(RNS) — In honor of the 250th birthday, many believers gathered this weekend to celebrate the Christian roots of America. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously said: “America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it.”
The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, echoed the point by saying the lineup of speakers at Rededicate 250 — most of them evangelical and Christian — is “pretty much a depiction, a screenshot of (America’s) foundation.”
Whatever you may think about the role of religion in the public square today, these leaders had better check their religious DNA tests again. The religious ancestors of the modern evangelicals leading the event in Washington, D.C. — not to mention the Catholics and the sole rabbi who also spoke at the rally — were outcasts in 1776.
Much of the criticism of the event Sunday (May 17) has been that it conflicts with separation of church and state (and it does). But I want to focus on a different point: The folks leading this effort would have been viewed as heretics, worthy of suppression, for most of early American history. If there was a Christian America, they were not included.
Let’s start with the math. Sure, most people in the Colonies before the revolution were in religious denominations now considered Christian. But the Christianity practiced by the nation’s leaders was much more narrowly defined.
It certainly didn’t include Catholics, who were banned from even voting in five Colonies. In most places, heretical and dissident Protestant denominations were harassed, too. In Massachusetts in the 17th century, the Puritans hung Quakers for their heresy.
Most important, the Baptists of the day — the ancestors of modern evangelicals — were routinely tossed in jail for daring to not be Anglicans. From 1760 to 1778 in Virginia, 45 Baptist preachers were jailed. Archibald W. Roberts was indicted for using hymns and poems instead of the Psalms. A service by David Barrow, a Baptist minister, was interrupted when a mob forced his head into the mud and water until he almost drowned.
The Rev. David Thomas’ service was disrupted by protesters who hurled live snakes and a hornet’s nest into the room. Descriptions of other attacks include: “frequently taken from pulpit—beaten,” “meeting broken up by a mob,” “tried to suffocate him with smoke,” “severely beaten with a whip” and “jerked off stage—head beaten against ground.”
This wave of persecution was especially significant because it happened in the counties surrounding James Madison’s home. “That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages,” he fumed in a Jan. 24, 1774, letter.
If we were to distribute political power according to a Christian census of the founding era, Episcopalians and Congregationalists would run the country. They were the dominant forms of Christianity then and now make up about 2 percent of the population. The evangelicals, like Hegseth, who claim America’s Christian founding as their own? They were not welcomed into leadership.
The first 150 years of life in the Colonies can be viewed as a series of experiments in the Christian nationalist approach. The Americas were indeed settled as a Christian land. In Jamestown, Virginia, failure to observe the Sabbath three times would be punished by execution. In Massachusetts, Puritan leader John Cotton explained their approach to religious tolerance: “Theocracy, or to make the Lord God our governor, is the best form of government in a Christian commonwealth.”
But this theocratic approach was soundly rejected by the Founding Fathers — and the driving force behind that rejection was 18th-century evangelicals, the very ancestors of today’s Christian nationalist movement.
The evangelicals of the day came to think even efforts to help religion would backfire. They teamed up with Madison to oppose a Virginia effort to use taxpayer funds to support all clergy, believing that support could encourage laziness by clergy and evolve into harassment. A Baptist petition noted that once early Christianity received state sanction, via the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, “how soon was the church over-run with error and immorality.”
The Christian nationalists are right (and many secularists wrong) about one thing — most of the founders thought religion was profoundly important. “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” John Adams said. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Some argued that the fragile new nation would need help from God or, as the Declaration of Independence put it, a “firm reliance on Divine Providence.” Another reason was more practical: A strong republic required citizens with a moral compass. That could not happen at scale without religion. As George Washington put it, “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.” How, for instance, could the criminal justice system work if people lied under oath, which religious people would surely never do?
But Christian nationalists take this truism and jump to the greatest non sequitur of all time — that the founders therefore wanted the state to promote Christianity. On the contrary: The evangelicals and their Enlightenment allies believed that the best way to encourage Christianity was to get the government away from it.
Later in life, Madison was reflecting on how well the First Amendment had worked. Interestingly, he pointed not to a decline in religious persecution but to the rise in religiosity:
“On a general comparison of the present & former times, the balance is certainly & vastly on the side of the present, as to the number of religious teachers, the zeal which actuates them, the purity of their lives, and the attendance of the people on their instructions. … The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.”
If he were alive today, Madison and his Baptist allies would say that the best way to help Christianity and the nation would be to reject Christian nationalism — and the best way to promote religion would be to have the government leave it alone.
(Steven Waldman is author of two books on the history of religious freedom in the United States: “Founding Faith,” about the founding era, and “Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom,” about the subsequent 250 years. Waldman is a member of the Religion News Foundation board of directors. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
