America . . . Christian From the Get Go

Show Outline with Links

Introduction

A lot of disinformation has been circulated about the Christian founding of America. I say “disinformation” because I am being polite, as is my wont. There are other nouns that could be used, like lies, falsehoods, mendacious deviations, and devious circumlocutions. The deception has been made much easier because of the extent of our apostasy. The farther we get from our roots, the easier it has been to lie about those roots.

Like all effective falsehoods, there are snippets of true things that are torn out of their original context and then woven into the fabric of the lie. When this is done by experts—and it is being done by experts—and when the light ain’t so good, there you go. As you have no doubt heard, “All the Founders were Deists,” which they most certainly were not.

Some of the prime partial truth ingredients in these lies would include things like the First Amendment, and the constitutional prohibition of religious tests for federal office holders. We will get to those shortly. Please refrain from any further yelling until we do.

Bear With Some Background

When it was looking like the Continental Congress was going to declare our independence from Great Britain, word was sent out to the various states, telling them that they would need to adjust their foundational documents. Their constitutions and charters would all have assumed various relationships with Great Britain, and that was soon to change. Most of the states made the necessary changes.

The changes to be made needed to include church/state relations. What this means is that at the Founding the relationship of the various states to the Christian faith was not a matter of constitutional deadwood from a century before. These measures were measures that were altered or ratified at the time we declared our independence (1776), going up through the time when we ratified our current Constitution (1789).

The sort of laws I am going to discuss were laws that need to be considered state-by-state. This is because we were and are a confederation of states. A lot of nonsense has been smuggled into this discussion because this most obvious fact is overlooked. The Constitution specified the arrangement of these distinct states to the central government, as well as their relationship to one another. The Constitution did not drastically alter the internal governance of these states . . . including on religious issues.

For example, the Constitution did not, at the Founding, dictate anything whatever about religious oaths for office holders at the state level. States could (and did) require that office holders affirm the truth of the Protestant faith in order to be eligible to hold that office. In at least one instance this was a requirement in order to be able to vote.

So the First Amendment had nothing whatever to do with the religious tests required by South Carolina or Virginia or Connecticut. The Constitution obviously would apply to those federal territories that were not yet states, in places like Tennessee. This is because the territories were under direct federal authority. But in this area of religious requirements, the states were not bound by the First Amendment. As it turned out, they were bound by the religious commitments of their citizens, which tended to be all over the very Protestant map.

And so as a consequence the states did all kinds of different things with this state of affairs. They were absolutely free to do so, and yet, however varied their approaches were, they were all Christian. More than that, they were all Protestant and Christian. And please follow me closely here. When you make an oven omelet with 13 Protestant eggs, the end result is not going to be any kind of secular breakfast dish.

Hard and Soft Establishment

It will be helpful at this point to distinguish hard establishments from soft establishments. A hard establishment would be when a particular denomination was the official denomination of that state, as the Congregation Church was in Connecticut and Massachusetts. The churches and ministers received financial support from the state, and tithes to the official church were mediated through the state. That would be hard establishment.

Soft establishment was the result of so many Protestant denominations jostling around in a state, as in New Jersey, that it was not feasible to pick one and make it The One. And this is key. The movements toward disestablishment in the various states were the result of multiple Christian denominations not wanting those darn Anglicans to get a leg up. Disestablishment at the state level was not driven at all by consideration of the First Amendment. That didn’t enter into it. In a number of the cases, the First Amendment didn’t exist yet.

For example, in 1776, the established church in Virginia was Anglican. By the time the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the process of disestablishment was largely complete. But this was not a movement away from Christianity into secularism, but rather a movement from formal support of one denomination to an informal support of multiple thriving denominations. Later in his life, James Madison looked at the religious scene in Virginia with satisfaction because it was so healthy and robust. Christians were running around everywhere.

But because the populations of these states were overwhelmingly Christian (and Protestant), soft establishments were common. There were variations, but in order to hold office, and sometimes in order to vote, you needed to affirm the existence of God, our Savior Jesus Christ, and the truth of the Old and New Testaments. The way that all this was framed usually excluded Roman Catholics and Jews.

And blasphemy was not protected speech. From the Founding down to the time of the Second World War, blasphemy could be restricted, and it cheerfully was. And let us not forget sabbath legislation. When I was stationed in Virginia in the seventies, I remember them finally removing their sabbath legislation—blue laws—then.

