Was America ever Christian? Did its inhabitants—most of them, at any rate—at one time constitute a community of Christian believers? Since its formation as a nation, of course, America has chosen not to be officially identified with any actual religion. The First Amendment as it relates to religion is as well known to opponents of the Christian presence in American public life as to its defenders: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Even the laziest attendee of a sixth-grade civics class knows that the founders did not want any religious organization or denomination to enjoy a government-conferred advantage in the competition for followers. After all, as we shall see, many supporters of the American Revolution defined their struggle for independence from Great Britain as much in religious terms as in purely political terms.

Still, the key question remains: Was America ever a Christian country in the same sense that we can say, for example, Algeria is a Muslim country? The answer to that question is much less complicated than it might seem to some. If, let’s say, about 90 percent or more of the population thought of themselves as Christian, even if they never actually set foot in a church, would it be unreasonable to say that the population was overwhelmingly Christian? I think it would be very reasonable to think that, in the same sense that Algeria is a Muslim country, America at one point was Christian.

You will, of course, find a multitude of American college professors who would not agree with that position. It irks many American intellectuals who have adopted a predominantly secular worldview that the overwhelming majority of Americans through most of American history up until the second half of the twentieth century didn’t share their secularist position. Actually, it has been the aggressive assault on America’s Christian beginnings in public debate over the past few decades that has led many conservative Christians to long for a return to a more traditional America—an America that they certainly assume was more “Christian.”

For example, from the 1970s on, quite a few new books were published that said, yes, America was once Christian. Such books expressed a longing among many conservative Americans for a return to a time when America was relatively untouched by the cult of sexual gratification, the drug culture, and the rejection of most values that had usually been considered “traditional.” The 1960s were a time of immense turbulence in American national life, not just because of anti–Vietnam War protests that roiled much of the country but also because of a conscious youth rebellion against moral restraints on personal behavior that Americans had in general respected as normative, even if they hadn’t always been able to observe them. When the first backlash against the 1960s American cultural revolution began a decade later, the American Christian conservative movement, later identified with such personalities as Rev. Jerry Falwell and Rev. Pat Robertson, began to coalesce around the idea that America had once been “Christian” but had sort of lost its virtue in the upheavals of the 1960s. Ardent secularists probably derided such an idea as a sheer myth, but if it was ever a myth, it was a powerful one that was as reassuring as it was attractive.

Several books appeared that argued that America had actually been providentially brought into existence specifically to be a “Christian” nation—a nation with a prophetic destiny to bless, if possible, the rest of the world. The authors of these books suggested that recently America had lost its way not simply by failing to maintain the godly values espoused by most of the first English settlers to live on the American continent but by losing sight of America’s purpose to be a “godly” nation.

Providentialism

Of the many books that set off to try to prove that America had been founded as a Christian covenant community in a providential plan devised by the Almighty himself, few had more popularity and influence among American evangelical Christians than The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall and David Manuel. First published in 1977 by a Christian publishing house, Fleming H. Revell, the book sold (in hardcover and softcover versions) more than six hundred thousand copies. It was a gigantic bestseller and may well have been read by hundreds of thousands of other readers who never actually purchased a copy. Nine years later Marshall and Manuel followed up with another book continuing the story of America from the perspective of possible—indeed probable—Christian providence, From Sea to Shining Sea. As recently as 2009, a new version of The Light and the Glory appeared.[89]

The Light and the Glory actually begins its tale through the eyes of Christopher Columbus who, the authors claimed, had expressed the belief that his discovery of the New World had been a divinely originated call upon his life. Marshall and Manuel’s theme is unabashedly simple: just as the ancient Israelites in the Old Testament story sensed a corporate call of God upon their nation, so the inhabitants of America, from the Pilgrim Fathers onward, had inherited a corporate relationship with God that required them to behave in a godly way and, when necessary, to bow their heads in national repentance. Writ large, this is the core of the idea of “American exceptionalism.”

The two authors acknowledged that many Christians in the modern era believed that the idea of corporate communities having a covenantal relationship with God had been eliminated once Jesus Christ appeared. The Old Testament Israelites, such Christian thinkers and theologians argued, had functioned as a community led by Jehovah, the almighty God, during the period when Israel was being formed as a nation and being led out of Egypt into the Promised Land. After the coming of Christ, according to Marshall and Manuel, many Christians believed that no ethnic or national community in the world could maintain a corporate relationship with God. That possibility surely had come to an end once the New Testament had come into existence. “But what if,” Marshall and Manuel asked, “in particular, [God] had a plan for those He would bring to America, a plan which saw this continent as the stage for a new act in the drama of mankind’s redemption? Could it be that we Americans, as a people, were meant to be a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’ (Luke 2:32)—a demonstration to the world of how God intended his children to live together under the Lordship of Christ? Was our vast divergence from this blueprint,” the authors asked, “after such a promising beginning, the reason why we now seem to be heading into a new dark age?”[90]

The Light and the Glory belongs to the category of historical interpretation that is sometimes called “providentialism,” the notion that certain events in history are guided by a divine hand in a providential way for the benefit of the participants or their successors and others, albeit for God’s ultimate purposes. It is, of course, a way of understanding our past that is comforting and reassuring. It implies that there was a sort of providential blueprint for America from its first days of European, and particularly English, settlement. It is fair to say that until the twentieth century, American historical writing and even American legal writing, at both the academic and the popular level, was deeply influenced by a self-conscious providentialism. Even such secular concepts as “manifest destiny,” the American belief that America was providentially destined, even duty-bound, to extend its political and cultural power ever-further westward (not stopping, according to some interpreters, on the West Coast of the American continent but leaping across the Pacific to the lands there) derived much of its force from Christian providentialism.

This perspective is very popular among Christian conservatives, for it reinforces their conviction that their perspectives on national and international policy are natural heirs to the ideas shared by the first English colonial settlers in North America and later articulated in the concepts that led to the American Revolution. Indeed, it is almost an axiom of American Christian “providentialists” that the nation was founded with the explicit intention of embodying and advancing the ideas of Christian nationhood. It’s interesting that George Washington himself, in his first inaugural address, said, “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States.”[91] John Adams, our second president, after he had left office, wrote on July 4, 1821, “The highest, the transcendent glory of the American Revolution was this—it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the precepts of Christianity.”[92]

Agnostics and atheists, of course, pooh-pooh this whole idea. Since the whole of creation, and therefore the whole of history, is a series of accidents, they argue, there is no such entity as Providence guiding anything. Richard Dawkins is quoted as saying, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”[93]

According to Dawkins and most atheists who based their view on the supposed discoveries of science, life is simply this: a random series of purposeless events with no guiding hand whatsoever. Marxists, of course, believe that all of history is unraveling according to the economic imperatives of inexorable economic and sociological laws. For them, “destiny” is fulfilled when Marxists gain the levers of political power and manipulate life on earth until every man, woman, and child at some undetermined point in the future will find themselves living in the utopian paradise of Communism. At that point, Marxists believe, there will be no war, no crime, no serious social problems because rational economic developments will have rendered them all irrelevant.

But it is not just the Marxists and other unbelievers who are quite hostile to the notion of providential history. A significant and perhaps growing portion of respected Christian historians and thinkers completely reject the idea that America ever was distinctly Christian. Such thinkers and writers, indeed, completely reject the possibility that the American Revolution was a divinely inspired and divinely guided series of events whose purpose was to advance the cause of Christianity in one particular part of the world, namely the new nation that became the United States. More than two decades ago, evangelical historians Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden collaborated on a book that said it sought “to examine carefully the popular belief that America was once a ‘Christian nation’ which has now been all but overrun by secular humanism. To put it most simply: is this a factual picture, a mythical picture, or something else altogether?”

The authors stated their conclusion early on in the book. It was their opinion that “early American history does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly or even predominantly Christian, if we mean by the word ‘Christian’ a state of society reflecting the ideals presented in Scripture. There is no lost golden age to which American Christians may return.” The trio also concluded that “careful examination of Christian teaching on government, the state, and the nature of culture shows that the idea of a ‘Christian nation’ is a very ambiguous concept which is usually harmful to effective Christian action in society.”[94]

Christian Nationalism

This overall skeptical view of the Christian providentialist interpretation of American history is shared by John Fea, author of the much more recent volume Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?[95] Fea writes negatively of what he calls “Christian nationalism”—a view of history that interprets most of what happened in America since the first colonial settlements as demonstrating the finger of God. He partly shows his hand by complaining that “the Christian Right,” a term that usually carries a derogatory connotation, habitually “use[es] Washington’s supposed Christianity to help promote their cultural agenda for contemporary America.”[96] Fea fails to define either “the Christian Right” or what its “cultural agenda” might be. (If he means Christian conservatives, then there is wide breadth of difference among them on a cultural agenda for the contemporary United States.) The core of his argument, which is essentially shared by Noll, Hatch, and Marsden, is as follows:

1. There is “little evidence to suggest that Christianity permeated the culture and value system of the colony,”[97] and even if there were strong communities of Christians here and there, the society in which they lived in New England was too flawed to deserve the term “Christian.”
2. The English colonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries couldn’t have been serious Christians because almost all of them accepted slavery as a fact of life. Also—and this is certainly true historically—the Puritan Christians who established large and powerful communities in New England were, by today’s standards, sometimes harshly intolerant of religious diversity.
3. The most important founders of America in the Revolutionary period were not really Christians but an eclectic gathering of eighteenth-century intellectuals who may have shared views in common on the importance of Christian ethical behavior as defined in their day but were at variance with each other theologically, from Unitarian to Deist, and thus could not really have agreed on any notion of how America might become, let alone actually be, “Christian.”
4. Church attendance in the colonies at the time of the Revolution was probably no more than 15 percent of the population, thus demonstrating that it was politics more than spiritual concerns that motivated the Revolution.

