This piece is part of “America in the balance: the fight for our history and future,” a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Standing on the National Mall for the “Rededicate 250” worship service in May, House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a prayer that cast the United States as a Christian nation. Johnson claimed in his prayer that God directed the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence to do so, and he called the United States “a place of miracles” and “the light and the glory of all nations.” He then declared that he and the crowd did “hereby rededicate America as one nation under God.”
Neither Johnson nor anybody else can rededicate this nation to God because, by design, it was never dedicated to God in the first place. But he and like-minded Christian nationalists are trying at this moment to redefine what happened on July 4, 1776, and to mold the nation into something our founders did not intend it to be. Thus, during these semiquincentennial celebrations, we have seen them push the myth that the American experiment was sectarian.
The delegates overwhelmingly rejected the call for official prayer as they hashed out the details of the Constitution.
We’re told George Washington prayed on bended knee in the snow at Valley Forge. But not only did someone make up that story after Washington died, the original 1808 version of the tale fomented religious bigotry against Quakers by suggesting they were unpatriotic and unchristian for remaining pacifists. We’re told that patriotic clergy members formed a “Black Robe Regiment” during the Revolutionary War to march into battle. But that’s a modern yarn about as accurate as Paul Bunyan creating Minnesota’s lakes with Babe the Blue Ox. We’re told that prayer “saved” the Constitutional Convention in 1787 after Ben Franklin urged it. But the delegates overwhelmingly rejected the call for official prayer as they hashed out the details of the Constitution with dialogue and debate.
From the “Rededicate 250” rally on the National Mall to worship services at the Pentagon to social media posts by federal agencies about the founders and Christianity, the Trump administration continues to amplify fake Christian nationalist history. State legislators in Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Missouri and elsewhere have pushed bills that would mandate the teaching of some of these Christian nationalist myths in public schools. And some states are mandating the posting of a highly edited version of the Ten Commandments that ignores the religious liberty rights of students, parents and teachers. That also sends a message to students with different beliefs that they are second-class citizens in their own schools.
Additionally, in many churches across the country, people will wave the American flag and sing songs about the nation during Sunday services this week, as if the Bible declares this land to be the world’s most blessed and godly nation. I’ve looked, and that idea of the United States being God’s favorite is not even in “Two Corinthians.” But as such church services demonstrate, Christian nationalism fuses and confuses American and Christian identities to the point of transforming the nation into an idol.
The problems with Christian nationalism go beyond syncretistic church services and inappropriate government events. The fun-house mirror version of the founding of the United States represents a deliberate attempt to forcibly baptize America and transform the nation into something that it isn’t and that the founders never intended it to be. In this new Christian nationalist vision, it is not self-evident that we are all created equal. In their telling, Christians — or at least those who claim to be such for social acceptance or political power — receive more rights and privileges.
While Christian nationalists use July Fourth to advance their view of the United States as a Christian nation, their rhetoric and their rallies distract us from the real religious story of our nation’s birth: that the founding generation not only cast aside the idea of a king but also saw a separation of church and state as the only way to protect religious liberty.
The founders knew what a “Christian” nation looked like. They broke away from one. And they charted a new course. With Article 6 of the Constitution, which bans religious tests for those seeking political office, and the First Amendment, which says there shall be “no law respecting an establishment of religion,” those founders made their intent clear. Thomas Jefferson, who knew a thing or two about our founding ideas, specifically pointed to the words of the First Amendment to explain how this created “a wall of separation between church and state.” He wrote that to my spiritual ancestors, Baptists in Connecticut, because Baptists had been pushing for such separation for nearly 200 years.
The founders knew what a “Christian” nation looked like. They broke away from one. And they charted a new course.
Politicians such as Jefferson and James Madison and preachers such as John Leland and Isaac Backus believed a separation between church and state was for the betterment of both. This American experiment shielded our young nation from the sectarian wars that plagued Europe and created a place that, as Madison later noted, enabled religion to flourish. This is what Christian nationalists want us to forget amid the fireworks, ice cream and fake accounts of history.
Rather than trying to redefine the founding of the United States, this Fourth of July we should celebrate church-state separation. As Leland, an influential colonial Baptist preacher who worked with Jefferson and Madison, explained in a Fourth of July speech during Jefferson’s presidency, “state-established religion” is “spiritual tyranny” that “converts religion into a principle of state policy, and the gospel into merchandise.” In this age of grift mixed with Christian nationalism, may we too see that the Christian nationalist vision of America is as far from the American experiment as the slime-green color of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is from “American Flag Blue.”
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