Interview: A More Perfect Mess
July/August 2026Debates over America’s founding are rarely mere arguments about the past. Increasingly they shape present-day battles over law, religious liberty, national identity, education, and the proper relationship between church and state. And few questions carry more political and theological weight than this one: Was America founded as a Christian nation?
Historian and author John Fea has spent much of his career helping readers navigate that contested question. His 2011 book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction, revised in 2016, challenged both Christian nationalist claims that the founders created an explicitly Christian republic and secular accounts that treat religion as incidental to the American experiment. This year Fea returns to the subject with In God We Trust: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, forthcoming from Westminster John Knox Press on September 29, 2026.
Fea is a historian of early America who has taught for more than two decades at Messiah University, Pennsylvania, and is a senior fellow at the Lumen Center for the Study of Christianity and Culture. His work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and USA Today, and his earlier books include Why Study History?; The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society; and Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.
Bettina Krause, editor of Liberty magazine, recently spoke with Fea about why the Christian nation question persists and what the historical record does, and does not, show.*
Bettina Krause: Can there ever be a yes-or-no answer to the question: “Was America founded as a Christian nation?”
John Fea: Anyone who’s trying to answer that question in a black-and-white way is probably thinking more about contemporary politics than they are about history or the complexity of the past. The primary responsibility of a historian is to try to separate out their own political convictions—to take the politics of the 21st century out of the equation. Now, that may not be entirely possible. But historians must try to think about how the 18th-century founders themselves were trying to define the relationship between religion and politics, church and state.
When you look at it from that perspective, it’s messy. It’s complex. What’s fairly clear, though, is that the founders wanted to keep church and state somewhat apart. They didn’t want to model the new American republic on European countries, with their state churches and religious wars. Instead, the founders wanted to protect religion. They thought religion was good for the republic and would create a healthier citizenry. On the other hand, they had their doubts about whether one religion should be dominant.
I often say it’s a bad historical question to ask, “Was America founded as a Christian nation” because that wasn’t a question for debate among the founding generation. In fact, it has been a matter of intense debate only from about the 1980s through to the present. So the question itself is more a political than historical one. And it’s a question that’s not very useful for understanding the dynamics of 18th-century America.
Krause: You write in your book something along the lines of “history is all about making smooth stories rough.” So what is the “smooth story” today about America’s founding that history needs to make a little bit more “rough”?
Fea: The 250th anniversary of the United States has prompted people to search for what we historians describe as a “usable past.” We all want a past that we can use in the present to bolster our own identity or to promote some kind of agenda, whether political, social, or cultural. When you’re looking at the past only for its usefulness in the present, it’s very easy to find the things that you want to find: to see a story that’s clear, uncomplicated, unnuanced, unmessy, smooth. A story that translates well into your agenda in the present. And we all do that, regardless of whether we come at it from the left or right. But historical thinking requires truthfulness and integrity; a willingness to accept that what happened in the 18th century may not necessarily help us advance our own political ideas in the present.
We often talk about what the Founders “believed.” We hear this all the time, right? Both sides in the culture war debates will say, “The Founders believed this, or that.” As a historian I want to ask, “Well, which Founder are you talking about?” Rarely did the founders speak in unison on these questions of religion and government. It’s much messier than those on either side want to believe.
Krause: Let’s get to some of those specific claims. I was covering the Rededicate America event on the National Mall in May, and what struck me is that each speaker was making the case that the American experiment was just as much a spiritual project as it was a political one. How much weight should we give that argument?
Fea: During the Revolutionary era there were certainly moments when the Continental Congress proclaimed days of prayer—days of “thanksgiving and humiliation,” they called them. In fact, May 17, 1776, was one of those days, and thus the Rededicate 250 event was the 250th anniversary of that moment. But what happened at Rededicate 250, I think, was more of a political rally than any kind of reflection on the history of these thanksgiving and fast days.
Speakers were essentially cherry-picking certain moments that deserve to be celebrated as part of a larger narrative, but presenting them as if these events were the defining moments of the Revolution.
The American Revolution was about taxation. It was about stamp acts and intolerable acts and the Boston Tea Party, the Boston massacre, tensions between the power of Parliament versus the power of local British American colonies. It makes complete sense that some people in the 18th century responded to these things through a lens of faith. But the revolution itself was not some kind of theological or Christian event. It was about much more mundane issues, which were not always connected by the Founders with Christianity. Yet what came across at the Rededicate 250 event was an ahistorical story—that Christianity was the central theme of the revolution.
Krause: How does this idea of “weighting” history correctly work when we’re talking about some of our founding documents, such as the Constitution or the Declaration? For instance, some people focus on the four times that the idea of a divine power is mentioned in the Declaration, yet make no mention of the bulk of the document, which was the 27 grievances against King George III.
Fea: Well, those four references are there, but to suggest that they have anything to do with the specificity of the Christian religion is a stretch. Belief in divine providence, or that rights come from God—these were ideas that anyone in the British English-speaking world of the time would have simply accepted. It was in the air that they breathed.
When it comes to the Constitution, there’s nothing there to suggest that the framers were trying to create a religious, or, more specifically, a Christian country. In fact, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which came a couple of years later, go out of their way to make sure that America will never be dominated by one religion, or that one religion will be privileged over another.
Article VI of the Constitution says there will be no religious test oath as a condition for holding public office. In other words, you don’t have to be of a particular faith or any faith at all to hold political office.
And then of course the First Amendment’s disestablishment clause says there will be no national church. This is in an era in which most European countries had state churches, which meant, in practice, that taxpayers of every faith had to support the official church—its buildings and clergy—through a religious tax.