The two main issues mentioned in this critique need to be separated from each other. First, how serious were most of the colonial settlers of the seventeenth century about establishing a Christian community in the New World? Second, at the time of the Revolution and shortly thereafter, how prominent were the views of evangelical Christians?

The story of the first English settlers in North America has been frequently and elaborately told in many accounts of early American history. Broadly speaking, there is a consensus that the first permanent English settlement in North America, the one at Jamestown in Virginia, was inspired by different motives from those held by the Puritans in the New England settlement. Christopher Newport captained the Susan Constant, the largest of three ships—along with the Godspeed and the Discovery—that made landfall at Cape Henry in Virginia on April 26, 1607. The Virginia Company that was formed in London in 1606 had been granted a charter by King James I of England, who insisted that the purpose of the company was “propagating all Christian religions to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.”[98]

But John Smith, the man who became leader of the colonists on the written instructions of the Virginia Company, was genuinely skeptical about any religious motive in the initial settlement of Virginia. “For, I am not so simple to think that ever any other motive than wealth will erect there a commonwealth,” he wrote on his return to England in 1609. In fact, he mocked the pretensions of company publicists that piety was involved at all in the exploration of North America via Virginia. Those propagandists for settlement, he averred, were “making religion their colour when all their aime was nothing but present profit.”[99]

The Jamestown settlement nearly went extinct during the “starving time” of 1608–1610, but after the handful of surviving colonists were rescued by the timely arrival of a well-provisioned fleet under the command of Lord De La Marr, a new order of discipline was imposed. After his arrival in 1610, De La Marr’s first action was to convene a church service in which the colonists would be called to sacrifice and industry. There was then a steady influx of new colonists.

By 1619 the number of settlers, all single men, was around two thousand. That year was marked by three landmark events in the colony’s history. The first was the arrival of a ship from England with ninety “young maidens” (to the great delight of the colonists) who offered themselves in marriage to any colonist who could afford the cost of her trip across the Atlantic. The second historic event was the landing of twenty African chattel slaves from a Dutch trading ship. This marked the sad beginning of the African slave trade with Virginia and other states further south. The third was the convening in the Jamestown church of a legislative assembly, the first ever in North America.

Despite the overtly money-seeking motivations of the first Virginia settlers, the majority of whom were indentured servants, the regime imposed by De La Marr introduced a legal code that made church attendance compulsory. John Rolfe, the colonist who married the Indian princess Pocahontas (credited with saving the life of John Smith) after she had been baptized as a Christian and renamed Rebecca, had introduced a new strain of tobacco that was much more popular with both the colonists and the infant tobacco market in England. But Rolfe gave evidence of being a man of more than simply mercenary interests. In a 1614 letter to Sir Thomas Dale, governor of Jamestown, Rolfe explained his marriage to Pocahontas, defending himself from cynical criticism that he was drawn to Pocahontas by nothing but carnal needs. He was, he wrote to Dale, “well assured in [his] perswasion (by the often triall and proving of my self, in my holiest meditations and praiers), that [he] had been called [into the marriage] by the spirit of God.”[100] Rolfe thought of the settlers in distinct Old Testament Hebraic terms as a “chosen people.” They were, he said, “a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God.”

The Jamestown colonists were to experience greater trials in the future, notably a devastating massacre by Native Americans in 1622, yet for many years the recruitment of settlers in England included trolling the city streets for orphans, the desperately poor, and others who could satisfy the labor demands of the Virginia tobacco industry. As a company announcement said at one point, “The Citie of London have, by act of their common counsel, appointed One Hundred Children out of their superfluous multitudes to be transported to Virginia; there to be bound apprentices for certain years, and afterward with very beneficiall conditions for the Children. . . .” The same announcement made it clear that “it falleth out that among those Children, sundry being ill-disposed and fitter for any remote place than this City, declared their unwillingness to go to Virginia; of whom the City is especially desirous to be disburdened; and in Virginia under severe Masters they may be brought to goodness.”[101]

Meanwhile, a group of pious separatists, Protestant Christians who wanted to be “disburdened” from the Church of England and its royal head, King Charles I, had migrated from the town of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire to Leiden, in the Netherlands. There they were welcomed and encouraged to practice their religion in any form they liked. For the first few years the voluntary exile had worked satisfactorily, but by 1620 they were anxious to move on. Their children were becoming “de-Englished,” and their aspirations were to build a completely new society somewhere else. These were the original Pilgrim Fathers, a resolute, courageous group of Christians willing to face overwhelming odds to fulfill what they thought was a divine calling. They secured a patent from a London company to settle in America and secured a ship from England, the Mayflower, to transport them first to Plymouth, in the south of England, and then across the Atlantic.

They set sail from Plymouth, England, at a very inauspicious time, December 11, 1620, the beginning of one of the roughest weather seasons in the North Atlantic. Despite the stormy passage and the cramped accommodations, 102 men, women, and children crammed into a narrow space below deck and sailed forth into the North Atlantic. The passenger area was so crowded that no one had more space than a single bed, and the ceiling was so low that no one taller than five feet could stand up straight. All but two of the passengers and crew survived the journey. Of the two deaths, one was that of a sailor who had cruelly mocked the passengers with profane curses. He died the same day he contracted a mysterious fever that didn’t afflict any of the other passengers or crew. The second death was of a Pilgrim who disobeyed instructions to maintain a daily consumption of lemon juice and who, as a consequence, died of scurvy.

The Mayflower had originally been intended to land its passengers at the mouth of the Hudson River under the patent granted to the London Virginia Company. However, when it approached land off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the Pilgrim leaders were told by the captain that to continue the journey south to the Hudson would require lengthy and perhaps risky sailing. The leaders of the Pilgrims accordingly decided to disembark near where they had first sighted land, at what was to become Plymouth, Massachusetts. Without the authority from the London company to establish their colony there, however, the leaders proposed that the passengers on the ship sign a voluntary compact of self-government, the first such document in American history. Accordingly, all forty-one of the adult male passengers signed what has become known as the “Mayflower Compact,” committing themselves to combine together into a “civil body politic.” The Compact is surprisingly simple and hardly comprises a full-blooded political constitution, yet it makes clear that uppermost in the minds of the Pilgrim settlers in New England was (1) the spreading of Christianity, and (2) a covenant to act toward each other in mutual respect and submission. The Compact begins with an obligatory display of loyalty to King James of England and then proceeds to spell out what is being agreed upon. It reads:

In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith etc. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitution, and offices, from time to time, as shall be through most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11 of November, in the years of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty fourth, 1620.[102]

One of the signatories of the Compact was William Bradford, later to become the governor of Plymouth Colony and the first great eyewitness chronicler of the Pilgrims and of Plymouth. As he notes sadly in his account of the Pilgrims, Of Plymouth Plantation, more than half of the original Pilgrims who set foot in the New World in the winter of 1620 had died before the winter was over from hunger, exposure, and the ever-present scurvy that the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in the diet brought on.[103] It was the heroic efforts of Bradford, Elder William Brewster, and the one experienced soldier in the group, Captain Miles Standish, that made possible the survival of the others. Yet by 1630, despite the replenishment of Plymouth’s numbers by new arrivals, the population of the colony amounted to only about three hundred. Bradford wrote poignantly, “Thus out of small beginnings, greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousands, so the light her kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehova have all the praise.”[104]

The “one small candle” that Bradford was referring to had already set in motion the beginning of what became known as the Great Migration, a steady stream of Puritans from England seeking somewhere to live out their faith and their lives unencumbered by the Church of England or the increasingly anti-Puritan government of King Charles I. These Puritans were not separatists, as the Pilgrims had been: they were not repudiating the Church of England. They sought, however, to build a civil society much more reflective of their Christian values than would have been possible in England.

The man who epitomizes this facet of the Great Migration was John Winthrop. He was a successful London lawyer and landowner in the east of England. He was a leading figure in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, obtaining a charter from the king that authorized the company to govern the colony it was about to form without having to refer back to anyone in London. King Charles had become increasingly intolerant towards Protestant nonconformists like the Puritans, and in March of 1629 he dissolved Parliament, beginning an eleven-year period of royal rule in England without Parliament. In October 1629, while still in England, Winthrop was elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and, increasingly worried by the development of events in England, began to gather supplies and recruit men with skills needed in the new community. The principal members of the Massachusetts Bay Company were Puritans, and they decided to take the entire company, with the rules of self-government approved by the king, to New England with them.

