Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? - Lecture 1

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

So thank you all for coming out on a Friday night to hear a history lecture. Give yourself a hand for that. So let's let's dive in here to the to the question at hand. Was America founded as a Christian nation? Someone recently pointed out to me that I used the phrase Christian nationalism in my 2011 book. You see the second edition up on the screen here. My 2011 book on religion and the founding, aptly, of course, titled Was America Founded as a Christian Nation, a historical introduction. Christian nationalism wasn't a very popular term in 2011, 2010, when I was writing this book. So I had to actually, when this person identified that I used this phrase, I actually had to go back and look in the book to see how I used it and in what context I used it. And it turns out that I employed the phrase to describe those on mostly the political right who appealed to the American founding to claim that the founding father set out to create a nation that privileged Christianity. These so-called Christian nationalists, the term I used, again, as I described them now almost 15 years ago, taught that the roots of a Christian nation were embedded in the soil of John Bradford's Plymouth colony in 1620, John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, the so-called City Upon a Hill, in 1630, and so on down the line. They argued that the founding documents of the United States were the product of the West's Judeo-Christian heritage. And they made somewhat tortured claims that the founders were mostly, if not all, Orthodox Christians. It seemed that some of the founders in the Christian nationalist narration, as they narrated their spiritual biographies, would be entirely comfortable worshiping each Sunday in their own megachurches. Now, since 2011, and especially after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, the idea of Christian nationalism has become part of a main part of mainstream political discourse. In fact, it's almost become a sort of cottage industry in the world of publications and punditry. Political commentators throw it around very haphazardly. Substack writers, journalists, political scientists write a lot about it, sociologists, different forms of activists, academic activists, non-academic activists. Mostly it's used by people who have a stake in our ongoing culture wars. If you did a Google N-gram, I'm hoping most of you are familiar with this way of measuring words in publications. A Google N-gram search shows a massive rise in the use of the phrase Christian nationalism in books and articles. The graph starts to go up around 213, 2013, and then soars and is continuing to rise here in 2025. So I would argue that Christian nationalism today is a real thing. It informs much of the so-called Make America Great agenda and has made serious inroads in evangelical communities. What was once considered a fringe movement, largely associated with people that were known as Dominionists or Reconstructionists or certain segments of the religious right, has become a more common part of our political vernacular today. Self-professed Christian nationalists, again, this is their calling themselves Christian nationalists, like, say, Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson, for example, are now taken seriously by the mainstream media. They are interviewed on the New York Times by the New York Times on their podcasts. They're covered on CNN. Those in the movement known as the National Conservative Movement make no bones about their interest in advancing a Christian nation, similar to something like Viktor Orban's Hungary. Speakers at last year's, or actually this would be August 2025's National Conservative Convention, featured Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Moeller, Trump advisor and podcaster Steve Bannon, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, among others. Again, none of these men would shy away from the label Christian nationalist. But sometimes the phrase Christian nationalism is applied so liberally by its critics that anyone who believes that their religious faith informs their politics in some way is labeled almost automatically a Christian nationalist. Politico journalist Heidi Prisbila had to apologize after she appeared on MSNBC and said that a Christian nationalist is anyone who, quote, believes that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority, unquote. Another extreme example is the Mother Jones magazine editor who warned her Twitter followers about the dangers of Christian nationalism in America after a flight attendant told her to have a blessed day as she deboarded a flight. Academic activists, again, mostly in the social sciences, are finding Christian nationalists under every rock. It reminds me of H. L. Mencken, the early 20th century journalist, famous 1925 line about conservative evangelical Christians. Mancken said, quote, heave an egg out a Pullman car window and you will hit a fundamentalist, unquote. Today Mencken's line might be adapted this way: drop an egg from a plane flying over the red states, and you will hit a Christian nationalist. Yet there are some social scientists who are starting to see a problem with this ubiquitous nature of Christian nationalism. For the last couple of years, I've been part of a group of sociologists, political scientists, historians, and religious study scholars, a group sponsored by the Boise Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College, who are starting to offer a clearer and more nuanced definition of Christian nationalism in the United States. So I just throw that out there. By the way, a volume is forthcoming on this, so stay tuned. What is missing in all of this punditry, whether it be from the left or from the right, about Christian nationalism is what's missing is a nuanced, complex treatment of Christianity and the American founding that does not cherry pick from the past to make a political point in the present. A practice that the late historian of the American Revolution, Bernard Balin, called indoctrination by historical example. Boogeymen are