Kenneth D. Wald
Tue, October 18, 2022
The media has alerted us to surging public support among Republicans for declaring the United States a Christian nation.
In a national survey by a respected polling institute, that sentiment was endorsed by roughly three-fifths of all Republicans and almost 80% of Republicans who identify themselves as Evangelicals or born-again Christians. Some prominent Republicans have gone further by insisting that separation of religion and state is a myth.
The advocates of Christian nationalism might be chastened if they learned about an instructive exchange between George Washington and the Presbyterian ministers of New Hampshire and Massachusetts just six months after the president had taken the oath of office in 1789.
A painting of President George Washington by artist Gilbert Stuart from 1796, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In an otherwise effusive letter praising Washington, the ministers complained about a crucial omission from the U.S. Constitution. They wanted language recognizing the United States as a Christian nation. As they told the president, “we should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some Explicit acknowledgement of the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent” in the Constitution.
Although President Washington praised the ministers for their devotion to spreading the Gospel, he instructed them gently that this was not the task of the government. It would be best if responsibility for moral uplift was assigned “to the guidance of the ministers of the gospel.” The government should be left out of it.
In fact, Washington he insisted, “... the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.” This perspective, not hostility nor indifference to religion, accounted for “the absence of any regulation respecting religion” in the Constitution.
As Washington saw it, religious institutions were part of civil society and did not possess political authority under the Constitution. He had endorsed this principle five years earlier when he opposed a Virginia bill authorizing public funds to pay for Protestant teachers of religion.
Washington’s explanation did not end other attempts to characterize the United States as a Christian nation. Just 40 years later, Congress was besieged with petitions to end the transport and delivery of the mail on Sundays, the Christian sabbath. The response of the House Committee on Post Offices was provided by Richard Johnson of Kentucky, a former vice president who later held a U.S. Senate seat.
The committee had searched the Constitution in vain for any indication that Congress could stop the Postal Service from doing its job for explicitly religious reasons. The very idea was repugnant to constitutional values.
Johnson argued that members of Congress are supposed to represent their constituents but they are chosen “to represent their political, and not their religious views.” The Constitution, he reminded his colleagues, “regards the conscience of the Jew as sacred as that of the Christian.” Hence, Congress has no authority to violate the conscience of any citizen by declaring one day of the week more holy than another.
These examples, which could be multiplied, show that the founders of the Republic, including George Washington, James Madison and other signers of the Constitution, insisted that the United States had no official religious identity. Even if a majority of the population were Christian, that conferred no governmental authority upon them.
George Washington's signature is seen on a personal copy of the acts of the first Congress (1789), containing the U.S. Constitution and the proposed Bill of Rights. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File]
This principle was intended as much to protect religion from the state as the state from religion. When religion exercises the power of government, an 1839 report on the mails declared, “Christianity degenerates into an instrument of oppression and loses all its beauty and moral excellence.” By contrast, religion flourishes most fully “unaided by the secular arm” of the state.
It is not clear what would be accomplished by declaring Christianity as the religion of the United States apart from conferring second-class citizenship on people who were not Christians. Given the diversity of political views among Christians, it would be extremely challenging even to identify what government policies or regulations would represent that religious tradition.
Christian nationalists, who often describe themselves as constitutional conservatives, might want to conserve the Founders’ approach to religion rather than trying to undermine it.
Kenneth D. Wald is distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida and the author of “Religion and Politics in the United States,” forthcoming in its ninth edition.
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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Kenneth D. Wald: Founding Fathers differed from Christian nationalists
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