this fallacious logic held, we know that they never cited biblical principles during the constitutional convention and ratifications, as we’ll see in Chapter Six.34

Two facts illustrate the founders’ intentions to build this wall. First, our Constitution is deliberately godless. There are no references to gods, goddesses, or divine intervention.40 The omission was not an oversight. Supernatural power was rejected in favor of the natural power contained in the first three words: “We the People.” 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.41

“No…shall…ever…any.” These words are a mandate. 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.”43 Divorcing religion from government offices was so important that the US Congress edited the word god out of its oath of office. The first bill Congress passed under the Constitution that President George Washington signed into law in June 1789 was “An Act to regulate the Time and Manner of administering certain Oaths.” As originally proposed, it had two clauses mentioning god: “in the presence of Almighty GOD” and “So help me God.”44 Neither made the final cut, and the oath remains godless until 1862 (see chapter 24). The federal experiment with state-church separation was so successful that the states began to follow along. Other than New York and Virginia, arguably the two most important, the original states had religious tests for public office, and none had godless constitutions.45 But they also all predated the federal Constitution. As they updated and amended those constitutions, the states began to follow the federal model of state-church separation, abolishing religious...

Americans should celebrate this “great American principle of eternal separation.”48 It’s ours. It’s an American original. We ought to be proud of that contribution to the world, not bury it under myths.

They were as close to consensus on separating the two as they were on any subject. 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.”49 Most of the founders agreed with Gibbon and recognized that religion can be exploited for political gain and that religion, when it has civil power, is often deadly. These beliefs were common among the founders, but not universal. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration, believed that “the Christian religion should be preferred to all others” and that “every family in the United States [should] be furnished at public expense…with a copy of an American edition of the BIBLE.”50 However, in spite of, or likely because of, their divergent religious beliefs and backgrounds, the founders thought that separation made sense.

Washington thought that religion was best left to the private sphere. He defended the Constitution’s godlessness. The government would “give every furtherance” to “morality and science,” which might incidentally advance religion, but religion was a personal, not a government matter.55

The statute guaranteed religious freedom by guaranteeing a secular government. In the statute, Jefferson skewered “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others.”

The law ensured: 1. that there would be no governmental support of religion (“to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical”); 2. that the government could not take away a citizen’s rights because of their opinion on religion (“our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); and 3. that religious tests for public office were prohibited (“proscribing any citizen as unworthy [of] the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity…unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which…he has a natural right.”)

In 1785, six years after Jefferson first proposed the statute for religious freedom, Madison shepherded it through the state legislature (as he would later push the First Amendment through the House), making Virginia the first state to separate government and religion. The statute was unique in another respect. It was less a declaration of positive law and more a declaration of a natural right: “the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.” Relying on natural law to protect rights was a Jeffersonian motif, as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4 on the Declaration of Independence. Madison is not only the Father of the Constitution and the Father of the Bill of Rights, but also perhaps the greatest advocate for the separation of state and church. “Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance;” he wrote in 1822, adding, “And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”60 Madison argued that the separation existed as much to protect religion as to protect government. In response to a sermon he received from a New York clergyman, Madison wrote that “the United States is a happy disproof of the error s...

Separation is not a one-way street that allows religion to influence government while preventing government from influencing religion; it is a wall preventing religion from tainting government as well. State and church “will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together,” as Madison explained.72

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.”

