Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

Summary: Historical questions are often much more complicated than we would like to present.

I have listened to John Fea's podcast for years now. And I have read his book on the issues that lead to Evangelicals voting for Trump. But I have not read Was American Founded as a Christian Nation or his more traditional history books. Part of what moved me to pick this up and read it after having owned the book for a couple of years was a desire to understand the rhetoric that has come to be known as Christian Nationalism. Fea uses the language of Christian Nationalism, although he uses it slightly differently than the sociologists like Perry and Whitehead use it. Fea is using Christian Nationalism as a descriptor of people who sought to make the country into an explicitly Christian nation. These two subtly different meanings are compatible but they reflect the different fields of study. Fea is a historian who is grounding his work on the historical events, people, and writing or speeches, while Whitehead and Perry are working with survey data. Both are trying to get at the mythology (in the sense of origin story) of America.  (Although Fea wrote this originally in 2011 and revised the book in 2015, so his use of the language of Christian Nationalism is prior to the Trump-influenced investigation of it.)

John Fea is trying to complicate the historical story and counter all of the different myths of the origin of the US in regard to its relationship to Christianity. He traces the ways that there have been many that have sought to make the US into a Christian nation and how the type of rhetorical Christian Nationalism that we see today is very old. He also traces the ways that there has never been a solely Christian Nationalistic movement. The founders were not all pietistic Christians seeking after God, nor were they all Deists that tried to remove a more fundamentalist Christianity from the public role.

Was Ameria Founded as A Christian Nation plays several important roles for me. First, it grounds our current movement historically. Christian Nationalism is not a new concept, either in its modern idea (the Religious Right was also very explicitly grounded in a type of Christian Nationalism) or historically. Many politicians throughout US history have pointed to concepts of the US being a specially chosen nation or different from all other countries in God's plan. In addition, the concept of Christian Nationalism as a type of exclusionary force is not new. Fea's Believe Me book talked explicitly about the historical role of anti-immigrant, especially immigrants that were not white protestants, played in not just recent Christian political movements, but also in earlier America First movements.

Willie James Jennings in discussing the theological rise of the concept of race speaks about theoretically, Christians should be inclusive, not exclusive in their orientation toward others. Christians are mostly gentiles that were grafted into the story of Isreal and should ideally, invite others to join them in also being grafted into the story of God's kingdom on earth. But instead, what has mostly happened is an exclusionary stance, that points to our own high status and views others as less than. Similarly, NT Wright has written well in his biography of Paul about the importance of a radical boundary-crossing as being essential to the rise of the early church.

I think we need much more orientation toward complicated history and less toward meme-friendly simplifications. If we can communicate history in the form of a meme, it is likely inaccurate history. I think this is particularly important for Christian who understand the impact that sin has on both individuals and institutions. Nothing is simply good or bad, even though there are clearly some things that are worse than others. I am not going to try to figure out what good things we may learn from Nazi Germany or chattel slavery. But I do think that part of rebalancing our historical sources means that we need to investigate areas where we have undervalued people and systems and sources so that we can have a more healthy understanding of the ways that our history continues to impact our present.