The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

And of course, when tolerance waned in New Amsterdam, “Religion was the root of it: [Governor Peter] Stuyvesant despised Jews, loathed Catholics, recoiled at Quakers, and reserved special hatred for Lutherans.”60 When Stuyvesant tried to prevent twenty-three Jewish refugees from entering the colony because they were part of a “deceitful race” that would “infect” the island, his superiors back home overruled him, enforcing tolerance and requiring that “each person shall remain free in his religion.” 61

Although tolerance might be adopted as a Judeo-Christian principle in some enlightened circles, religious freedom cannot be. Religion at its heart is a claim to hold the ultimate truth. Christianity holds that truth to the exclusion of all others, with an eternal reward if you accept the truth, and eternal punishment if you do not. Such a worldview can never coexist with true freedom. It will always use its power to promote its truth claim either by the stick (Paine’s “fire and faggot”) or the carrot (Paine’s “traffic” or indulgences).

The Puritans’s founding principle was intolerance, not tolerance, let alone religious freedom. They understood and even admitted this. One Puritan preacher, Urian Oakes, later president of Harvard, called toleration the “first-born of all abominations.”62 Another, Thomas Shepard Jr., preached that it is “Satan’s policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration.”63 John Cotton helped banish the heretics Anne Hutchinson, who was once Cotton’s acolyte, and Roger Williams. In 1647, Cotton published The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe as a response to Williams’s 1644 book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, which had called for a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Cotton claimed that “...