Establishment, American Style
Timon Cline Says America is a Christian Nation
Establishment is inevitable. Some moral ethos, some orthodoxy, some religion must govern law and custom. There is no neutrality. Man is a sociable and religious creature; he cannot live otherwise. Nor can laws governing the conduct and associations of men ignore this, albeit sometimes they pretend to. Law is supposed to lead men to virtue, if gradually, as Thomas Aquinas said. The only question is what kind of virtue. It is a question of which, not whether.
If these are perennial rules of political life, then America, exceptional as it may be, is no exception. And, indeed, its history reveals as much. Which religion, then? According to its own past and indigenous folkways, America possessed an explicitly Christian establishment for most of its history, an ecumenical Protestant one to be exact.
Pleading the Christian nation thesis is as American as apple pie, despite what pundits say today. This is a provocative, heterodox suggestion today, even as most Americans, by some miracle of God, remain self-professedly Christian, if only culturally. And yet, demonstration of this thesis need not depend on majority opinion. More tangible and verifiable evidence is found in the country’s institutions, constitutions, and laws—things of consensus that express the original and intended character of a nation more reliably than private correspondence of a few household names or a couple well-remembered treatises.
Moreover, beginning in 1776 or 1787 or 1791 is misguided. Our country is older than that and so too is its character. John Adams, rivaled only by Thomas Hutchinson as an historian of New England, instructed us to go back further to understand the then-new republic, that is, back to the earliest beginnings in the seventeenth century.1
The common, decidedly modern supposition that the “old world” was completely thrown off in exchange for a “new birth of freedom” does not hold up against the data. Jefferson’s mythical wall of separation was a minority report and not imposed upon the constitutional order until long after his death. While contextual and prudential adjustments were made in the American context, establishment of the Christian religion was transported to the colonies, again, if in particularized form owed to the unique genesis and growth of each colony. And these things were not summarily discarded in the late eighteenth century.
How could they be given their thorough integration into the nascent American way of life for over a century? The colonies, whether Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, were sanctioned by the English monarch to spread Christianity and abide by English common law which integrated Christianity itself. The laws of each colony reflected this. As Justice David Brewer put it, “it is not exaggeration to say that Christianity… was the principal cause of the settlement of many of the colonies.”2
The Mayflower Compact (1620) dedicated the colony to the “advancement of the Christian faith.” The Charter of New England (1620) commanded the “enlargement” of the Christian religion. The Cambridge Platform (1648), following the Westminster Confession (1646), which governed the churches that Ben Franklin, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams grew up in, charged the magistrate with care of religion and praised the cooperation between church and state in this regard.
John Cotton declared church and state in New England to be “close and compact, and coordinate one to another, and yet not compounded.”3 Sermon after sermon—hundreds of them—from Congregationalist clergy affirmed the same, namely, that the chief duty of civil authority was to the common good, true religion, and protection of the church, and this sentiment was expressed in this medium into the nineteenth century. The laws of Massachusetts and Connecticut reflected a decidedly Christian ethos, the ethos in which eighteenth-century men were nurtured.4
But we cannot focus just on New England, even though it exercised outsized influence in shaping the character and trajectory of the eventual nation. Dale’s Code (1610), Virginia colony’s first legal standard, required church attendance, protected clergy from public insult, and punished blasphemy, among other things.5 William Penn’s colony was designed to be “populous and Protestant” and serve as a “Holy experiment.”6 As historians have pointed out, Penn, the supposed harbinger of modern-day religious liberty, restricted such liberty to Protestants. Whatever denominational diversity marked the colonies, a consensus is visible: colonial America was dedicated to the proliferation of Christianity, was based on it, Protestantism in particular.
Fast forward to the late eighteenth century: all that colonial stuff is outdated, surely. Not so fast. The first state constitutions and their accompanying laws tell a different story. In some way, God is invoked by all the first state constitutions. Nine of the thirteen states required civil officers to affirm certain Christian doctrinal tenets. Delaware’s 1776 constitutional language is representative:
Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust, before taking his seat, or entering upon the execution of his office, shall take the following oath, or affirmation, if conscientiously scrupulous of taking an oath, to wit: “I, do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”
North Carolina had similar language. Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Vermont limited officeholding to Protestants whilst reserving toleration for Christians generally. Pennsylvania required an affirmation of God’s existence and “a future state of reward and punishment.” Maryland was somewhat laxer, given its historic Catholic aristocracy and majority Protestant population, in favoring general Christians in this regard. Full civil participation was limited explicitly or implicitly to Protestants. For example, Article 18 of New Jersey’s constitution states,
That no person shall ever, within this Colony, be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God in a manner, agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; nor, under any presence whatever, be compelled to attend any place of worship, contrary to his own faith and judgment; nor shall any person, within this Colony, ever be obliged to pay tithes, taxes, or any other rates, for the purpose of building or repairing any other church or churches, place or places of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry, contrary to what he believes to be right.
