From Religious Colonies to Religious Liberty

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

Welcome back. I’m Hank Wilson and this is Living a True Christian Life.

Today, I’d like to take a little detour.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time recently talking about the early Church, about men and women who lived their faith in a world where Christianity possessed virtually no political power.

Peter didn’t have the government behind him.

Neither did Polycarp.

Neither did Perpetua and Felicity.

In fact, sometimes the government was the very thing they needed protection from.

And yet Christianity grew.

Now I’d like us to jump forward more than a thousand years and cross an ocean.

Because by the time Europeans began establishing colonies in North America, Christianity and political power had developed a very different relationship.

And that brings us to a question we hear quite often today:

Was America founded as a Christian nation?

It’s an interesting question.

But I’m not sure it’s the best question.

Perhaps we should begin somewhere else.

What did the people who settled early America actually believe about religion?

And what did they mean when they talked about religious freedom?

Because, as we’re about to discover, they didn’t all mean the same thing.

Massachusetts

Let’s begin in Massachusetts.

We often hear that the Puritans came to America seeking religious freedom.

And they did.

But there’s an important qualification.

They primarily wanted the freedom to practice their religion and to build a society shaped by their understanding of Christianity.

That isn’t quite the same thing as our modern idea of religious liberty.

Massachusetts Bay was intended to be a godly community.

Church and civil society were closely connected, and religious dissent could carry serious consequences.

Roger Williams discovered that.

So did Anne Hutchinson.

Both challenged aspects of the religious establishment.

Both eventually left Massachusetts.

The Puritans wanted freedom from religious authorities with whom they disagreed.

They were considerably less certain about freedom for people who disagreed with them.

That distinction matters.

Rhode Island

Roger Williams eventually helped establish Rhode Island.

And Williams proposed something much more radical.

He believed civil government should not control a person’s conscience.

Government could regulate behavior necessary for civil society.

But faith?

That belonged between the individual and God.

Interestingly, Williams wasn’t trying to remove Christianity from society.

Quite the opposite.

He was a deeply religious man.

Part of his concern was that when government acquired the power to control religion, it could corrupt the Church just as easily as the Church could influence government.

That’s an idea worth remembering.

Religious liberty wasn’t necessarily created because people thought religion was unimportant.

Sometimes it developed because people believed religion was too important to be controlled by politicians.

Maryland

Then there was Maryland.

Maryland was established under the Calvert family, who were Roman Catholic, at a time when Catholics faced serious restrictions in England.

For a period, Maryland became an experiment in religious toleration.

The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 extended protection to Christians who professed belief in Jesus Christ.

That was significant for its time.

But notice something.

It wasn’t modern religious freedom either.

The protection had boundaries.

And Maryland’s history would later include bitter struggles between Catholics and Protestants.

Once again, Americans were learning that religious toleration becomes complicated when political power changes hands.

Pennsylvania

Then we come to Pennsylvania.

William Penn was a Quaker.

And Penn’s vision went considerably further.

Quakers themselves had suffered persecution in England, and Penn envisioned Pennsylvania as a place where people of different Christian traditions, and eventually people from other religious backgrounds, could live together peacefully.

Penn called it a “holy experiment.”

And perhaps that’s exactly what it was.

Could people who disagreed about religion still share a civil society?

Could government maintain order without deciding whose theology was correct?

Those were enormous questions.

Virginia

Virginia gives us still another model.

There, the Church of England became the established church.

Taxes helped support it.

Parishes performed important civil as well as religious functions.

Other religious groups sometimes faced restrictions.

So by the eighteenth century, the colonies that would eventually become the United States had already experimented with several different relationships between religion and government.

Puritan establishment.

Anglican establishment.

Catholic toleration.

Quaker pluralism.

Roger Williams’s liberty of conscience.

There wasn’t one American model.

There were several.

And sometimes they collided.

Then Came the Revolution

By the time of the American Revolution, generations of colonists had lived through these experiments.

And the people we call the Founders inherited all of them.

Many of those Founders were religious.

Most lived in a culture profoundly influenced by Christianity.

Biblical language was everywhere.

Churches were important community institutions.

Christian ideas influenced morality, education, and public life.

But that doesn’t mean all of the Founders believed exactly the same thing.

They didn’t.

Some were traditional Christians.

Some held theological ideas that would make many Christians today uncomfortable.

Some were influenced by the Enlightenment.

And many combined religious belief with Enlightenment ideas about natural rights, reason, and government.

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t John Witherspoon.

Benjamin Franklin wasn’t Samuel Adams.

And George Washington’s religious beliefs have been discussed and debated by historians for generations.

Trying to squeeze all of them into one modern religious category doesn’t help us understand them.

It simply makes the history smaller.

What Did They Build?

Perhaps the better question isn’t what every Founder personally believed.

Perhaps the better question is:

What kind of government did they create?

The Constitution contains a remarkable provision.

Article VI says that no religious test shall ever be required for federal public office.

Think about how unusual that was in a world where governments had spent centuries deciding which religious beliefs qualified someone for public life.

Then came the First Amendment.

Congress could make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

And Congress could not prohibit the free exercise of religion.

Those two ideas belong together.

Government could not establish the faith.

Government could not suppress the faith.

Religion was protected partly by limiting government’s authority over it.

And perhaps the colonies help us understand why.

The people who created the United States didn’t have to imagine what religious establishments looked like.

They had lived with them.

So Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

We’re back where we started.

And my answer is that history gives us something much more interesting than a simple yes or no.

America emerged from a culture deeply influenced by Christianity.

That should not be erased.

Christian beliefs, institutions, language, and moral traditions profoundly shaped colonial America and many of the people involved in the founding.

But a society influenced by Christianity is not necessarily the same thing as a government constitutionally established as Christian.

The United States did not create a national church.

It did not require federal officeholders to profess Christianity.

Instead, it gradually developed a system intended to protect religious belief by preventing the federal government from choosing which religious belief would rule.

And perhaps that’s where this history becomes important for Christians today.

The Christian Question

Maybe Christians are asking the wrong question when we ask:

“Was America founded as a Christian nation?”

Perhaps the more important question is:

Does Christianity need the power of government in order to be Christian?

We’ve just spent considerable time studying the early Church.

Those Christians had almost no political power.

They couldn’t pass laws requiring people to behave like Christians.

They couldn’t elect Christian emperors.

They couldn’t demand that government enforce Christian doctrine.

Sometimes they couldn’t even gather safely.

And yet…

They changed the world.

They did it by serving.

By teaching.

By caring for the poor.

By opening their homes.

By enduring persecution.

By forgiving.

By loving their neighbors.

And by living lives that made other people wonder what was different about them.

Perhaps there’s something there for us.

Religious liberty gives Christians an extraordinary gift.

We are free to worship.

Free to preach.

Free to teach.

Free to serve.

Free to disagree.

Free to persuade.

Free to live our faith openly.

Maybe the question isn’t whether America was founded Christian enough.

Maybe the better question for Christians is whether we are living Christian enough with the freedom we’ve been given.

Because Christianity has never been strongest when people were forced to believe it.

Christianity has always been strongest when people could see Christ reflected in the lives of those who claimed to follow Him.

And no government can legislate that.

That’s something only we can choose to live.

Until next time, may God bless you, keep you, and remind you that religious freedom isn’t merely the freedom to believe.

It’s also the freedom to live what we believe.