Now I happen to believe that hard establishment is not a good system, even at the state level. I am in favor of formal hard disestablishment at every level. My advocacy for Christian nationalism is in favor of soft establishment—with the government recognizing that Jesus rose from the dead, and that the Christian faith is true, and that a Christian consensus is the foundation of our legal and political system.

My discussion of hard establishment here is not so that you will conclude that I think it is a good idea. I simply want everyone to acknowledge that it was not an unconstitutional idea. And if hard establishment was acceptable at the Founding, as was soft establishment, how much more is soft establishment acceptable now? American as apple pie. In fact, looking at the time lines, it is probably more American than apple pie.

Apostate Nation

This means that America is currently not a pagan nation, and we are not a secular nation. We are an apostate nation, and there is quite a difference. A woman divorced for adultery is not the same thing as a virgin.

If you would be so kind as to take a look at the cartoon I posted with this article, you will see a gradual set of steps going down into complete infidelity. And one of the things you need to understand about human nature is that every last reason for taking each one of those steps was swathed in plausible and scholarly rationalizations. The devil is a liar, and is an expert on how to escort gullible smart people into a fog bank of sophisticated nonsense. As has been done.

When the Israelites worshiped the golden calf at the base of Sinai, they were willfully rewriting history. They were revising history on the fly, tailoring it to suit their lusts. They came to Aaron, openly acknowledging that Moses had brought them up out of Egypt (Ex.32:1). This Moses, who brought us up out of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him. Therefore, their argument then went, make us a golden calf, which we will worship as the god who brought us up out of the land of Egypt (Ex. 32:4). “We used to think that Moses did that . . . three verses ago.” Not only were they rewriting history, they were doing so with their eyes wide open. They were doing this because there were some Israelite women they wanted to get freaky with, and the golden calf offered them more scope in this area of developing theology than did that killjoy Moses.

We have done exactly the same thing, and probably for the same reason. After the Second World War, our federal courts began dismantling and rewriting our history, and doing so in the name of the Constitution. This half century of lies has been so successful that ardent defenders of the Constitution, men like James Lindsay, are freaked out by anything that even begins to resemble the relationship of churches and states that the Founders themselves simply assumed as standard operating procedure. “We need to stand by Moses, that great Founder of our Republic,” Lindsay says. When pressed for his reasons, he points to the golden calf.

The grand mistake that carries water for this intellectual apostasy is the fallacy of maintaining that a restriction that was placed on Congress was somehow a restriction that was also placed on the states. But it was not. That downgrade did not happen until the Supreme Court began to do some reverse engineering by means of something they called the incorporation doctrine, using the Fourteenth Amendment as their pry bar.

The restrictions that had been placed on the central government with the states as watchful guardians were transformed into restrictions that were applied to the states with the central government as the watchful guardian. And that monumental civic reversal only became halfway plausible after a bloody war was fought that succeeded in transferring a significant amount of governmental authority away from the states to the central government. It was a grand abuse, in other words, and in my view it was the central point of that war. It was the great centralizing war.

Founding Myths Are Tenacious and Powerful

Every society has an understanding of where they came from. This understanding is part of what it means to be a society in the first place. Let us call this sort of understanding a founding myth. As I am using this phrase, the employment of the word myth says nothing one way or the other about whether or not the myth is accurate or true. That may or may not be the case. 

Now I recognize that a very common use of the word myth makes it synonymous with a falsehood. “I heard that gang bangers in Chicago have been great for Windy City tourism.“ “That’s an urban myth, Henry.”

A founding myth, on the other hand, might be a good account of what actually happened at the beginning, or it might be a made up story. Or parts of it might be a made up story. 

Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she wolf. George Washington didn’t lie about the cherry tree. Brut, a refugee Trojan, landing in Britain, then gave her his name. Cadmus founded Thebes, following instructions from Apollo, by means of killing a dragon, and sowing the dragon’s teeth. The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was located where it was because that is where an eagle perched on a cactus. Such stories are used to legitimate rule in the eyes of the people. They unify the people to one another, as well as unifying them to their divine or heroic past.

And whether the founding myth is true or false, it serves these functions either way. The central function is one of providing cohesion. And if revolutionaries don’t like the nature of the cohesion provided, and they want to introduce an alternative principle of cohesion, one of the basic things they need to deal with is the obstacle of the founding myth. The founding myth gets in the way of whatever their hot brains are cooking up for us.

