Editor’s Note: This article first was posted on Spirit of Abilene in June 2024.

By Dr. Dan Stiver

As the nation moves to celebrate the Fourth of July, appropriately so, the complex relationship of the United States and religion has come to the fore as much as ever. The rise of Christian nationalism, now documented by numerous studies, is a desire for Christianity to be the law of the land. While evangelicals represent a high percentage of this movement, it has affected almost every major Christian group. They often see it as reflective of the vision of the “founding fathers,” whom evangelicals also often see as fellow evangelicals. Marjorie Taylor Greene, U.S. Representative, has said that the Republican Party should be the party of Christian Nationalism (July 23, 2022).

The assumption is that such an established religion would be good for religion. The irony is that what is ostensibly an attempt to respect and appeal to the authority of the founders means that their views are actually disregarded and disrespected. And it’s not just that they are disrespected; their wisdom, which purports to be valued in these efforts, is rejected. To uncover that wisdom, one needs also to respect history. Distorting or falsifying history is not just problematic in itself; it can not only cover up misdeeds, from which we can learn, but also can conceal wisdom. A historical look reveals several surprises, pointing to a wisdom and reality virtually the opposite of what is claimed in these Christian Nationalist efforts.

One surprise is that it was not an accident or oversight that no religion was established in the Constitution, nor was the word “God” even mentioned. If that was not clear enough, Article 1 of the Bill of Rights established to the contrary the separation of church and state. A second surprise is that hardly any of the first presidents and leaders could be called evangelicals (a much later term) or even orthodox Christians. All of the first presidents would be placed into the broad category of deism, which affirmed a God who created the world with moral and natural laws, ascertainable by common reason without the aid of the Bible, with no need for God to intervene; that would be an insult to God’s workmanship! It would be more fair to make the basics of revelation available to all, through reason.

Thomas Jefferson’s views are well known, but also George Washington’s pastor while Washington was president pointed out that although he did occasionally attend an Episcopal church, he was neither confirmed nor often took Communion or attended. He was a strong defender of church and state separation. For good or ill, these were a far cry from modern evangelicals. For most, it’s not that they were irreligious or did not always deny that religious faith could indirectly be supportive of morality; they saw, however, the problems for direct entanglement of politics and religion. A third surprise is that it was those whom one might call evangelicals such as Baptists who lobbied and fought for separation of church and state. It was in many ways religious folk fighting for the health of religion who opposed the state establishment of religion! How could this be? And how could this perspective be so convincing? 

For one thing, Baptists and others had been persecuted by other Christians. In the colonies, often divided by different Christian views, religious violence and strife had already occurred, threatening to undo any sense of “united states,” e pluribus unum. The established Christian group in one place could be the persecuted in another. Leaders could see the reality, then and now, that any attempt at establishing a religion such as Christianity always meant it was only one form of Christianity, usually a small and sectarian form, over against all others, which would provoke no end of strife, especially when one group with their particular interpretations could use the power of the sword, so to speak, of the state and of taxation to promote their one view. That would be the same problem today.

It’s never just Christianity per se that would be the national religion; it’s a particular version, often a narrow one, that people desire to enshrine. So it was the lessons of hard experience that undergirded the wisdom of the founding fathers on separation of church and state. Moreover, they knew their history and their European roots. They knew of the century of brutal warfare that had ravaged Europe after the Reformation, revealing that mandating religious agreement was not a recipe for political peace. Thus they began an experiment that actually allowed religion to flourish in unprecedented ways, probably beyond what proponents for separation of church and state could even have imagined at the time. 

Another surprise of history is that these early colonies were not very religious, with very few attending church. The church historian Franklin Littell points out that the country was virtually a heathen country at the time in need of missions. Church participation has gradually increased throughout U.S. history, peaking in the middle of the last century but still quite strong compared to European nations with a tradition of state churches where Christian practice has dwindled dramatically, sometimes almost to nothing.

This flourishing in the United States, separate from state establishment, has been one of the greatest mission movements in Christian history. Do evangelicals truly want to undermine that? Another ironic and perhaps surprising realization for so many evangelicals who have been drawn to Christian nationalism is that one could argue that coerced faith is not faith at all, that is, a state church is actually contrary to any kind of genuine, heart-felt evangelism—unless one is just after political power rather than faith! For myself, as a Baptist Christian, I would say that relying on the power of government coercion to promote my particular faith is a lack of faith in God and the Gospel (the Good News) itself.

These founding fathers were not wise in all things. Perhaps if founding mothers had had more influence such as Abigail Adams, John Adams’ wife, who argued that the men “remember the ladies,” it might not have taken another century and a half for women to have the right to vote and be full citizens. Maybe the scandal of allowing slavery and even seeing slaves as only three/fifths of a person could have been averted. It is a shame, though, that the distortion of history can prevent us not only from learning from their mistakes but even from their wisdom.

Dr. Dan R. Stiver is president of Fletcher Seminary and is a former professor of theology at Logsdon Seminary at Hardin-Simmons University