In April 1630, Winthrop was a passenger aboard the Arbella, one of four ships carrying four hundred migrants that assembled for sailing off the Isle of Wight on the south coast of England. During the voyage across the Atlantic aboard the Arbella, Winthrop delivered a sermon that has echoed throughout American history as an expression of the way American Christians—and then just Americans in general—have traditionally seen themselves: a special people with special responsibilities and, above all, generous toward each other and outsiders. The sermon was titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” and the most frequently cited phrase from it has been, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

In the twentieth century, at least two American presidents, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, cited the phrase as an affirmation that the United States as a nation has a unique responsibility to be a blessing to the world. Reagan, in fact, cited Winthrop’s phrase, which is taken from the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (see Matt. 5:14), in his 1974 address to the Conservative Political Action Committee, but his better-known usage was in his farewell address as president in January 1989. He said, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than the oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”[105]

But when people cite the “city on a hill” portion from Winthrop’s speech, they usually fail to mention the rest of it, which is emphatic about three points. First, the Puritans setting off for the New World considered themselves bound together in a mutual covenant that had been freely entered into in God’s presence. Second, they, and Winthrop, felt that God would keep faith with the Puritans if they kept faith with him, and third, God would “break out in wrath” against the community if it became worldly rather than godly. Winthrop preached,

We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.[106]

What might be the consequences of disobedience against God’s order? Winthrop answered the question, “But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.” It was a classic Calvinist statement of man’s fallenness and God’s grace. The Puritans were Calvinists, and they believed that human beings were totally depraved and worthy of God’s divine judgment. But they also believed that God, in his mercy, had selected those he would draw to himself before the foundation of the world. Nothing men or women could do would affect God’s choice of who had been predestined for grace and salvation.

What therefore, Winthrop rhetorically asked, should be the principle of behavior to be demonstrated toward each other? Brotherly love. “That which most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only,” Winthrop continues, “we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” The “love” of which Winthrop speaks is, he says, “like we shall find in the histories of the church, in all ages; the sweet sympathy of affections which was in the members of this body one towards another; their cheerfulness in serving and suffering together; how liberal they were without repining, harborers without grudging, and helpful without reproaching; and all from hence, because they had fervent love amongst them; which only makes the practice of mercy constant and easy.”[107]

Because it has been fashionable since the twentieth century for many people to scorn the Puritans as repressive and intolerant, it is worth citing Winthrop’s sermon at length to grasp how self-critical the Puritans were and how they held themselves to very high standards of behavior toward others. Indeed, it is probably reasonable to say that the Puritans, among America’s founders, were more conscious of their human failings than almost any generation of Americans who professed the Christian faith.

They were also conscious that they were exceptional people, not in the sense of being superior to others but in the sense of being called by God to a unique purpose, quite similar to the Israelites on their journey from Egypt to Zion. They often referred to themselves as “the New Israel” and consciously sought to build a society much closer to Jewish society under the Mosaic Law. Winthrop, in fact, sought to build not only a model church but also a model state, legislating laws directly modeled on the Old Testament Torah. Indeed, in the early years there was capital punishment for offenses requiring such a punishment in the Old Testament: worshiping any god besides Jehovah, witchcraft, adultery, sodomy, and kidnapping. It was certainly not a society compatible with modern concepts of almost unrestrained self-indulgence.

The Sabbath was rigidly enforced, with citizens being prohibited even in their own homes from engaging in any activity that might be deemed work, and the civil and ecclesiastical society that Winthrop and his like-minded associates formed enjoyed a system of government that was far more open to broad political participation than in virtually any contemporary community in the Western world. Winthrop began governing the assembly of settlers, with seven “assistants,” in August 1630. In October of 1630, an assembly of “the whole body of the settlers” decided that the “freemen of the colony,” who were all in Massachusetts already, and not the stockholders of the company, should have the power of selecting “assistants” by choice, and selecting from among themselves the governor and the deputy governor. The assistants would in effect form a legislative body that would make laws for the colony. The clergy were strictly prohibited from participating in government.

The late historian Sydney Ahlstrom observed, “The Bay Colony governed itself by the resultant bicameral system without essential modification for over sixty years. To call it a ‘theocracy’ is therefore absurd. Its franchise was wider than England’s, and of all the government in the Western world at the time, that of early Massachusetts gave the clergy least authority.”[108] It was certainly a community that sought to embody what it believed were the set of civil laws closest to what the members thought most pleasing to God for the governance of any civil community, yet it clearly did not embrace the idea that pastors or other church leaders were inherently more qualified to assume governing power than ordinary laypeople.

Attractive as many features of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were, it was certainly no untroubled Christian utopia. There were frequent wars with the Indians—nowadays called Native Americans—who quickly discovered that the colonists had imported notions of land ownership derived from European practice and not at all from North America, where land usage (for hunting or agriculture) was far more important than legal title, a concept that was initially quite alien to the Indian tribes. Native Americans themselves, when they were even noticed, were often referred to condescendingly as “children” or, worse, as Canaanites whom the Puritans—the New Israel—had as much right to displace as the ancient Israelites had the right to displace the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan after the exodus from Egypt.

In fact, one of the first serious political controversies in the Bay Colony was with a brilliant, pious Puritan, Roger Williams, who made it a habit to behave as fairly as possible toward the Indians. Williams offended the leadership of the colony when he insisted that church and state should be entirely separate from each other. Winthrop and Williams liked each other, although their opinions on numerous topics varied widely. Winthrop believed that God had created a covenant with an entire people, the New England settlers. Williams believed that God created covenants only with individual human beings. There should, he thought, be orderly secular rule in society, but the secular authorities had no right at all to interfere with a private individual’s conscience. Williams, moreover, in his Christian theology, essentially believed that the individual conscience was the sole entity entitled to make religious judgments.

To the leadership of the Bay Colony, this was antinomianism, the view that Christians, because they attained righteousness by faith rather than through observance of the law, were not subject to moral laws upheld by any community. It was a dangerous heresy, because it seemed to invite those who upheld its principles to dissent from the behavioral norms of the community. Williams, moreover, seemed in some ways to be what contemporary people call a secularist, since he wanted to banish religion altogether from government. The Puritan settlers believed that no amount of good works could affect a believer’s salvation. God had already decided that question in relation to everyone. But they also believed that there was a covenantal relationship between God and the community. This required the community to craft laws aligned as much as possible with biblical models, which in practice meant Old Testament laws. It also meant that preachers had to be careful to walk a narrow line between asserting the unconditional nature of God’s grace toward individual believers and urging their congregations to hew to community laws and standards that they felt affirmed the community’s covenant relationship with God. The tension between these two positions was to surface forcefully during the case involving Anne Hutchinson.

Winthrop had been deposed from the governorship in 1634 when the freemen of the colony found that the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter required a convening of the General Court four times a year, whereas Winthrop had convened it only once each year. When the freemen discovered what the Charter really said, they voted to depose Winthrop and replace him with the deputy governor, Thomas Dudley. Historian Paul Johnson calls this incident “the first political coup in the history of North America.”[109] Winthrop’s deposition was voted for by the freemen of the colony not only because of his high-handedness in not convening the General Court but also because he had insisted on oaths of personal loyalty to him as governor and had frequently acted autocratically.

The new administration of Dudley and his associates wasted little time before deciding in October 1635 to arrest Roger Williams and deport him to England. It was his close friendship with Winthrop and the fact that Winthrop was no longer the governor that saved him. Winthrop was aware of what had been decided in council, so he secretly sent word to warn Williams to flee from the Bay Colony to Providence, in what is now Rhode Island. It was a narrow and harrowing escape, for Williams had to flee from Plymouth, where he had been a preacher, in the snows of winter.

The confrontation of the Bay Colony leadership with Williams was followed shortly afterward by the Anne Hutchinson affair. She had arrived in the colony as an immigrant in 1634 and was heavily influenced by the preacher John Cotton. She was a highly intelligent woman and a gifted speaker. Before long, she was conducting prayer meetings first for women, then for listeners of both sexes, in her home. Her views generally agreed with Puritan orthodoxy, but she was forceful and articulate in expressing her opinion on the need for a greater participation of women in Puritan society. Where she parted company with the Puritan preachers and civilian leaders of the colony was in her objection to sermons calling for closer obedience to civil law as a part of honoring the “second” covenant (of the community with God). She considered this emphasis as denoting a “works-based” righteousness. Christians, she felt, could sin freely without necessarily endangering their salvation.

In 1637 she was brought to a civil trial before the General Court of Massachusetts, presided over by John Winthrop, who had been re-elected governor the previous year. Though she answered the charges against her with wit and skill, it was clear that the opinion of the court was already set. What ensured that she would be found guilty was her insistence that she could determine God’s will simply by listening to the Holy Spirit and without regard to God’s Word, the Bible. In the views of the Puritan leadership, she was a potentially dangerous disturber of the peace. When she was excommunicated from the Puritan Church for dissenting from orthodoxy and banished from the community, she decided in March of 1638 to accept the invitation of Roger Williams to find refuge in Providence.

