Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? - Lecture 3

There is a lot of discussion of "Christian nationalism" in the news today. Most of it is political, with pundits on each side advancing a vision of the United States that they believe conforms to the true spirit of the American founding. The pundits, activists, journalists, and academic sociologists and political scientists will continue to have their say, but this lecture is historical in nature. What did the founders believe about the relationship between Christianity and the American Republic? 

Historian John Fea examined the idea of America as a Christian nation, the role the Bible played in the American Revolution, the religious beliefs of the Founders, and how those beliefs may or may not have influenced their work as statesmen. Join us for this critical conversation as the United States gears up for its 250th anniversary next year.

Friday Night Lectures feature three short, engaging talks interwoven with live Q&A, table discussion, and time to connect with others. Attendees will enjoy a welcoming atmosphere with complimentary beverages and hors d'oeuvres as we reflect on challenging questions of faith, Scripture, and ethics.

John Fea is a Visiting Fellow in History at the Lumen Center and Distinguished Professor of American History at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of six books, including Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction, one of three finalists for the George Washington Book Prize.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Now I want to delve into the documents. Um, and again, we can look at all kinds of founding documents, but I thought I would just I just kind of say a few things about the big ones. Um the Declaration of Independence and the uh United States Constitution. So let's talk about something, a word a phrase that we normally apply to the Constitution, or at least legal scholars apply to the Constitution, but we never talk about in terms of the Declaration of Independence, and that is the phrase original intent. Have you heard this phrase? Right? Um, there's a certain form of uh constitutional interpretation in law schools that say we need to understand uh in order to interpret the constitution, you have to understand the original intent of what the founders meant, and then you go from there, right? Uh very few people talk about what the original intent was of the declaration of independence, or else they maybe think they know what the original intent was of the declaration uh of independence. So I want to I want to just touch on this, and you'll see where I'm going here with the larger Christian nation, Christian America question. Um, what was the original intent of the Declaration of Independence? So uh I am guessing here, whoops, I something's missing on here, but I was I'll just I'll do it, put it this way. Uh I would guess if we were to take a survey of everyone in this room um and ask them, you know, what parts of the United States Constitution do you have memorized? Right? I'm sorry, the Declaration of Independence. Sorry. The Declaration of Independence, what parts do you have memorized? Right? I'm guessing, you know, you don't have the word for word, the the long list of grievances memorized, right? Um, which is something I do with my American Revolution students. I give them all the grievances and then I ask them to write an essay about like what is what are what are the writers thinking. You know, give me the historical context for these grievances. We've just studied them all semester. You should know what they mean by by this. But anyway, I'm guessing. This is a guess. I think I think I'm in the ballpark here. Um you might recall, you know, maybe when in the course of human events, right, the opening line. Um, a lot of my students like to think the opening line of the Declaration of Independence is we the people, but that's the Constitution. But you might you might gravitate towards the laws of nature and nature's God. Uh, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In other words, these ideas that are uh part of the first two paragraphs uh of the Declaration of Independence. I mean, most kind of people on the street, if they can quote anything, might be able to quote uh something from those first two paragraphs, those kinds of phrases that I have here in red. Um back to this idea of original intent. Uh, one book I like on this, I'm always making book book references. If you can't, if you want to read this and get this down, email me and or don't get it down, email me and I'll give you the title. Um, this is a uh historian named David Armitage who wrote a really interesting book uh about a decade ago now called The Declaration of Independence, a global history. And uh, for those of you who can't see this writing, Armitage says the Declaration was, quote, decidedly unrevolutionary. It would affirm the maxims of European statecraft, not affront them. Uh essentially, what Armitage argues is that the original intent, the original purpose of the Declaration of Independence was uh essentially a foreign policy document to literally declare to the world that America is now independent from Britain. Uh, this has all kinds of foreign policy implications about financial support for the revolution from other nations, the war from other nations. There's all kinds of support for troops, you know, troops. You know, certainly they want places like France to know that they've declared independence. Um, but but again, just that a declaration of independence, Armitage argues. Now, there's a lot of evidence from the way in which uh later in life uh the founding fathers talked about the Declaration of Independence. So here's Thomas Jefferson. Uh, this is an 1825 letter. Jefferson's gonna die about uh 13 months later. Um, but he he says, when forced therefore to resort to arms, he's talking here about the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution, arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our jurisdiction. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Or you might be able to emphasize, I would emphasize the word this. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles or new arguments, all those things about, you know, created equal and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and uh, you know, uh nature's God and rights from our creator, right? This was not the object. No, not to find out new principles or new arguments, never before thought of, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subjects in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take, right? A message to the world, here is why we are declaring independence. Here's another member of that, by the way, most of you know John Adams is the, or Thomas Jefferson is the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence. You know, John Adams liked to fight over this. He thought it was his idea. They were both on the committee uh that wrote the thing. Um, but here's John Adams, much earlier in 1782, uh, the declaration was, quote, that memorable act by which the United States assumed an equal station among nations. Now, what's missing in these uh these claims about the original? I just give you two examples here. Armitage has chapters of examples on this. What's missing from these uh statements about the purpose of the Declaration of Independence? Well, what's missing is all of those things that you have memorized, right? About being created equal, or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or all those ideals and values. And what I would argue is all of these ideals and values, as Jefferson put it, that we have memorized in those first two paragraphs, especially the two references to God there, nature's God, uh, and that our rights come from our creator, uh, were not new or exceptional or American ideas. Uh, they were largely understood as givens in the larger British transatlantic world, uh, in which the colonies uh were a part of. Uh, these were not uniquely American concepts, in other words. Uh most of the English-speaking world would have believed that our rights came from God. They would have believed uh that you know we have uh uh certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, uh, and they would probably use Locke's uh word property, right? Uh the point is um many who want to argue that America is a Christian nation will appeal to uh these first two paragraphs as some kind of uniquely American appeal to God or to our rights coming from our creator and so forth. More on that uh in a second. Now, what's the question is why when I would ask you which when I ask you which parts of the Declaration of Independence do you have memorized, right, why do you all turn to those, right? Or why I'm guessing some of you might think the purpose of the those are the key themes in the in the Declaration of Independence as it was originally understood in the 18th century. Well, it's because the Declaration of Independence has a long life, and it is often used uh later on by leading Americans uh who tend not to focus on the original intent, the grievances and so forth, the the statecraft, the foreign policy dimensions. But it's they they appeal to those first two paragraphs, the stuff that you have memorized, in order to advance certain kinds of social reform, a social agenda. This is the argument made of uh by a uh uh the late historian Pauline Meyer, who called the Declaration of Independence American scripture, right? When when Paul, you know, the closest thing that Americans, as Americans, have to a sacred text, right, are those first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. Uh the grievances, the foreign policy stuff, none of that is sacred to people because the the first two paragraphs have been used and employed in various moments since 1776 by important political and social players uh to make it American scripture. So, you know, for example, um, you know, if you've read uh the the uh the document produced by the Seneca Falls Convention, uh the Women's Rights Convention in the early 19th century, right? It's called the Declaration of the Sentiments of Women. And in that document, um, you know, it's basically the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which I just had up on the screen, except the word women women is added, woman, right, is added to the to the preamble. The idea here is that if we are going to take these principles in those first two paragraphs seriously, then we need to apply them to uh women as well as men. Or uh if you read the first edition of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, which is an uh abolitionist newspaper. Garrison was one of the foremost abolitionists, right? Uh he makes a case for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved by appealing to the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, all rights come from God. This applies to everyone. This is why slavery and the American Revolution, the American ideals, American values are incompatible with this institution of black chattel slavery. So again, using those first two paragraphs and turning this foreign policy document into something that has become what Meyer calls American scripture. How does the Gettysburg Address begin? Four score and seven years ago, right? Uh what's that number? 