Together, Washington, Knox, Allen, and the rest of the colonial irregulars had lifted the British Empire’s siege of Boston. Shortly after the Ticonderoga victory, the Reverend Jedediah Dewey preached a long sermon thanking God and giving him credit for the victory. Ethan Allen rose and shouted, “Don’t forget, Parson, that I was there!” But Dewey refused to recognize the human side of the accomplishment. He harangued Allen as a “bold blasphemer” for daring to take credit.6 But other founders agreed with Allen. Franklin touched on the idea in Poor Richard’s Almanack: “God helps those who help themselves.”7 (Though not original to Franklin,8 this advice does not, as three-quarters of Americans believe, come from the bible.9) John Jay wrote, “Providence seldom interposes in human affairs but through the agency of human means.”10 And John Adams thought, “Miracles will not be wrought for us…. If we will have government, we must use the human and natural means.”11

“It was not fabricated in the Loom of France, nor are the materials english, but they are the product of our own American soil, raised and Nurtured, not by the gentle showers of Heaven but by the hard Labour and indefatigable industry and firmness of her sons, and watered by the Blood of many of them.”13

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read,” Jefferson wrote.15 If this is true, we should look less to out-of-context quotes and more to the actions of the founders. We’ve seen that George Washington rarely prayed, attended church, or mentioned Jesus in his correspondence and that he shunned priests at his deathbed. Many people tried to pry some religious endorsement or personal religious information from Washington, but “the old fox was too cunning for them,” as Jefferson merrily recalled.16 Jefferson rewrote the New Testament using a razor, editing out the supernatural and salvaging what he considered worthy lessons from a mortal man. By his own admission, he excised “the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.”17 It was, Jefferson wrote, like pulling “diamonds” from “dunghills.”18

Gouverneur Morris spoke more than any other delegate to the Constitutional Convention (173 times19) and actually penned much of the final wording of the Constitution, including the poetic preamble. He also had sex with a married woman…in a convent, hardly respecting the nunnery as a believer would. The peg-legged bon vivant was the US minister plenipotentiary to France in the early 1790s. While there, he carried on a tryst with Adélaïde-Emilie Filleul, Marquise de Souza-Botelho (later Madame de Flahaut). Morris and Adele, as he called her, “had each other whenever they could,” notes one biographer, including “in his carriage; and in the visitors’ waiting room of a convent in Chaillot where Adele’s old governess lived as a nun.”20 On another occasion, Morris visited the married woman and, as he put it, “we perform[ed] the first Commandment given to Adam, or at least we use the means.”21 That is, they didn’t actually bear fruit and multiply, but they went through the motions. He got to know her in the biblical sense while violating biblical principles. Another biographer captured Morris’s sexual escapades nicely. Flahaut “and Morris were eventually so ‘wanton and flagrant’ that they engaged in intercourse ‘in the passage…at the harpsichord…down stairs…the doors all open,’ and in a coach with the coachman staring straight ahead.”22

A MORE INSIDIOUS RATIONALE underlies the Christian nationalist claim about the founders: the myth that only Christians are moral. 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.

Religion gets its morality from us, not the other way around. Even today, many people mistakenly believe that morality cannot exist outside of religion.25 The founders certainly did not make this mistake,

For many founders, religion was not the source of morality; they thought it was a substitute for morality: a substitute for those who didn’t have the time and education to discover moral truths on their own. Often, when the founders spoke of “religion and morality,” they were speaking not of one thing, but of two separate phenomena—religion for the people, morality for them.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.26

“National morality” here means something akin to societal or collective morality, as opposed to the government as a moral agent.

Alexander Hamilton wrote these lines, not George Washington.27 Hamilton was not referring to the government needing divine aid or religion requiring governmental aid, but to society requiring a morality Hamilton thought religion provided.

“arose from [Hamilton’s] horror at the ‘atheistic’ French Revolution.”28 Interestingly, although Washington included this sentiment in his final speech, he omitted Hamilton’s next sentence: “does it [national morality] not require the aid of a generally received and divinely authoritative Religion?”29 Washington’s edit suggests that he believed that any religion, not just Christianity, could replace morality. The Farewell Address conceives of religion and morality as two separate, distinct things—not as synonyms expressing the same thought, though Christian nationalists misread it that way.

Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society—I mean hell.”31 Though religion would check the masses, Adams did not believe “in the total and universal depravity of human nature, I believe there is no individual totally depraved…. While conscience remains there is some religion.”

