I would say at my church which is in a Republican voting area is basically split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans and probably voted 60/40 Biden/Trump. Lot’s of churchgoers are Democrats, many proclaimed evangelical Republicans don’t go to church.
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This describes my parents’ (mainstream protestant) view. Of course, their particular brand traced it’s US history to immigrants who left their European country expressly to avoid being blended into the state approved church.
A pretty standard story for the US.
Interestingly, evidently the idea of the US as a “christian nation” wasn’t invented until the 1950 with a post war surge in national unity and church membership under eisenhower.
This movement was harnessed by anti-new-deal business interests that had been around since the 1930s. They recruited various ministers who believed in god and the free market.
There were a bunch of Germans that emigrated to South Australia in the 19th century for this reason (including one of my ancestors). They were still speaking German three generations later and one of the most famous descendants was Max Schubert, who started Penfolds Grange (Australia’s most prestigious wine).
Yep, pretty much the same year.
Eh, the original colonies and early states mostly had established churches that were financially supported with taxes. And you typically had to be a member of the correct church to hold office.
That was well after the ratification of the Bill of Rights which only restricted the federal government on the establishment of a religion, not state governments. Until the ratification of the 14th amendment, that is, which extended the restrictions to all levels of government.
Massachusetts had an established church (Congregational) until 1833. I believe they were the last state to do away with it.
Francis Scott Key included the phrase “and this be our motto: in God is our trust” in the poem that is now The Star-Spangled Banner. That was written in 1814 and it’s been a line in our national anthem for as long as The Star-Spangled Banner has been our national anthem. (No, it’s not in the first verse, but the anthem has 4 verses.)
Prior to the use of the Star-Spangled Banner as the national anthem, it was My Country Tis of Thee, which contains the phrase “Protect us by Thy might, great God our King!”
The phrase “In God We Trust” was first put on coins during the Civil War and had been around a long time at that point. The Union soldiers certainly saw themselves as doing God’s work. “As [Christ] died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on” is a line from Battle Hymn of the Republic.
So no, the idea wasn’t conceived in the 1950s at all.
That said, there was certainly a resurgence of it in the 1950s, which is when “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and when “IN GOD WE TRUST” was first printed on all paper money. But those weren’t new ideas. They were newly re-popularized old ideas.
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A lot of the colonists were fleeing the state religion. Some, like the Quakers, weren’t Christian. (There were also Jewish immigrants early on.) And I’ve been told that the motivation for that “no state religion” clause was Massachusetts. The other states didn’t want that.
Eh?
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If that is true they probably feared that the state religion would be Episcopalian rather than Congregationalist.
Massachusetts is the state that Roger Williams left because as a Congregational pastor he wasn’t Congregationalist enough.
Massachusetts is the state (well, colony) that had the witch trials.
Massachusetts was the last holdout on keeping its established state religion.
In order to hold state office in Massachusetts a person had to avow:
And I’ve read that while they used the word “Christian” it was effectively enforced as “Protestant” (because it went without saying that Catholics weren’t real Christians).
My understanding is that you are reading contemporary ideas into historical circumstances. After world war 2, the US reinvented it’s image of itself, as societies can do after catastrophe.
Certainly christianity influenced deism and the enlightenment.
But that is not the same as establishing the US as a “christian nation”.
The reformation had almost ripped europe in two. The US was specifically established as a nation that was not religious.
The term “judeo-christian” was invented in the 1950s, for example.
I don’t know what state constitutions have to do with it. We are taking about the federal government, not state ones. And I’m assuming those state constitutions have artifacts from their earlier governance in which religion was definitely not separated from the state.
Isn’t it telling that even with all that precedent, that kind of language was specifically omitted from the federal government?
Eh, that’s a bit of revisionist history.
They were a collection of different states that were mostly very religious, having state-sponsored churches and requiring office-holders and in some cases even voters to be Christian. But the different states had different religions and saw the benefit of not squabbling amongst themselves over which version of Christianity would dominate.
Lucy mentioned Massachusetts. Here’s what Maryland had to say about religion:
New Jersey specified that you had to be Protestant to have civil rights:
And so on. Others required faith in the trinity or avowing that both the Old and New Testaments are the inerrant word of God.
So if you want to split hairs… I will grant you that we were not considered a “Christian nation” but rather a federation of Christian states. If you think there’s a meaningful distinction there then the latter is probably more accurate.
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I think that is an incredibly meaningful distinction actually.
I admit that I am less familiar with the state constitutions.
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You might find this interesting. It was my source for the Maryland & New Jersey quotes.
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Quakers, like modern Unitarians, don’t have to be Christian. The movement grew out of Christianity, to be sure, but even early on they rejected a lot of the trappings of Christianity.
A lot of the founding fathers were deists. Again, they grew up in a Christian tradition, but many of them didn’t think of themselves as Christian.
God In America: People: Thomas Jefferson | PBS
Like other Founding Fathers, Jefferson was considered a Deist, subscribing to the liberal religious strand of Deism that values reason over revelation and rejects traditional Christian doctrines, including the Virgin Birth, original sin and the resurrection of Jesus. While he rejected orthodoxy, Jefferson was nevertheless a religious man.
Jefferson famously cut up the Bible to remove the stuff that he thought obscured the message of Jesus, whom he believed to be a great moral teacher, not the son of God.
To be clear, the reason for this was largely because it was recognized that there would never be agreement on which Protestant sect would be the federal religion.
The federal government could never have come into existence if they’d tried to usurp that power from the states. It was a separation of powers thing, not an opposition to state religion.
There were some who were indeed opposed to state religion (like Jefferson). But that’s not why there was sufficient support to prevent a federal religion. Most people just wanted to keep their own state’s religion.
That makes sense, but having attended a Quaker college myself, there was never a question of their identity being anything BUT Christian. Certainly that’s just one group’s/church’s view, and there are others, but having been immersed in a Quaker environment, this is still a foreign concept to me.
Most modern evangelicals would have little common ground with their Jesus Christ.
Sell your possessions and give to the poor, welcome strangers from a foreign land, overturning money-changer tables in the temple, self-sacrifice, give to Caesar, must remove the plank in your eye, whatever you do to the least, etc.
I am sure some follow it pretty closely and I don’t judge people who try to do good without following 100% of what he preached - I’m sure not one of us here fully follows his teachings.
Interesting, I didn’t know this, and growing up I lived at the intersection of Quaker and Academy streets, named after… you guessed it, the quaker academy that used to be there. I think it was basically an elementary school and maybe high school. The ‘Religious Society of Friends’ may or may not explain what is known as the ‘Friends Church’ in town.
I think the salient point is that there religion was separated from the federal government.
It might have been a federation of christian states, but the christianity of those states was accidental as far as the federal government was concerned.
People may very well have thought of themselves as living in christian states. And i believe they though of themselves more as citizens of their state than as citizens of the country. Certainly that was true of the South, with deadly consequences in the civil war.
So perhaps it makes a kind of cultural sense to take that historical personal identity as being christian, and graft it back onto the national identity after people started thinking of themselves primarily as “american” instead of being from new york, or virginia, or whatever.
That doesn’t mean this process didn’t create a novel idea of america as a “christian nation” starting in the 50s.
I think it also does not do justice to the idea of separation of church and state, which has a long history of both secular and religious support, to see as simply being a kind of truce because each denomination knew it couldn’t win out and be the state religion. It is much more than that.