Deliver Us from Evil

Last week’s Democratic National Convention got me thinking.

Two weeks ago I suggested that America’s brightest future was as a multi-religious society, not as a “Christian Nation.” That brought strong reader feedback, and that—plus the media’s DNC coverage—reminded me that, for many, being American and being Christian are practically the same thing. It’s almost as if we became a nation in order to promote the gospel! As one reader put it:

Standing for and honoring Christ as our nation’s Cornerstone…is not something to compromise with or evolve away from as the moral INTENT of the Founders of this country…Fidelity to the Truth/Christ/Scripture in 1776 began this great nation.

I suspect many believe that our nation’s very purpose and future depends on its Christian identity. My own view is different: while strong Christian identity is essential for millions of Americans, I do not believe Christian identity is essential for America itself.

Our nation is “The United States of America.” The name came from the Continental Congress that drafted both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, the governing document that the USA used 1781-1791, until the US Constitution replaced it.

Our founding is rooted in (1)The history preceding these documents, (2)The men responsible for these documents—“our founders,” and (3)The documents themselves. These are three key places to examine whether the USA was founded to be a “Christian Nation.”

1. The History. The USA united 13 former British colonies that first declared themselves “independent, sovereign states” and then waged war to secure that independence. But neither war nor independence was needed to create a “Christian nation”—because we already had one!

The colonies, after all, were part of Britain, and Britain had a state church, the Church of England, with the king as its head. The colonies had established churches of their own—some going back nearly 150 years BEFORE the revolution and continuing afterward.

The Paris Peace Treaty, which formalized Britain’s acceptance of the USA’s independence, began “In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity,” and then listed the king’s titles, including “defender of the faith, and prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire.” An edition of this treaty published in London in 1783 calls it “the treaties between His Most Christian Majesty and the United Sates of America.”

In other words, America was already a Christian nation before the USA was even born! Why break from England at all, then? Because the USA was not founded to be Christian; it was founded to be independent. After all, the American Revolution was NOT fought to found something that already existed—It was fought to create something new.

That something new included ideas gleaned from the “Enlightenment,” the 18^th century’s most powerful intellectual movement. Among those ideas were the separation of powers, check and balances, a Bill of Rights that guaranteed religious freedom INSTEAD of an established state church. So whereas England and the colonies were Christian by law, the USA was not. In this sense, the founding of the USA made America less Christian than it was before, under England’s rule!

The Founders. The founders were men of faith, but many embraced “Deism,” a faith that re-shaped traditional Christianity in light of the Enlightenment’s new stress on reason and science and nature:

During the first half of the eighteenth century…the mode of thought called Deism made inroads upon the Christianity of the Apostles' Creed. The Deists professed belief in a single Supreme Being, but rejected a large part of Christian doctrine. Follow Nature…not Revelation: all things must be tested by rational private judgment…For the Christian, the object of life was to know God and enjoy Him forever; for the Deist, the object of life was private happiness. For the Deists, the Supreme Being indeed was the creator of the universe, but He did not interfere with the functioning of His creation. The Deists denied that Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired; they doubted the reality of miracles; they held that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Redeemer, but a grand moral teacher merely. Thoroughly rationalistic, the Deists discarded all elements of mystery in religion, trying to reduce Christian teaching to a few simple truths.

(Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order)

By the end of the 18^th century, Deism was dominant among intellectual and upper class Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, and our first three Presidents: Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.

Jefferson’s case is especially “enlightening,” because he actually went so far as to create his Jefferson Bible: cutting and pasting excerpts from the gospels into a version that “improved” on the original by preserving Jesus’ words while “Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dunghill.”

What “rubbish,” “dross,” and “dung” did Jefferson delete from his version of the gospels? All the stories of Jesus’ birth, all the miracles, most of John’s gospel, and all the accounts of Jesus Resurrection and post-Resurrection appearances! In other words, the true Jesus for Jefferson was the great moralist and teacher, not the Christ. The good man, not the Son of God.

Like his fellow Deists among our Founders, Jefferson believed in the rational basis for faith in a creator God and the moral code inherited from the biblical tradition. Of course, the Deists shared these beliefs not only with Christians but also with Jews and Moslems—subscribing to such beliefs did not make Deists true Christian believers, any more than Jews or Moslems are Christians, despite sharing many of our values.

In my view, the Deists rejected too many basic Christian beliefs—the doctrine of the Trinity, the Divinity of Jesus, the Redemption, the idea of Original Sin, belief in hell—to be called Christians. Their opponents were willing to label them “anti-Trinitarian” Christians, much like the Unitarians who emerged shortly afterward. But, “Trinity” has been the official Christian name for God since the Nicene Creed in 325. To me, “anti-Trinitarian” Christian is a contradiction in terms.

My overall point is simple: the “moral intent” of the Founders was never to forge a Christian nation—for the simple reason that many of them were not Christians themselves.

The Documents. It is quite true our founding documents have many references to God. But notice how these documents name God: “Creator,” Divine Providence,” Supreme Being, ”Divine Governor, “Supreme Judge of the World, “nature’s God.” Christian accept these words —but they are precisely the words Deist typically used for God. What we don’t find are words that only Christians use: “Trinity”, “Christ”, “Jehovah,” or “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” In other words, the language in these documents is not specifically Christian at all, it is generically theistic—language any Unitarian, Jew, Muslim, or Deist can live with. It is lowest-common-denominator language for a nation that is neither officially Christian nor officially secular.

Thomas Jefferson confirmed this in his autobiography, when he described his fight to introduce religious liberty into Virginia’s constitution. Some legislators preferred to protect only Christianity, but Jefferson wanted more:

Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

This is the key moment in understanding religious liberty, says Jefferson, because “it proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal.”

In other words, it is re-writing history to claim our founding had the moral intent of forging a Christian nation. Our War of Independence was fought against a Christian nation, many our founders were not Christians themselves, and they wrote our founding documents to cover all beliefs and to protect all believers. Ironically, they created our nation less Christian than its mother nation, and less Christian than the states it united. Eventually, those states would all follow the Nation’s lead and disestablish their churches.

In my view, the real religious significance of our nation’s founding is this: the USA is the first nation on earth dedicated to the proposition that freedom of religion is more important to the nation than adherence to any one religion. In a word, the USA began as a religious experiment—a nation where all religions could live together in civic harmony, because no religion has privileged status. That experiment still faces its greatest challenges.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com