Is the U.S. a “Christian Nation?”
No! Yes! Kinda!

With some 64% of its population self-identifying as Christian for the 2020 census, the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 Christian populations of the world. But once the camera pans out from the tiny countries comprising that list (Romania, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, et al) the picture changes significantly.

Partly owing to its relatively large population (331 million in 2020) and partly to its history of being settled heavily by those fleeing religious persecution, the U.S. leads the world in the gross number of Christians. Its 64% of the U.S. translates to 213 million people, easily outdistancing Brazil at 168 million and Mexico at 113 million.

(Of course, if all those people professing the faith actually attended church regularly, they would overflow out the doors and help establish sales records at local donut shops and brunch locations after services, but that is a discussion for another day.)

Fueled by those numbers and the religious faiths of most Founders, various zealots anxious to enforce their religious beliefs at the ballot box or in the courts often do so by claiming the U.S. is a “Christian nation.” The Founders, after all, were primarily Christians (with some Unitarians and Deists in the mix), and they produced a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that remains standing today on a bedrock of Christian values (including the Old Testament that Christianity shares with  Judaism and Islam).

Is their argument correct?

Not in any sense that would use religion as the basis for legislation or a legal decision. The Constitution is forthright on that matter, specifically prohibiting in the First Amendment the establishment of any religion or any suppression of religious practice, and in Article VI any religious tests for public office. In that very clearly delineated sense, the Constitution stands as the “bible” of this secular country.

Even a cursory scan through a book that has long sat on my shelf—“The Founders on Religion,” with selections from the Founders’ written works and correspondence—reveals consistent warnings against the establishment of any state religion.

But what about Christianity’s role in the wider sense of American culture and its morally infused—as every country is—legal system?

Here, the picture is more nuanced—in a way that should oppress neither professing Christians nor those of any other or no faith.

Indeed, if we set aside its dogmas (the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, heaven and hell, the Trinity…), Christianity’s core teachings for how to live within some form of community informed a great deal of what finally became America’s founding documents.

First was the creation itself, which God surveyed in Genesis and observed as “very good.” Such an optimist!

While it is true that the Founders erected multiple barriers to the temptations of greed and treachery they knew forever lapped at the shores of human behavior (separation of powers chief among those barriers), theirs was still an audaciously optimistic view of the possibilities for human flourishing. That view dovetailed nicely with the “very good” creation and the abundant moral teachings of Jesus that pour forth in the Parables and Sermon on the Mount: let your light shine; build on a solid foundation; love your neighbor, yourself and your enemies; blessed are the meek and merciful, the peacemakers and the persecuted; be quick to seek forgiveness and to grant it; judge not; give to the needy.

All those speak to the dignity and respect every person deserves as an equal child of God, which served as a template for the radical egalitarianism that suffuses both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and which we know from the historical record informed the Founders’ deliberations.

So sure: Christianity finds a kindred spirit in America’s founding documents (and vice versa). What it clearly cannot do, however, is impinge on or require any belief or practice on the part of a heterogenous population that now runs to some 370 different religions and a large swath (some 24%) of religiously unaffiliated atheists, agnostics, and spiritual-but-not-religious “Nones.”

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Elaine Pagels is a now retired Harvard professor and historian of religion who recently took to the pages of “The Atlantic” magazine in a special issue called “The Unfinished Revolution” to reflect on “The Moral Foundation of America.”  In it, she takes a brief but forceful tour through human history, reminding us just how relatively recent and revolutionary the idea of individual freedom is.

Pagels chronicles ancient civilizations up through the Enlightenment and beyond that enforced strict hierarchies of social and political status, conferring anything resembling modern individual rights only to a select few who were viewed as sufficiently aristocratic and “well-bred.” Even the oft-quoted wise men of western lore, the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, had little use or regard for those they deemed of lower status.

After citing Plato’s claims that his own privileged status merely reflected the “will of the gods” and could thus not be extended to his lessers in Greek society, Pagels has this to say about his prized pupil, Aristotle:

“Aristotle took a different approach, invoking what would later be known as biological determinism. Observing that among wild animals, different creatures possess different innate abilities, he argued that the same is true of humans—for instance, that disparities in intelligence and physical strength predispose people to be natural-born rulers or slaves.”

Granted, America’s own Founders some three centuries later, for all their rhapsodizing and insistence to their British overlords about pursuing the “self-evident” truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” etc.,  nevertheless allowed slavery to continue in its founding documents,

That now scandalous contradiction, borne largely from the tortuous path of political compromise, should remind us all the more that any constitution for a secular government or holy book for a religion are idealized guides for an inherently imperfect species that never quite lives up to its ideals, despite most people’s persistent struggle to do so.

And this is where in my view, the central story/theme/narrative/symbol of Christianity—that God descended from the heavens and took human form—exudes particularly potent power. Despite humanity’s imperfection, suffering and mortality, God doesn’t stay above the fray trimming his nails or tossing thunderbolts at dictators. (If only!)

Instead, he gets an up-close taste of his creation  and embraces, identifies and becomes one with its birth, its joys and sufferings, and its death.

I want to add here that I don’t “believe” in God in any such literal sense (including the existence of any gender-based deities). But I have come to appreciate the story and symbol of the incarnation as a powerful, potentially transformative, and yes, lovely story of solidarity, nobility, and ultimate value in the human project.

And given the tenor of the Founders’ deliberations in the formation of America, it is hard to deny that the Christian story provided plentiful raw material for their truly revolutionary idea that every life is divine, and worthy of care and equal opportunity.

So: a “Christian nation?” No.

But a nation built on a moral foundation and view of the human being that was highly congruent with the predominant teachings of the religious orientation of its founders, which remain as relevant (and urgent!) today as they were in 1776?

It’s hard not to see it that way, or to think its influence is somehow wrong. Christianity informs America’s cultural and civic life in the perfectly natural way that Islam undergirds countries in the Mideast, and Buddhism and Hinduism still course through life in Asia.

It’s simply a part of our history, and for all its faults, false prophets, the failures of its practitioners, and those who seek to use it as a cudgel against perceived heathen enemies, it undergirds our founding and much of what has continued to allow America to achieve the pre-eminence it has on the world stage for nearly 250 years.

Whether it continues as such depends almost exclusively on how strongly “We the People” continue to insist on the right of human beings to be free from the oppression that nefarious actors have brought to bear on too much human history in the past, and who unfortunately never relent in their efforts to seize control of the future.

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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing

Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam  https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/

Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com

“The Crucifixion Behold Thy Mother,” painting by William Blake (1805), see https://www.thehistoryofart.org/

“Declaration of Independence,” painting  by John Trumbull (1819), see https://smarthistory.org/trumbull-declaration/

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