The First Amendment was designed to separate church and state—to keep the government out of religion. But also, the other way around. It forbade federal money going to support a particular religion. Today you hear people say, “The establishment clause was meant to protect the church from the state, but it didn’t forbid state support for religion.” That’s a problematic argument. The whole idea of disestablishment was driven by the idea that the government should not force people to pay taxes to support a religion that was not theirs. That’s the historical roots of the establishment clause.
The Constitution, in this sense, is a very secular document. What I mean by secular is not secular humanism or atheism, as the Christian right often defines it. When I say secular, I mean that the Constitution really does, to some degree, separate the church and the state.
Krause: Thomas Jefferson famously described a “wall of separation” between church and state, and this has become a flash point in debates today. What do we get wrong about this idea of a “wall of separation”?
Fea: The debate really begins in 1947 with a Supreme Court establishment clause case called Everson v. Board of Education. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion, and said, in effect, “In the United States, there is a wall of separation between church and state and it is high and impregnable.” Here he was drawing on an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, where the Congregational Church is the official church established by the state. And so Jefferson is encouraging them to keep up the fight for complete religious liberty, so they will no longer have to pay taxes to support a church that isn’t their own.
Hugo Black in 1947 uses that letter to say that there is a complete wall of separation between church and state. Was Hugo Black right or wrong? Personally, I’d hope for a high wall of separation between church and state, mostly for religious reasons. I don’t think the government should be able to tell churches what to do. But historically, the idea of a high wall between church and state—through which religion never passes—is not how it played out in American history.
There have always been religious events or rituals in the federal government. A perfect example here would be military chaplains or prayer before meetings of Congress. Thomas Jefferson attended a religious service in the Capitol building. There have always been what one historian describes as “checkpoints” through that wall of separation, through which religion has passed. That doesn’t mean the wall is irrelevant or the wall is not important. But as a historian, I can’t say that it represents the reality of American history from the founding to the present, because clearly it doesn’t.
Krause: The Everson case is also fascinating because it incorporated the establishment clause against the states. Up until that point, only the federal government was restrained from establishing a church—states were free to do so. Some on the Christian right are increasingly calling for “disincorporation” of the establishment clause. Even JD Vance has talked about getting back to a “pre-Everson” America. In other words, let the states and local communities decide how to deal with religious questions and to define the relationship between church and state. To me that is a frightening prospect, but does it accord with history?
Fea: This is an argument you often hear. There are some historians who are making a Christian nationalist argument. And “historians” should be in quotes—I prefer to call them political activists. They point to the fact that many American states at the time of the founding did have religious establishments and religious test oaths. States did privilege one denomination over another. In fact, some states said that you had to uphold the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments in order to vote.
So they argue, “See? We were a Christian nation. Look at these state constitutions!” Their methodology is to take that moment and freeze it in time, and then simply unthaw it in 2026, as if nothing has happened in between.
Historians talk about change over time as being important to understanding the present. For instance, in the 1860s after the Civil War the United States ratified the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, and said, “Slavery can never come back now—it’s illegal.” The Fourteenth Amendment said, “States, you must now conform to the Constitution and all the amendments,” meaning states no longer have a right to make choices about slavery. And, as you rightly point out, the 1947 Everson case applies that same principle for the first time to the religion clauses of the Constitution.
Of course, by the time the Supreme Court heard the Everson case, the states had already removed the test oaths and establishments from their constitutions for very practical reasons—the growing pluralism of American society meant that Catholics, Jews, and others were pushing against these things.
And then, of course, we could also ask whether America could even have been called a “nation” at the time in the 18th century when many of these establishments and test oaths were added to state constitutions. This was the period between the Declaration and the drafting on the U.S. Constitution. There was no federal government. We were a just collection of states under the Articles of Confederation. And, to make it even more complicated, some states, such as Virginia and Rhode Island, did not have established churches. Again, the messiness of history!
But could the Court overturn Everson and return America to a time when the establishment clause doesn’t restrain the states? The way the current court is assembled, who knows what might happen?
Krause: How can an average person, a nonprofessional historian, sort through these questions? For instance, maybe we see a meme on social media of George Washington praying in the snow with an inspiring message underneath suggesting that America must be faithful to its Christian roots and values. How would you advise us to approach that sort of material?
Fea: It can be difficult. For the past 15 years I’ve been going into churches and public spaces doing lectures on such topics as “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” I cannot tell you how many times I have someone come up to me before the lecture and say, ”My mind is already made up”—either one way or the other. People tend to come to these lectures for affirmation of their existing views. But I usually give a more complicated presentation, and no one leaves happy.
The discipline of history cultivates certain skills that I think are essential to a democracy—empathy, learning how to walk in the shoes of someone who’s very different to you, even if that person’s long dead. What did they believe? Why did they believe it? Am I superimposing my ideas on this person, trying to turn them into what I want them to be?
These are skills that also translate very well into everyday life. When you get your first job and you’re sitting in a cubicle with someone you think is from another planet, you need to learn how to understand different people, to empathize.
There’s a certain kind of humility associated with history because we can never really know what these people thought. We can’t get into their heads; only the documents are left behind. So we must make provisional judgments about other people as opposed to attacking them. We need to try to understand people with whom we disagree, to ask why they did the things that they did.
All the skills that are essential to studying history translate into democratic virtues that, in the context of 2026, make us better citizens. It’s more than simply knowing the three branches of government or when the Civil War started. It’s more than the quick hit—making a point and winning a battle with your enemy on social media. The study of history is formational, and it takes time. It’s about developing certain habits of mind that, in turn, cultivate essential democratic skills.
*The interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full conversation on the Just Liberty podcast, available on all major podcast platforms, and on YouTube at @LibertyMag1906.