Historians of the American experience have spilled oceans of ink attempting to explain the heart and soul of the country, and the attempts to do so will never cease. Part of the explanation for this quest is that social and cultural development is not stagnant, and succeeding generations of scholars and activists are motivated by their own experiences as Americans to answer questions and look in places in the historical record that might help explain how and why society today is the way it is. For example, a common trope celebrated today is that America is a nation of immigrants. This widely accepted view is questioned by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, who writes that “The claim that the United States is ‘a nation of immigrants’ is the benevolent version of US nationalism. The ugly, predominant underside is the panic of enemy invasion.”1 She concludes: “The US autobiography must be rewritten. This is a project that cannot be left to professional US historians … unless colonization and imperialism are understood to be inherent in the very founding and all US institutions, we cannot begin to dismantle the fiscal-military state.”2
Her analysis of “America,” as she understands it, begins with The Doctrine of Discovery, the legal framework that informs the U.S. colonial system of controlling Indigenous nations.3 From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, much of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law that Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to non-Christian peoples outside Europe.4 This doctrine was used to justify the occupation of Indian lands Puritans claimed to have found unoccupied and unimproved by the earnest labors of men. The doctrine was simple: lands not cultivated or “improved” in the English fashion were free for the taking. From the very beginning of English settlement in the colonial period, the Puritans assumed that once the Indians came to understand that the “gifts” of civility and Christianity would free them from what missionary John Elliot called an “unfixed, confused and ungoverned life, uncivilized and subdued to labor and order,” they would gladly submit to English political authority.5 If they “refused” those “gifts,” their inevitable demise would rest entirely on their shoulders. Can a nation whose “original” (albeit foreign) settlers stole property from inhabitants who had occupied that land for at least 12,000 years justify that theft on a particular interpretation of the meaning of the word civilization? For many historians today, the answer would likely be “no,” or “it depends …,” but in the aggregate picture (narrative) of American “civilization,” such fundamental paradoxes are not resolved (or even acknowledged) because the underlying religious rationale for such dispossession (theft) of others’ property is buried deep in the American psyche in which American “exceptionalism” (which incorporates national providentialism6) serves as a cover-term that occludes illiberal and immoral policies and actions in the service of achieving American “greatness.”
What this discussion exemplifies is that the narrative that America was founded by British religious refugee immigrants in search of a place to freely establish their New Israel, a shining city on a hill, is mired in historical revisionism, uncritically taught in school curricula, that has legitimized the policy of removing “uncivilized” Native peoples to allow for the settlement of the empty land by superior “civilized” White European settlers.7 That darker aspect of the role of religion in the founding of America is generally ignored or glossed over in most mainstream histories; it is left to critical scholars, such as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, to set the record straight. This is an example of how, despite the rich historical record available to anyone who cares to read it, the founding of America has been reconceived, reshaped, and rehabilitated so that, for example, school children read mainly (or only) about the Pilgrims’ struggles with the rugged environment and “war-like Indians” as they sought only to live in peace with the Indians and establish communities where they might worship their Christian god, a gross distortion and simplistic portrayal of Puritan beliefs and practices, as well as a simplification of the complex history of relations between early European settler communities and Native Americans with whom they were in unavoidably close contact over many decades. In essence, in mainstream accounts, Puritans are removed from history, plucked from time and space, decontextualized and denatured in histories written for public school curricula that depict these settlers as peaceful, law-abiding people, simply living and reacting to and coping with their environment in the same way that any reasonable American would today.
