When he talks about the role of religion in the founding of the United States, historian Gregg Frazer does not attract eager audiences.
“Neither side really wants to hear what I say," says Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at The Master’s University, a Christian school in Santa Clarita, California.
The founders, Frazer says, did not create a Christian republic. Several key founders either rejected core Christian doctrines or were vague enough to keep historians debating. For Frazer, that often disappoints audiences of his fellow Christians.
But, he says, nor were the founders a cluster of rationalist deists — believers in a God who set the universe in motion like a clockmaker and then left it alone — and anti-religious skeptics, as they are sometimes portrayed. That disappoints audiences who favor a high firewall between church and state. Most of the founders were religious in one form or another.
The long-running debate over the founders’ intentions about religion has been turbocharged with the approaching 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Amid the America 250 celebrations, some Christian activists and authors are redoubling claims that the U.S. had a Christian founding.
They have an ally in the White House.
President Donald Trump is promoting “ America Prays,” culminating in a May 17 gathering on the National Mall in Washington. Official participants include many Christian organizations and individuals, some who champion the idea of a Christian founding. Cabinet officials are issuing Christian messages in their official capacity. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed that “America was founded as a Christian nation … in our DNA.”
In short: The long-standing debate — secular government on one hand, faith on another — rages and matters still.
Countering the Christian nation narrative
Critics and advocacy groups are pushing back.
“Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense,” says the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It decries efforts “to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.”
Six in 10 U.S. adults surveyed say they believed the founders originally intended America to be a Christian nation, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center report.
Why do the founders’ beliefs and intentions matter?
“Everyone’s looking for what we historians call a usable past,” says John Fea, author of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”
“We go into the past looking for what we want in order to advance a particular political or cultural agenda,” says Fea, a fellow at the Lumen Center, a Christian research institute and study center in Madison, Wisconsin.
Advocates often skirt history's nuances. For example, public officials and others did indeed offer prayers on behalf of the new republic at important historical moments.
“But are those prayers the central part of the story of what happened when we, in the United States, declared independence?” Fea wonders. “Last time I checked, it was about taxation and representation and shutting down the port of Boston and all these more economic and political things.”
Church and state in the new nation
Historian Mark David Hall argues that Christianity did strongly impact the founding. While core founders did not hold traditional Christian beliefs, he contends many other founders did, and that this shaped their thinking about how to form the new republic.
“There’s plenty of evidence Christianity had an influence,” says Hall, author of “Did America Have a Christian Founding?”
He says founders’ attention to human dignity harmonizes with the Bible’s teaching of humanity created in God’s image. The system of checks and balances — to prevent the concentration of power — reflects teachings about human sin that would have permeated a largely Protestant culture, he says.
He also notes that some early presidents and Congresses issued proclamations for prayer and thanksgiving, though some drew opposition and controversy. Some states sponsored churches for decades after the country's Constitution was ratified, indicating the founders did not believe religion should be absent from public life.
They believed that faith was important in forming moral, responsible citizens of the new republic. They promoted “toleration without eliminating the importance of real religious commitment on the part of differing adherents,” Frazer wrote in his book, “The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders.”
There is no reference to any specific religion in the Constitution beyond the date — “in the year of our Lord” 1787. It forbids religious tests for officeholders. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights guarantees religious freedom and forbids “establishment” of a national religion.
Twentieth-century Supreme Court rulings applied the First Amendment to the states on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from denying citizens’ rights. The court cited founder Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state.” Courts have since wrestled with how to apply that principle in areas such as school prayer, healthcare, labor law and crosses on public lands.
Frazer argues that the Bible is not cited as a source for any governing principles in the documented proceedings of the Constitutional Convention or in the influential Federalist Papers, which advocated for the Constitution. He says the founders drew on influences such as Enlightenment thinking on such concepts as human equality, accountable government and freedom of religion. Early critics of the Constitution faulted it for lacking religious content.
The Declaration of Independence does have religious language, declaring that rights come from the “Creator.” It appeals to “divine Providence” and to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Thomas Jefferson and other founders — adroitly, Frazer says — used terms acceptable to Christians as well as followers of other religious and philosophical movements.
America's complicated religious history
Even the seemingly straightforward question, “Did the founders intend America to be a Christian nation?” raises questions: Who were the founders? When was the actual “founding”?
Some see the founding as the original colonial settlements — a century and a half before 1776. Colonial charters for Massachusetts Bay and Virginia declared the spread of the Gospel as a fundamental purpose. Puritan Boston endeavored to be a Christian “city upon a hill.”
In practice, the religious nature of the colonies varied. They had economic and territorial ambitions alongside heavenly ones. State religious persecution of religious minorities in Virginia and Massachusetts drew pushback.
The religious values of a colonial system that decimated Native communities and imported enslaved Africans has also come under enduring scrutiny.
Decades before the American Revolution, an evangelical revival known as the Great Awakening reached many colonists. Church membership and attendance declined steadily throughout the 18th century, according to studies, even as the colonies remained mostly Protestant.
The Protestant label also covered a range of beliefs, as some churches shifted toward Unitarian views that esteemed Jesus as a prophet or sage, not divine.
By the Revolution, rationalistic approaches to religion strongly influenced many college-educated and propertied elite men, such as those who produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Frazer wrote. So did Freemasonry, a fraternal order based on beliefs in a universal God and morals.
Some founders were devout Christians such as John Jay, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry. Others believed in God but not in Jesus’ divinity, including key founders like Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The enigmatic Washington kept active in his Episcopal church but avoided sacraments and also was an active Freemason. He spoke about God in terms most people at that time could accept, such as “Providence” or “Supreme Ruler.”
Challenging misconceptions about deist founders
But contrary to popular belief, most founders were not deists.
Frazer instead describes many founders as “theistic rationalists.” George Washington believed that divine “Providence” saved his life in battle and intervened on America’s behalf. He was far from alone.
“They did believe in an active God,” Frazer says. “Therefore, prayer matters, because there’s someone listening.”
Even the skeptics thought religion was important in forming virtuous citizens. Franklin donated toward building projects for various churches and a synagogue in Philadelphia. Many scholars believe the First Amendment created a sort of religious free market in which Christianity and other faiths have flourished to this day.
At speaking engagements, Frazer hands out a flyer with 12 points on why the Christian America view is dangerous for both church and state.
“It’s mostly dangerous for Christianity,” Frazer contends. By claiming people or ideas as Christian if they aren’t, it “muddies the waters in terms of what Christianity is all about.”
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
