Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe debunks the claim that America is a Christian nation and how God is embedded in our culture and politics.
Transcript
DDM – Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET – And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM – This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
MET – I am about to say something that will ruffle some feathers, but here we go – legally speaking, America is absolutely not a Christian nation.
MET – I know there are a lot of you who have been raised, or at least been told, to believe that America was founded as a Christian country, but I am about to explain how that is 100% a fabrication.
MET – On the one hand, there were definitely colonies that were founded on religious beliefs. I’m not denying that. A number of the first European settlements in America were Christian. And I think it IS important to note that they were Christian and not religiously free. The pilgrims and the colonists absolutely did not come here for religious freedom in the beginning. They came to establish religious communities. It really wasn’t until the Baptists were doing their thing in places like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania that there was any notion of religious freedom. So in that regard, I will grant you that the colonists established Christian communities.
MET – But that is not the founding of America. That is the founding of a bunch of disparate, religious colonies with no connection, guiding principles, or system of laws that make up any kind of community or government, let alone a nation. America came late.r
MET – America came once the colonies had formed into something like states, and those states wanted to join into something larger. And even that was contestable. Some of you may remember that before the Constitution we had something called the Articles of Confederation.Those were a failure because they did very little to create any kind of connective tissue between the states. They didn’t create a nation – they created a coalition of separate nation states that were somehow supposed to get along. That, to no one’s surprise, didn’t work.
MET – Which leads us to the Constitution.
MET – The Constitution is what makes America America. It quite literally constitutes us. So if you’re going to talk about the founding of America, the place to start is less with the colonies, and more with the debates about constitutional monarchy and the Bill of Rights.
MET – Which brings me right back to religion.
MET – Here’s the thing more people need to know – there is no God in the Constitution. He’s not mentioned. Not even once. Some people might get all up in arms and say, “What about our rights from the Creator?” but hold your horses – that’s not in the Constitution. That’s in the Declaration of Independence. And the Declaration isn’t a legal document. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s an angry break up letter, at best. But really more of a manifesto or declaration of treason. Yes – treason. So, literally, the opposite of a legal document. It’s definitely illegal.
MET – But even if it were, and I will pretend for just a second, what does it really say? That we are imbued by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. God does not give us our rights. Our Creator does. Look, Thomas Jefferson was a very smart, and very specific guy. If he wanted to say we got our rights from God, he would have said it. But he said our rights came from our Creator. Thomas Jefferson, like the vast majority of the Founding Fathers, was Deist who was deeply invested in Enlightenment philosophy. He didn’t believe in an all-powerful God who commanded the universe, and it is dishonest to put those words in his mouth.
MET – So what does this mean?
MET – Thomas Jefferson believed, like most Enlightenment thinkers, in natural rights. That’s literally what he said – that certain rights are self-evident. They are so inherent and so clear that we can see them obviously in the world around us. Those rights are given to use by Natural Law. That, may indeed, come from a Creator. But NOT God, per se. Nature, the ultimate creator, grans us rights. That is why they are self-evident.
MET – Okay, how can I make such a bold claim? The evidence is in the constitution. The Founding Fathers were looking to separate themselves from the monarchy (and really, the monarchies) of Europe. And the monarchies of Europe were defined by the Divine Right of Kings. The Divine Right of Kings is a fun little tautological idea based on Romans 13: 1-2 and Proverbs 8:15-16. Romans says, Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. And Proverbs argues, By me kings reign,and rulers decree what is just; by me rulers rule, and nobles, all who govern rightly. These verses led to the idea that kings are basically infallible. In short, you should submit to the king, because God made him king. And you know God chose him as king, because he is king. You don’t get to be king unless God wants it.So it’s a free pass for any monarch to do pretty much whatever they want because, according to the Divine Right of Kings, their words and actions are sanctioned by God; so to question them is to question God.
MET – What does this have to do with the Constitution and the Founding Fathers? And the answer is – very specifically and intentionally, NOTHING.