87. Subtract 18 87 from 1860. No, yeah, 87 from 1863. Where do you land? 1776, right? Once again, uh Lincoln drawing upon those first two paragraphs, not the original intent of the Declaration of Independence, but on the on the more philosophical parts of that that most people in the British speaking world would have accepted. Two examples of this on religion, or maybe just one. Let me see what I got here. Yeah, let's do two. Um two real two examples of this on religion. Um, you know, this is an uh excerpt from a speech that Dwight Eisenhower gives to the American Legion in 1955. And it's about, he's talking about religion here, uh a kind of what we call civil religion. Um, American scripture is, of course, the Myers term. The founding fathers expressed in words for all to read the ideal of government based upon the dignity of the individual, the ideal previously had existed only in the hearts and minds of men. They produced the timeless documents upon which the nation is founded and has grown great. They, recognizing God as the author of individual uh not fights, but rights, right? Declared that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. To you and to me, this ideal government is a self-evident truth, but in many lands the state claims to be the author of human rights, and here's his sort of veiled critique of uh of communism. But the point is, he's drawing upon that idea that our our you know our rights come from our creator, right? Drawing upon those first two paragraphs. Uh Martin Luther King does this too, back to letter from a Birmingham jail. Um, you know, he gets into some theology at the beginning. Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel? I bear in my body the marks of Lord of the Lord Jesus. Was not Martin Luther an excr an extremist? Here I stand, I could do otherwise, so help me God. And John Bunyan, I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience. And Abraham Lincoln, this nation cannot survive, half slave and half free. And then, of course, Thomas Jefferson, right? Uh, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Uh, so here is King, you know, using the Declaration of Independence, those first two paragraphs, not the original intent, but the philosophical uh, you know, opening, uh, to turn the Declaration of Independence into what Meyer calls uh American scripture. Well then that then leads us, we you know, we'd be remiss if we didn't we didn't just touch on this real quickly. Um what about the what should we make of the references to God or providence or religion in the Declaration of Independence? There are actually four references in there. Two come in that preamble section, and then two come at the end. Uh Jefferson refers to nature's God. Um, this would have been uh a very uh kind of vague way of describing God. Uh, you know, at least he starts off with this kind of vague God, the God of nature, the God of um, you know, who has created the world uh and set it into motion, right? Is presides over the physical world. Um, you know, there's nothing explicitly Christian uh about this God. This is not a God who has sent his son into the world to die for the sins of the world and offer salvation or something like that. Uh, it's also a God that would have been very, very familiar uh to uh 18th century skeptics. For example, English deists. Uh does that name ring a bell? Does that phrase ring a bell to people? Uh a deist might be somebody in a very basic definition, you know, would be uh someone who believed in a watchmaker god, you know, who created the world like a watchmaker creates a watch and then let it run by natural laws without intervening, right? In the purest form of the word, uh a deist would would reject uh miracles, would reject answers to prayer, would reject providence, right? God intervening. Um, this this is a very complicated debate. The deism is thrown around uh by um by uh you know politicians and pundits and you know popular writers. Um you know uh the watchmaker God is is the way I describe it to undergrads. But if you studied 18th century deism, they're all over the place. I mean, 18th century deists in the English-speaking world, some of them would have believed in in Providence, that God intervened, some of them would have believed in an afterlife, right, where God judged people based on uh their uh uh how they perform morally in this world. So the the idea of the watchmaker God, the kind of pure deist thing that we you know talk about with undergrads or basic definition, you know, it's deism is a lot more complicated than that, I'll put it that way. So when you hear people saying, like, oh, all the founders were deists, you know, or when you hear people saying, um, you know, Benjamin Franklin could not have been a deist because he asked for prayer at the Continental Congress, at the Constitutional Convention, and no deist asks for prayer, right? Um that's a kind of simplistic understanding of deism. There were plenty of English deism. Thomas Chubb, for example, comes to mind, uh, or John Tyndall, who would have certainly believed that God intervenes at different times and different places, but there would be some who would who would say God never intervenes, right? It's a really messy category in 18th century uh uh English thought and American thought. Um so this nature's God, you know, we're not quite clear on what it is, who it is. It's a creator God, certainly, uh, because we know from the