Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? - Lecture 2

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

One of the things about these three lectures, I was telling someone uh the other day, um they don't really build off of each other. So, like if you wanted to, you know, slip out for this lecture and come back for the third one, you won't miss you, it won't be like you missed a lot. I'm just, you know, I don't want you to slip out. But uh we're we're now gonna move into uh we're now gonna move into the 18th century um and think a little bit more about the actual history here and think about the role of religion, Christianity uh in the founding. And I thought uh there's a lot of ways we could have approached this uh topic, but I thought one of the best ways to do it was perhaps to think about, uh especially with this audience here, uh to think about uh the Bible and the way in which the Bible was used uh in the 18th century by revolutionaries, by uh revolutionary preachers, patriot preachers, uh, and so forth. And my argument here is, uh, which I'm going to kind of deconstruct or unpack a little bit here, is that indeed the Bible was important to the revolutionary generation. So I know this is gonna be really hard to read in the back, but I'm gonna explain what's what this chart is, and I'm happy to share it with you if you want. But uh in the 1980s, there was a political scientist, his name was Donald Lutz, taught at the University of Houston. And Donald Lutz and his team of graduate students read through uh the published material uh written by um the so-called founding fathers. I think he's defined founding fathers as people who signed uh one of the three major documents, either the Declaration of Independence, uh the Constitution, or the Articles of Confederation. So I could be wrong about that. There may have been a few other things in which he he chose. But his his uh his idea was to uh find out what were the intellectual sources of the uh founding fathers, and he did it through a system of quotes. Like what kind of quotes or what kind of references did they make to different thinkers, different texts, and so forth. And it's uh, you know, the the study has some problems with it, but it still is the kind of gold standard for uh historians who are writing books about uh the Bible and the American Revolution. And uh maybe talk about one of those historians here in a second. Um so what you see here is just uh uh a graph from uh one of Lutz's uh papers that he published uh based upon his study, and it shows uh the distribution of citations uh between in founding fathers' writings between 1760 and 1805. Uh and again, you can you can look here. Do I have a do I have a uh pointer on this? I don't think so. Um but in the 1760s, this would be the era of the uh Stamp Act and the Townsend duties uh in in British colonial America. Uh the most uh he breaks them down, he uses uh these categories of but that this historian Bernard Balin, who I actually referenced in the last lecture, uh, uses. Uh the Bible, right? Enlightenment sources, largely coming out of the uh uh sort of late 17th, 18th century Enlightenment, uh Whig uh political tracts, these would be people known as Commonwealth writers and others who were making uh kind of anti-Tory or anti-monarch uh um statements and writings, uh common law, which would be, you know, uh people like William Blackstone and others, and then classical writers, you know, the ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, right? The Cicero's, the Plato's, the Aristotles, you know, and so forth. Uh, if you look at this carefully in the 1760s, if you can see it, uh in the 1760s, uh the Enlightenment document, Enlightenment sources, uh, people like Montesquieu, Rousseau, you know, these kinds of people, uh, John Locke, uh, were cited more than any other uh text, um, with 32 and 24% uh with the Bible. Uh in 1770 and then all the way through to 1805, it is the Bible that is the most cited book uh by uh the founding, the founding fathers that Lutz studied. Uh unlike any other text, it is the Bible that is cited uh the most. Now, you know, this becomes fodder for a particular kind of interpretation of uh the American Revolution, in which someone might say, well, you know, the American Revolution was founded upon Bible, the Bible is the most cited text, right? It's a biblical nation, right? Or, you know, maybe even a Christian nation based upon the Bible, a nation built upon biblical teachings. Uh, and you know, you could make you could make that case since it was the most read book. And uh, you know, it's it's it's a fair, I guess it's a fair argument. Uh, of course, if you were to add up, another way of looking at this, if you were to add up all the Enlightenment, Whig, common law, and classical texts uh together and put them together, in other words, the non-biblical literature, would would far exceed uh the uh biblical literature that gets cited. So, you know, if you look at the the totals here uh on the far right, uh the Bible is cited uh you know, 34%, 34% of the of the founders cited the Bible the most. Uh, and then you know, Enlightenment, Whig, common law, they're you know, in the roughly this you know 60 plus range. Um, so the point is, I guess, the takeaway for me, at least on this, is that the Bible is is present uh at the founding. The founding fathers, the so-called founding fathers, are using the Bible uh as a source, uh, and they're using it more than any other individual text uh in the 1760s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Uh