The claim that America was founded as a Christian nation -- a favorite of Right-wing Christians -- is just not true.
By Kerry Walters
June 15, 2012
June 15, 2012
Once
they begin to circulate, falsehoods—like counterfeit currency—are
surprisingly tenacious. It doesn’t matter that there’s no backing for
them. The only thing that counts is that people believe they have backing. Then, like bad coins, they turn up again and again.
One
counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is the
claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. It’s one of the
Christian Right’s mantras and a favorite talking point for
televangelists, religious bloggers, born-again authors and lobbyists,
and pulpit preachers. Take, for example, the Reverend Peter Marshall.
Before his death in 2010, he strove mightily (and loudly) to “restore
America to its traditional moral and spiritual foundations,” as his
still-active website says, by telling the truth about “America’s
Christian heritage.” Or consider WallBuilders, a “national pro-family
organization” founded by David Barton, whose mission is “educating the
nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country.” Called
“America’s historian” by his admirers, Barton is a prolific writer of
popular books that spin his Christian version of American history. And
then there’s Cynthia Dunbar, an attorney and one-time professor at
Liberty University School of Law. She’s another big pusher of the
Christian America currency. Her 2008 polemic One Nation Under God proclaims
that the Christian “foundational truths” on which the nation rests are
being “eroded” by a “socialistic, secularistic, humanistic mindset” from
which Christians need to take back the country.
Unlike some of
the wackier positions taken by evangelicals—think Rapture—the claim that
America was founded as a Christian nation has gone relatively
mainstream. This is the case largely because the media-savvy Christian
Right is good at getting across its message. A 2007 First Amendment
Center poll revealed that 65 percent of Americans believe the founders
intended the United States “to be a Christian nation”; over half of us
think that this intention is actually spelled out somewhere in the
Constitution.
Conservative politicians sensitive to the way the wind
blows are careful to echo the sentiment, or at least not to dispute it,
even if they’re not particularly religious themselves. Recent GOP
presidential aspirants Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and
Rick Perry championed the claim with gusto. Even John McCain, who
usually left the Bible-thumping to his Alaskan running mate, jumped on
the bandwagon in his failed 2008 bid for the presidency by assuring a
Beliefnet interviewer that “this nation was founded primarily on
Christian principles” and that he personally would be disturbed if a
non-Christian were elected to the highest office in the land.
So
the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is widespread.
In the currency of ideas, it’s the ubiquitous penny. But like an actual
penny, it doesn’t have a lot of value. That so many people think it
does is largely because they don’t stop to consider what “founded as a
Christian nation” might signify. Presumably the intended meaning is
something like this: Christian principles are the bedrock of both our
political system and founding documents because our founders were
themselves Christians. Although wordier, this reformulation is just as
perplexing because it’s not clear what’s meant by the term founders. Just who are we talking about here?
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