second reference that this God, the God of the Declaration of Independence, if you will, uh, and endowed his creation with uh certain rights, right? So we are, you know, we have been created, according to uh the the God of the Declaration of Independence, to have, you know, these unalienable rights. Again, there's nothing specifically Christian about that claim. A deist would have kind of believed that as well. Um, you know, atheists, I I I challenge people, I do this this game where I challenge people to find me an atheist in 18th century America. And I can't remember what I used to do. I used to buy, I'd say I'd buy a Malaya lunch if you could find one, and no one has found one yet. Um, there's very few atheists, you could probably find one. There's very few, but even Tom Payne and Ethan Allen and Elihu Palmer and some of these other people, they did have a concept of a creator god, right? Um, that that existed and might even reward uh and punish people at the in the end um based upon how they lived. Uh so do our rights come from the creator? Well, that's what the signers of the Declaration of Independence, that's what Thomas Jefferson, uh Ben Franklin was part of the committee, John Adams, they all certainly believed this idea. Uh again, that's a historical claim. You know, I'm you know, I I guess you would it would be hard and fast to try to find, you know. I don't know, how do you is there a ref is a Second Amendment given to us by the Creator, the right to bear arms? You know, these are really interesting theological questions. But certainly, certainly the founders, the founders would have believed, the writers of the Declaration would have believed that their rights came from God, as anybody living in the British Atlantic world in the 18th century would have believed. There would be no one who would disagree with that claim. Uh, even the most skeptics, uh the most the most pronounced skeptics uh of the era. So uh, you know, he's he's he's very we this this God is you know nature's God. We know that this God created people with with rights. Those rights are defined by Jefferson as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Um many today would also say that it includes the Bill of Rights and, you know, all our rights. You know, if you listen to uh the Speaker of the House, you know, it's all our current Speaker of the House, Johnson, uh, you know, all every right that we ever owned, you know, we ever have is given to us by the Creator. Um, the next two references are from the final paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Here there is an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitudes of our intentions. So again, now we know a little bit more about this God. This God is one day going to judge uh humankind, right? Um, we don't quite know how or how that works, but it'll be based upon the rectitude of our intentions. Uh, you know, this is not a specifically Christian claim. Christians believe this, but so would a deist. So would some of these deists that I mentioned, right? That there is uh, you know, Benjamin Franklin, for example, believed, Thomas Jefferson believed that he would uh they would be judged uh in the in the afterlife by the creator God based upon their, you know, how moral they lived in this life. Um Franklin at some at one point in his butt in his autobiography even connects this uh to um his pursuit of moral perfection uh and you know trying to become a uh uh truly morally perfect person. And then the final reference to kind of God or theology is last paragraph, and for the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence. So again, here one might argue, and I've I've kind of changed my position on this, the more I've studied 18th century deists. Uh, in the first edition of the book, I argued that um the Declaration of Independence was a theistic document because it assumed a God who could provide who providentially intervened into the affairs of human beings, right? The more I read about 18th century deists, though, uh, as I just mentioned, deists uh also had a view, not as a robust view as Christians, uh, but certainly also believed that God could providentially intervene at times. Um, you know, some would say in times of crisis, there was one 18th century deist who said, like, you know, God would only intervene if a comet was like heading towards uh heading towards the earth and humankind needed to be saved. I can't remember which one said that. But but certainly deists would have had a position of providence. So, you know, again, these references to God are kind of, you know, you can't really nail the Declaration of Independence down as any kind of Christian or maybe even theistic uh document. Um, and you said, what's the big deal? Why am I making such a big deal about this? Because much of my work here uh in writing this book, uh popular history of Christian America, and thinking about these things has been uh, you know, church facing the church, facing my tribe, right? So to speak, facing Christians. And uh a lot of this is challenging the notion, which is very popular among Christians, some kind of uh many of these Christian nationalist historians, that the Declaration of Independence is in some way a biblical or theologically Christian document. And all I'm just trying to suggest here in this group is it's a lot more complex and complicated than that. And it's certainly, you know, is in no way overtly Christian. It may not even be uh, you know, overtly theistic, but certainly deep. Theists, even Christians, could come on board. There was no resistance to this