there's a Vanderbilt historian named uh uh Jimmy Bird James Byrd, who uh used the Lutz, um dug deeper into the Lutz material. He came out this book maybe five or ten years ago called Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, um, the Bible and the American Revolution, published with Oxford University Press. And what he concluded, based on the data, uh Lutz's data, is that there these were the eight most popular Bible verses cited in um not only among the founders, but also among ministers who preached patriotic or revolutionary era sermons. Uh, these are the top eight, and they are actually ranked. They're not just eight randomly put up there. This is ranked on how many times uh these verses were cited or referenced in um published, all published material. Uh, I think he went and worked through this collection known as the Evans Early American Imprint Collection, which has uh all of the pamphlets and and and uh published material from the colonial and revolutionary era. Uh Romans 13, which we'll come back to here in a second, uh, was the most referenced, the most cited uh scripture verse in the revolutionary era. And uh some of you may know Romans 13. This is the passage about Paul uh you know telling um the Romans to be the Roman church to obey uh the civil authorities, right? We'll get to that one. I want to zero in on that one with you a little bit uh here in a few minutes, um, because as you might guess, this was a favorite verse of the uh loyalists, the Tories, right? The ministers who did not like the American Revolution. Um, second was Exodus 14 through 15. Again, this is the story of the Exodus, Moses parting the Red Sea. Uh in these, these mostly sermons. Uh, you have things like, you know, uh George Washington playing the role of Moses uh in the in the uh kind of allegorical take on the on the account. You have um Pharaoh being compared to George III, right, oppressing the people. You have the Exodus as a kind of uh metaphor for freedom, for liberty, for the American Revolution. So uh this was a favorite among many of the uh patriotic preachers of the day. Uh third, Galatians 5, this is Paul's statement about being free in Christ. Uh liberty. I want to come back to this one. I also want to dive a little more deeper into this one here in a in a couple minutes. Uh Judges 4, 5, this is the uh four to five, this is the song of Deborah uh in the Old Testament, in which uh the angel of the Lord comes and puts a curse on the people of Maraz for not assisting the Israelites in their war against the Canaanites, for staying out of the conflict, right? And the curse of Miraz was often used by patriotic ministers and directed towards people like Quakers or German Anabaptists on the frontier who did not want to get involved in uh the uh the war, right? They refused to take sides or they wanted peace, right? And how dare you go against God's providential will by supporting the American patriots? Uh so the curse of miraz is placed upon you for your failure to act in on behalf of God's people, right? The colonists. Um 1 Peter 2 is very similar to Romans 13, right? Fear God, honor the king, right? Again, another favorite verse of the uh uh of the loyalists, the uh the opposition to the revolution. Um 1 Kings 12, uh, some of you know your Bible. This is the story of uh Solomon's sons, uh Rehoboam and Jeroboam, splitting up the kingdom, right? Uh Rehoboam was a tyrant, you know, according to uh according to ten of the tribes uh of Israel. Uh he acted in a tyrannical way, according to the way the revolutionary preachers use this. And as a result, uh the ten tribes were forced to separate, declare independence, if you will, from uh, you know, from the the the the uh rehobom who then became the king of uh uh Judah, right? And they all went off and uh Rehabom became the king of uh am I getting this right? He became the king of uh of Israel and and Jeroboam stayed in Judah. Um so again, you could see you can see the metaphors here, right? Um I'm a his I'm a historian, not an American historian, uh not a biblical scholar. Yeah, excuse me. Psalm 123, uh David's thanksgiving for national salvation from our enemies, right? Uh our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth, preached over and over again in American pulpits during the war, right? Asking God to show his favor on those enemies who were persecuting them. Of course, the enemies being uh the Redcoats or the British Army or George III and so forth. Um, and then you had uh Matthew 5, interestingly enough, another favorite verse of those uh mostly mid-Atlantic, New York, New Jersey, mostly Pennsylvania, uh German Mennonites, Anabaptists, Quakers, peace churches, right, who would often appeal to uh Jesus' call to turn the other cheek, to love thy enemy, right? There were some Presbyterian patriots at the time when they interacted with Quakers, which could have been someone just like their next door neighbor in an 18th century community. Uh, you know, they said, we can't trust these Quakers uh to not only fight for the cause of liberty, but when we form a new nation, we can't even give them the right to vote or to participate in government because of their uh failure to support uh the Americans in the revolution. Um and their, you know, turn the other cheek is not necessarily a wartime verse, right? Is the idea. So I became interested in not only the idea that, of course, the Bible was being used uh more than any other book, but I became really interested in the question of exactly how the Bible was being used. In what ways was the Bible being uh employed uh by mostly preachers, but even some of the founding fathers in a political leaders in uh this revolutionary era. So let me give you two examples here, right? I said I would I would come back to two verses. Uh here's Galatians 5, verse 1. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery. So what I did when I you know kept seeing this verse even in my own study coming up over and over again, even before I read Byrd's book, which came out much later than mine, um I said, okay, is there some kind of consensus on how this verse should be interpreted through the course of church history? Um so I went back, I read ancient commentaries on this. Uh I read Augustine on Galatians, I read, uh I'm trying to remember. I may John Chrysostom maybe uh I read on Galatians. I read Martin Luther on Galatians, this passage. I read John Calvin on these on this passage, right? For the way in which, you know, these church leaders of the church in ages past thought about and interpreted Galatians 5. And there were differences, of course, but if I could sum up, and you know, again, this is this is for biblical scholar, what I'm about to do is like the cardinal sin. But if I were to if I were to sum up the interpretations that I read in almost all of these commentaries, it would go something like this. Uh it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. So Christ has, uh, through through Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, and by putting your trust in him, I'm summarizing the commentaries now, doing a massive overview here, right? Um we have been free. Christians have been freed of something, right? Uh stand firm then. Uh, you know, you know, stand in this faith, uh, and do not let yourself be burdened by a yoke of slavery. And, you know, it varies from commentator to commentator, but the the yoke of slavery is either, you know, it's sinful practices, the sinful nature, right? Uh something to do with uh the influence of the devil trying to enslave you with sin, right? In other words, it was it was roughly a spiritual interpretation of this verse, you know, which which essentially said, you know, Christ's death, burial, and resurrection has freed you from the bondage uh of sin in your life, whether it be your own practice, in the sin nature, satanic influence, whatever it might be, right? And I'm guessing if you are a church-going person and you hear sermons about Galatians in your churches, uh you may have heard something similar to this interpretation. Am I, yes? Am I in the ballpark? Right? All right, let's just let's just leave it at that. Um, again, I'm a historian, not a not a biblical scholar. I'll say something about that again here in a second. Um So I'm in the archives, and I am in uh actually at Rutgers University Special Collections. Uh be specific here, right? And I'm reading through the papers of an 18th-century Presbyterian minister from a small little town in southern New Jersey called Deerfield, New Jersey. Uh his name is Enoch Green, the minister. He's a he's a Princeton grad, College of New Jersey at Princeton class of 1764. Um, you know, he's he's uh you know probably the foremost intellectual in that community, right? I'm reading through his sermon notes, and I come across a sermon on Galatians 5, Galatians 5, 1. And I'm reading the sermon, I'm reading the notes, and uh it looks very familiar to me. It's in the ballpark, right? He's talking about uh, you know, being Christ has freed us from slave from sin, from the bondage of the yoke of slavery that's sinned and so forth. It you know, it was in the ballpark to what I had read from, you know, uh Origen or Chrysostom or Augustine or Luther Calvin, right? You know, again, the purpose here is not to parse the the different uh the different um interpretations, but to give you kind of a ballpark feel about how the church interpreted this. Um so you know, I was like, this is great. I think, I don't know, I took some notes on it or something. And uh so I kept turning pages in this sermon, sermon notebook, right? I'm turning pages, turning it, might have been the next day even. Uh the first sermon was preached in 1765-1766. The uh the sermon I just mentioned was preached in 65-66. Uh in 1775, I find another sermon, and they're easy to identify the verses because they, you know, the the way of the way these Calvinist preachers preach is they put the verse on the top and then they explicated the verse. Uh, another sermon on Galatians 5, 1. So uh, you know, here I am saying, okay, I don't know if how many of you here are clergymen or ministers, right? You know, thinking, all right, it's like 10 years later. Uh he, you know, needed a sermon, went into the filing cabinet, pulled out the Galatians 5 sermon. Maybe no one will remember it from 10 years ago, or there might be new, you know, new uh new parishioners or whatever. I'll just preach the same sermon. That was what I was expecting. Instead, it is an entirely allegory, it's a tire metaphor, the sermon, um, in which he's telling his congregation that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourself be burdened by a yoke of slavery. And in the notes, he talks about the yoke of slavery uh in a kind of political way. Slavery was a political term in the larger kind of Whig political thought, right? Anyone whose individual liberties and rights were taken away, where the founders talked about this all the time, in actually a way separate from uh black chattel slavery often, that they were being enslaved, right, by some outside power. Like the British were