Yes, the US Is a Christian Nation
A secular or non-Christian United States would be very different
Is a nation its government? Or is a nation its people? That’s what I think of when U. S. liberals argue against the idea that the United States is a “Christian nation”. If a nation is the people, if the nation is an anthropological thing, then its identity comes from what the people are.
Most Americans either practice some variety of Christianity or are culturally Christian.
Yes, the U. S. government (its state) is officially secular, and long may it remain so. No law made by Congress establishing a national religion or interfering with its free exercise is allowed. This is a precious thing and should be protected.
Part of that means understanding what the principle is and what it’s not. Disestablishmentarianism and free exercise are not laïcité, the French idea of complete removal of any reference or use of Christianity or other religion from public life. Lots of liberal citations of Jefferson’s (now famous, but in his own time, privately expressed) belief in a “wall of separation” between church and state don’t change that.
The characteristics of a national population can be distinct from the nature of the government. Witness this with language, where many countries in the Global South have various European tongues as official languages. Still, in many cases, most of the ordinary people speak indigenous or creole languages, and only a small percentage, the elite, speak the official European-origin language.
The U. S. has been like this about Christianity. Evangelical/Calvinist Protestantism has been the popular religion of a broad swath of American society since Anglo-American society formed in the 17th century. Catholicism was the religion of large waves of European immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mainline Protestantism has traditionally been more elite — Anglican was another way to say “gentleman” in colonial and early republican Virginia — but it’s always been there too.
Atheist/deist/agnostic non-belief was niche until recently. In the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, deism was an elite point of view. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were not regular guys. Ordinary white people of the time were religious Christians.
Even after the last two decades, when the U.S. saw a particularly sharp drop in the percentage of citizens claiming to be religious, one in every eight Americans was a white evangelical Protestant in 2017. Then some claim an identity or connection to another Christian tradition — Roman Catholics, Mormons, and mainline Protestants.
Americans who affirmatively identify as atheist or agnostic still make up no more than 5% of the population according to most surveys. It’s a minority point of view. Unfortunately, in the U.S., this means it is very open to being considered an elite point of view.
Meanwhile, Christian religiosity pervades U.S. society, culture, and political institutions. Christian holidays are considered federal holidays where Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist sacred days are ignored. Americans often consider themselves very generous, especially to Christian religious charities. At the same time, Calvinist ideas of deservedness make many Americans oppose expanding social democracy. Further examples, including the Christian symbolism and references found throughout American literature, drama, and music, the influence of Presbyterian and Catholic clergy on the Hays Code period in Hollywood, and institutions like the National Prayer Breakfast, point to a very Christian society, indeed.
The percentage of Americans who would vote for an open atheist for president was 60% in early 2020, which might seem high, but not really in comparison to the 96% who would vote for a Black candidate or the 93% who would vote for a woman candidate.
But, liberals say, the U.S. is secular constitutionally! The Founding Fathers strongly supported the idea of secular government, and that’s what they designed!
My response is two points:
- If the U.S. were secular, it would be a secular Christian culture, in the sense that being secular would not recreate the U.S. as a Jain culture, a Shinto culture, or a traditional Diné (Navajo) culture
- The U.S. isn’t all that secular
Folks raised in the U.S. have a lot of trouble with the first point because Christianity is so dominant — hegemonic — in the country that it is hard to understand everything that comes from it. It’s, frankly, hard to imagine a society organized by other cultural narratives and ideas.
Could you imagine the U.S. being structured, being based, on Buddhist ideas of non-attachment to material objects or desires?
Could you imagine the U.S. being based on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) ideas about matrilineal descent?
Could you imagine the U.S. based on some Jewish ideas: no original sin, no hell, perhaps no afterlife at all, and again, traditionally matrilineal descent?
Could you imagine the U.S. being based on Jain ideas of non-violence, even to the point of vegetarianism?
I can barely do it, and I’ve given this some thought.
Then the reality of the second point: the U.S. government and the country’s political culture are entwined with Christianity, in overt and covert ways.
Culturally Christian ideas about the primacy of marriage and the nuclear heterosexual family in contrast to the collectivism of Maoist China led Catholic conservative Patrick J. Buchanan to successfully recommend that his boss, Richard Nixon, veto a bill to create a national childcare program.
The bulk of religious freedom first amendment case law — including whether or not mandatory Christian prayer in schools is constitutional — is based on the energetic use that right-wing Christians have made of the courts.
Protestant Christian prayer was led in U.S. public schools until sixty years ago. Maybe that seems like a long time ago, but computers already existed, and my parents were teenagers.
The anti-abortion movement has passed modern Catholic Christian ideas of embryonic and fetal personhood into dominant political discourse, and increasingly into law.
Protestant Christian ideas about alcohol and general Christian protection of Sunday as a holy day have also been written into U.S. law.
Then there is the degree to which U.S. political culture is soaked in Christian references, political organizing, and displays of power.
The National Prayer Breakfast, the Al Smith dinner (Catholic priests in their Roman collars laughing it up with presidential candidates), and televangelists praying with presidents in the Oval Office are only the most open signs.
The Moral Majority, Campus Crusade for Christ, pilgrimages to the (Calvinist) Liberty University by both Christian right-wing political candidates and Bernie Sanders, GOP politicians speaking at the meetings of National Right to Life, and even, in a way, Barack Obama speaking and singing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney — all show how non-secular the country’s political culture is.
Could we imagine any equivalent with non-Christian faiths or politicians?
Could we imagine U.S. politicians engaging with non-Christian religious leaders in these ways? Could we imagine a social or political movement in the U.S. based on non-Christian morals and worldviews? Perhaps we could imagine a Democratic U.S. president eulogizing a non-Christian U.S. politician as a gesture of kindness and solidarity, but doing it with such intimate cultural knowledge?
Atheist and agnostic Americans, as well as those of non-Christian faiths, may enjoy the current disestablishmentarianism of the U.S., but probably have no illusions that the U.S. is a truly secular country. In such a country, a lawsuit asserting the religious liberty to have an abortion in accordance with your religion would not even be required. In such a country, you would have your sacred days off from work and your children would have them off from school, no matter what they were. In such a country, alcohol would be regulated based on its scientifically-supported health effects alone.
A secular country would give genuinely equal footing to the worldviews, moral systems, symbols, and traditions of non-Christian faiths and cultures, and would allow those moral systems to have equal weight in rhetoric and argument about public affairs so that no tradition is closer to the heart of power than any other.
The U.S. very clearly does not do that. I say that means it’s not a secular country. Clearly, it is not a country culturally dominated by any religion other than Christianity.
Even without being an actual theocracy, even with a constitutional prohibition on establishing a state religion, the U.S. is clearly a Christian nation.