What tends to be highlighted in contemporary historical retellings is their bravery and tenacity, adherence to their cherished religious principles and practices, their unflinching perseverance in the face of truly formidable hardships—valued American traits to be emulated, traits that are foundational to American exceptionalism. The history is more complex, and that complexity is well-chronicled in histories of that period; however, important aspects are often ignored and strategically replaced by the hagiography-trope of the freedom-loving, freedom-seeking Christians who landed in New Canaan with big dreams and only the best intentions to peacefully coexist with their new pagan, uncivilized, neighbors. While there were massacres and grotesque savagery committed by both European settlers and Native Americans during the seventeenth century and beyond, it is also true that the North American colonists, over time, did encroach on and dispossess Native peoples’ land and, thereby, their way of life and their ability to maintain any viable cultural continuity, culminating in the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands.8 What is of particular interest to me is that the religious justification for the well-documented illiberal, illegal, and immoral behavior of government dealings with Native Americans has, in general, been ignored because it does not comport with a benevolent (patriotic) interpretation of American identity, an identity that was largely constructed in the first decades of the nineteenth century and which has persisted to the present day.9
David D. Hall, in his deconstruction of Puritanism in the nineteenth century, argues that two situations influenced how the Puritan past was being imagined or represented. The first was political and cultural, the challenge of defining the essence of “American.” At the time the United States came into being, it was a patchwork of regions, each with its own identity. But by the 1830s, these regional identities were giving way to “romantic nationalism” that relied on words such as union and symbolic figures such as George Washington. According to Hall, the political leaders of New England were not involved in this process, having seen their federalism eclipsed by the “republicanism” of Thomas Jefferson and his southern successors in the presidency. The disaffection with the republicans came to a head during the War of 1812 when a group of hardcore federalists met in Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1813 to discuss the possibility of withdrawing from the federal union.10 An important event in American myth-making occurred in Plymouth at the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims landing (December 1820); Daniel Webster spoke at the ceremony and attempted to transform the event into a founding moment of American liberty and unfettered commerce. Others in New England were imagining the Pilgrims and especially the Mayflower Compact as crucial sources of democratic America. Once this myth was launched, it became impervious to criticism.11
America Was Never a Christian Nation
The passengers who disembarked from the Mayflower in 1620 were mostly religious refugees and British subjects, most of whom enjoyed and maintained the privileges of their British heritage even as they strongly criticized the corruptions of the Church of England and the British political establishment that motivated their flight to the New World. The increasing membership of other (mostly) Protestant denominations in the colonies and, later, in the various states meant that the strict Calvinist theology of the Puritan leadership in New England would find fewer and fewer takers over time, and the dream of establishing a New Jerusalem (or Israel) in America would be relatively short lived. The competitors for Christian souls included Quakers, Shakers, Baptists, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, among other sects—rendering colonial America and the early decades of the United States a smorgasbord of (mostly) Christian faiths, often with strongly contrasting views on Christian theology, human nature, politics, and the role of religion in government and society.12 New England was never formally a theocracy, but if not a theocracy, Massachusetts was theocentric,13 and such a highly controlled and abstemious lifestyle would not long endure in a nation that was more devoted to property rights and commerce than to the promise of a better life in the afterworld.14
Despite the desire of fundamentalist Calvinist Puritans, centered in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to create a national theocracy based on their theology, the United States was never remotely a Christian nation.15 However, over time, and especially beginning in the early decades of the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, the idea of the United States as a Christian nation gained traction, with important consequences in social and political life. In the twentieth century, the idea of “Christian America” was promoted by the business community and religious activists who opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, arguing that it was a program of “pagan statism” that threatened individual freedom.16 The false notion that the United States government was founded on a Protestant religious worldview,17 a claim made by White Christian nationalists today, or that Americans are a religious people,18 a claim made by both Republican and Democratic politicians, persist in the face of overwhelming and indisputable evidence to the contrary. Although the role Christianity (or any religion) ought to play in politics and civic society has been contested and fraught throughout American history, its purported central relevance to the establishment of the United States as a democratic constitutional republic has been clearly demonstrated to be false; yet the centrality of religion, particularly varieties of Protestant evangelicalism, and the claim that American identity is spiritual in nature have never been seriously questioned by the dominant political establishment because to do so would be politically risky, even fatal, for a career in elective politics. As a result, the myth persists that America is a deeply religious country, and this myth has become an essential feature of the nation’s self-image, to itself and to the world, despite data that show that regular church attendance continues to decline and Americans who claim “other,” refuse to answer questions about their religious identification, or claim to be agnostic or atheist when asked about their religious affiliation is at an all-time high.19
The Founders were not shy about making clear the importance of maintaining neutrality regarding religion in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and, later, in the U.S. Constitution.20 Thomas Jefferson authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was adopted by the Virginia state legislature in 1786 and became the basis for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The law specified that there would be no governmental support of religion, that the government could not take away a citizen’s rights because of their opinion on religion, and that religious tests for public office were prohibited. That law, along with the University of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence, were the only achievements he wanted inscribed on his gravestone.21 In his influential work The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine was unafraid to directly confront what he believed were the dangers that religion posed for the establishment of a social order based on human reason and action, not subservient to the dictates of any religious doctrine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” Many Founders were Deists (or agnostics) who believed that some, possibly divine, force started the universe but thereafter humans were on their own to determine their own individual and collective destinies. Yet despite these historical facts, and the words and deeds of important colonial personages, the trope that America is a Christian nation persists because it is an essential component of the myth of American exceptionalism, highly resistant to critique.
