Constitution Versus Culture
Thomas S. Kidd July/August 2026The idea that America is a “Christian nation” has become increasingly prevalent over the past half century. A search in Google Books’s NGram Viewer shows that the phrase “Christian nation” rarely appeared in pre-Civil War publications. It started to become more common around the year 1900. Then the use of “Christian nation” grew dramatically in the 1980s, upon the election of President Ronald Reagan and the emergence of the Moral Majority as a religious force in politics. In more recent years, the claim that America is, or was, a Christian nation has generally reacted to liberal and secular advances in American culture and law.
Conspicuous Silence
During the founding era, belief in America as a Christian nation was often assumed, rather than asserted in a partisan way. Characterizations of America as a Christian nation did occasionally appear during the American founding, however—particularly in controversies spawned by the Constitution of 1787.
The Constitution said almost nothing about God, much less Christianity. It also did nothing to ensure that America would have only Christian leaders. Many of the state constitutions did have faith-based tests for elected officials. For example, states including Pennsylvania and Vermont originally required officeholders to affirm belief in the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, a measure designed to bar Jews and other non-Christians from office.
Article VI of the U.S. Constitution stipulated, however, that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office.” Obviously the framers did not think this move would lead to non-Christians quickly seizing positions in the national government. The Founders just preferred to leave religious boundary-setting to the discretion of the states.
Still, the “no religious test” clause generated some grumbling. The delightfully named Luther Martin, a Constitutional Convention delegate from Maryland, declared in 1787 that “in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism.” A New Hampshire writer likewise averred that under the new Constitution, America could end up with “a Papist [Catholic], a Mohomatan [Muslim], a Deist, yea an Atheist at the helm of Government.”
The logic reflected here was that a “Christian country,” in Martin’s phrase, should have only Christian rulers. An American guarantee of Christian leaders would echo the way that England in the 1700s required its monarch and members of Parliament to be Christians. The Constitution’s prohibition on national religious tests obviously did not prohibit voters from taking candidates’ religion (or lack thereof) into consideration. Indeed, some of John Adams’ supporters in 1800 argued that Thomas Jefferson, Adams’ rival, was a heretic and perhaps a closet atheist. Thus, they contended, Americans should not vote for Jefferson. But the majority of the electorate did vote for the allegedly heretical candidate, and Jefferson became the third president.
Defenders of the religious test ban argued that the measure was not anti-religious but signaled a commitment to religious liberty. Many Christians, especially Baptists, were delighted with the no-test-oath clause, because they saw such oaths as government intrusion into theological and denominational matters, ones best left to the churches and individual believers. Oliver Ellsworth, a future U.S. senator from Connecticut and chief justice of the Supreme Court, argued in 1787 that the prohibition on religious oaths was not “unfavorable to religion.” Instead, it was intended to “secure to you the important right of religious liberty.”
Still, defenders of the “Christian country” argument represented by Luther Martin sought to amend the Constitution in ways that would commit it explicitly to the Christian faith. William Williams, a Connecticut judge and signer of the Declaration of Independence, insisted that the no-religious-test clause was a mistake. In 1788 he proposed that the Constitution should include theistic, though not explicitly Christian, language in the preamble.
The additional language Williams suggested would have read “We the people of the United States, in a firm belief of the being and perfections of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governour of the world, in his universal providence and the authority of his laws; that he will require of all moral agents an account of their conduct; that all rightful powers among men are ordained of, and mediately derived from God.” This statement would have required all those who swore to uphold the Constitution to affirm a belief in one true God, God’s laws, and God’s providential rule over nations and people. But there was insufficient support for adding such theistic language to the Constitution. Nor was there majority sentiment for removing the no-test-oath clause.
Leading Founders such as the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush nevertheless expressed a typical view when he told John Adams in 1789 that he wished the “name of the Supreme Being had been introduced somewhere in the new Constitution. Perhaps an acknowledgment may be made of his goodness or of his providence” in a future amendment, Rush suggested. It is not quite true that God’s name went wholly unmentioned in the document, since the Constitution did end by using the conventional phrase “the year of our Lord 1787.” But to patriots such as Rush, the lack of substantive comment about God was conspicuous and concerning.
The absence of God in the Constitution would appear regularly in political debates in the 1800s. In times of national turmoil, such as the War of 1812, traditional Christians suggested that our national neglect toward God had provoked God’s judgment. In 1812 the traditional Congregationalist and Yale College president Timothy Dwight bewailed the fact that “we formed our Constitution without any acknowledgment of God; without any recognition of his mercies to us, as a people, of his government, or even of his existence.”
Dwight also bitterly recalled the 1787 episode in which a few Constitutional Convention delegates, led by Benjamin Franklin, had proposed that they open sessions with prayer, only to have the motion tabled. This incident is made more puzzling by the fact that Franklin, who called himself a Deist, made the motion for it. Most convention delegates apparently saw the motion as a distraction, because it would require hiring a chaplain, for which they had no budget. Still, Dwight regretted that “the Convention . . . never asked, even once, [God’s] direction, or his blessing upon their labours. Thus we commenced our national existence under the present system, without God.”
In 1815 the anti-slavery Presbyterian minister Alexander McLeod of Pennsylvania got more specific than Dwight about the Constitution’s failings. McLeod wrote that in the Constitution, “God is not at all acknowledged, and holding men in slavery is authorized.” Historians have spilled much ink over whether the Constitution was basically pro- or anti-slavery, but there is no doubt that the Constitution, on a plain reading, made little acknowledgment of God, much less Jesus. Figures who shared Dwight and McLeod’s concerns made repeated attempts in the 1800s to add theistic or Christian language via amendments to the Constitution, but to no avail.