everywhere. The Make America Great Again Right rips on so-called leftist academics who are apparently teaching their students that religion or even Christianity was not important to the founding. I say this is a boogeyman because I know very few, if any, professional or academically trained historians with a research university PhD who believe that the founders were all a bunch of deists and secularists. Good scholars know better than to make these claims, and they can point to countless peer-reviewed studies of the role of religious faith in the founding, even some that take religion seriously and not a guise for something else. Meanwhile, most of the journalists, sociologists, political scientists, and others writing about Christian nationalism today simply assume that the question, was America founded as a Christian nation, is a settled one? And the settled answer is no, it was not. With this assumption, they succumb to the temptation of making a priori claims that the Christian nationalism driving much of our political discourse today is built on a faulty historical foundation. Like the Christian nationalists themselves, they seek a past they can use in the present. Now, this is the only part of my talk, by the way, I'm going to be reading. Um, everything that I've set up to this point is stage setting. I actually want to put the contemporary debate over Christian nationalism aside, for the most part, and think with you about the place of Christianity in the founding of the United States. Perhaps as a historian might do. Narratives that capture the full scope and complexity of the role of religion in the founding are needed right now. Especially since the debate over was America founded as a Christian nation, will no doubt intensify as we embark on the national conversation about the meaning of America during the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026. Programming note. Ken Burns' documentary on the American Revolution starts on Monday. My goal tonight is to get us thinking historically about what might go into a responsible narrative about Christianity and the American founding. There is a lot I could cover here. This is where I say go buy the book. But I've decided to limit my focus tonight to three things. First, in the time I have left here in this first lecture, uh, I will suggest that until the last 50 or 60 years, Americans understood themselves to be living in a Christian nation. Lecture two. We will turn to the 18th century and focus on the role the Bible played in the American Revolution and the American founding. And then in lecture three, I want to discuss the religious nature or lack thereof of U.S. founding documents with a specific focus on the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. So that is where we're heading. Let's dig in. Lecture one. Americans have always believed that they were living in a Christian nation. Now, let me explain what I mean by that statement. I am making this statement as a historical claim. In other words, I'm not suggesting people were right to believe that they were living in a Christian nation. I'm not suggesting that they understood the founding correctly when they said we were living in a Christian nation, right? But if you were to ask the majority of Americans living in the United States between roughly 1789 when the Constitution is ratified, and say the 1970s, they would say that they were living in a Christian nation. And if they thought they were not living in a Christian nation, they would have been in a significant minority. That's my historical claim here. Again, we can debate whether they're right or wrong to believe that. But that's to me not a historical uh question. Right? It's I I want you to see how the way Christian nationalism or the idea that America was a Christian nation uh was constructed over time. So the I again, I apologize for the small um the small images here. Some of you may not be able to see them, but uh up there in the top left, you'll see Martin Luther King Jr. Uh if you have ever read Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham jail, which if you haven't, you should. Uh this document is loaded with theological claims and Christian claims about the nation's founders and American identity. There's at one point where uh Martin Luther King says, in order for this country uh to um uh you know live up to its highest values, we need to get more in touch with our Judeo-Christian roots. And he traces those Judeo-Christian roots in Letter from a Birmingham jail uh to people uh like some of the uh some of the found ancient church fathers, uh, to Thomas Jefferson and others, right? They all were kind of promoting, he argues, a Judeo-Christian heritage. Now, for Martin Luther King, a Christian nation is one that you know treats everybody equally. It's a nation in which there's no segregation, there's no Jim Crow, right? Where racism is not a uh uh a fundamental issue that separates and divides people, right? For America to become more Christian, to become a Christian nation for Martin Luther King, is to uh bring an end to uh this kind of segregation, Jim Crow, and have civil rights for all people. But he frames it in this kind of Christian nation uh sort of framework as he talks about uh this in a way that perhaps maybe uh civil rights leaders uh today may not necessarily appeal to. The next person's a little more obscure. Uh, his name is Washington Gladden. Anyone ever hear of Washington Gladden? A few people. Uh Washington Gladden was associated with a movement in the late 19th and early 20th century known as the social gospel movement. The social gospel movement, it's it's it's Gladden, there's other figures. Walter Rauschenbusch might be a name some of you may have heard. Um, these social gospelers were all about advancing the kingdom of God in the United States uh by dealing with the society's social problems, particularly poverty, injustice, these kinds of things. The gospel had social ramifications, and many of them embrace what we might call a kind of post-millennial view of uh of the end times, right? If we can only solve all of these social problems, especially in urban centers, uh, we can usher in or set the stage