MET – By that I mean, the Founding Fathers very specifically and intentionally left God out of the law because they were trying to get AWAY from monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings. We were literally fighting a whole revolution to separate ourselves from kings. We had to eliminate God from the equation, otherwise we would get into very tricky territory about who had power and why.So the Constitution leaves God out. Instead of deriving its political power from God, the Constitution derives its power from the people – literally the government of the United States is supposed to get its authority from the consent of the governed – not a higher power. That’s legit written into the Constitution. So not only is America not a Christian nation, it was specifically designed to keep all of that complicated Christian stuff OUT of the federal government because it disempowers the democratic and republican (small r) nature of the nation they were trying to form.
MET – And just in case you needed that made any more clear, in 1797, right after the Constitution was ratified and the government was established, the Founding Fathers made a very clear statement about..In the last years of the 18th century, the United States entered into a treaty with Tripoli, a Muslim Barbary State. Article 11 of this treaty reads, and I am not making this up, As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. So in 1797 we announced to the world we are in no way a Christian religion and we had no problem with Islamic nations. Weirdly, the Christians of the 20th century missed the memo.
MET – NOW, I am going to complicate this all further by telling you that legally we are not a Christian nation, but culturally, that is a more nuanced question. I will die on the hill that Christians have no legal claim to America. But I am more sympathetic to claims that our cultural legacy is Christian. And that comes down to some of what I said earlier – the first colonies were religious, we have long had a Christian majority in the country, and I will definitely admit there is a difference between the law and the social climate.
MET – But here is something to think about. Let me give you a few facts about church attendance:
MET – Church attendance in colonial America varied significantly, with high, often enforced participation in 17th-century New England (up to 70% in some areas) contrasting with lower, more varied attendance elsewhere. While 18th-century,, the Great Awakening boosted attendance, estimates suggest formal church membership was low (roughly 17–20%) on the eve of the Revolution, despite high cultural adherence.Please note that – in the 18th century, that’s in the 1700s, church attendance maxed out at 20% of the population.That is a very surprising statistic for a lot of people. During the era of the Founding Fathers, we get various estimates. Some historians who study these things believe that less than 10% of the population attended church. Others put that estimate at closer to 50%! So it’s kind of hard to know. But, regardless, it would seem that at the best and most generous estimation, less than half of the population went to church
MET – Church attendance actually hit its all time high in the 1950s. That was when we were at our most churchy – we were the most Christian of our Christian selves at that point. And church attendance hovered right around 50%. That’s it – at the time in our history when Christianity was the most vibrant and had the greatest influence over America about half of the population had any regular involvement with a church
MET – Now, this is obviously a much more complex issue than just who goes to church when. The influence of Christianity is more than just how many people go to church. The cultural impact of Christianity reaches beyond the church walls and into sociological, economic, and political concerns well beyond church attendance.But on the other hand, there is something really striking that I need you to understand. Church people are, and always have been, the minority in the United States. People may identify as Christian because they aren’t atheist or they celebrate Christmas, but actual Christianity, as in, engagement with the faith, is actually pretty rare.So when people say this is a Christian nation, they aren’t making claims about how many Christians there are in the nation – because there just aren’t that many. And there never have been.It is actually a very small part of the population that has any involvement with the faith at all. And people think that back in olden times people were way more quote unquote Christian, but they really weren’t. America doesn’t hit its Christian stride until well into the 20th century.
MET – So when we make claims about America being a Christian nation, what are we saying?
MET – In actuality, it’s a claim about a very small group of people having an incredibly outsized influence over the population as a whole. Because the nation at large doesn’t really have any connection to the church. But the church claims to have a connection to the nation.
MET – More likely, it is a claim about culture. We are not a religious nation at all. There is no evidence to support that we are a particularly religious nation but we have what I will call a God problem.
