John Fea

John Fea is associate professor and chair of the History Department at Messiah College, a Christian college in Mechanicsburgh, Pennsylvania. This selection comes from his 2011 book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

So begins Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, a 1797 agreement between the United States and Tripoli, a Muslim nation located on the Barbary Coast of northern Africa. The treaty was necessary because Barbary pirates, under the sanction of Tripoli, were capturing American ships and selling crew members into slavery. The Muslim states of the Barbary Coast (Tripoli, Algiers, Morocco, and Tunis) had long used piracy to control Mediterranean trade routes. Any nation that wanted to trade freely in the region was forced to negotiate a peace treaty with the Barbary States, which usually included some kind of monetary tribute. During the colonial era, American vessels were protected from the Barbary pirates by British warships, but after the Revolution the United States would need to work out its own treaty with these countries. The Treaty of Tripoli, which included the assertion that the United States was not founded on the Christian religion, was signed by President John Adams and ratified unanimously by the Senate. The text of the treaty was published in several newspapers, and there was no public opposition to it.

The American negotiators of this treaty did not want the religious differences between the United States and Tripoli to hinder attempts at reaching a trade agreement. Claiming that the United States was not “founded on the Christian religion” probably made negotiations proceed more smoothly. But today this brief religious reference in a rather obscure treaty in the history of American diplomacy has played a prominent role in the debate over whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation. It has become one of the most deadly arrows in the quiver of those who oppose the idea that the country was founded on Christian principles.¹

If the Treaty of Tripoli is correct, and the United States was not “founded on the Christian religion,” then someone forgot to tell the American people. Most Americans who followed events in the Mediterranean viewed the struggle between the United States and the Barbary nations—a struggle that would last well into the nineteenth century—as a kind of holy war. Americans published poems and books describing Muslims as “children of Ishmael” who posed a threat to Christian civilization. Captivity narratives describing Christians who were forced to convert to Islam only heightened these popular beliefs.² In fact, the sentiment expressed in the Treaty of Tripoli—that the United States was not “founded on the Christian religion”—can hardly be reconciled with the way that politicians, historians, clergy, educators, and other writers perceived the United States in the first one hundred years of its existence. The idea that the United States was a “Christian nation” was central to American identity in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Nineteenth-century Americans who believed that the United States was a Christian nation made their case in at least three different ways. First, they appealed to divine providence. The United States had a special place in God’s plan for the world. The success of the American Revolution confirmed it. Second, they argued that the founders were Christians and thus set out to create a nation that reflected their personal beliefs. Third, they made the case that the U.S. government and the documents upon which it was founded were rooted in Christian ideas. Today’s Christian nationalists have a good portion of American history on their side.

Christian Nationalism in the Early American Republic

If the United States was ever a “Christian nation,” it was so during the period between the ratification of the Constitution (1789) and the start of the Civil War (1861). While the Constitution made clear that there would be no official or established religion in America, and the states were gradually removing religious requirements for officeholders, Christianity, and particularly Protestant evangelicalism, defined the culture.

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When ministers, politicians, and writers during these years described the United States as a “Christian nation,” they were usually referring to the beliefs and character of the majority of its citizens. The United States was populated by Christians. This meant that it was not a “Muslim nation” or a “Buddhist nation” or a “Hindu nation.” Indeed, the people of most Western European nations in the nineteenth century would have used the phrase “Christian nation” to describe the countries to which they belonged. But in America the phrase “Christian nation” could also carry a deeper meaning. It was often used as a way of describing the uniqueness of the American experiment. It was freighted with the idea that the United States had a special role to play in the plan of God, thus making it a special or privileged Christian nation. Moreover, when nineteenth-century Americans talked about living in a “Christian nation” they rarely used the term in a polemical way. In other words, they were not trying to defend the label against those who did not believe the United States was a Christian nation. Instead, they used the phrase as if it were a well-known, generally accepted fact.³

One of the main reasons that people could describe the United States as a Christian nation during this period was because the country was experiencing a massive revival of Protestant evangelicalism.⁴ Known as the Second Great Awakening, this religious revival stressed salvation through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ and was quite compatible with the democratic spirit of the early nineteenth century. Humans were no longer perceived as waiting passively for a sovereign and distant God who, on his own terms and in his own timing, offered select individuals the gift of eternal life. Instead, ordinary American citizens took an active role in their own salvation. Theology moved away from a Calvinism that stressed humankind’s inability to save itself and toward a free-will or democratic theology, preached most powerfully and popularly by revivalist Charles Finney. The new theology empowered individuals to decide their own religious fate by accepting or rejecting the gospel message.⁵

This revival of religion owed a lot to the First Amendment (1791). By forbidding Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” religion became voluntary. If churches could no longer rely on state support, they would need to craft their message in such a way that would attract people to their pews. Long-established denominations such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists gave way to more democratic, enthusiastic, and evangelical groups such as Baptists and Methodists. New sects such as the Mormons and the Disciples of Christ emerged with force. Religious services continued to be conducted in churches, but they were also being held in camp meetings like the one in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Writing in 1855, church historian Philip Schaff quoted an Austrian writer who observed, “The United States are by far the most religious and Christian country in the world…because religion is there most free.”⁶ When Thomas Jefferson claimed smugly in 1822 that Unitarianism would soon be “the religion of the majority from north and south,” he could not have been more wrong.⁷ Apparently Jefferson did not leave Monticello very much during the final years of his life, for America was fast becoming the most evangelical Christian country on the face of the earth… .

Religion and the First Amendment

While some Anti-Federalists opposed the Constitution for its failure to affirm a religious test for national office or its failure to reference Almighty God, others opposed it for its failure to affirm liberty of conscience in matters of religion. Centinel, a Philadelphia Anti-Federalist, wrote that the Constitution had “no declaration, that all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own consciences and understanding.” Recalling the long history of religious persecution in Europe, another Philadelphia Anti-Federalist, “An Old Whig,” demanded a “bill of rights to secure, in the first place by the most express stipulations, the sacred right of conscience.” “Sydney,” a New York Anti-Federalist, wondered why the U.S. Constitution did not include a statement protecting citizens from religious persecution in the way that the New York state constitution had done.⁸

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Anti-Federalist demands for a formal statement defending the right to liberty of conscience in matters of religion came to fruition when the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect in 1791. The amendment was part of ten amendments, known today as the Bill of Rights, passed by the first U.S. Congress in 1789 and ratified, as per the Constitution, by three-fourths of the states. The First Amendment stated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The amendment’s religious clause has drawn much discussion throughout the course of American history. Contemporary debate over the meaning of the amendment has centered on whether the federal government can limit public displays of Christmas manger scenes or the Ten Commandments in federal buildings. While such debates are certainly worthwhile, our intention here is to explore the meaning of the First Amendment in the historical context in which it was written.

Most interpreters of the First Amendment agree that it forbids Congress from passing a law that privileges a particular religious group over any other. Unlike many of the British-American colonies and some of the states, the U.S. government does not promote a specific religious group or use federal funds to support a particular sect. As we saw above, the “noestablishment” clause applied only to the national government. The First Amendment also forbids the national government from inhibiting the “free exercise” of religion. It protects individuals from government intrusion into their religious practices. The First Amendment was written to secure the individual right to worship according to one’s conscience. It was not meant as a means of protecting government from the religious beliefs of its citizens.

(2011)

Notes