Like Washington, Adams suggested that any religion, not only Christianity, can replace morality.

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).

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.”34 (Note: what’s left of Jefferson’s personal lib...

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and even Franklin and other founders did not think that religion was the source of morality, but its substitute. Madison, in The Federalist number 10, differentiates the two. “If the impulse and the opportunity [to create majority factions] be suffered to coincide,” he wrote, “we well know ...

They were claiming that religion is necessary for societal morality. And they were wrong. 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.”36 He might have been writing of the founders.

“one would be hard put to demonstrate the ways [Thomas] Paine’s rationalistic religion or deism differed from the religious views of his contemporaries Franklin or Jefferson” and that such views “were common among the liberal-thinking gentlemen of the era.”37 While Paine was open about his views, expounding them in The Rights of Man, “Jefferson and other elites” confined their views to that elite circle, fearing that spreading them might undermine society’s moral order.38 While “gentlemen” such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Franklin were “free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric,” the laity was not.39 Their attitude toward plebeians was patrician, as Wood points out. Washington referred to the masses as the “grazing multitude,” Adams spoke of the “common herd of mankind” or “common persons” with no idea of “Learning, Eloquence, and Genius,” and Gouverneur Morris thought they had “no morals but their own interests.”40

“At the time of the Revolution most of the founding fathers had not put much emotional stock in religion, even when they were regular churchgoers. As enlightened gentlemen, they abhorred ‘that gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers’ and looked forward to the day when ‘the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.’”41

We know that both Baruch Spinoza and John Locke profoundly influenced the founders’ thinking. Berated as an atheist and drummed out of Jewish society in Holland, Spinoza thought religion “in the highest degree necessary for the common people who lack the ability to perceive things clearly and distinctly.”42 Locke thought that for the “vulgar” and the “mass of mankind” it was better to have divine rules than to “leave it to the long, and sometimes intricate deductions of Reason, to be made out [by] them. Such trains of reasonings the greatest part of mankind have neither the leisure to weigh; nor, for want of education and use, skill to judge of.”43

Franklin suggested that the letter’s recipient, who was also the manuscript’s author, “burn this piece before it is seen by any other Person.”44 He explained that he thought religion necessary to ensure that the “weak and ignorant” act ethically. You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life without the assistance afforded by religion; you having a clear perception of the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice, and possessing a strength of resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common temptations. But think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security.45

Even if the founders were correct in this elitism and people really did need religion to prevent them from running amok, it does not follow that we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles. That a republic requires morality and therefore a moral people, and therefore a religious people, does not mean it requires Christians. The founders’ guarantee of religious freedom for all makes it clear that they did not think so either. In fact, these Enlightenment thinkers and the founders they influenced shared an important constant: they did not view religion as valuable because of its truth claims or as a source of morality, but simply as a means of producing good behavior without a reasoned moral analysis. This is a severe blow to the Christian nationalist. Any religion would do; Judeo-Christianity was not special. Montesquieu, the political theorist the founders may have relied on more than any other, perhaps said it best: “even a false religion is the best security we can have of the probity of men.”46

WHEN REVIEWING THAT IRREVERENT MANUSCRIPT, Franklin rhetorically asked, “If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?”47 [emphasis in original] Here, Franklin’s imaginative mind failed him. To be fair, Franklin and the other founders did not have the data we possess today. Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society is, the better off it is. We now know that religion is not necessary for a society to succeed. In a metastudy examining this very question, sociologist Phil Zuckerman explains, “Murder rates are actually lower in more secular nations and higher in more religious nations where belief in God is deep and widespread. And within America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates tend to be among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon. Furthermore, although there are some notable exceptions, rates of most violent crimes tend to be lower in the less religious states and higher in the most religious states. Finally, of the top 50 safest cities in the world, nearly all are in relatively nonreligious countries, and of the eight cities within the United States that make the safest-city list, nearly all are located in the least religious regions of the country.”48