Religion Is America’s Politics
Throughout American history, religion has played a role in high-pitched domestic and foreign policy debates and conflicts. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that support or opposition to the institution of slavery often relied as much on religious arguments as on the politics of states’ rights. At one extreme of public opinion, opponents of slavery in the antebellum period expressed moral outrage at the practice, arguing that slavery was completely contrary to the Christian value of the fundamental equality of all human beings, supported scientifically by the monogenetic theory of human evolution, i.e., a single origin for all human beings. At the other extreme of opinion, supporters of the institution of slavery viewed it as moral, consistent with biblical authority, historically justified, beneficial for the enslaved Africans,22 and necessary for economic development, while asserting the polygenetic theory, which claimed that observed differences in human societies (i.e., races) reflected different origins among human groups, and that the negro was inferior to the White man.23 Similar opposing views applied to the policies and practices toward Native peoples dating back to the early 1600s. Opponents of the dispossession of Native peoples’ lands, with its manifest negative effects on their entire way of life, found these practices unjustified on moral grounds, contrary to Christian teachings (as they understood them) and contrary to the existing rights of colonial British subjects under the tenets of Magna Carta, British common law, and the Bill of Rights, which (they argued) should apply to all inhabitants of North America. Supporters of dispossession policies found moral justification by reference to the biblically sanctioned right of dominion over the lands and peoples discovered by Christians throughout the world, officially promulgated by a Papal Bull in 1452. However, it must be kept in mind that opponents of slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples’ land did not necessarily or universally believe that non-White non-Christian people should have all the same political or civil rights and privileges that (civilized) White colonial British subjects enjoyed. Thomas Jefferson refers to Africans as “a distant people,” not the “one people” referred to in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, who are dissolving the “political bonds which have connected them with another” but a separate people. They have no connection to the British Empire.24 When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” his, and his coauthors’, understanding of the words equal, rights, unalienable, and liberty were quite different from our current understanding of what those words should mean in a truly participatory, democratic civil society.25
In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt argues that the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) opened the way for eighteenth century racial doctrines that influenced how the terms rights, liberty, equality, and unalienable were likely understood by the authors of the founding American documents. The distinction between “man in nature” (physis) and “man in society” (civis) provided justification for occupation and conquest—geographical, physiological, biological, psychological, and economic—without regard for the political elements that had dominated the thought of Church and State in Western Europe since Aristotle and Augustine:
The barbarian, the heathen ethnic, and those existing in a pre-political state of nature were no longer considered as a part of an existing order of things, as described in Aristotle’s Politics, or as part of the spiritual body of the faithful in Christ, as described by Augustine. In Hobbes, those unprotected by an existing commonwealth were fit for conquest.26
The liberty mentioned in the Declaration of Independence referred to natural liberty, or “man in the state of nature,” not political liberty in which positive law enumerates who is included and who is excluded in the polity. In 1848, U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun, proud defender of the institution of slavery, questioned the idea of human equality even in the pre-political world; he described the phrase “all men are created equal” as a “hypothetical truism” about the state of nature.27 Legal scholars have argued that the phrase “all men are created equal” was intended as a rejection of the divinity of the monarch, not an affirmation of universal equality. The rejection of the Divine Right of Kings to rule absolutely over their subjects was a key rationale in justifying the treasonous act of the colonists who declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776. The founders broadly believed that full equality was restricted to the insiders (i.e., themselves, the dominant political class of educated, propertied, mostly of British provenance, Christian White males) and excluded Africans (whether enslaved or free), Mexicans, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and unpropertied men.28
Nearly a century and a half before ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, John Winthrop, English Puritan lawyer and one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, made clear his belief that what he called “Natural liberty”—the freedom to do what one chooses—was evil and corrupt. The Body of Liberties, adopted December 10, 1641, by the General Court of Massachusetts, enumerated offenses derived directly from biblical scripture, including the death penalty for worshipping any other god but the Lord God (Deuteronomy 13:6 and 17:2; Exodus 22:20); for blaspheming the name of God the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost; or for cursing God in like manner,29 among other punishable offenses for nonconformity to Puritan beliefs. Winthrop and other Puritan leaders came to America with purpose and mission; they believed that God blessed that mission, which was the furtherance of God’s design and not simply civil government. To succeed in their purpose, they believed that the entire community must conform and that their government must use compulsion if necessary to ensure conformity.30 This commitment had real consequences on the lives and liberty of residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the leaders of the colony banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, among many others, for theological disagreements. They also executed Mary Dyer, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra on Boston Common for the terrible crime of being Quakers.31 Clearly, while few Americans today would accept such draconian proscriptions and punishments for blasphemers, much of the Puritan understanding of the purpose, role, and goals of religion in civil society rests quite comfortably with millions of Christians today.
