I like politics — always have, ever since I was a little fellow, riding in my father’s truck listening to talk radio and asking him questions about the subjects being debated. Still, I sometimes get tired of the media ruckus and having the same old arguments. Some arguments, however, are very important to continue, even when we get tired. One of the important battles of our day is whether the United States of America had a Christian founding.
Over the past 70 years, secularist scholars have made a concerted effort to separate religion from any aspect of American government, including the founding. While they were right to criticize oversimplistic interpretations of American history that align America’s national trajectory with God’s providential plans for the rest of the world, their alternate interpretation skews way too far in the other direction. As a result, an ongoing battle has ensued to determine just how “Christian” America’s founding was.
Was Everyone a Christian?
Sometimes when people discuss this topic, they seem to communicate all the founders were orthodox Christians. This standard is unhelpful. No society anywhere, at any point in history, has consisted only of orthodox Christians.
Attempting to portray every founding father as a robust evangelical is a mistake. The historical record does not support it. The broad majority of the men who represented their communities in the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were orthodox Christians (some even ministers), but a few clearly held unorthodox beliefs, and others were outright Deists.
On the other hand, liberals and their sympathizers should be careful about trying to read between the lines of every communique from the eighteenth century for closeted Deists. Most arguments historians have used to claim founders like George Washington were Deists are made from negative evidence — that is, an absence of what they consider to be sufficiently Christian language. However, as Mark David Hall demonstrates in Did America Have a Christian Founding? the number of founders who can clearly and definitively be classified as Deists is vanishingly small and does not include Washington.
F. Leroy Forlines also provides helpful analysis in Secularism in the American Republic, where he gives detailed attention to the thinking of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the importance of Christianity to the health of the republic. Jefferson famously held heterodox religious beliefs, but he was no secularist. Rather, he believed that Christianity with its moral practices is essential for the success of the democratic-republican form of government. To his thinking, the Christian worldview promotes a culture that makes liberty from invasive government possible.
Christian Culture
Perhaps the most Christian aspect of America’s founding was the culture of the day. Certainly, many colonists were not redeemed believers, but the entire ethos of the culture was saturated with what we call a Christian worldview today. A young person growing up in eighteenth-century
North Carolina or Rhode Island had almost the exact opposite experience of our children. He or she was encouraged by most aspects of society to live according to a Christian moral standard regardless of his or her personal relationship with God. While we may struggle to imagine such a world during this time of great wickedness where social pressures demand we reject the truths of the faith, that world was real.
Those who lived in that era perceived that early American culture was unique even compared to other countries of the day. For example, sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 1830s to research why its citizens were so successful in developing a remarkably free society. The question interested him greatly because his home country of France suffered horribly during its revolution some forty years earlier and continued to struggle to provide liberty for its people.
Tocqueville concluded the two structural factors in American success were the decentralized power of the state that left local governments in charge of day-to-day governance and the existence of a robust civil society that assumed the responsibility of addressing social problems rather than shifting the burden to the state. Significantly, he concluded these structures were possible only because Christian habits of thought and action regulated the conduct of nearly everyone in the society. Almost every founding father said much the same in public and private communications.
But What About the Enlightenment’s Influence?
At this point you may be thinking, “But didn’t the Enlightenment provide the intellectual foundation for the political design of the country? Then how Christian can that aspect of the founding be?”
In fact, the Enlightenment is not a monolithic movement. Some aspects of the Enlightenment influenced some of the founders, but other aspects of the Enlightenment most assuredly did not.
Secularist scholars often exaggerate the importance of the most radical ideas of the Enlightenment to argue that Christianity should be excluded from the public square. However, these interpretations are overwrought.
For example, some of the founders’ ideas were informed by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, and Adam Smith. But these three men were not radical like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Voltaire, and they produced ideas that were often but not always compatible with orthodox Christianity, accurately reflecting the world God has made. However, the founders clearly diverged from the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. For this reason, many scholars have noted clear distinctions between the American War for Independence and the French Revolution.
For instance, significantly, the American founders held a Christian understanding of the nature of man. That is, they were convinced all men are flawed in their character. Most articulated this belief as resulting from the Fall. But even those who did not believe in the Fall believed that no one, regardless of birth or education, was exempt from the reality of imperfection. For this reason, they argued it is essential to provide checks and balances in governmental structures to avoid allowing any one person or group of people to rule without limit.
Federalism limited the power of any one group by preserving the powers of government the states held prior to the ratification of the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment made the limitation of the federal government explicit by stating most of the powers of ruling society had been left to the states and to the people individually (civil associations). As a result, our nation, bolstered by a Christian culture for many decades, has successfully maintained a working democratic republic with immense personal liberty for nearly 225 years.
The founders’ belief in man’s fallen nature diverges significantly from an Enlightenment belief that denied the doctrine of original sin. Some Enlightenment thinkers even argued all men were born “essentially good” but were perverted by society. Others contended the powerful and rich were untrustworthy, but the commoner could always be trusted to make the right decision. These beliefs had disastrous consequences during the French Revolution,
when Enlightened political philosophy produced a government with a skewed vision of man’s nature, a highly-centralized state that smothered civil associations, and a lack of effective checks and balances that led to years of tyranny, vigilante executions, mob activity, and chaos.
Who Cares?
A student recently — with respect and genuine curiosity — asked me, “Why should I care whether the founders were influenced by Christianity or the Enlightenment?” The question is a good one.
First, we should note that atheists and those actively promoting wickedness in our culture think this argument is an important one to win because they know history shapes our identity in the present and informs how we proceed into the future.
Second, as Christians, we believe truth matters. Falsehood always leads to destruction. So, we must maintain the truth about the past to promote human flourishing for our neighbors — even the unbelievers.
Third, those arguing for an Enlightenment foundation for our government also oppose Christians pursuing politics through a Christian worldview. We need to stand firm in opposition to this limitation of our religious freedom protected in the Bill of Rights and recognize such arguments are a form of religious persecution.
Is it accurate to say America had a Christian founding? Yes.
The Christian worldview was dominant in the culture, it was essential for the functioning of a limited government, and it provided the intellectual foundation for the founders’ thinking when it came to political structures. These points do not mean every founding father was redeemed or that America is destined to bring about the millennial reign of Christ. But it does mean theology has always informed our politics and should continue to do so through us.
About the Writer: Phillip T. Morgan is curator of the Free Will Baptist Historical Collection (fwbhistory.com) and History Program coordinator at Welch College (welch.edu).