The weaknesses of the Puritan settlement in New England are obvious: the disdainful and sometimes criminally wrong treatment of Native Americans, the intolerance of dissenting theological views, and the quest for legalistic righteousness that inevitably often led to pride. Yet it is absurd to apply twentieth-century values—they didn’t provide full liberation for women, they had slaves—to the seventeenth-century community of Christian believers who immigrated to America. Every community in every age has glaring weaknesses, usually conferred by the social and political prejudices of the age. We often don’t notice these shortcomings until the generations that exhibited them are long since departed. Yet Professors Noll, Hatch, and Marsden, in their Search for Christian America, make the assertion that the thoughts and actions of the Puritans in New England “do not lead to the conclusion that there was once a properly Christian nation.”[110]

What is “properly Christian”? Prior to 1620 there had been no known civil compact anywhere in Christendom that involved the willing mutual submission of all the members of a community. It is clear that after the arrival of Winthrop and the Puritans in 1630, the inhabitants of the New England colonies were picking their way through the minefield of how to live a Christian life in a society comprised of sinners. They made many mistakes, especially by acting harshly towards Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Yet they sought to preserve the structure of a civil community that was elected by constituent members and at the same time be reserved in making theological judgments about other members of the community. It is surely unreasonable to apply to seventeenth-century English settlers in a sometimes hostile North America the standards and values we now take for granted in our comfortable lives.

In fact, Noll, Hatch, and Marsden appear to contradict their own dismissal of the early New England settlers as not “properly Christian” when they add, a little later in their text, that “there is at least one major area where a case can be made for just such a conclusion” (that the settlers were “properly Christian”). This, they say, “is the area of general moral influence in helping to create a law-abiding citizenry with a strong conscience. . . . Although the exact connections are impossible to document definitively, it does appear that Americans were generally well disposed to obey the civil law, to play by the rules in the democratic process and to bring their actions and those of others under moral review.”[111] That sounds “properly Christian” to me. The Puritans, surely, came to have this influence because they consistently attempted to live their lives by the highest standards of Christian conduct as they perceived them to be. Christian piety rather than any other religious activity seems to have gotten them that way.

Mark Noll, a member of the trio of scholars who wrote The Search for Christian America, has acquired some prominence on his own through his work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, so it might be thought the phrase “properly Christian” implied in his mind intellectual acuity, whereas, by implication, the Puritans perhaps lacked this. But while evangelical Christians in contemporary America have sometimes had a reputation for not being intellectually up to snuff, whatever shortcomings the Puritans undoubtedly displayed, absence of intellect or educational attainment was not one of them. It is the consensus, in fact, of many historians that the Puritan period of American history was one of exceptional commitment by the community to the principle of learning. Harvard College, later to become Harvard University, was founded in 1636 to provide high academic training for the preachers that the Puritans wanted in their community. It is surely therefore significant that a secular historian, the late Richard Hofstadter, said of the Puritans, “It is doubtful that any community ever had more faith in the value of learning and the intellect than Massachusetts Bay. . . . Among the first generation of American puritans, men of learning were both numerous and honored. . . . These Puritan emigrants [from England] expected their clergy to be distinguished for scholarship, and during the entire colonial period all but five percent of the clergymen of New England Congregational churches had college degrees.”[112]

Nor should it be thought that Harvard College and other academic institutions that grew up during the Puritan period were narrowly focused theological factories. “In fact,” Hofstadter adds, “the Oxford and Cambridge colleges which trained the men who founded Harvard College had long since been thoroughly infused with humanist scholarship. The founding fathers of colonial education saw no difference between the basic education appropriate for a cleric and that appropriate for any other liberally educated man. The idea of a distinctively theological seminary is a product of modern specialism, sectarian competition, and of a reaction to the threat of secularism in the colleges.”[113] If being “properly Christian” implies warm enthusiasm for learning and academic attainment, the Puritans certainly qualified as “properly Christian.”

Tragedies and Failures

Yet the combination of academic talent and theological zeal did not always have a happy result in Puritan New England. One of the most notorious incidents was the Salem witch trials of 1692. The basic facts of the case are not in dispute. Two young girls who were daughters of the vicar of Salem were thought to have a case of “hysteria.” On investigation, they reported that they had been listening attentively to the mysterious tales of a black slave called Tituba. Under pressure of the investigation, Tituba said that she had been a “servant of Satan.” The girls also implicated other members of the community, who immediately fell under suspicion of witchcraft. Hysteria over the possible presence of witches in the community led to a hasty series of investigations and the convening of a special court. Trials were held after a few months, leading to the execution of twenty people convicted of witchcraft. This sociopathology mercifully died out by October 1692, and in time the Massachusetts General Court issued an apology to the relatives of the executed and granted indemnities.

A major factor in the change of heart in Massachusetts from witch-hunting hysteria to restored common sense was the return from England of Increase Mather, a learned Puritan dignitary who was the president of Harvard College. In this affair, though, he was strongly at odds with his son Cotton Mather, a brilliant and prolific writer who had himself graduated from Harvard and was interested in medicine. Cotton Mather had a large library of books on astrology and the paranormal, and he believed in the phenomenon of witches.

The tragedy of the Salem witchcraft trials was that it was a case of mass hysteria largely fueled by political, and indeed criminal, vindictiveness on the part of less-educated laypeople. The deaths of twenty people because of hysterical public persecution were tragic, but the trials need to be kept in perspective relative to other spasms of anti-witch hysteria elsewhere. In the entire Puritan period of dominance in New England—say from 1630 to the end of the seventeenth century—there were thirty-four executions for witchcraft (including the ones at Salem). In Scotland during the same period, by contrast, there were one hundred times as many executions for witchcraft.[114] Some historians have noted how rapidly and completely the Puritan establishment admitted the error of their earlier hysteria and offered apology and compensation to their victims. “What strikes the historian, however,” writes one commentator, “is not just the intensity of the self-delusion, by no means unusual for the age, but the speed of the recovery from it in the autumn [of 1692], and the anxiety of the local government and society to confess wrongdoing, to make reparation and search for the truth. That indeed was uncommon in any age. In the late 17th century it was perhaps more remarkable than the hysteria itself and a good augury for America’s future as a humane and truth-seeking commonwealth.”[115] Perhaps “the area of general moral influence in helping to create a law-abiding citizenry with a strong conscience”—the area of Puritan moral worth conceded by the Noll-Hatch-Marsden team—was most clearly in evidence in the speed with which the injustices and misjudgments of the Salem witch trials were reversed.

By the end of the seventeenth century the spiritual enthusiasm of many of the original Puritan settlers and their families had dimmed somewhat. In addition, the increasing wealth of all the colonies sometimes tended either to crowd out religious zeal or to temper it with the trappings of prosperity and respectability. The European Enlightenment, though not yet in full flower, was also progressively altering the theological landscape of New England. Deism and Unitarianism were beginning to make an appearance, particularly in New England. In addition, the morals and habits of young people were being affected by some local customs that caught on in New England families. One of them was “bundling,” which was the sleeping together in the same bed of young people of the opposite sex, partially clothed, and with the permission of the parents. It was supposed to enable young people to get to know each other better. It certainly did this, but not surprisingly, it also created an increase in unplanned pregnancies.[116]

The Great Awakening

It was in this setting that the pastor of a Congregationalist Church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards, became the herald of a widespread movement of local-level evangelism that became known as the Great Awakening. Edwards is widely regarded as one of the first-rate minds in the whole of American history, and he believed passionately in God’s grace and the need for personal conversion. He also clearly believed that America—or at least the New England colonies of his day—had a Christian destiny. The author of several books on various aspects of God’s mercy and goodness, he has become most famous in history for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In it he spoke of “the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.”[117]

The intent of this sermon, of course, was to provoke his listeners to repentance and to a change of life, but it would be wrong to imagine that Edwards was morbidly preoccupied with God’s wrath. He was concerned with what he considered a general decline in religious seriousness and the excessive partying of young people. He preached against both vigorously. In 1733 a religious revival broke out, then spread to other towns, and by the end of the decade much of New England had been transformed because of the dramatic effect it had on people’s lifestyles. Edwards was fascinated by the fruits of personal conversion, and he wrote the book A Faithful Narrative to describe specific conversions in his own parish. Yet the real power of the Great Awakening to arouse whole communities was not fully seen until the visit of English evangelist George Whitefield in 1739 and 1740. In many respects the conviction that America indeed had a “Christian” destiny grew out of the New England revivals presided over by Whitefield.

In 1739 Whitefield preached to crowds of several thousand people up and down the East Coast of America. In one of the more unusual friendships of the eighteenth century in America, Whitefield became very close to one of the American Revolution’s most famous figures, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, of course, was a Deist and in no way enthusiastic for Whitefield’s theology. But he had seen Whitefield successfully address with his unassisted voice an audience of eight thousand people in Philadelphia and believed that he was capable of being heard by up to thirty thousand. The author of Poor Richard’s Almanac disagreed with Whitefield’s theology—Franklin never moved on to orthodox Christian belief from his Deism—but, having come out of a Puritan background in his childhood, strongly supported the morality and sense of fair play that he felt the Puritans had brought to America. Franklin believed in a God who guided the affairs of nations, and Franklin was a strong supporter of religion as a guide to moral behavior. To support Whitefield, Franklin published all of Whitefield’s sermons and journals. He also provided a witty account of Whitefield’s skill as a speaker, admitting that he had been seduced by Whitefield’s oratory into contributing far more to a church collection plate than he had intended.[118]

Whitefield’s preaching in the open air did not derive from his being a compulsive outdoorsman. Because of his exclusion from many churches in North America, Whitefield took to preaching in fields, marketplaces, and other open areas, complete with a portable folding oak pulpit. This earned him the moniker of a “mob preacher,” meaning that he was reaching out to all the rougher segments of society as well as to its respectable members.