Contested Clauses
By far the most important addition regarding religion, of course, was the First Amendment (1791), which stipulated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The state-level trend outside of New England was already toward disestablishment and religious freedom as of 1791. Virginia had adopted Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” in 1786, which disestablished the Anglican Church and guaranteed religious liberty for all Virginians. There was little popular momentum toward creating an American national establishment akin to the Church of England or the Church of Scotland.
The framers did not dictate to the states what they must do about their traditional established churches, namely the Anglican/Episcopal Church of the southern and mid-Atlantic states, and the Congregational Church in New England. As in most matters, the Constitution restricted only the national government’s latitude (“Congress shall make no law”) regarding an established church. Indeed, several New England states maintained their tax-supported Congregationalist churches long after the adoption of the First Amendment, well into the 1800s.
Many Anti-Federalist critics of the Constitution wished to see an explicit commitment to religious liberty, which accounts for the adoption of the free exercise clause. That clause generated little controversy in 1791. But the first Congress, as it debated the no establishment clause, wanted to clarify that while Congress could not establish a national denomination, the U.S. government was not hostile toward religion either. Representative Benjamin Huntington of Connecticut expressed the common fear that the no establishment provision could be interpreted in a way that was “extremely hurtful to the cause of religion.”
James Madison, of Virginia, rightly known as the Father of the Constitution, countered that the First Amendment’s two religion clauses meant to convey that Congress could not create a national church or coerce religious practice, and that the government meant to protect free exercise of religion for all Americans.
From 1787 to 1788, Madison faced a backlash from Baptists and other critics in Virginia who worried about the absence of a religious liberty statement in the Constitution. They likewise wanted explicit assurance that the national government would create no official denomination. Obviously the Baptists were not anti-religious, but everyone knew that if there was to be an official American church, it would definitely not be that of the oft-persecuted Baptists. Such denominations just wanted an equal playing field for all religious groups.
To secure Baptist support, Madison promised that he would promote the First Amendment’s religion clauses as part of a larger Bill of Rights after ratification was complete. Madison kept his word, even though he did not originally think that these clauses—or the Bill of Rights generally—were necessary. He believed that if the Constitution did not explicitly give the national government the power to interfere with religion, judges and other interpreters should assume that the government could not meddle with such rights. Thankfully, critics such as the Baptists put sufficient pressure on Madison and other Founders to guarantee the adoption of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights, which many Americans regard as the most precious part of the Constitution.
A Christian Culture?
As noted earlier, the phrase “Christian nation” did become more popular at the beginning of the 20th century. As non-Christian immigrants from overseas became more numerous, so did assertions that Christianity played a special role in American culture and law. In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), for example, the Supreme Court ruled that “we are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.” The court even asserted, based on accumulated traditions of America’s culture and laws, that “this is a Christian nation.”
In more recent forms, the assertion that America is a Christian nation has typically responded to liberal or secularist developments in American law, including the Supreme Court’s prohibition of school-sponsored Bible reading and prayer in the 1960s. Arguments that America was a Christian nation came from opponents of the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973) and of gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). Some secularist critics have argued that opposition to abortion and gay marriage is “religiously based,” and therefore passing laws against abortion or gay marriage violates the establishment clause.
But drawing a sharp line between secular and religious sources is an unsupportable legal distinction, since most universally accepted laws, such as those against murder and theft, are at least partially rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. One can also make arguments against murder and theft, as well as against abortion and gay marriage, on a legally sound basis without any reference to religion or Scripture.1 A law against murder isn’t illegitimate and “religiously based” simply because murder is prohibited in the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately for rigid secularists, there’s no way around the indelible Judeo-Christian legacy in American law.
An American Paradox
So where does all this leave the “Christian nation” question? The answers depend on how you frame the issue. The U.S. government is based on the Constitution, where we find little evidence to suggest that the Founders intended legally to create a “Christian nation.” The framers could have used theistic or Christian language in the Constitution, but they didn’t. They could have required officeholders to be theists or Christians, but they didn’t. And they could have created an established church, but they didn’t.
Culturally, however, there are important ways in which America has been, and perhaps still is, a Christian nation. The vast majority of people involved in the American founding were professing Christians. Even today, more than 60 percent of Americans identify as Christians. Demographically, the United States has always been a majority Christian nation. Most Founders assumed that Christianity, and its Jewish antecedents, made a major contribution, and perhaps the definitive contribution, to American ideas about right and wrong, the importance of virtue, and the dangers of vice. The Bible has been and remains the nation’s most popular book, although the level of Americans’ biblical knowledge has declined precipitously since 1776.
Christians and secularists will continue to disagree about the extent to which we are a “Christian nation.” The debate reveals a paradox, however. America has largely been secular in a governmental sense. That secularity—especially church-state separation—was not historically meant to suppress religion, but it has fostered religious liberty, as the Founders intended. Religious freedom has undergirded the flourishing of American religious groups, making America unusually religious. American religion has been mostly but not exclusively Christian. You can especially see our religious vitality when comparing the U.S. to countries such as Britain, France, or Australia. Thus, since the American founding, our nation has been structurally secular and profoundly religious at the same time. Compromising the balance between robust religion and secular government endangers the American heritage of religious liberty.
1 Alex Deagon and Francis J. Beckwith, “Religious Freedom and Abortion: Why State-Imposed Abortion Restrictions Do Not Breach the First Amendment,” Baylor Law Review 76, no. 3 (2024): 511–74.
Article Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Thomas S. Kidd is a research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City. He has authored numerous books, including Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale University Press, 2019) and Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale University Press, 2017). His most recent book, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh, was published this year by Yale University Press. His work has also been published in various media outlets, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and he blogs at “Evangelical History” at The Gospel Coalition website. He’s on Twitter, @thomasskidd.