MET – God is everywhere in our society. We hear about him in our economics, in our pop culture, and in our politics. But we don’t adhere to him. We are a Christian nation in that we insert God into anything and everything, but we are not Christian by any theological, practical, or spiritual definition. We don’t go to church, we aren’t theologically grounded or educated, we don’t adhere to scripture, and we don’t reflect any particular belief system. And yet, God is a huge part of our culture.
MET – My claim, then, is that our God problem is really specific to America – we have taken the trappings of faith, embedded them in our politics and culture, but stripped the actual Christianity out of it. The result is we have politics with the language of God in it, but God gets left out. And I say this not as a political statement as much as a historical one. I have LITERALLY just outlined for you all of the ways God has been stripped out of our public lives. But at the same time, we have added him back in time and time again, but in a way that adheres to our faithless lifestyle. We have God without the God. We have a God of politics and culture – not of faith.
MET – All of this brings me to what you probably guessed was coming – Donald Trump’s antics of the last week or two. Now, I could go on and on about his battle with the Pope. It is abundantly clear that there are people, generally those who support Trump, who feel that the Pope’s brand of Christianity is suspect. Given that the Pope’s brand of Christianity is kind of global and important, that’s a big problem.And there is obviously tension between MAGA Catholics and traditional Catholics.
MET – But what I want to focus on is THE IMAGE. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, stop now and Google it. On April 12th, Trump (and it was Trump himself) posted an image of himself dressed as Jesus, surrounded by divine figures and happy supplicants, with rays of light coming out of his hands, apparently healing a sick man. One of my biggest problems with the image was that the man he was healing looked a lot like Jeffrey Epstein, but that is neither here nor there. Trump has since deleted the image and backtracked claiming it is just evil, liberal media who sees Jesus in this image.It is obviously him as a doctor!
MET – Dear listener – do not let him talk to you like you are an idiot. That was a religious picture of Trump as Jesus and anybody who tells you any differently is insulting you. I mean, really, don’t talk to that person anymore because they have told you what they think of you and you deserve better. It’s Trump as Jesus. It’s blasphemy
MET – But how did we get to a place where ANY politician thought it would be acceptable to portray themselves as a deity? Where did this idea that a person could be a god or a messiah come from? This is our God problem. We are not a Christian nation. But God is endemic to our politics. We have so intertwined God into our politics, and made discussions of God a part of the political scene, that it is common for people to substitute a political leader for God, and God for a political leader. The God problem is not whether we are or are not a Christian nation, the God problem is whether we can tell God from our politics. And the thing is – we often can’t. We have so muddied the water between our politicized faith and our faith of politics that our president actually thought he could replace Christ. Like, he literally thought his supporters would appreciate it if he just supplanted the Messiah.
MET – That is not a God problem; that is a God emergency.
MET – We cannot claim to be a Christian nation if we live in a country where it is possible to substitute a person for Christ. And we cannot claim to be a Christian nation if so few of us are actually involved with the faith. Right now in America the percentage of people who attend church regularly is actually quite high. We’re coming in at about 30%. So in some ways we are MORE of a Christian nation now than we were at the founding – so do with that what you will. But that’s generally not what people mean when people say we are a Christian nation. But what they DO mean is suspect, at best. What they OFTEN mean is that God is at the helm, or that God is at the heart of our nation. And BOTH of those are debatable, at best.
MET – What IS clear is that God is everywhere, even if he is not a driving force. Because God has been politicized. God has been turned into an economy. God has been turned into pop culture. And if THAT is what you mean by a Christian nation, sure, great. There is something about God everywhere you look. But for those of us who take God seriously, that should be a sign of trouble, not joy. Because the God I believe in cannot be secularized by politics and pop culture.
MET – The God I believe in does not fit into the economic models we are working with in these United States. The God I believe in is not the sanitized and cheapened version so common in the public sphere.
MET – If that is what is meant by a Christian nation, maybe we are one. But I don’t know what that has to do with Christ..
MET – Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM – Music by Audionautix.com
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