America is NOT a Christian Nation.
America is not a Christian nation, and to repeat that falsehood is to spit on the grave of reason, to deny history, and to betray the very spirit of the Enlightenment, which brought this Republic into being. Jerusalem is not in North America or South America, nor in Europe—certainly not in Denmark—and it was never meant to be transplanted into the New World as a capital of theocracy.
Those who built this nation did not see themselves as apostles of Galilee but as heirs of Voltaire, Locke, Montesquieu, and Hume. They were not apostles but deists, skeptics, rationalists, and cautious agnostics who—having seen the wars of religion and the tyranny of priests—were determined to keep revelation in its narrow cell and give sovereignty to reason. To claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation is not merely an error; it is historical malpractice, a deliberate act of intellectual vandalism.Consider Thomas Jefferson, who more than any other man embodied the Enlightenment spirit in American form. Christians today often claim Jefferson as one of their own, the author of the Declaration, with its invocation of a “Creator.” But Jefferson’s God was no Christ. He wrote in 1820 to John Adams: *“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”*¹
This is not Christian faith; this is deistic ridicule. Jefferson literally took scissors to the Bible, excising miracles, virgin births, and resurrections, leaving only the ethical teachings of a mortal man.² His “Jefferson Bible” is a funeral pyre for the supernatural claims of Christianity. Jefferson himself described Christianity’s priests as “the most perverted system that ever shone on man”³ and called the clergy a “mortal enemy to freedom.”⁴ What more unmistakable evidence is needed that he stood outside the Christian fold?
Benjamin Franklin, the practical genius who gave us electricity and the postal system, was no more orthodox. In 1790, writing to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, Franklin confessed: *“As to Jesus of Nazareth, I have some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon. I see no harm in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence.”*⁵ He treated divinity not as truth but as utility, the way one might treat a folk tale that comforts children. Franklin was not a Christian believer but a man of the Enlightenment, who found value in virtue but refused to kneel before dogma.
And then there was Thomas Paine, the incendiary pamphleteer whose Common Sense lit the fuse of revolution. In The Age of Reason, Paine thundered: *“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”*⁶ He called the Bible a “book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy.”⁷ Paine’s words were so blunt that he was ostracized even in America for his iconoclasm. However, his deism was the most radical articulation of what many founders felt quietly: that reason, not revelation, should rule the minds of a free people.
John Adams, the second president, went further than any in giving this skepticism political form. In 1797, he signed the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate, which declared with crystalline clarity: *“The Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”*⁸ These were not idle words. They were diplomacy and doctrine, a declaration to the world that America would not be another crusader state.
George Washington, the most revered of the founders, was not a Christian in the confessional sense. He avoided communion, slipping out of church before the Eucharist.⁹ His writings, including the famous Farewell Address, invoked only vague Providence.¹⁰ Washington was a Mason, steeped in the language of natural religion, who refused to endorse any specific creed. His God was the cosmic watchmaker, not the risen Christ.
And then, a generation later, came Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was, in truth, a crypto-deist —a man who wrapped his skepticism in ambiguity for political survival, but never abandoned his suspicion of dogma. As a young man, he was so outspoken against Christianity that friends recalled him being labeled an “infidel.”¹¹ Though he invoked God in his speeches, it was always a God undefined, a cosmic power, a Providence, never Christ the Redeemer. He once said plainly: *“The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession.”**¹² His Second Inaugural, often misread as Christian piety, was in fact a meditation on the inscrutability of divine justice, not a hymn to any creed. Lincoln’s refusal to define God is the mark of deism’s shadow, not the certainty of revelation.
What, then, are we to make of the claim that America is a Christian nation? The Puritans who first came to these shores were not architects of liberty but agents of imperialism. They destroyed native civilizations under the banner of a wrathful Old Testament deity. They expelled dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. They hanged Quakers. They burned witches. Their vision was not the Republic of Liberty but the theocracy of Geneva transplanted to New England. To confuse their colonial brutality with the founding of the American Republic is to mistake disease for cure. The Constitution was written not by Puritans but by Enlightenment heirs who understood the danger of priestly rule.
Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, declaring that *“our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions.”*¹³ Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” defended it fiercely, warning against “the tyranny of a religious majority.”¹⁴ These were the documents and debates that birthed the First Amendment, with its wall of separation between church and state. Christian nationalists today sneer at that wall, but it is Jefferson’s wall, Madison’s wall, the barrier without which America would have become another sectarian battleground.
To say America is a Christian nation is therefore to deny Jefferson’s scissors, Franklin’s doubts, Paine’s thunder, Adams’s treaty, Washington’s evasions, Madison’s vigilance, and Lincoln’s cryptic deism. It is to erase the Enlightenment from the Constitution and replace it with theocracy. It is to forget that when Washington took the oath of office, he placed his hand on a Bible but added the words “So help me God” as a gesture of personal faith—not as a constitutional requirement. It is to ignore that the Constitution itself makes no reference to Christ, no invocation of the Trinity, and only mentions “God” once, in dating documents “in the Year of our Lord.” That was boilerplate convention, not theology.
The truth is that America was founded as a secular Republic, in which religion was privatized, politics secularized, and the Enlightenment enthroned. The founders were not saints but skeptics; their faith was in reason, not revelation. Christian nationalists who insist otherwise are engaged in a project of historical falsification, a propaganda campaign meant to turn a free Republic into a church-state monstrosity. They take comfort in slogans like “Christian nation” because they cannot defend their creed on the grounds of reason alone. They must rewrite history to baptize the Constitution.
But America does not belong to their fantasy. America belongs to Jefferson’s scissors, Franklin’s wit, Paine’s thunder, Adams’s treaty, Washington’s silence, Madison’s vigilance, and Lincoln’s ambiguity. It belongs to the Enlightenment, not to Jerusalem. To call it otherwise is to insult reason, intellectual honesty, and intelligence. This nation was born not at the foot of a cross but in the light of reason, and it will remain free only so long as it resists theocrats who would trade liberty for superstition.
Notes
- Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823, The Adams-Jefferson Letters.
- Jefferson’s “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” (The Jefferson Bible, 1820).
- Jefferson to William Short, April 13, 1820.
- Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813.
- Franklin to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790, Papers of Benjamin Franklin.
- Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), Part I, Section I.
- Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), Part II.
- Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11, signed 1797, ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate.
- On Washington leaving before communion: Benson J. Lossing, Washington and the American Republic (1860).
- Washington’s Farewell Address, September 19, 1796.
- William Herndon, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889).
- Quoted in Joseph Lewis, Lincoln the Freethinker (1924).
- Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777, enacted 1786).
- Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785).
No Responses