Biblical scripture and church doctrine were also at the root of widely practiced gendered social and racial hierarchies in colonial America that privileged the educated, White male clergy as the natural and rightful leaders preordained to lead their people in the establishment of the New Israel in America under the benevolent protection and watchful eye of an omnipotent god whose wrath would unleash unmentionable suffering for those who disobeyed his will or questioned his supreme authority over men in matters of religious orthodoxy and church administration as well as in all aspects of civil government. Although these social hierarchies originated in the theology and customs of many Christian (and non-Christian) sects in Europe and were observed in colonial American religious communities, they also influenced attitudes and practices in the broader society, then and today. The democratic values of gender and racial equality that are instantiated in the law today were not addressed in the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. In fact, it would not be until 1920 with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that women gained universal suffrage (twenty states or territories had recognized women’s suffrage prior to 1920), and not until 1965 for full suffrage for Black Americans through much of the South. Despite the importance of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Constitutional Amendments that abolished slavery (1865); granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and provided for due process and equal protection of the laws (1868); and granted suffrage to Black men (1870), respectively, by 1877, the Reconstruction governments had been overthrown or superseded, and White supremacist Democrats regained control in the South. Southern states exploited loopholes to circumvent provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments. For example, states imposed literacy tests, poll taxes, and understanding clauses that required the voter to understand some portion of the state constitution to deprive the franchise to Black citizens. Regarding the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, states were not subject to federal judicial scrutiny, and private acts of violence and terrorism against Blacks were generally unpunished in Southern state jurisdictions. The Fifteenth Amendment gave the vote to Black men but not to women. The voting rights of Black people were empty words through much of the South until the Second Reconstruction, which produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voter suppression of Black Americans is still practiced today in many parts of the country.
Amid the conflict that had torn the nation apart over the Confederacy’s insistence that they had the right to enslave people to benefit their own private interests and that they had the right to rebel against the government that had infringed on that right, Abraham Lincoln, in his Address on Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, offered the aspirational principle that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” On March 4, 1865, Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, sought to bind the wounds that had ripped the union apart, saying, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
At another time and in another context, Reverend Carl McIntire, a pastor and founder and longtime president of the International Council of Christian Churches (a fundamentalist Christian group of national churches), in a 1981 interview published in the New Yorker, said the following: “Separation involves hard, grueling controversy. It involves attacks, personal attacks, even violent attacks … Satan preaches brotherly love in order to hold men in apostasy … aggression is an expression of Christian love.”32 One man—Lincoln—sought reconciliation and healing, invoking Christian charity in a moment of still simmering tensions, appealing to our better angels; the other man, McIntire, saw violence and aggression against apostasy as justified, an expression of Christian love; for McIntire, charity and brotherly love were signs of spiritual weakness and satanic trickery, not Christian virtues. These antipoles have animated politics and political culture throughout colonial and U.S. history, each tied to strong beliefs on the nature and meaning of Christianity and its proper role in civil society. Both prior to and following the American Civil War, government was claimed to have been the enemy of decent, God-fearing, Christian Americans, whose rights have been trampled upon by liberal elites, atheists, and others enthralled by the duplicity of Satan. What Reverend McIntire and other evangelical followers of Rousas John Rushdoony actually oppose is a secular, democratic government, the government that Lincoln sought to establish for a reconstituted nation that would be based on democratic norms for “all the people,” Christian and non-Christian, believers and nonbelievers, even though it would take more than a century for Lincoln’s aspiration for equality under the law to take firmer hold.
