The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

He recalls Benjamin’s Franklin’s argument—as incisive today as it was more than 200 years ago—that when “a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support [it], so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

The term “Judeo-Christian” is difficult to pin down because it is something of a fabrication.8 From a scholarly standpoint, as noted in a 1992 Newsweek article, “the idea of a single ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is a made-in-America myth.”9 One Jewish theologian stated the problem plainly: “Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity, and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism.”

The single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or even political party; it was believing the United States is and should be a Christian nation.

Project Blitz encapsulates the problem Christian nationalism poses. First, it seeks to alter our history, values, and national identity. Then it codifies Christian privilege in the law, favoring Christians above others. Finally, it legally disfavors the nonreligious, non-Christians, and minorities such as the LGBTQ community, by, for instance, permitting discrimination against them in places of public accommodation or in employment.

(Thomas Jefferson thought the idea that the Ten Commandments or Christianity was the foundation of English Common Law an “awkward monkish fabrication” and a “fraud.”

the Treaty of Tripoli, which was negotiated under President George Washington and signed by President John Adams with the unanimous consent of the US Senate in 1797, and which says that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

In fact, Judeo-Christian principles, especially those central to the Christian nationalist identity, are thoroughly opposed to the principles on which the United States was built. The two systems differ and conflict to such a degree that, to put it bluntly, Christianity is un-American.

First, our Constitution is deliberately godless. There are no references to gods, goddesses, or divine intervention.40 The omission was not an oversight.

The prohibition on religious tests in Article VI, Clause 3—“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”—was the only mention of religion in the original document. The Constitution often uses malleable language, but this prohibition is “the most emphatic statement in the document.”

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

Jefferson also authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, upon which the First Amendment would be based. That law, along with the University of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence, were the only achievements he wanted inscribed on his gravestone. The statute guaranteed religious freedom by guaranteeing a secular government.

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”);

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.”

James Madison also wrote the greatest defense of the wall of separation. His anonymously published essay of 1785, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” convinced the people of Virginia to vote against the bill giving financial support to Christian ministers. The Supreme Court consistently cites the “Memorial” when interpreting the religion clauses of the First Amendment. “Pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution” were the “fruits” of fifteen centuries of established Christianity, Madison wrote.64 Echoing Gibbon, he observed, “Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society is, the better off it is.

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.”

The least religious countries: Have the lowest rates of violent crime and homicide Are the best places to raise children and to be a mother Have the lowest rates of corruption Have the lowest levels of intolerance against racial and ethnic minorities Score highest for women’s rights and gender equality Have the greatest protection and enjoyment of political and civil liberties Are better at educating their youth in reading, math, and science Are the most peaceful Are the most prosperous Have the highest quality of life.50

Those states that are the most religious have more societal ills, and tend to: Have the highest rates of poverty Have the highest rates of obesity Have the highest rates of infant mortality Have the highest rates of STDs Have the highest rates of teen pregnancy Have the lowest percentage of college-educated adults Have the highest rates of murder and violent crime.

That is, as the physicist Steven Weinberg observed, the real danger of religion: “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

The idea that all people are created equal is not a religious idea; the idea that some people are special or chosen is one that various religious groups have embraced throughout history. The entire Hebrew Bible is about the chosen people. Religion promotes elitism, not equality.

(That Jefferson could write of freedom so eloquently and condemn slavery in fervent and revealing terms here and elsewhere, while at the same time owning slaves and fathering children with the slaves, who then became slaves themselves, is a paradox of cowardice. He was one of America’s greatest intellects, excelled at communicating grand ideas in simple and poetic terms that enthrall us centuries later, but failed utterly and in terrible ways to practice some of those ideas.)

(In any event, Lincoln “read Shakespeare more than all other writers together,” according to his secretary, John Hays.10)

Christian churches today still terrify parishioners and children with the prospect of being burned alive for eternity: hell.9 While almost every culture and religion has an afterlife, Jesus was the first to preach about it as a place of eternal punishment. The place of torment is mentioned 162 times in the New Testament and not once in the Old Testament.

The founders did not ignore the centuries when religion ruled—they simply forswore the doctrines that permitted religion to reign. Perhaps this was because, as atheist author Ruth Hurmence Green put it, “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”

Not only are the people supreme, but America is “founded on the natural authority of the people alone without a pretence of miracle or mystery,”26 as John Adams put it. The people are solely responsible for the Constitution. Remember, while defending American ideals during the Revolutionary War, Adams cautioned that it should “never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods.”

As the framers excluded god from the document, the document excludes religion from government—its only references to religion are exclusionary: Prohibiting a religious test for public office.29 Prohibiting governmental interference with religious worship.30 Prohibiting religious interference with government.31