And this brings us back around to our subject. If our contemporary Red Guard wants us to become a progressive and atheistic nation, and they do, one of the things they must absolutely do is get rid of the Christian founding myth. 

And to make my point as clear as I can make it, our Christian founding myth is accurate. It is true. That is what happened. We look at the facts and nod our heads because of how correct it all is. America was Christian from the get go.

The strategy the progressives have attempted to use to get rid of this set of historical inconveniences comes in two stages: 1. Sneering, debunking, sidelining, revising, demythologizing, reinterpreting, and persuading all the academic cool kids that only a numskull fundamentalist would maintain anything so embarrassing. This is the long term discrediting work of corrosion. It is the sustained artillery barrage that softens up the target before the invasion. 2. Violent assault. The invasion proper. The pulling down of statues.

We are well along in this process. The violent assault stage was recently seen in the attacks on every kind of statue you might think of—from Robert E. Lee to Frederick Douglass. The statues being pulled down were not being attacked because of their role in one particular part of the story . The entire narrative of early American history was being melted down, and had little to do with what side of the Civil War such men were on. The underlying problem was that both Lee and Douglass were Christians. The America that was under attack was Christian, and so the entirety of that American era has to go down the memory hole. Whether or not an individual was actually a Christian, or a consistent Christian, or an infidel in a largely Christian world didn’t really matter. The Ministry of Truth insists on only using blank pages in their sketch pad.

This of course did result in some bright spots amidst the mayhem. In the course of their revolutionary warp spasm, the commies did manage to get some actual scoundrels. But as happy as I was to see Woodrow Wilson catch it, he was not the actual target. 

The culture wars can see the action get pretty hot, and among the most fiercely contested topics, the Christian founding of America would be one of them. This is why David Barton draws the animus that he does. I differ with Barton at various points, but the outrage that is aimed at him is because he lives in a castle made up of two-ton granite quotations from the Founding Fathers, quotations that exalt the name of Jesus. They sneer at him because he is not a scholar. That’s what scholars always do when confronted with someone outside their guild who knows a lot more than they do.

How It Matters

I said earlier that founding myths are tenacious. It is no different with the Christian founding myth. That Christian founding myth has been under pointed attack for three quarters of a century now. Even so, it is still alive and functioning. A lot of Americans still assume it. It is deep within our DNA, and eradicating it will take a lot more than what the official historians of the Alternative Founding Myth have been able to do thus far.

It is kind of like the creation myth versus the evolution myth. Over half of all Americans still believe in an historic Adam and Eve, and this is a century and a half after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, and with the teaching of evolution having complete supremacy in the public schools. It is little fun facts like that which help keep a spring in your step. 

What the reigning orthodoxy can do, however, is make people stay quiet about what they think. They are pretty successful in making people keep their heads down. What I am saying about America’s unvarnished Christian founding is something that resonates with many people, and they might nod slightly. But anything more than that, and they will get the treatment—especially if they have a job in academia. But I do not make this point in order to say that such believers are cowards. It is just that they know they will be in a hot war if they say anything, and they don’t really have all that much ammo.

But they feel like it is right. Like I said, it resonates with them. But when someone says, “The Founders were Deists, bozo. Read a book sometime. Look it up,” they don’t have a retort handy. And if they don’t have a retort handy, and they don’t have tenure, then perhaps it would be best to let the gentleman continue to prate about how much the golden calf did to take down Pharaoh. 

“And then we marched through the Red Sea with the golden calf—this very one—at the head of the procession!”

In a Nutshell

So circling back to the top, in the period of the Founding (1776-1789), here are a few relevant state-level facts. And remember that as time went on, and these establishments were discontinued, whether hard or soft, this was not because the leaven of the First Amendment was working its way through the loaf, but rather because the leaven of other kinds of Christian denominations coming into the picture, growing and flourishing.

The progression downward has been like this: the Christian faith explicitly stated and affirmed > the Christian faith assumed as something that goes without saying > the Christian faith quietly denied > the Christian faith violently denied. In case you were wondering, we are now at the fourth stage. The antidote to all this nonsense is to affirm, and loudly, the first stage. We cannot clamber back up the slippery slope. We have to jump.