The Great Awakening displeased much of the ecclesiastical establishment of the Congregational Church in New England. Though Whitefield was an ordained member of the Church of England, its senior prelates disapproved of Whitefield’s dramatic and often emotional preaching style. The Congregationalists, far more numerous than the Anglicans in Massachusetts, closed the doors of their churches to him and his like-minded fellow evangelists. Those who supported Edwards and his evangelicalism were called by contemporaries “New Lights,” while those who opposed it were called “Old Lights.” New converts to Edwards’s zealous evangelistic approach to life were often called, on both sides of the Atlantic, “enthusiasts.” The term had a connotation as equally derogatory as the term “fundamentalist” when employed today to negatively label evangelical Christians. Edwards was recognized as a brilliant thinker and expositor of Christian doctrine, but he was the target of sharp and sometimes intemperate criticism from his clerical colleagues even though he brought masses of previously unchurched Americans into the habits of Bible reading, democratic assembly led by laypeople, and an indifference to social hierarchy that was far-reaching in its impact.

In the nineteenth century, historians began to acknowledge that there had indeed been a great religious stirring in New England in the decades from 1730 onwards, the first acknowledgment of the Great Awakening. It was then an easy leap to the view that the Great Awakening might have had an important role in preparing Americans for the ordeal of the struggle for independence from England. The revival taught vigorously that all men were equal and in equal need of salvation, and it encouraged Americans to make their own judgments about their faith based on their reading of the Bible. Harvard historian Alan Heimert argues in Religion and the American Mind that the spirit of the Great Awakening became the vital force behind the American Revolution. “Calvinism,” says Heimert, “and Edwards provided pre-Revolutionary America with a radical, and even democratic and social ideology, and evangelical religion embodied, and inspired, a thrust towards American nationalism.”[119]

How Christian?

When the argument about the state of American Christianity at the time of the American Revolution comes up, it falls into four general categories:

1. How many Americans attended church at the time of the Revolution?
2. How “Christian” was the behavior of Americans, given that the vice of slavery was widely practiced in America?
3. How many, and which, of the Founders were evangelical or at least self-consciously professing and outspoken Christians?
4. How much “Christian” content is in the founding documents?

Noll, Hatch, and Marsden, the most evangelical of the skeptics on the issue of the degree of “Christianness” in the American colonies at the time of the Revolution, make several points. They argue, for example, that church membership may never have amounted to more than one third of the New England population, and that in some of the southern counties it probably did not rise above 5 percent. They also argue that the Revolutionary period “was marked by declining concern for church, weakness in evangelicalism, and general spiritual lassitude. Not until the local revivals in Virginia and Connecticut in the 1780s, which anticipated the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, did Christianity show marked gains in the new United States.” Finally, they make the important point that the closest followers of Jonathan Edwards disagreed strongly with many of the views of the patriots for the understandable reason that the patriots seemed to care much about their own freedom but not at all for that of American slaves.[120]

The view of Christian fervor in decline at the time of the Revolution, however, is strongly disputed by other authorities. According to James Hutson, chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress and author of several works on the Revolutionary period, the view that religion by 1700 had reached a sort of decline, which may not have been permanently reversed by the Great Awakening, is incorrect. It is not true, Hutson says, that religion had died out by 1700 or had basically acquiesced to the views of the Enlightenment by the time of the Revolution. Hutson continues, “This view is wrong, say recent authorities: according to one expert, religion in the eighteenth century was actually in the ‘ascension rather than the declension’ and another scholar sees a ‘rising vitality in religious life’ from 1700 onward; a third goes even further and finds religion in many parts of the colonies in a state of ‘feverish growth.’”[121]

The issue of the acceptance of the existence of slavery by most of the patriots is an important failing of their collective Christian conscience. There were, of course, patriots who vociferously opposed slavery, and did so after the Revolution had been won and the latest question in dispute was the nature of the United States Constitution. But the general blindness to the evil of slavery reflects a broadly accepted social convention of the time, deplorable though it may be to us, in much the same way that most of the Christian world accepted the general imposition of limits to the public role of women until acceptance in the twentieth century of women’s rights to vote and to be involved in politics.

Faith of the Founders

One of the most detailed recent studies of the one hundred or so men who signed either the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or both is contained in Michael Novak’s On Two Wings. He writes,

Virtually all the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution were churchgoing men. Several were ministers or chaplains, others had trained to become ministers, and still others were conspicuously learned in religion. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration, 34 were Anglican, 13 were Congregationalist (once known as Puritans), 6 Presbyterian, and one each Baptist, Catholic, and Quaker. The proportions regarding the Constitution were nearly the same.[122]

Without question, some of the founders were ardent evangelical Christians and earnestly desired to be part of the founding of a Christian nation. Among the most conspicuous, of course, was Patrick Henry of Virginia. According to Thomas Kidd, author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, “revolutionary writers and orators like Patrick Henry and even religious skeptics like Tom Paine self-consciously employed an evangelical style to motivate their audiences.”[123] It was true then, as it is today, that ordinary people could be moved by evangelical rhetoric without themselves subscribing to evangelical Christian belief. Yet Kidd argues that not only Henry’s verbal style but also his beliefs about liberty “arose from the Great Awakening. Henry and other Patriots, even if they might not have been ardent church-goers, sometimes absorbed in a rhetorical sense Protestant idea of resistance that would directly influence the American Revolution.”[124]

What held together the wide variety of founders, despite the variety of their degrees of belief or unbelief in Christian orthodoxy, was, first, the view that in some respects Providence had been at work in the midst of their struggle to constitute a new republic. Americans, many patriots felt and said, constituted “a new Israel,” a special people marked out by Providence for future greatness. Second, Americans shared a conviction that freedom of conscience was bestowed on all human beings by the Almighty. Third, many Americans at the time of the Revolution felt that the future safety of the republic they were making would be dependent on the virtue of the citizenry.

It was the avowed Deist Benjamin Franklin who articulated the providential aspect of the American Revolution. In 1784 he said, “If it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined” in the Revolution.[125] The leader of the American Revolutionary armies and America’s first president, George Washington, was reticent about his personal Christian beliefs. He was an Anglican, but along with many Anglicans of his day, when he went to church he did not take communion. But Washington was not reluctant to bring Providence into his explanations for the success of the Revolution. On being appointed, reluctantly, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in 1776, Washington confided in a letter to his wife Martha that “It [had] been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service. . . . I shall rely, therefore, confidently on that Providence which has heretofore preserved and been bountiful to me.”[126]

In his first Thanksgiving proclamation after becoming president in 1789, Washington called the people of the United States “to the Service of that Great and glorious being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”[127] This was a formulation that might sound unnecessarily grandiloquent to most people today, but it was certainly recognizable to any churchgoing Christians as falling within Christian doctrinal orthodoxy. Washington never spelled out the extent of his Christian beliefs, but when he wrote to the Hebrew congregation of Savannah, Georgia, in response to their congratulations on his inauguration as president, possibly in the year 1789, Washington clearly identified “Providence” as the God of the Hebrews in the Bible. In fact, Washington specifically identified Americans as heirs to the chosen people whom Moses led out of Egypt into the Promised Land. “May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose Providential Agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent Nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporarily and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.”[128]

The most forceful and influential articulation of the view of Providence as being involved in America’s Revolution was that given by John Witherspoon, then president of Princeton, on May 17, 1776. His sermon became famous soon after its delivery and was reprinted and distributed in more than five hundred Presbyterian churches throughout the colonies. His view of Providence was sophisticated and has parallels, according to scholar Michael Novak, with that of Thomas Aquinas. The doctrine of Providence, Witherspoon said in the sermon, “extends not only to things which we may think of great moment, and therefore worthy of notice, but to things the most indifferent and inconsiderable.” Witherspoon said he thought that Providence didn’t manipulate people like puppets but operated through the vagaries of nature. Thus, he said, an enemy might be rendered irresolute through the assault on its commanding general of a bout of dysentery. Witherspoon added, “I think I may say with truth that there is hardly any step which they [the British] have taken, if it has operated strongly against themselves, and been more in our favor, than if they had followed a contrary course.”[129]

John Adams, the second president and in many ways the architect of American independence, began his professional career with the intention of possibly becoming a clergyman. His theology became less evangelical with the passage of time, however, and though an ardent churchgoer, he ended his days as a Unitarian. Adams nevertheless subscribed to a providential view of America’s beginnings. “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” he wrote, “as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind over all the earth.”[130] Despite the steady erosion of his faith in Christian evangelical principles, Adams remained a consistent champion of the Christian faith as a bulwark of right behavior in society. “The Christian religion,” he wrote in his diary on July 26, 1796, “is above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity. . . . It is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man.”[131]

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams was more outspokenly evangelical as the events developed that led to the American Declaration of Independence. But it is interesting that even before Thomas Jefferson penned the document, Samuel Adams was expressing a natural law version of a Creator God much closer to the Deist concept of God—which was Jefferson’s at the time—than to common evangelical usage. “All men,” he said, “are equally bound by the laws of nature, or to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator. They are imprinted by the finger of God on the heart of man . . . and confirmed by written revelation.”[132] Thus Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration—“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—was a politically realistic blend of several streams of the religious thought of the Revolutionary generation, from committed Christian to Deist.

