Polls recently indicate that more and more Americans link being an American with being a Christian [1]. Yet the consensus on what this actually means is as nonexistent as ever. We hear a lot about how this country was founded on “Christian principles” and that the Founders wanted this to be a “Christian nation.” Yet with a few exceptions, most folks would likely chafe horribly should we actually try to return to anything close what that meant in 1787.
The question of what the Founders intended is an interesting one, since even cursory research produces conflicting statements on both sides. Many of the most prominent clearly felt that what they had wrought in the Constitution was a device for keeping religion from distorting government. They intended, it seems, that people as individuals should decide for themselves, within a private sphere, how to believe and subsequently how to worship. The government, they claimed, should not be permitted to interfere with that. The question, of course, is whether they intended this to be the case in the other direction.
In a way, it’s a ridiculous question. How do you prevent an individual’s religious ideas from informing his or her political actions? You don’t. However the individual believes, that is what will be taken to the polls. All such questions may be similarly addressed—what goes on within your skull is yours and the government cannot interfere with it.
But public displays, judicial acts, and legislation ought to be free of overt religious sentiment. Passing laws should be based on common welfare—if an exhortation to god is necessary to make a law seem “right” then that law is not Constitutional. It has to make secular sense.
Nevertheless the issue is muddy, because the same Framers often talked about christian principles and the common bonds of christian community, at least in private, and often in speeches. Is this a contradiction?
I believe not. The problem is, the idea as currently framed and debated is simply out of context, not broad enough. What did it mean to be part of a christian community in 1787? That everyone went to church, prayed the same way, believed in the same god or description of god?
At that time, I suspect, “christian community” was a label for a total package of cultural markers. One didn’t have to believe overtly in any specific christian doctrine in order to accept social ideas about what made a community. Being a christian was a political, social, and economic condition as much if not more than a religious conviction. (Hence, Manifest Destiny.) While you might not pray in that church down the street, you would defend it and move easily in the externalized community around it.
What would this have meant in practice? It would have meant holding a view in white European supremacy, in the notion that land required “improvement” (clearing, farming, etc), in a specific form of marriage, in disapproval of miscegenation. It would have signified common greetings, modes of understanding the world, support of certain ambitions, judgments of certain failures. It would have meant building in a certain way, dressing in a certain way, talking in a certain way. In other words, “being christian” would have meant the same as being from Delaware or Virginia, of being white, of supporting certain forms of trade. In some parts of the country, it would have meant owning slaves or at least agreeing that the “inferior” races should be subject to slavery.
It would have meant linguistic conformity, the suppression of native history as well as language, the conviction that your way was necessarily superior and right and that those who did not agree were somehow not civilized.
[2]Above all, it indicated that—Civilization. In Europe, centuries earlier, “Christendom” was as much a political concept as a religious one, and that currency had not completely devalued. Being a “Christian Nation” meant basically being Civilized, at least in the sense of what was commonly agreed upon. God, the church, prayer—that was part of it, but in much the same way as political affiliation could be considered today. Of course anyone civilized would be a christian, for most people the idea of doing without such a framework would have been lunacy. Or, more fundamentally, the question would not even have occurred to them.
Because they paid it about as much attention as it is paid today. The political and economic concepts that were then layered onto “Christianity” were not then and are not now supported Biblically. The destruction of native Americans was nothing that could be condoned by so-called christian virtue, and some said as much, but their voices were shouted down by those who saw “being christian” as something much more than merely following scripture. It was a question of identity and that identity had evolved culturally, not doctrinally.
So when today someone makes the claim that the Founding Generation built a christian country, they are not exactly wrong—but they probably don’t know what it is they’re claiming. What that generation saw as essential to being a christian then was the product of centuries of social evolution and meant many thing that have nothing to do with religion at all. (For a more modern reference, you might look at Germany’s political party, the Christian Democrats.) Just as today we are living in a cultural milieu that has evolved to meet the requirements of changed social conditions and a recent recognition that many of things that a fundamental view of christianity offers are nothing we are willing to live with anymore.
In either case, I think the Founders would be appalled at how their intent has been so misinterpreted and maligned today—appalled, but I doubt they would be surprised.
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