- Baptizing Uncle Sam: Tracing the Origins of Christian Nationalism
Who first developed the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation? To many religious conservatives, the answer is obvious: America’s Christian identity began with the nation’s founders. Not surprisingly, secular liberals, religious pluralists, and others outside of the Christian Right have challenged this understanding of the founders’ intentions. Not only is God conspicuously absent from the Constitution, they point out, but the Constitution proscribes religious tests for public office, and the First Amendment prohibits Congress from creating any “establishment of religion”—actions that suggest a secular political order rather than a Christian state.
For decades, most historians of the founding era, with only a few notable exceptions, have accepted the secular interpretation of America’s political origins. But this begs the question: If the political order that the Constitution created was secular, where did the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation come from? This is the question that Steven K. Green’s Inventing a Christian America and Kevin M. Kruse’s One Nation under God attempt to answer, though in very different ways. Green argues that the myth that the constitutional framers were devout evangelical Christians who wanted to create a Christian state originated among evangelicals in the early nineteenth century. Kruse places the origins of “Christian America” a century later, among [End Page 391] opponents of the New Deal in the mid-twentieth century. But both attempt to discover the creators of the “myth” of the nation’s Christian identity.
Although the title of Green’s monograph suggests a focus on the evangelical invention of the Christian-nation myth, some readers may be disappointed to discover that this subject occupies only the final chapter of the book. Most of the book consists not of an analysis of the invention of this myth, but of a systematic attempt to prove that the idea of the Christian founding really is a myth—that is, that it is fiction rather than fact. The framers of the Constitution may have never heard of the Mayflower Compact or John Winthrop’s sermon about a “city upon a hill,” and they certainly did not use those ideas as models in creating the new republic, Green asserts. The Great Awakening was, at most, only one influence among several on the English colonists’ political thought in the mid-eighteenth century, and not a particularly prominent influence at that. And the constitutional system of checks and balances owed its origins not to a Calvinist view of human depravity—which most of the framers of the Constitution had decidedly rejected in favor of deism, “rational Christianity,” or Arminian versions of the faith—but rather to an anti-Calvinist understanding of human nature that believed in both human reason and human frailty.
Green is certainly not the first to advance these arguments. In fact, other books, such as Frank Lambert’s The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (2003), Steven Waldman’s Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty (2008), and John Fea’s Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (2011), have already examined some of these questions in greater depth. The most original part of Green’s analysis comes in his final chapter, where he traces the origins of the Christian-nation myth to early nineteenth-century evangelicals who wanted to sacralize the nation’s founding. Immediately after George Washington’s death, his biographers rushed to give the nation a new...