Samuel Adams actually signed the Declaration, as most of the delegates to the convention did, on August 2, 1776. After signing but before leaving Philadelphia, he made an impromptu speech that expressed his own view of the independence struggle in theological terms. He declared, “We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious eye beholds his subjects assuming that freedom . . . which he bestowed on them. From the rising to the setting sun, may His kingdom come.”[133]

The concept of liberty as a God-given quality was not limited to the thinking of evangelicals or theologically conservative Christians. Virtually all the founders believed that the Jewish and Christian religions were the principal foundations of republican liberties. Thomas Jefferson, who described himself as a Unitarian follower of Jesus but was really either a Unitarian (in his later years) or a Deist, said, “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?”[134]

In Kidd’s view in God of Liberty, some “Patriots posited an almost unbreakable link between Christianity and republican government—a bond best articulated by leading Patriot and physician Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia.”[135] After the adoption of the Constitution, Rush said, “The only foundation for a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”[136] But Rush became more liberal in his theological views and eventually became a Universalist (someone who believes everyone will be saved, whether Christian not).

There was enormous variety in the theological views of the supporters of the American Revolution in New England from evangelical through Deist. What all proponents of American independence held in common in their theology, however, was the conviction that America, in its rebellion against perceived tyranny, now had a special compact with the Almighty.

One of Boston’s most conspicuously liberal pastors (from a theological perspective) was Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of West Church in Boston. Mayhew was quite theological in his support of America’s revolution, deeming it a “glorious” Christian duty to resist tyranny.[137] America’s Tories (those who wanted the independence rebellion suppressed), meanwhile, identified religious affections themselves as a leading cause of the rebellion against George III. They particularly denounced local New England clergymen for allowing themselves to become the dupes, as they thought, of incendiaries like Samuel Adams. These observers concluded that certain of the colonies’ religious denominations were, by doctrine and tradition, inherently subversive and could never coexist with monarchical government.[138] Thomas Jefferson, the favorite president of many Americans, would have agreed with this Tory complaint. “Pulpit oratory” he said constituted “‘a shock of electricity’ through the whole colony.”[139] A British agent in New York in March of 1776 concluded that “at Bottom [this] was very much a religious war.” James Hutson cites a British historian, J. C. D. Clark, who has called the American Revolution “the last great war of religion in the western world.”[140]

Twentieth-century observers of the great sequence of events that led not only to the Declaration of Independence but also to the drafting and signing of the Constitution of the United States often claim to see a continuum reflecting the hand of the Almighty. These two documents, such scholars and observers argue, reveal evidence that Christianity played a major role in shaping the thinking of America at the moments it formally became a nation. Yet many historians have noted a sharp difference between the “Christian components” of the mood of the Continental Congress, which provided legislative authority for the implementation of the Constitution in 1789, and the Constitutional Convention itself. It is hard to dispute the point that the Continental Congress was significantly more alert to spiritual issues than the Constitutional Convention, even though the man charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was not even an orthodox Christian.

The first Continental Congress, meeting from September to late October of 1774, consisted of fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies who met in response to British reprisals against the Boston Tea Party and were determined to discuss collectively their grievances against Great Britain. The second Congress, which convened in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, was assembling after the clashes at Lexington and Concord. The War of Independence had already begun, and people’s lives were in serious danger. It was, of course, under the auspices of the second Congress that the Declaration of Independence was signed.

The Congress’s first appeal to its constituents was on June 12, 1775, when it called for a national day of “public humiliation, fasting and prayer,” set to begin five weeks later, on July 20. Throughout the Continental Congress’s life before the Constitution was adopted, the several subsequent fast days (usually in March of every year) and Thanksgiving Day (usually in late summer) proclamations showed, in the view of one historian, “how Congress, guided by covenant theology, drew the roadmap for regaining God’s favor. The first requirement was that the American people recognize God’s overruling Providence.”[141]

The Continental Congress was particularly concerned for the godly demeanor of the army. The Articles of War governing the conduct of the Continental Army, adopted on June 30, 1775, and revised and expanded on September 20, 1776, devoted three of the four articles in the first section to the religious nurture of the troops.[142] James Hutson writes, “It is difficult to overemphasize Congress’s concern for the spiritual condition of the armed forces, for the covenant mentality convinced it that irreligion in the ranks was, of all places, the most dangerous, for God might directly punish a backsliding military with defeat, extinguishing in the process American independence.”[143] Congress expressed anxiety in the fast day proclamation of December 11, 1776, recommending “in the most earnest manner” to “officers civil and military under them, the exercise of repentance and reformation; and further, require of them the strict observation of the articles of war, and particularly that part of the said article, which forbids profane swearing, and all immorality.”[144]

Washington himself paid special attention to the demeanor of the troops, asking officers to conduct prayers with the men. His first order as commander of the Continental Army was against blasphemy, drunkenness, and gambling. On July 4, 1775, Washington issued an order “that most earnestly requires and expects a due observance of those articles of war established for the government of the army, which forbid profane cursing, swearing, and drunkenness. And in like manner he requires and expects of all the officers and soldiers, not engaged in actual duty; a punctual attendance on Divine service, to implore the blessing of Heaven upon the means used for our safety and defense.”[145]

Does this suggest that Washington and the members of the Continental Congress were unusually pious? Not at all. It simply means that, even though church attendance may have been rather low at the time of the Revolution and very few Americans were strict Calvinists in their theology, the lessons of covenant theology were deeply rooted in most Americans of that day who considered themselves Christian. Whether they attended church faithfully or not, most of them readily took to the idea that God has a special purpose for America. Was the country “exceptional”? Americans at the time of the Revolution probably would have been unsure of that particular term, but many of them felt that it probably was, by divine providence.

Virtue was a concept of classical antiquity that was not very different from Christian concepts of selflessness and truthfulness. James Hutson, the Library of Congress historian we have already encountered, believes that the revolutionary generation often conflated virtue itself with Christian morality and assumed that virtue was best promoted by Christianity. Hutson writes: “The following syllogism imprinted itself so strongly on the minds of the Founders that it became a cliché: religion promoted virtue; virtue promoted republicanism; religion promoted, and was indispensable for republicanism. In the words of Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), Christianity was ‘the strong ground of republicanism . . . many of its concepts have for their objects republican liberty and equality as well as simplicity, integrity, and economy in government.’” Timothy Dwight, who was to become the president of Yale College and repeatedly warned Yale students and church audiences against the dangers of the “infidel philosophy” of the French Revolution, said of Christian moral and religious instructions, “It makes good men and good men must be good citizens.”[146]

Several in the revolutionary generation were quick to draw the connection between moral behavior and the traditional Christian belief in rewards and punishments in the afterlife. Irenaeus, a Revolutionary-era editorialist who used the name of an early church father, wrote in 1780 that “the belief in future state of rewards and punishments” was absolutely “necessary for the well being of civil society,” for “we shall find that persons are often restrained from gross immoralities by the fear of future miseries, when civil penalties prove insufficient for that purpose.”[147] Indeed, as one of the best informed historians on religion in the revolutionary period points out, “The Christian system of behavioral incentives/disincentives seemed to be so essential for the maintenance of social order that several states—Pennsylvania (1776), Vermont (1777), South Carolina (1778) and Tennessee (1796)—prohibited individuals from voting or holding office who denied a future state of rewards and punishments.”[148] A writer in the Virginia Independent Chronicle of 1784 editorialized: “Mankind [sic] have generally speaking, enacted laws to restrain and punish enormities, to countenance virtue and discourage vice: yet the most approved and wisest legislators in all ages, in order to give efficacy to their civil institutions, have found it necessary to call in the aid of religion; and in no form of government whatever has the influence of religious principles been found so requisite as in that of a republic.”[149]

There was an almost universal agreement among the founders on what constituted virtue and what constituted vice, regardless of the differences among them on points of strict theology. This explains the apparent oddity of Thomas Jefferson’s behavior. A Deist with sympathies for some of the most radical ideas of the French Revolution in the late 1780s and the 1790s, when president he became one of the most ardent of America’s chief executives ever to encourage churchgoing as a civic virtue. Some people believe that Jefferson underwent a sort of conversion to Unitarian Christianity after reading in 1793 a book by Joseph Priestley, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. In any event, Jefferson was not shy in openly saying that he was a Christian: “I am a Christian,” he wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1803, “in the only sense in which he [Jesus] wished any one to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed other.”[150]

