The Historical Claim of Christian Nationalism
Tracy McKenzie, Ph.D. Arthur F. Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning; Professor of History
The rising tide of Christian nationalism that has swept across the United States in recent years should be of grave concern to all who care about the purity of the gospel message and the testimony of the church. As a Christian historian, I am particularly concerned about the historical dimension of this phenomenon. As sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry make clear in Taking America Back for God, the belief that the United States is or should be a Christian nation is inseparable from the conviction that the United States was a distinctively Christian nation at its founding. Rhetorically, the insistence that the country was Christian at its birth is one of the main arguments Christian nationalists make for why it should be so today.
Christians in the United States have been advancing this line of argument for nearly two centuries, most commonly during times of national crisis or of internal cultural conflict. In my lifetime, it has been the central thesis of influential works by prominent Christian writers such as Francis Schaffer, Peter Marshall Jr., D. James Kennedy, Tim LaHaye, David Barton, and Eric Metaxas—non-historians all—among a host of others. Although well-intended and sincerely defended, this whole line of argument has been pernicious in its effects. Here are some reasons why.
The first, and simplest, is that the claims about America’s Christian founding are typically false or, at best, grossly exaggerated. On the one hand, there is no doubt that many of the earliest English migrants to North America were people of faith and religiously motivated. It is equally true, however, that the majority of English men and women who came to the future United States during its colonial period (between 1607 and 1775, to be exact) came as indentured servants. The surviving documentary evidence suggests that they were typically propelled far more by economic desperation than by religious principle. Add to this the hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Africans who were brought to North America as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and it becomes obvious just how misleading is the ubiquitous assertion that the migrants who came to North America in advance of the American Revolution had typically come in search of religious freedom.
Beyond this, the common claim that our founding documents were authored by Christian men motivated by Christian principles to create a Christian nation suffers for lack of evidence. The Constitution, for example, makes no reference to God, and the men who framed it did not publicly commend it on religious grounds during the debate over ratification. Finally, we must acknowledge that, at the time of the nation’s first census in 1790, it appears that barely one tenth of the new country’s free population were officially church members. That proportion would rise dramatically during the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, which was also the time, not coincidentally, that American Christians began to claim that their country had always been substantively and predominantly Christian. Secular liberal intellectuals aren’t the only ones who practice “revisionist” history.
Second, by making claims about the country’s Christian founding so central to their arguments about the proper role of Christianity in the nation’s life, advocates of the Christian nation thesis have helped to politicize this essentially historical question. It’s easy to understand how this could happen. How we remember our origins as a nation is critical to how we understand our identity as a nation. In this sense, the debate over the religious dimension of the founding of the United States becomes inseparable from cultural conflict about the place of religion in the United States today, and the stakes can seem enormously high.
And so when we hear of secular intellectuals who grossly understate the importance of Christianity in U.S. history, the temptation can be great to shout “revisionist!” and then jump into the other ditch, uncritically accepting unverified claims or stretching the evidence to find irrefutable proof of the Founders’ born-again convictions. To be honest, this is why I’ve become reflexively suspicious whenever someone at church asks me about the role of Christianity in the founding of the country. I’m always tempted to reply, “Why do you want to know?” My sense is that, deep down, such questions are often less motivated by a desire to learn from the Founding generation than to enlist them as allies in the culture wars. It’s a lot like those campaign ads that grow so tiresome before Election Day. Too often what we really want is for prominent Founders to make a cameo at the end and announce, “We’re the Founding Fathers and we approve this message.”
There are other dangers that lurk when we make dubious assertions about the nation’s founding as part of our efforts to engage our secular culture. It becomes easy to back ourselves into a rhetorical corner such that, if we acknowledge that Christianity was not as strong at the nation’s inception as we have claimed, it may seem to discredit our arguments for the importance of religious rights and liberties today. This then feeds an unnecessary anti-intellectualism in which we feel compelled to insist that all of the trained academics who reject our historical claims (including the preponderance of Christian scholars) are simply mistaken or, worse yet, intentionally lying. The insistence that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that “revisionist” intellectuals are intentionally distorting that truth also feeds our all-too-common sense of marginalization and even victimization. Seen in this light, “taking back” our history can become part of “taking back” our country. And yet God doesn’t need our historical exaggerations to protect his church and accomplish his purposes.
Above all, the historical argument embedded in Christian nationalism buttresses the confusion of categories at the heart of Christian nationalism that makes it so problematic. Its tendentious assertions about our national history aren’t just to be regretted because they are historically inaccurate. Far more serious is how they tempt us to conflate our identities as Christians with our identities as citizens of the United States by teaching us to conflate the church with our nation.