enslaving us by taking away our liberties, by taxing us, you know, and so forth. So this is what he was getting at. And it was clear that this sermon was interpreting slavery to be uh, you know, parliament was enslaving them, right? It was parliament that was doing the enslaving. We need to stand firm. Uh, they were apparently uh doing some digging here, there were many members of the New Jersey militia in his congregation that day. So, you know, what did stand firm actually mean there uh in that sense? But then here was the kicker. Um, I keep reading along and I see this thing in the notes that says, um uh, it is for freedom, liberty, right? Liberty from tyranny, liberty from slavery, liberty from political oppression that Christ has set us free. And the word Christ next to it, in parentheses, says New Jersey militia. Right? So I've never seen anything that overt, right? But it was, you know, so so I what can I say about this? I, again, for the third time, I am not a theologian, I am not a biblical scholar, I'm a historian, right? So I cannot, with any degree of expertise or certainty or training, tell you that Enoch Green in 1775 interpreted Galatians 5.1 correctly. What I can tell you is it was a very innovative interpretation, right, based on what I had read uh before in the past. And this idea, I use Galatians 5 here uh to show over and over again the way that the Patriots, as a sort of window into, oh, the way the Patriots used uh the Bible in very, very creative ways to advance what was essentially their political agenda, right? I mean, you know, we don't like to think of the we we Americans don't like to think of the American Revolution as a political agenda, right? It was, you know, truth or something like that. No, but it was it was their political agenda. Um, and they were using scripture in all kinds of uh innovative ways to uh to promote this uh this agenda. Now by the way, like uh the idea that using scripture to advance political agendas is as old as the republic, right? The birth of the republic. I mean, it's this is nothing new that we see going on today. When uh you know Mike Pence does his his carefully constructed verse uh explication of 2 Corinthians 7 14, uh in which he replaces like the flag with uh you know the nation, so with uh with Israel, so to speak. Anyway, Romans 13, uh again, top of the list, right, of the Bible's use according to Byrd, um was of course very popular among the uh the loyalists. Uh how many of you have seen either seen the play, It's Coming to Man. Madison in January or heard the soundtrack of Hamilton. Yeah, I mean, there's a figure in there which, you know, kind of gets, kind of gets, uh takes a beating in the beginning of the play. His name is Samuel Seabury, right? He's an Anglican Loyalist minister, you know, who's from Westchester, New York. Um he and several other Anglican ministers in the 18th century wrote uh long explications uh of Romans 13, trying to argue that, according to one New York Anglican Charles Inglis, the American Revolution, he said, was quote unquote, based on the teachings of Romans 13, was quote unquote conceived in sin, right, as a result. Why? Well, let me read this opening of Romans 13, and I want you to think about it in terms of somebody who uh, you know, is is uh defending the crown, right, in in the 1760s or 1770s. Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but of God, the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. Uh if you want to look for the biblical literalists in the 18th century, it was the opponents of the American Revolution. Uh Seabury, Inglis, and other Anglican pamphleteers took this verse seriously. Uh, you know, asking questions is high taxes, or is the closing of the port in Boston, or is um the fact that you are not going to be able to paint your house this year because there's a tax on lead under the townson duties. Are these, do these rise to the level that Romans 13 should be violated? The teachings of Romans 13 should be violated, uh, and you should ignore submitting to the God-given authorities. Seabury even goes further and points out that Paul is writing during a time of intense persecution uh to the Romans, right, under the Roman Emperor. You know, Christians are being killed uh during this period. They're dying for their faith during this period. And even amidst that moment, right, this persecution, these martyrs, what does Paul tell the Romans? Be subject to the higher powers. Those who resist the higher powers receive themselves damnation. If you keep reading in Romans 13, I love this. There's actually a part in there at the end, if you remember, about uh pay your tithes, right? Pay your taxes. So, so again, I'm not a biblical scholar. I don't know if the if this was, they were interpreting this the right way or not, but it is fascinating that both sides were invoking scripture uh to try to justify their political positions. Uh, the revolutionaries were often using scripture in a very kind of allegorical kind of way, and the Anglicans were actually using it, interpreting it in a literal uh fashion. But they were they were both they were both using uh the scriptures in that regard. So um was America founded as a Christian nation? I mean, I'm not sure how much uh this lecture kind of gets at that question, and I'll talk about you know a little bit more about you know getting at this question here at the in the third lecture. But clearly the Bible is everywhere in 18th century uh America. And what's interesting to me is how the Bible, in this sense, is being used in that period.