What states had a hard establishment of a particular Christian denomination? There was Massachusetts (Congregational until 1833), and Connecticut (Congregational, until 1818), New Hampshire (Congregational, until 1819). And the Congregational church was disestablished in Vermont in 1807. Although Vermont was the 14th state, and not one of the original states, I bring it up because they came into the Union in 1791, after the Constitution was ratified and functioning, and they came in with an established church. That was no barrier.

What were examples of soft establishment? Let’s start with the least likely candidate, that being Rhode Island. That state was founded by Roger Williams, a hothead advocate of complete religious liberty. Even so, at the time of independence Jews and Catholics did not have legal equality in Rhode Island. That state also prohibited labor on the Lord’s Day, although waivers were possible for Jews and Seventh Day Christians.

Keep in mind that what follows is a sampler of indicators, and not an exhaustive list.

In New Jersey, their 1776 Constitution limited civil rights and office holding to Protestants. In 1776 Delaware, public office was only open to those who acknowledged that the Old and New Testaments were “given by divine inspiration,” and who professed faith in “God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed forever more.” In the 1776 of Pennsylvania, in order to hold public office a man had to affirm that the “Scriptures of the Old and New Testament [were] given by Divine inspiration.” New York at this time disestablished the Anglican Church (which oddly affected the Dutch Reformed in some counties), and the hot debate that followed concerned whether to exclude Catholics from holding office—an unsuccessful effort led by Anglican John Jay (of Federalist Papers fame). South Carolina also had an Anglican establishment, but in their Constitution of 1778, this broadened out a bit. That Constitution said the “Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.” We have already discussed Virginia, where the process of disestablishment was driven by dissenting Christian churches. Maryland had also had an Anglican establishment, but their 1776 Constitution changed that. At the same time, their Constitution said, “all persons, professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection in. their religious liberty.” Office holders were also required to make a profession of their faith in t he truth of the Christian religion. North Carolina disestablished the Anglican church, but their 1776 Constitution set the requirement that only orthodox Protestants were eligible to hold public office. Georgia had a “soft” Anglican establishment from the beginning, which they disestablished in 1777. But they continued with a mild form of multi-establishment. Any county with at least thirty heads of households could select a minister of their own choosing, and that minister would receive a stipend from the state.

Add it all up. What all this amounts to is that there was a system of soft establishment in the United States as a whole. And as I have argued before, this was affirmed by the Supreme Court, most notably in the 1892 case, Holy Trinity Church v. the United States. The United States enjoyed a soft establishment of the Christian faith for almost two centuries.

Postscript: The PCA Is an Explicitly Christian Nationalist Denomination

I am not saying this in order to score any cute points. I am in deadly earnest. The American version of the Westminster Confession is certainly a modification of the original Westminster, that much is granted. But that modification was made in 1788, in Philadelphia, and in the clear light of all the foregoing it was not a downgrade from hard establishment to any secularist “smudge, blur and scribble.” The American Westminster is a clear expression of the soft establishment principle, of the very kind that this Christian nationalist (as in, me) is advocating and arguing for. This is it.

My point here is not to engage with Kevin De Young’s argument that the original Westminster required things of the magistrate that it shouldn’t have. That discussion is proceeding elsewhere, and it is a discussion I want to heartily encourage.

Rather, my point here is what the American Westminster requires of the magistrate. Further than that, I want to point out what the American Westminster requires Kevin De Young to affirm. The issue is not whether Kevin could affirm the original Westminster without taking an exception. The issue is whether he can affirm the American Westminster without taking an exception.

Every minister who subscribes to the American Westminster, and who has not taken an exception on the point, is in principle a Christian nationalist. They are bound by their confession to Christian nationalism—if in fact soft establishment is Christian nationalism. So the alternative for them is stark. Either start embracing the term Christian nationalism, or stop calling me one.

The magistrate has the duty to protect the Christian church. Not religious institutions generally, but “the church of our common Lord.” Not mosques. Not synagogues. Not Hindu temples. The immediate context makes it plain that they were talking about denominations of Christians, with no Christian denomination being favored over the others. The magistrate is responsible to protect the religious liberty of Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Quakers, and Congregationalists. And, as was demonstrated above, this is exactly the kind of soft establishment that was pervasive throughout the country at the time the concrete was poured.

This was the logic of the Founding.