language. Right? In the Constitution, there was resistance because it didn't mention God, and the Anti-Federalists didn't like that. They wanted more God language. But there was no resistance by the Second Continental Congress to the fact that these, in fact, Benjamin Franklin wanted to put more uh references to God and content to the nature of God into the Declaration of Independence, but Jefferson uh and the committee overruled him. So there's the Declaration of Independence, just some random thoughts. I'm gonna wrap this all up. You might think I'm all over the place right now, but uh these three lectures will come home here in a couple minutes. Um a godless constitution, right? Now people get really mad at me, Christians get really mad at me when I put that title up, right? Uh, you know, the constitution does not mention God. You realize that. There's nothing in the constitution that relates to God. Uh Article 6, you know, is talks about test oaths, right? No, no religious oath for office. You know, that's that's pretty much all the actual initial text, not including the Bill of Rights, but the text says about religion, even, right? There's there's no religious test for holding federal office, right? Um when you get to the First Amendment, you obviously have these uh two religion clauses in the First Amendment. Uh the uh the the disestablishment, right? There'll be no established church, uh, and then the uh freedom of religion clause uh in there, but again, no reference to uh the Christian God or even the deist god or any kind of God. And now occasionally I'll get I'll get some person in the audience who you know is one of these people who already has their mind made up when they come in a certain way in a certain way, um, who says, You're wrong, right? It says in the end, the year of our Lord, 1787, it's signed the year of our Lord, right? So this always bothered me because certainly if you're gonna sign it, we don't sign the document the year of our Lord anymore. So it certainly says something about the 18th century culture that's different than our culture, right? But the more I looked into it, it was clear, it's be it's it's clear to me now that that was probably never discussed in the meeting. It was probably just added on by a clerk after everybody had left Philadelphia, right? So this is not some big point of debate about whether to put the year of our Lord, right, on there. So technically, God is mentioned, right, in the in the United States Constitution in that way. So this gets to a question someone asked uh earlier, right? Um and here's where things get messy. Uh if you take a so-called federalist view of Jeff of uh the 10th Amendment, which is what Thomas Jefferson took and other founders, uh, there's nothing that says uh that the Constitution's uh disestablishment clause or the testos apply to the state constitutions that were actually, I mean, some that statement's kind of a little anachronistic because these state constitutions were were written before the United States Constitution was in 1787, right? Um almost all of these state constitutions have either a religious test oath for office holding, namely a Christian office test oath for office holding, or they have an established church. So for example, uh in 18, until 1832 or 33, Massachusetts Bay, the established church was the congregational church. And if you were a Baptist, now this it this is more complicated because it changes a little bit over time, but the idea here is if you were a Baptist, uh, you know, and you um, you know, you still had to pay your religious tax to pay the ministers and maintain the property of the congregational church, you know, even though you weren't from that denomination, right? That's what a that's essentially what an established church means. The government supports uh the one particular church. Connecticut had a religious establishment until 1818. Um so so you see this, these these states that are not conforming to either the First Amendment uh or Article VI of the Constitution. So here's one example. Pennsylvania, right, my my uh former home state, 1776. By the way, Pennsylvania, most historians say Pennsylvania was the most radical democratic state constitution, or maybe constitution ever written uh in the world. It it gave uh rights to vote to people who did not own land. That was radical, right? Um it was uh very democratic in that sense. Uh even free blacks uh could vote, right? Free blacks who didn't own land could vote. By the way, that was rescinded later on in a later uh constitution, which raises all kinds of questions about the direction of progress that history moves in, but that's a whole other lecture. Um but here's Pennsylvania, right? I uh even amidst all the lit the democratic radical nature of this constitution, um, you know, Tom Paine loved the state constitution of 1776, but I don't think he liked this part. I do believe in this is what you had to do to run for office or to vote in an election in the state constitution of 1776. I do you had to affirm that I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration. You know, I tell my students this would be like you come to the polling place and they like, you know, put your hand on the Bible and tell me, do you believe in the Old Testament and the New Testament being inspired? I do. You can go vote. Right? I mean, that's now this is different than religious liberty. Anyone in Pennsylvania could worship God freely in the way that they want. But if you couldn't affirm the divine inspiration of the Old New Testament, you weren't participating in the government.