During his presidency, Jefferson assiduously attended church services in the original chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. One anecdote about his allegedly being challenged by a clergyman who encountered him en route to the church service is revealing. “You going to church?” the Reverend Ethan Allen reportedly asked Jefferson. “You do not believe a word in it.” Jefferson did not contradict the comment but responded, “No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning, Sir.”[151]

The church services held in the Capitol, with Jefferson regularly attending, were by today’s standards surprisingly ecumenical. Preachers on any Sunday ranged from denominations such as Anglicans or Presbyterians, Swedenborgians, Quakers, Unitarians, Baptists, and even Roman Catholics. James Hutson emphasizes how significant it was that Jefferson helped make federal government property available for different church groups. “It is no exaggeration to say that, on Sundays in Washington during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the state became the church.”[152] In January of 1806, Jefferson and fellow congregants listened to a thunderous message on the need to be “born again” from Dorothy Ripley, an English preacher who traveled across the Atlantic several times to evangelize the Americans. Apparently no great fuss was made about the fact that a woman was preaching in the church, but when the House of Representatives elected a Unitarian as chaplain and invited him to preach in 1821, an Episcopalian priest complained that the Unitarian had “expelled Jesus Christ from the House.”[153]

How does the striking evidence of Jefferson’s approval of the use of federal property for Christian church services square with the famous and much-quoted Jefferson pronouncement, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in January 1802, on the need for “a wall of separation” between church and state? In the letter, frequently cited by the Supreme Court in the twentieth century, Jefferson made it clear that he did not proclaim fasts and thanksgivings as his predecessors in office, including George Washington, had done. The speculation is that, while making a philosophical statement that justified his refusal to announce national religious events, Jefferson didn’t want to alienate pious New England Christians who had helped vote him into office. Accordingly, two days after writing to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson attended church in the House of Representatives, and he was a regular and frequent church attender for the remainder of his presidency.[154]

Jefferson had campaigned for the presidency in 1800 in the face of harsh accusations from political opponents that he was an “infidel” and even an atheist. If he ever had been such, he certainly wasn’t by the time he became president. On New Year’s Day in 1802 he had received at the White House a gift of a gigantic block of cheese, weighing 1,235 pounds in all, from Cheshire, Massachusetts, on the instructions of a leading evangelical Baptist of the day, Rev. John Leland. Many Baptists, including Leland, had supported Jefferson for the presidency in the election of 1800 because they deemed that a political alliance with a suspected Deist was the best guarantee for religious freedom for Baptists. As late as the 1770s, Baptists in Virginia, a predominantly Anglican state, had been not only dunked in water in mockery of the rite of baptism but in at least one instance actually beaten to death. Historian Thomas Kidd writes that the cheese symbolized one of the strangest, but most significant political and cultural alliances of the early post-Independence nation: “an unlikely alliance of evangelicals, Enlightenment liberals, and deists, working together to win religious freedom.”[155]

That religious freedom, of course, did not become protected by federal law until the ratification of the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1789. But the Constitutional Convention itself reflected a very different mood—one of self-confidence in the ability of the new nation to survive—from the Continental Congresses that had issued countless calls to prayer and fasting in the 1770s. In fact, several attendees of the Convention, as well as others, complained that despite the apparently divine blessing on the American Revolutionary effort, the Constitution itself made no reference to the Almighty. “Many pious people,” Benjamin Rush said to John Adams in 1789, “wish the name of the Supreme Being had been introduced somewhere in the new Constitution.” Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, observed, “We found the Constitution without any acknowledgment of God; without any recognition of his mercies to us . . . or even of his existence. The Convention, by which it was formed, never asked, even once, his direction of his blessing upon their labours.”[156]

Many Americans since the time of the Constitution have been puzzled in the same way. It is revealing that Benjamin Franklin, the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention, reproved his fellow delegates on June 28, 1787, soon after the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia, for forgetting “their powerful Friend” (God) who had helped guide the Americans to victory. “I have lived a long time,” Franklin told the Convention, “and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. . . . We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that ‘except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that, without his concurrent Aid, we shall succeed in this Political building no better than the Builders of Babel.” Franklin, consistent with his comments, moved that “Prayers, imploring the Assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our Deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning.” The motion failed, possibly because the Convention did not possess funds to pay a chaplain.[157]

Toward the end of the Convention, however, sentiment in favor of a thanksgiving proclamation surfaced once more. On September 25, 1789, Elias Boudinot, a member of the Continental Congress and later the first House of Representatives, told his fellow delegates to the Convention that “he could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings that He poured down upon them.” Boudinot moved that the House and Senate request the president “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many signal favors of Almighty God.”

Only two congressmen went on record as opposing Boudinot’s motion, both of whom took the position that Congress was prescribed from doing this by the Bill of Rights it had just passed. Congressman Roger Sherman responded that examples of national thanksgiving had precedents in “Holy Writ,” in itself a comment that implied, without anyone’s contradicting him, that “Holy Writ” was an accepted belief of the vast majority of the Congress. In consequence, on October 3, 1789, George Washington issued a proclamation recommending that the American people thank God on November 26 for “his single and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence” as well as plead with God to “pardon our national and other transgressions.”[158]

Washington, as we have seen, was not at all a Deist but believed that God answered prayer and that Christian behavior was a prerequisite for decent republican society and government. In his farewell address to the American people on September 19, 1796, Washington delivered his most famous—and frequently quoted—pronouncement on the subject. The speech was originally drafted by Alexander Hamilton, but the final version of it was Washington’s. He wrote,

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it be simply asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?[159]

The farewell address, of course, has traditionally been closely examined to discern what Washington’s major political concerns may have been for the future stability of the independent American state. For example, many commentators have focused on Washington’s injunction to the country he had just finished governing to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and have thereby been emboldened to criticize key American alliances since World War II such as NATO. But probably a more fundamental precept on behavior toward foreign nations is contained in these words:

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it—It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! Is it rendered impossible by its vices?[160]

Washington’s immediate successor, John Adams, was a man of evolving theology who nevertheless described himself as a churchgoing man. But as Washington had done before him, and Jefferson was to do after him, Adams gave strong rhetorical support to religion. “Statesmen may plan and speculate for Liberty,” he said, “but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”[161] In his inaugural address, Adams said that he considered “a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for public service.”[162] He was careful, however, not to suggest that this amounted to a necessary qualification for political responsibility, which would have been in contradiction of Article Six of the Constitution that there be “no religious test.” Adams continued as president the fast-day proclamations that the Continental Congress had initiated. When war seemed imminent between the United States and France in 1798, Adams issued a proclamation for a fast on March 23 of that year. The country, he thought, once again needed to repent. “All religious congregations,” he said, ought “with the deepest humility, acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly charged as individuals and as a nation; beseeching Him at the same time, of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our offences, and to incline us, by His Holy Spirit to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor and heavenly benediction.”[163] War was narrowly avoided. Someone, perhaps, was listening.

After Adams, Thomas Jefferson was, as we have already noticed, a demonstrative public supporter of religion, whether or not he personally believed Christian doctrines. More than any other early American president, he was fascinated by the person and teachings of Jesus, even if he considered many Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth of Jesus, to be mere fables. Long after he had stepped down from the presidency, Jefferson in retirement at Monticello worked on what became known as the Jefferson Bible or, more formally, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. The manuscript was never published in Jefferson’s lifetime, and only in the past decade has the manuscript become available for public scrutiny at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. In essence, Jefferson took a sharp knife to the text of the four Gospels and compiled his own narrative from the text, making sure that he literally cut out any parts of the Gospel narrative that referred to miraculous events.

Jefferson’s successor in the office of the presidency, James Madison, is historically significant for American religion because he was not only the “Father of the Constitution” but the “Father of the First Amendment,” which both protects Americans from government imposition of religious practices and beliefs and protects citizens in their right to choose whichever way they want to worship or not worship (the “free exercise” clause). Madison, however, had already played a historically significant role in the shaping of American religious practice when, in the Virginia General Assembly in 1784, he opposed a bill by Virginia legislator Patrick Henry “establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian religion.” The bill was nondiscriminatory and merely asked citizens to pay a tax to support the religious denomination of their choice. In fact, it would have brought Virginia in line with many other colonies that had supported the established church with the financial assistance of the state until well into the nineteenth century.

But the odd-couple alliance of evangelical Baptists with theologically liberal Christians and Deists, already mentioned above in relation to the Jefferson-John Leland alliance, was adamantly opposed to the Patrick Henry bill. Opponents of the bill believed that state establishment of religion was not far removed from the monarchical system of government that Americans had opposed in fighting for independence. Though many Virginians in 1784 supported the bill, including George Washington and John Marshall, it was derailed when its chief proponent, Patrick Henry, was sidelined from the legislature by being promoted to governor. Opposition to it was then successfully mobilized, and it was defeated in the autumn of 1785.[164]

An overwhelming majority of Americans believed in the social value of Christianity in the first few years after the Revolution, even if not all of them accepted orthodox doctrines. A few prominent Americans, after independence, were nevertheless sharply hostile to Christianity in any form. One assault on the Christian faith was Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, published in 1794. This was a sharp attack on the Bible and on key Christian doctrines like the resurrection and the virgin birth, doctrines to which Jefferson himself was opposed and which came under attack in his own treatise on Christianity previously discussed.