The very next paragraph specifies that “no Protestant inhabitant” would be “denied the enjoyment of any civil right, merely on account of his religious principles.” Rather, anyone “professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect” was considered electable. South Carolina established itself as generally Protestant insofar as only Protestants in good standing with a church could hold office. Following states like Tennessee sometimes explicitly rejected denominational tests for office but still maintained that an atheist could not hold office.
Not only were magistrates and legislatures and governors expected to be Christians, but they were expected to be nursing fathers (Isaiah 49:23) to the “church of our common Lord,” per the Westminster revisions, as the Suffolk Resolves (1774) had said, and as Ezra Stiles and countless other ministers preached.7 A pan-Protestantism was in view. That is, magistrates were to protect the church and true religion from open revilement and, often, provide public funds for its maintenance. To this end, blasphemy and Sabbath laws were ubiquitous up through the 19th century.
Isn’t all this irrelevant because of the Constitution, the federal one? Isn’t the Constitution godless after all? No mention of God can be found even if it does include reference to the Sabbath. These common suppositions are, in part, because of a confusion of external v. internal policy under our compound (not consolidated) republic.
As the 10th Amendment reflects, fears of centralization and uniformity at ratification combined with the diversity of denominations yielded a federal constitution that would not consider internal (domestic) policy and would not need to speak to religion. The Constitution would’ve never been passed without this guarantee. Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural address championed this very dynamic.
In other words, the states were meant to be the central moral loci of the republic. Indeed, many people, including the authors of the Federalist Papers spoke of them as separate, individual republics or nations and, in turn, of the federal or national union as an empire. And so, on the question of religion, James Madison promised his fellow Virginians that “[t]here is not a shadow of a right in the general government to intermeddle with religion. Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation.” James Wilson, Richard Dobbs Spaight, Benjamin Franklin, and others campaigned for the new constitution on the same promise. This represented the constitutional consensus.
The First Amendment, which really only contains one clause, introduced a practical reassurance, namely, a restriction on the federal government from meddling with state-level establishments, or imposing one on them. No principle of secularism, pluralism, or church-state relations was introduced thereby. Substance was not at issue. Most thought establishment was fine and that religious liberty for Christians was an acceptable scope of application, with mere toleration for dissenting non-Christians. What was at issue was simply the restrictions on the general (or federal) government. Not until 1940 and 1947 was the first amendment reinterpreted to apply to the states. The first amendment was not considered at all by the Supreme Court until the 1870s; oaths of office weren’t treated until the 1950s, and Sabbath laws weren’t combatted until the 1960s.
But this fact of the division of labor between state and general government did not sanitize the federal government of religion. Prayers were offered in Congress straightaway, chaplains were hired, federal buildings were used by congregations on Sunday, and the Northwest Ordinance (1787) encouraged propagation of religion in federal territory. This was a thoroughly Christian nation even as the federal government was precluded from establishing national uniformity or disrupting the historic church-state arrangements of the states.
Much more could be said to flesh it all out. Basically, what you have at the founding of the country is a pan-Protestant confederated republic, most members of which had a history of some kind of Protestant established church, maintained tests of orthodoxy for office, and sometimes required citizens to give money to the maintenance of Protestant churches and public teachers; they punished dishonor of the Sabbath and of Christian doctrine in public. Contrary to popular myth, church attendance was high, probably around 75%.8 Religious liberty was afforded to all Christians, but not all religions. What is this place? It sounds like a Christian nation.9
[From Fight Laugh Feast Magazine 5.2]
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Adams, “To the Abbé de Mably” (15 Jan. 1783), available at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-14-02-0111-0004.
Brewer, The United States a Christian Nation (1905).
John Cotton, “Letter to Lord Say and Seal” (1636), in The American Republic: Primary Sources, ed. Bruce Forhnen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 36.
Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).
Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History, ed. Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 314-326.
Penn, One project for the good of England that is, our civil union is our civil safety : humbly dedicated to the great council, the Parliament of England (1679).
Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor (1783).
James Hutson, Forgotten Features of the Founding: Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early American Republic (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 111-125.
A version of this article was presented at New Saint Andrews College on April 12, 2024 as part of the 2023-2023 academic year lectureship.