Is America’s foundation Christian?

Opinion: July 4, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Thomas S. KIDD

Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Va.)

WACO, Texas

Was America founded as a Christian nation? This is one of the most heated historical debates in America today, with its implications reverberating from prayers at high school graduations to Ten Commandments monuments on courthouse lawns. On one side of the debate, you have traditional Christians who say the Founders were Christians, and that they built the nation on principles of faith. On the other, you have secularists who argue that the Founders were deistic doubters, if not outright atheists, and who see the Founding as an Enlightenment-inspired, nonreligious event. One’s opinions on this subject often reflect what kind of role you think faith ought to play in modern America, too.

A deeper look shows that the role of faith in the Founding was more complicated than this politicized debate suggests. One of the greatest ironies in the Founding period was that the people who pushed hardest for the separation of church and state were evangelical Christians. To them, state support for churches (almost all the colonies had a denomination established by law) led to religious corruption and the persecution of dissenters.

Nowhere was the evangelical attack against state churches more vehement than in Virginia. From the founding of Jamestown in 1607, the Anglican Church (the Church of England) had been the official denomination of the colony, just as it was in the mother country.

For more than a hundred years, this system worked fairly well, as the colony rarely had to contend with dissenting non-Anglicans. The situation changed dramatically in the 1740s, when the Great Awakening began to rumble through Virginia, led first by Presbyterians, then Baptists.

Religious revivals

The Great Awakening was a series of massive religious revivals and the greatest social upheaval in colonial American history. Thousands of Americans found their faith renewed, or stirred for the first time, as traveling revivalists spoke of God’s love and mercy for sinners.

In Virginia, the Anglican Church generally did not support the Great Awakening; to church and political authorities the new evangelical movement seemed like a spiritual insurrection. Revivalists criticized Anglican parsons for lifeless preaching, and for failing to recognize the prodigious work of God going on around them. In doing so, they brought the sacrosanct authority of the colony, and its church, into question. In a religious sense, this was the first American Revolution.

Young patriot leaders such as James Madison — who grew up a traditional Anglican but whose spiritual views became more liberal over time — deplored the persecution of Baptists, and became passionate about the cause of religious liberty. Once the Revolution broke out, and independence was declared, evangelicals cooperated with Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others to enshrine religious freedom in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Despite Baptist demands, the state did not disestablish the Anglican Church until after the war. In 1784, leading patriot Patrick Henry proposed that the state move to a plural Christian establishment that would allow people to choose the church that would receive their religious taxes. But to Madison and the evangelicals, this was unacceptable. They wanted the government to stop financially supporting churches, and argued that under disestablishment and full religious freedom, churches would flourish, not fade.

Madison and the evangelicals finally won the day with the adoption of Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786 (penned by Jefferson in 1777), which guaranteed that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship place or ministry whatsoever nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.” Madison’s prediction about churches prospering under religious liberty also came true, as Baptists, Methodists, and other evangelical congregations grew explosively in the decades following disestablishment.

The triumph of religious liberty in Virginia was followed by the adoption of the First Amendment’s prohibition in 1791 of a national “establishment of religion.” But did disestablishment on the federal and state levels mean that Americans preferred a secular public sphere? Not at all.

‘Wall of separation’

Even Thomas Jefferson, a deist hailed as a hero of today’s secularists, took a generous approach toward the public role of religion after disestablishment. For example, Jefferson routinely attended religious services in government buildings as president. Jefferson was the author, of course, of the 1802 letter in which he argued that the First Amendment had erected a “wall of separation” between church and state. But the same weekend he sent this letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, a Baptist minister named John Leland preached before a joint session of Congress, with the president in attendance.

Thomas S. Kidd (Thomas—Kiddbaylor.edu) teaches history at Baylor University and is senior fellow at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author of “God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution,” and the forthcoming “Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots.” He wrote this for The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.