for uh the coming of the kingdom of God. We want to make America a Christian nation. And in order to do so, we have to apply, whether it be the teachings of Jesus or larger the teachings of the New Testament, to solve these social problems of poverty, of injustice uh in mostly urban America. Uh, but much of their language, Bladden, Rauschenbush, so forth, are rooted in this idea that we want to Christianize America. We want to make America more of a Christian nation. Next, maybe someone many of you are familiar with. Uh Jerry Falwell, I could have replaced Jerry Falwell with Pat Robertson or Phyllis Slafley or a host of other people. But these members of the moral majority, the religious right, the Christian right, uh, they of course wanted to promote a Christian nation, uh, rooted in uh the idea that our rights come from God, that the founding fathers were Christians, uh, that we need to reclaim and restore all that was lost to our Christian civilization in the 1960s. We'll come back to this here in a second, right? So uh, of course, he is one of the founders of the what today we would call the Christian right uh movement. Um, but we we we need to reclaim, restore, renew America and restore it to its Christian roots, would be the argument. And frankly, Jerry Fowler is one of the most successful politicians uh in the post-World War II era because he was able to teach millions and millions of mostly white evangelical Christians that there's only one way to do politics, and that is through gaining political power and advancing an agenda through uh you know control over the levers of government uh to promote what he believed to be a Christian nation. Down in the second round. Now, usually you wouldn't have someone like Pope Leo XIII, not our current Pope, the one he's named after, Pope Leo the 13th on a list of Christian nationalists. But let me make a case for Pope Leo. Um, Pope Leo actually thought a great deal about the United States. In fact, he wrote an encyclical on how on the Catholic Church in the United States. And while he's writing in the late 19th century, uh he's also, by the way, responsible for creating, promoting, along with the U.S. uh. Catholic bishops, uh, Catholic University, the kind of official Catholic university in the United States. Leo was behind that as well. He cared a great deal and thought a lot about uh America and this country. But Leo has some fascinating historical arguments in his encyclical. He basically makes an argument, I'll paraphrase it. It goes something like this All you Protestants, you think that America is a Christian nation because you have the pilgrims in Plymouth and the Puritans and all these English people who came over in the 17th century because uh, you know, they wanted to establish a Christian civilization here. Well, if we really think about history, Leo says, what about Catholics? We were here well before you guys, right? We were out there converting the Indians. We were creating missions out in California and other places, you know, St. Augustine, Florida. You know, we were here way before you. So if you guys want to make historical claims about the country being founded as a Christian nation, uh, really the United States was founded as a Catholic nation, right? He literally makes this argument in that encyclical. I encourage you to go to go read it. So, you know, you can have Catholics claiming that the United States is a Catholic nation, uh, Christian nation in some way. Billy Graham, most of us in this room probably are familiar with. Uh, you know, Billy Graham is is preaching at a time of uh of um you know anti-communism in the United States. Uh he's trying to win people to Christ, get them saved. Um, and he believes that if more and more people are accept Jesus as their savior, become born again, the country will inevitably become more Christian. And we want the United States to become more Christian because then we can always juxtapose ourselves against those so-called godless communists, right? And usually when Billy Graham talked about godless communists, it was one word, right? There was no space between godless and communists. Godless communists, godless communists. Um, so again, Billy Graham, while he didn't have a kind of strong political agenda, like say Falwell or Robertson a little bit later, still very much framed a lot of his evangelism. Now, primarily he concerned was concerned about saving souls, right, and getting people to heaven. But he often framed his his uh his work in Christian nationalist kind of, and again, I'm using here Christian nationalists in the way I defined it in the Christian America book, right? Someone who believed America should be a Christian nation, right? Now, I'm guessing very few of you, now let's check this one. Uh few of you knew uh a few of you knew Gladden. How about Mercy Otis Warren? Right, it's a couple of the historians in the room, I see their hands up. Uh, Merci Otis Warren was one of the first historians of the United States. Uh, she wrote in the very early 19th century uh a history of the United States. If you read this history today, it reads like it would be some kind of uh, you know, history book assigned in a like really strong fundamentalist homeschool uh, you know, um class. Very much providential language. God had a special purpose for the United States. America is exceptional because God had that purpose, right? And this is why the American Revolution took place in the way it did. In fact, this providential history that Merci Otis Warren taught was very, very common in American history textbooks prior to uh, say, the Civil War. Um, you know, most of the major writers of the American Revolution in those decades were writing what we might call providential histories, trying to show that what happened in 1776 was the will of God, and this nation is specially blessed. So uh even in the writing of history, the first writings about the American Revolution, you see this Christian nation theme. Now, what I want to close this lecture with, and Brian, you're standing in front of my clock. Um, what I want to close, what I want to close this Christian nation uh first lecture with, is I want to think then a little bit about