For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Thomas Kidd (PhD, University of Notre Dame), Research Professor of Church History at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, to summarize the history of Christianity in America since its founding in 1776.
As the United States of America observes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question of the nation’s Christian roots seems more controversial than ever. Secularists tell us that biblical faith had virtually nothing to do with the Founding, while many today on the Christian right insist that the Founders were born-again believers who created America as a “Christian nation.”
Whatever role Christianity played at the nation’s birth, we have entered a post-Christian era in modern America. The reigning powers in American academia, business, entertainment, and law are typically hostile toward Christians and biblical morality. Freedom of self-expression has become the ultimate determiner of social justice. Traditional morality and even biological reality are often reviled as tools of oppressors. Our brave new world has made many Christians eager to recapture the nation’s spiritual origins.
In the following essay, I sketch the story of Christianity in America from the Founding to the present day, demonstrating that the church’s flourishing in America has depended not on a connection to the government but on the strength of its sovereign God.
Faith Among the Founders
America in 1776 doesn’t easily yield the image of uncomplicated biblical devotion that some Christians expect to find. To be sure, biblical concepts influenced America’s founding principles. To cite just one example, the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” makes no sense unless you assume (as the Founders did) that there is a created order perceptible via revelation, reason, or both. Thus, our equality and rights derive from our relationship to the Creator God. The Declaration’s view of humanity, then, is broadly based on Genesis 1 and 2.
However, saying that the founding ideals reflect a biblical worldview is not the same as saying that the Founders were orthodox, practicing Christians. Some of them surely were believers. Virginia’s Patrick Henry and Massachusetts’s Samuel Adams were outspoken Christians who insisted that America needed Christian morality and biblical beliefs to thrive as a republic. But when you look at the most prominent Founders, there are no obvious instances of personally devout and theologically sound Christians.
Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are perhaps the easiest Founders to diagnose theologically. Franklin called himself a Deist in his Autobiography, and through the end of his life he professed doubt regarding essential Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible.1 Jefferson was even more skeptical than Franklin for much of his life. Though he became convinced that Jesus was the greatest moral teacher in history, Jefferson still did not believe that Jesus was the Son of God.2 He famously prepared a Gospel compilation containing only Jesus’s parables and ethical teachings, with most of the miracles literally cut out with scissors.
John Adams was more supportive of a public role for Christianity than Jefferson was. Adams even backed the continuation of Massachusetts’s official church after the adoption of the US Constitution, believing that Christianity deserved state support because it was the primary wellspring of people’s virtue. But like Jefferson, Adams was a Unitarian, denying the doctrine of the Trinity.3
Other Founders, including George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, were guarded about their own beliefs, making them more difficult to label. Washington, like Adams, held a high view of Christianity’s social importance. But during his long career Washington said almost nothing about his personal convictions, and he clearly decided to never write the names “Jesus” or “Christ” or utter them in public. He held to this standard of silence about Jesus in all but a couple of instances.4 Washington also did not take communion for most of his life.5 Some reports suggest that he did partake prior to the American Revolution, but after 1776 he either did not attend church on communion Sundays or left the service before communion was served.
Madison certainly had a strong background in traditional Christian theology, both from his upbringing in the Anglican Church and from his studies under the Presbyterian pastor John Witherspoon at Princeton College. But after college, Madison also became largely silent about his own beliefs. Aside from his attending an Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, as president, scholars have little evidence with which to assess Madison’s own convictions.6
Finally, Alexander Hamilton was no one’s idea of a sanctified Christian, but he was more deeply rooted in orthodox Christian belief than either Franklin or Jefferson.7 And the dying Hamilton did request to take communion after Aaron Burr shot him in a duel.8
Free to Proclaim and Practice
Given the mixed personal record of the American Founders, what accounts for our nation’s impressive history of Christian devotion? The most important factor was the Lord’s providence working through thousands of churches to spread the gospel. A second essential factor in America’s robust religious history was the unusual freedom that churches and Christians enjoyed due to religious liberty.
In other words, America’s Christian strength was not dependent on the government somehow being “Christian.” We have seen the dismal results in countries such as England that have maintained an official state church.9 Political compromise and theological corruption are the inevitable products of church-state collaboration. America’s religious vitality was based on God’s power moving through zealous churches operating in a free environment. American history is a case study of the benefits of a “free church” ministering in a “free state,” a situation that the Baptist Faith and Message of the Southern Baptist Convention describes as the “Christian ideal.”
Founders such as Madison and Jefferson desired religious liberty for more “Enlightenment”-type reasons than evangelical Christians did. Jefferson thought religion was a private