unknown 28:20

Right?

SPEAKER_00 28:20

See the difference between religious freedom and these kind of Christian states that were being accepted. Uh we don't have, we don't have much time left, but Virginia is the only example where there is neither a uh a state church or a testos, the Virginia State Constitution. And ironically, it was because of all the evangelical Christians, Baptists and Presbyterians, who had suffered for so long under the Anglicans and wanted complete religious freedom. Um, you know, I I said this once in a lecture at Liberty University, and it didn't go very well. I said, you, I said, you, you Baptists, you know, you you you uh you know, if it wasn't for all Jefferson and Madison and so forth, and all these people that are deists or you think they're deists and you don't like, you wouldn't have the you know religious freedom that you had. So this makes the story complicated. When when was America founded, right? You know, was was it was America a nation under the Articles of Confederation when all the power rested in these states, which all had either testos or uh or um uh uh requirements, religious requirements for office? Was America founded in uh 1789, 1860 maybe was when America was American religion founded when the Supreme Court in 1947 applied the Everson back full circle, but applied the 14th Amendment to uh religious, uh religious issues as well. So now you could never have a state having a test oath or an established church, right? These these make this question, these questions complicated. So, in conclusion, uh, because my time is already up, um I am guessing many of you right now feel like I just took you on a roller coaster ride tonight, providing a lot of information, but no clear answer to the question was America founded as a Christian nation. If you felt that way, or if you feel that way, it is likely that you were thinking about the content I presented in a political rather than a historical way. Your natural inclination, what historian Sam Weinberg calls your psychological condition at rest, is to find something useful in this material, something that fits your preferred political or cultural agenda. And this is exactly how I want you to feel historians make the smooth places rough. Education requires a certain degree of uncomfortableness. History is ultimately a limited discipline, and it's not only always useful for constructing political agendas, leaps from 1776 or 1789 to the present are complicated, and they usually ignore what historians call change over time. I'm often asked to debate some of the proponents of Christian nationalism. I'm also oft have been asked to debate some of the proponents of a secular founding. Unless they are trained historians, I find such a task to be nearly impossible. This is because the real debate is not always about facts or what happened or what the founders said in this or that quote. David Barton could hold up a quote about God and John Adams' belief that God was important for the Republic and say, I told you so, and I would say, I agree, you're right. I I'd have no argument with that, right? This is, you know, yes, I can access that document too. Um but it's often these debates are about how as citizens in a democratic society we should use the past in the present. To put this differently, the question was America founded as a Christian nation, is a really bad historical question. I didn't want it as the title of the book, but the publisher thought it would be more sexy and sell more copies if we Yeah. And it did. It did. Yeah. Um The 18th century founders were not asking this question in the same way we ask it today on cable news talk show debates or in political rallies. In these venues, we answer yes or no to the question, this question, such as this uh so that we can build these political or cultural movements by using the past in the present. Uh, and most of the time when we do this, our understanding of the past is grounded in incomplete or half baked views of the past. Uh, we don't take the past in all its fullness. We, as citizens of both the American Republic and the Kingdom of God, can do better. We need history more than ever. Thank you.