What offended many American Christians at the time was Paine’s intemperate irreverence. Paine was a Deist, not an atheist, and he had been led to go to France by his antipathy towards the atheists and the atheistic direction in which he thought the French Revolution was headed. But Paine’s work briefly touched off a flurry of conspiratorial theories about unbelief in the United States as, supposedly, the product of subversive attempts of European revolutionaries to undermine both American republican democracy and Christianity. Yale’s President Timothy Dwight warned darkly in 1798, “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”[165]

Revival

Dwight need not have worried. America was on the brink of a series of Christian revivals that were to extend well into the nineteenth century and were to shape the national culture decisively. The Second Great Awakening, broadly speaking, is associated with revival movements that began in Connecticut in 1797 and spread throughout New England. At Yale College, there were reported to be fifteen long-lasting revivals between 1800 and 1840.[166] The most famous outbreak of religious zeal, however, took place in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Up to seventy-five thousand people gathered for preaching and prayer meetings that lasted sometimes for days at a time.

These revivals apparently resulted in marked social effects. One teacher traveling in Kentucky in 1802, at the height of the revivals there, was struck by the change in manners of the region. What had once apparently been a wild and lawless place had become transformed. “I found Kentucky the most moral place I have ever been in,” he said. “A religious awe seemed to pervade the country.” The same change of behavior, he reported, was noticeable in South Carolina after revivals there. “Drunkards,” he continued, “have become more sober and orderly—bruisers, bullies, and blackguards meek, inoffensive, and peaceable,” he continued.[167]

The revivals in individual states and counties were so numerous that most researchers have abandoned the task of keeping track of them. But in addition to local revivals confined to one locality, a new phenomenon was coming into existence: the practice of “circuit riding” by itinerant pastors and evangelists, most of whom were Methodists. The necessity of circuit riding, by which a single preacher would service in turn several different pastoral communities, arose from the absence of actual church buildings or permanent organizations, especially in America’s frontier regions. The precedent for traveling clergy was set by the Englishman Francis Asbury, who was the founding bishop of American Methodism. Asbury himself rode approximately 270,000 miles in a career of itinerant preaching, building up Methodist communities wherever he could. The growth of Methodism in America was astonishingly swift. The Methodists in 1780 had fewer than 10,000 members, but by 1820 they had grown to 250,000. They numbered half a million by 1830 and by 1840 had doubled again. By 1844 they were the nation’s largest denomination, with 1,068,525 members. All three major denominations—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—grew with great rapidity, almost certainly because all three were fiercely evangelical.

The phenomenon of growth among America’s evangelical churches was to continue well up to the end of the century. The late professor of political science Seymour Martin Lipset cited figures indicating that Americans affiliated with evangelical Christian denominations numbered about 11,763,000 in 1856, out of a population of 26,500,000. By 1890, H. K. Carroll, who was in charge of the Division of Churches for the 1890 census, concluded that, with a total United States population in that year of 62,622,250, only five million were not communicants or adherents of a Christian denomination. In fact, he calculated that 92 percent in 1890 and 91 percent in 1910 were linked in some way to a Christian denomination.[168] There had been yet another surge of awakening around the time of the American Civil War, in both the North and the South.

Americans themselves had noticed that here and there, wherever revivals were taking place, there was a marked improvement in the manners of the people. Yet the most striking evidence that Christianity had profoundly affected the manners of people at a popular level in America was offered by the French observer of American life Alexis de Tocqueville, who was assigned by the French government as a young man to observe the prison system in America. De Tocqueville’s magnum opus, Democracy in America, published in 1835 after his return to France, offers remarkably perceptive insights into the behavior of the entire nation. “On my first arrival in America,” he wrote,

the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other, but in America I found they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.[169]

While Alexis de Tocqueville was still in America, Charles Finney, later considered the “father of modern revivalism,” emerged as one of the most effective and influential revival preachers in America in the nineteenth century. At the time of his dramatic personal conversion to Christian belief in 1821, he was a legal apprentice in Adams, New York. His interest in the Bible derived from his frequent encounters with biblical quotations in the law books he was using at work. Finney believed that successful evangelism was a product of using the right evangelistic methods. In his case, these included meticulous organization in advance of revival rallies and provision of an “anxious bench” at which sinners contemplating conversion and spiritual rebirth could be admonished to abandon their sinful life and begin anew. In 1837, Finney gave up the position of pastor at a New York church in order to become a theology professor at Oberlin College. He was very active in social movements promoting temperance, care for people with mental difficulties, coeducational college education, and the abolition of slavery.

After Asbury, Finney was certainly the most famous evangelist of the Second Great Awakening, and he set the pattern for the voluntary societies with social reform as their main intention that grew up in the wake of religious revivals. Finney embraced the new world of industrial capitalism, seamlessly blending economic success and the energetic spread of the gospel. But Finney was no advocate of capitalism in all its varieties. He forcefully opposed slavery as a great blight upon America’s Christian soul. Slavery itself, of course, was not abolished in the United States until Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, intended for slaves in areas under rebellion—i.e., in the South—in the midst of the American Civil War. Yet during the Civil War itself, though there were atrocities on both sides, there were also ardent Christians on both sides who believed that they were fighting in God’s cause. It took Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address in March 1865, to make it clear that though he judged the war itself to have been justified by the decision of the South to attempt to secede, he did not consider the South inherently more sinful in Christian terms than the North. His words were astonishingly humble and gracious toward an adversary facing imminent and total defeat, and he fully acknowledged the Christian sincerity of his foe. Among other things, he said, “Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. The prayers of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” The remainder of the inaugural address makes it clear that slavery was the offense that brought on the war, but the war itself must continue until God’s providential will had been entirely worked out.[170]

Lincoln tragically died barely six weeks later, before he could help “bind up the nation’s wounds,” but the Christian character of the nation was by now indelibly stamped into the national consciousness. The German-trained historian George Bancroft had written a narrative of American history that is often termed “magisterial,” titled History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent.[171] Bancroft was a committed Christian who believed in the role of God’s providence in shaping the American past. He thought that America was a Christian nation established and sustained by God for the purpose of spreading liberty and democracy in the world.[172]

This seemed to be the view broadly held by a majority of America’s learned elite at least through the remainder of the nineteenth century. In a remarkable case of federal prosecution of a British Anglican priest hired by New York’s Church of the Holy Trinity, the Supreme Court not only took the side of the church, which was being prosecuted for violation of a law against hiring foreigners, but also stated categorically that the United States was a Christian nation. The purpose of this statement, in an opinion by Associate Justice Josiah Brewer, was not to lambast any militant atheists who may have been paying attention but to underscore the larger point that a minister of the Christian faith—no matter what denomination—was in a different category from the imported sweatshop labor that the original law of 1885 had been intended to prevent from working in the United States. The majority opinion opened with the words, “No purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.”

The opinion then gave a survey of American history since the age of Columbus, through voyages by Sir Walter Raleigh, through the Mayflower Compact, and through the Declaration of Independence, which, the opinion goes on, “recognizes the presence of the Divine in human affairs.” The opinion stated multiple times that “there is a universal language pervading them all [the previously mentioned historic events], having one meaning: they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation.”[173]

In case anyone had the idea that the Supreme Court thought that Americans were generally of mystical disposition because of this use of the word “religion,” Justice Brewer clarified his point by referring to an earlier Supreme Court decision in Updegraph v. Commonwealth, a blasphemy case that reached the Supreme Court in 1824. In that decision it was decided that, continued Brewer,

Christianity, general Christianity, is, and always has been, a part of the common law . . . not Christianity with an established church . . . but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men. . . . If we pass beyond these matters to a view of American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs and society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth. Among other matters note the following: The form of oath universally prevailing, concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer; the prefatory words of all wills, “In the name of God, Amen.”[174]

Interestingly, Justice Brewer’s opinion mentioned some customs of the United States from the most strongly Christian period of its history, such as “the observance of the Sabbath, with the general cessation of all secular assemblies on that day,” which is no longer observed today and may well not have been universally observed at the time. The Supreme Court underwent some criticism for this opinion, largely from Americans who did not want to consider themselves part of a “Christian nation.” In part to address these concerns, Justice Brewer published a book in 1905 called The United States a Christian Nation, in which he took pains to clarify his opinion:

But in what sense can [the United States] be called a Christian nation? Not in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or that the people are in any manner compelled to support it. On the contrary, the Constitution specifically provides that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ Neither is it Christian in the sense that all its citizens are either in fact or name Christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within our borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all.[175]

Brewer added that, of course, there was no religious test for office requiring people to declare themselves to be Christians.

The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia today acknowledges that the Supreme Court decision voiced by Justice David Josiah Brewer was not in any way an attempt to enforce Christianity by law. “He was simply making,” says the site, “an observation which is consistent with the fact that people in this country tend to be Christian.”[176]

Brewer’s brave statement about America’s past, much of which would have seemed obviously true to the learned elites of America in his day, almost certainly could not have been made at any later time by any Supreme Court justice. The winds of contrary opinion had been rising for many years. By the second decade of the twentieth century, they had reached almost tornado force.