The Christian Nationalist Vision of America Couldn’t be Further from the Founders’ Plan
With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on Saturday, MS NOW is running a special series of columns they’re collectively calling, “America in the Balance: The Fight for Our History and Future.” They invited me to write for the series on what Christian Nationalists get wrong about the nation’s founding.
My column, “The Christian Nationalist Vision of America Couldn’t be Further from the Founders’ Plan,” is out and I really hope you’ll read it. Here is a brief excerpt:
We’re told George Washington prayed on bended knee in the snow at Valley Forge. But not only did someone make up that story after Washington died, the original 1808 version of the tale fomented religious bigotry against Quakers by suggesting they were unpatriotic and unchristian for remaining pacifists. We’re told that patriotic clergy members formed a “Black Robe Regiment” during the Revolutionary War to march into battle. But that’s a modern yarn about as accurate as Paul Bunyan creating Minnesota’s lakes with Babe the Blue Ox. We’re told that prayer “saved” the Constitutional Convention in 1787 after Ben Franklin urged it. But the delegates overwhelmingly rejected the call for official prayer as they hashed out the details of the Constitution with dialogue and debate.
… The founders knew what a “Christian” nation looked like. They broke away from one. And they charted a new course. … This American experiment shielded our young nation from the sectarian wars that plagued Europe and created a place that, as Madison later noted, enabled religion to flourish. This is what Christian nationalists want us to forget amid the fireworks, ice cream, and fake accounts of history. Rather than trying to redefine the founding of the United States, this Fourth of July we should celebrate church-state separation.
Read the whole piece here. It’s important that we push back against fake Christian Nationalist history. And it’s important that we celebrate the real religion story of the nation’s founding: the separation of church and state.
That’s why I’m grateful for MS NOW publishing this piece. And it’s why we work at A Public Witness to counter Christian Nationalism and support church-state separation. But we can’t do it without the support of our paid subscribers and donors. If the Semiquincentennial has taught us anything, it’s how much this work is needed in this moment. So if you’re not already a paid subscriber, upgrade today to have us oohing and ahhing more than we will during the fireworks on Saturday.
As a public witness,
Brian Kaylor
