America founded on Christian values? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

So this is a great question and one that gets thrown around in American politics quite a bit so I'll be happy to talk about it. I also need to throw out a disclaimer, most of my answer is actually coming from a post of mine entitled "Christian Foundation or Not?" that will be going up on my blog ( Rethinking The Revolution )Monday. I also want to state that this is one of the biggest areas of historiographical debate amongst scholars of the era, so I will try and present both sides when appropriate.

Context

I'd like to first start out by addressing the question's premise. What does "founded on" actually refer to. If does it mean that the majority of the white inhabitants of North America would say they were a Christian? Well, that answer is a yes. The vast majority of the white population identified as one denomination of Christianity. But does that mean that people, around the Revolutionary War (we'll say, 1770 - 1790) went to church regularly? That answer is, no. Less than 20% of Americans attended a church service annually by 1775, with some parts being dramatically less (in rural New York, where present day Vermont is, the number was around 10% church attendance in a given year) and other areas, especially in places like South Carolina saw a high of around 30% church attendance in a given year. But it is also worth noting that since the start of the Second Great Awakening (around 1730-1750) new sects of Christianity had popped up, so religious diversity is something that did flourish.

Religious diversity within the colonies made them distinct amongst the colonial jewels of the British Empire. By the time of the Revolution, Anglicanism was among the most powerful religion of the time, but dozens of religions populated each region. Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, Unitarians, Deists, Catholics, Jews, and Quakers and more were all present and distinct by the 1770s/[Jon Butler & Grant Wacker & Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life. Oxford University Press. New York. 2008. Pp 74—75.] This is important to recognize this because there was tension between different religious sects during the era.

The Role of Revolutionary Religion in American Society

The dominance or lack thereof that religion held over the average person’s life during the Revolutionary Age varies and is generally divided up by state or by religion and debated heavily today. Traditionally, older scholarship took for granted that religion’s impact was overwhelming on the founding fathers and on American society in general. Newer emerging scholarship over the last two decades has argued against these points.

Jon Butler, a leading American religious scholar argued religion’s apparent over-bearing influence has been used as a tool of the religiosity of later generations who were exaggerating and perhaps even fabricating some of their claims about America’s religious past to spread their own messages. This can clearly be seen in many of his works, including his essay “Coercion, Miracle, Reason: Rethinking the American Religious Experience in the Revolutionary Age.” In this essay, Butler clearly argued that most of what we believe about religion during this period ought to be reexamined because much of what historians believe on the topic may be inaccurate. Even more significant, Butler argued that the very concept of religious freedom as contemporary Americans understand it was radically different during the Revolutionary Age and cites the creation of state-supported churches and taxation mandates that many states held against religious minorities during the Revolution as his evidence. Other historians, such as Patricia U. Bonomi disputed this point and clung to the age-old belief that the desire for political freedom intertwined itself with religion. Bonomi asserted that religion changed with America as it attempted to dissolve both political and religious bands with Great Britain.

The Founders

The real debate probably goes with addressing what the founders believed. Did most identify as Christian? Yes. Did many of them have typical beliefs of Christianity as we know it today? No. The reason I say this is two-fold. The first part is that much of what typical Christians of many mainline Evangelical sects believe today actually developed in a period known as the Second Great Awakening (1790 – 1835) which was a period of religious revivalism in America. The Founders hadn’t experienced this reinterpretation of Christian scriptures, and many of them had actually spent significant amounts of time studying the bible in Greek and the Enlightenment theologians that had followed. This is important because many Founders’ concepts of Christianity is pretty different than what most American Christians think about today. So let’s look at a few Founders to get a quick glimpse at what they believed.

Thomas Jefferson: What’s funny though is that Jefferson was a deist, who believed in the teachings of the New Testament, but not in the miracles or supernatural elements. That said, Jefferson also said, "I am a real man Christian, that is to say a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus," in referring to the moral practices of Jesus. He dismissed things like the virgin birth to similar stories found in Roman mythology (which he also studied). But he was no friend of all enlightenment theologians. For instance, he said, "The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and incomprehensibilities... that it had lost its native simplicity and purity." Ben Franklin: Franklin was of course a notable atheist – the most notable of the bunch who cared little for organized religion. Like Jefferson, he did revere the teachings of Jesus but remained skeptical of the faith, saying, “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a Question I do not dogmatise upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.” Essentially he said that he never saw it as something worth studying, and since he was near the end of his life, he’d soon be dead and find out once and for all if any of it was true. John Adams: Adams was a Unitarian, and while a church goer himself, he did not let his religious beliefs impact his political ones. Furthermore, he was quite skeptical of American religion and he wrote about this often, saying things like, “The United States of American have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments…It will never be pretended that any persons employed in [ the creation of the government] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise… rather than our reason and senses." George Washington was an Anglican who regularly chose to not go to church or even speak about religion. The Founders Archive through the Library of Congress, which has over 30,000 of Washington's letters and journal entries catalogued (and key word searchable) reveal that he only spoke about his religion on a handful of occasions and never with any true show of affection for it. Alexander Hamilton: Hamilton, well, here’s a link to a previous answer I had made on this topic where I address his religion specifically. Long story short, Hamilton did identify as Christian, but saw Christianity as a political weapon to use against his foes.

Now there were Founders who appear to be somewhat genuine in their beliefs (Charles Carroll of Carlton was a staunch Catholic, John Dickerson was an adamant Quaker) but my point is that over all, their beliefs were complex, and pretty much all of them rejected the idea that Christian ideals should be used in the creation of the government.

America as a secular nation

In the end, the majority of Americans identified as Christian, but very few practiced their faith in an organized fashion. The founders likewise didn’t see religion in the same light we see it today, and even those that did saw the creation of the new republic as a secular event. Our founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, Bill of Rights) are overwhelmingly secular, and much of what they speak about can be found within the pages of other secular documents of their day (Like the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights, 1689). Even more deliberate is the fact that the many journals, letters, and notes taken from the delegates at the first Constitutional Convention clearly show their desire to create a separation of Church and State, since it was the British’s goal to link the Anglican Church to the colonial governments and they had hindered their freedoms. So was America founded as a Christian nation? Well, that’s for you to decide.