What these fundamentalist evangelical Christian leaders believed in, both in colonial America and today, is theocratic government, one that recognizes America as a Christian nation, one that should oppose immoral policies, that is, policies that are contrary to their Christian values. In the final analysis, they agree with Rushdoony that there is no neutrality: the state either answers to God or it answers to something worse.33 Religion was a critical and powerful force used in the arguments of both the anti-slavery unionists and the pro-slavery secessionists, and religion has continued to serve as a powerful motivating factor in political arguments today in conflicts ranging from women’s reproductive rights, the charter school movement and the assault on secular public education, the role of the federal government in all domains of social policy and civic life, immigration policy, foreign policy, and much more. It is fair to say that religion is America’s politics, as much as politics is America’s religion.
The Competing Ontologies of Reason and Religion
We cannot understand the identity and the meaning of America unless we come to grips with how and why the idea and myth of America as a Christian nation evolved from the earliest settlements of Catholic Spanish explorers in what today is Florida, to the White Christian nationalist movement that is a current and real threat to American democratic values.
While attitudes about race and gender identity continue to divide Americans across the ideological spectrum, it is arguable that the most fundamental and powerful factor that divides people today, politically, falls along religious lines.34 Evangelical Christianity has found a powerful ally in the Republican Party, especially since the Richard Nixon administration, which has aligned with their political preferences and policy goals, passively or overtly supporting the religious Right’s demonization of other Christian and non-Christian religions, nonbelievers, liberals, secular humanists, ethnic and racial minorities, feminists, and, in recent years, the LGBTQ community as threats to American civilization. This alignment of the religious Right with the Republican Party is beneficial for both groups: politicians gain votes from religious communities to (re)gain and enhance their political power and influence and to advance their economic and political priorities, while religious communities can advance their social policy agenda, while also supporting the broader economic and political goals of the Republican Party.
The alignment of religion with political power has deep roots in the United States, with origins in British/European history, predating the first settlement in Jamestown (1607) and the landing of the Mayflower (1620); from these early roots, religion and politics have evolved together in an American soil that has nourished and continually reinvigorated succeeding generations of millions of Americans who have found Protestant Christianity the necessary foundation for their conception of American civilization, a place that God has chosen35 to lead the world to salvation and establish God’s kingdom on earth. Thus, even though the United States has never been a Christian nation in terms of its founding documents or legal system, religion in its myriad forms has always been a core—even central—element of American national identity and a powerful force in American political culture. Many of the challenges the American nation has faced derive from the tensions that are inherent in ontologies with often conflicting and incommensurate views on the nature and role of government in society, and the proper role of religion in civil society: one worldview is rooted in human reason and action as the primary and legitimate underpinnings of secular democratic government; the other is rooted in the supremacy of a religious worldview that supersedes human understanding of the world and can be invoked to justify policies that are undemocratic, harmful to various groups, harmful to national and global welfare, and contrary to human reason and factually verifiable analyses. Such opposing ontological frameworks have been part and parcel of human civilization for uncountable centuries, and they have been organizing frameworks in the trajectory of Western civilization for the past two millennia. While some scientists and humanist scholars argue that these competing ontologies need not be mutually exclusive, even the gradual encroachment of a religious ontology onto secular society can lead to changes in societal norms with profound and, as we have seen in the American and world history discussed in this article, deleterious effects on human equality and well-being. Because the origin of the United States is based on secular democratic principles, the greater risk to the continuation of the United States as a truly participatory, secular, democratic republic is from policies and agendas that are based on religious principles and beliefs that conflict with the operation and good order of a constitutional secular republican government. The myth that the United States is a Christian nation is not only a fabrication; its continued existence poses an actual danger to the health and survival of the American experiment, an experiment that is based on secular principles of equal justice under law, and the strict separation of church and state in all aspects of state functions, policies, and powers.
Notes
1. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Not a “Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021, p. 279.