um when the United States started, you know, fighting over America as a Christian nation. Right? If we've been, if we've always understood ourselves living in a Christian nation, right, you know, most people, when did it become a culture war issue? When did it become contentious? Why did it become contentious? And here, again, forgive me for those of you in the back, but I'll read this through. I would argue that this debate we have today over whether or not America was a Christian nation or not is a relatively new one. And it came out of a particular historical context, namely a reaction to the 1960s. Now, I push this all the way back to 1947. There was a Supreme Court case, Everson versus the Board of Education of Ewing, New Jersey. For lack of time here, the sort of details of the case are really not relevant. Except for the fact there was a church-state case. It was about busing. Can Catholic students uh take public transport, you know, public buses, public school buses to uh to their Catholic schools, and should the government fund those those uh Catholic schools, those buses taking kids to Catholic parochial schools? Um the controversy around this is in the official opinion, right? The opinion in the case written by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Hugo Black made the controversial statement, or it wasn't really too controversial at the time, but it became controversial, that there is a wall of separation between church and state. And that wall, he said, is quote unquote high and impregnable. In other words, right, a complete separation of church and state. This, he argued, is what the founding fathers taught. He, you know, you can read up more on this. He appealed to a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote uh in uh the early 19th century to a group of Baptists in Connecticut where he used this metaphor, right, of the wall between church and state. That ruling about a wall between church and state and being high and impregnable was then applied by Hugo Grant and the court in 1962 to remove mandatory prayer from public schools. Same, same ruling, right? High and impregnable, wall of separation with churches say you can't pray, make people pray in public schools. That was angle v. Vital. In 1963, Schemp was essentially the same ruling, although this time it applied to uh the uh mandatory Bible reading in public schools, right? That became unconstitutional. Uh there was pushback on this, but you know, ultimately these uh, you know, it was the Supreme Court who ruled. In 1965, Congress passes what becomes known as the Heart Seller Act. It's named after the two, uh the member of the Senate and the member of the House who sponsored it. This is often described too in textbooks as the Immigration Act of 1965, which essentially lifted all the barriers to non-Western immigrants coming into the country. In 1924, there was an immigration act that prevented uh people from you know, Chinese and non-Westerns, Muslims, right? Anyone who was not from the West, even Italians and Southern uh Europeans were were were held back, or at least quotas were placed on them. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson and and the Congress lifted all of those uh quotas, meaning that after 1965, you begin to see uh a bunch of non-Western immigrants coming into the United States uh from Asia, from the Middle East, uh, from South America, and they're bringing their religious beliefs, many of those beliefs, not Christian beliefs, with them. This creates all kinds of uh what we might call nativist reactions. You know, people begin to worry about the growing diversity of the country and the religious diversity of the country, and people start asking the question through the late 60s and especially into the 70s you know, what does this new diverse country that we have, what does this now mean for us as a Christian nation? So I think this plays a role in this. 1971, this Green v. Connolly case is often sometimes described as the Bob Jones University case, in which the United States uh government, the Supreme Court said if a college or a Christian, uh any really any kind of institution discriminates, private institution even, discriminates uh on the basis of race, those people will be ineligible for any kind of government uh assistance. Um now, most of most of uh Christian academies, you know, high K through 12 schools, they immediately uh, you know, integrated uh or else they hired lawyers to fight against this. Um the point is not necessarily as much about segregation here and their defense of segregation as it is uh big government, right? Here's the government. And Jimmy Carter, by the way, the president, gets behind and supports the Supreme Court's decision here, right? So it's here's this big government, this this Washington is coming into our backyards. By the way, it's the same argument the Confederates made about the Union during the Civil War, right? But Washington is coming into our backyard and they are telling us what we need, what we must do in our schools in terms of desegregation. So, in some ways, this whole kind of Christian right resistance to big government uh really um begins with the reaction to uh the Bob Jones, the Bob Jones case. Of course, 1973, you have Roe v. Wade, uh abortion. I think the bicentennial uh in 1976 causes people to start beginning to look more deeply at the founding. And many Christians are saying, well, wait a minute, if we're, you know, everyone's talking about the founding in 1776. Let's take a look at this ourselves. And here you begin to see picking out different verses about God or different different quotes and so forth about God and religion. And you know, maybe maybe we were founded as a Christian nation, and we've lost all that by these Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s. In 1979, Jerry Fowler, the moral majority, forms, the Christian right begins, and one of their primary agendas is to now make the idea that America is a Christian nation a part of their political platform. And now, for the first time, you are seeing full blown debates and discussions in a way that hadn't existed before about America's Christian identity. Thank you. Great.