2. Ibid., p. 283.
3. The United States has used the Discovery Doctrine to rationalize its dominion over Indigenous peoples throughout its history; in the 1820s, the Doctrine of Discovery was engraved in constitutional law by the U.S. Supreme Court under John Marshall in decisions regarding Indigenous peoples’ title to land. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” The Marshall court precedent was cited as recently as 2005 in the U.S. Supreme Court case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians, 544 U.S. 197 (2005) in denying the Oneida Nation land claim; the case was decided unanimously, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing the decision. Ibid., p. 33, 34.
4. The doctrine originated in a Papal Bull issued on June 18, 1452 (Dum diversas), which permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa and enslave the inhabitants, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.
5. James A. Warren, God, War, and Providence. New York, NY: Scribner, 2018, p. 4.
6. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 5.
7. Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony, architect of the American Christian Reconstruction movement, claims that the Bible commands Christians to exercise absolute dominion over the earth and all its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking, orthodox Christian clerics; and the federal government is an agent of evil. Public education is a threat to civilization, for it “basically trains women to be men” and represents “primitivism,” “chaos,” and “a vast integration into the void.” Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, p. 104.
8. See Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
9. Reginald Horsman argues that virulent scientific racialization of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples, including Mexicans, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans, was already widespread in North America in the seventeenth century, well before the influx of mostly European immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
10. David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, p. 349.
11. Ibid., p. 350.
12. Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.
13. John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. New York, NY: Viking, 2012, p. 169.
14. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York, NY: Vintage, 1962, claims that “perhaps as many as ninety per cent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790,” p. 82.
15. The Treaty of Tripoli of 1796, endorsed by John Adams and other members of America’s founding generation, declared explicitly (and uncontroversially) in Article 11 that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli, November 4, 1796, Stewart, p. 132.
16. Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2015.
17. Andrew L. Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. New York, NY: Sterling, 2019.
18. “It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people.” Barack Obama, “My Spiritual Journey,” Time, October 16, 2006; “We are a very spiritual, religious people.” Al Gore, Interview by Kevin Rose, November 2008, Current TV, Digg Dialogg.
19. David Noise, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2012, pp. 13–14. Jeffrey M. Jones, “US Church Membership Falls below Majority for First Time.” Gallup, March 29, 2021. Available online at https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx. Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study: Attendance at Religious Services. Available online at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/attendance-at-religious-services/.
20. Although there are three references to God in the Declaration of Independence (“Nature’s God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence”), there is no reference to Christianity; there are no references to God or divine intervention in the U.S. Constitution. In a draft of the Declaration of Independence that did not survive in the final published version, Jefferson made an explicit reference to Christianity, and it is highly critical. He condemned “the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain who was determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold … a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither” [Jefferson’s emphasis]. In other words, Jefferson was pointing out the hypocrisy and perfidy of a king who claimed to be Christian. However, Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery did not extend to his owning of slaves and fathering children with slaves who then became slaves themselves. Seidel, pp. 71–73.
21. Seidel, p. 36.
22. The Florida Board of Education recently approved a new set of rules requiring teachers to tell students that there were upsides to being enslaved; the state requires instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, July 31, 2023.
23. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in 1861 that “Our government is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Alexander H. Stephens, Cornerstone speech, March 21, 1861.
24. Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2022, p. 46.
25. “… the idea that the government must treat all people equally is irrelevant to the argument of the Declaration,” Ibid., p. 36.
26. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 192, 193.
27. Roosevelt III, p. 51.
28. “The contemporaneous understanding of the Declaration was pretty clearly that it was about national independence, not individual liberty, and certainly not the liberty of political outsiders.” Ibid., p. 50.
29. John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. New York, NY: Viking, 2012, p. 260, 261.
30. Ibid., p. 344.
31. Seidel, p. 100.
32. Stewart, p. 125.
33. Ibid., p. 124.
34. Bradley Onishi asserts that “For the evangelical church right now, membership is no longer based on color; it is also not really based on religion anymore, either. Your litmus test for religious belonging comes via your political beliefs.” Ibid., p. 89–90.
35. Guyatt.
Historians of the American experience have spilled oceans of ink attempting to explain the heart and soul of the country, and the attempts to do so will never cease. Part of the explanation for this quest is that social and cultural development is not stagnant, and succeeding generations of scholars and activists are motivated by …