An Almost Christian Nation

Religion is the subject of America’s oldest culture war. Since the early days of the republic, Americans have argued bitterly, although mostly peacefully, about when, how, and even whether to honor God in public life. 

Today we imagine this debate as a contest between advocates of strict separation of church and state and “Christian nationalists” who want to merge these institutions. In his valuable new study, Religion & Republic, Miles Smith contends that this was a false dichotomy for at least the first century of American history. A few Americans dreamed of a society in which religion would be a matter of private association. A larger but still relatively small number, concentrated in New England, thought the nation could be regarded as a covenantal community with a direct relationship to God. A plurality and perhaps majority, however, accepted and even celebrated the disestablishment of once-privileged churches. At the same time, they insisted that religious belief and practice were essential to civic health. 

Smith proposes to call this third group “Christian institutionalists.” Rather than the national government or specifically denominational structures, the institutions on which they concentrated included schools, charitable societies, and local jurisdictions. The premise that connected these groups was that belief in God, knowledge of the Bible, and respect for religious authorities should be encouraged in most areas of civic life. Except in cases of gross immorality, though, they could not be compelled by criminal law. 

Recognizing that Americans held a range of religious views, Christian institutionalists avoided doctrinal claims in their public activities. Still, they were overwhelmingly Protestant and unashamed in their belief that Protestantism was especially and perhaps uniquely suited to republican government. In the 20th century, Supreme Court justice David J. Brewer’s assertion that the United States was a Christian nation became something of a rallying cry for religious and political conservatives. But Brewer’s invocation of a generic Christianity is already a concession to increasing pluralism. Before the Civil War, Smith reports, Americans were more likely to see themselves as a specifically Protestant people. 

Smith’s account is partly aimed against secularists who treat Jefferson and Madison as avatars of the founding. Echoing an established body of scholarship, Smith contends that their theological skepticism and political secularism were far from representing the period. Episcopalians like John Jay and Calvinists like Roger Sherman were more typical of the founding generation. 

The difference was not simply a matter of private belief. The process of disestablishment in Virginia was more radical than in other states. In fact, the Virginia Constitution prevented churches from incorporating until it was modified by the legislature in the 21st century. Smith admits that the religious trajectory of the republic shifted in 1800 after Jefferson entered office as president. But the older, institutionalist perspective did not disappear from civil society and even found new strongholds in the judiciary. 

Smith’s primary argument, though, is not with secularists but rather with their religious allies. Jefferson famously coined the phrase “wall of separation between Church & State” in a letter to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. Without the support of a different group of Protestants, Jefferson’s otherwise eccentric preferences would never have achieved their influence on American life. The biggest challenge to Christian America, in other words, was other Christians—not the skeptics or deists who feature prominently in today’s polemics. 

Smith’s depiction of Baptists and others who emphasized internal belief and personal conduct is an intervention in contemporary affairs as much as it is a contribution to historiography. On the one hand, Smith worries about the tendency to confine holiness to the church while treating government and its works as if they were inherently profane—thus ceding power to un- or even anti-Christian actors. Although he does not say so explicitly, Smith hints that left-wing evangelicals are guilty of this self-marginalizing attitude. 

On the other hand, Smith rejects the brand of religious activism that involves congregational leaders expressing views on every possible issue—and appealing to national politicians to enforce those views. Confusing churches with political parties, it ends up discrediting their leaders and diluting their influence. If the former approach is not political enough, in other words, the latter is too political. Smith hints that this defect continues to undermine religious conservatism. 

The appeal of Christian institutionalism, for Smith, is that it concentrates on the intermediate tier of political life and a broad but limited set of issues. Christian activism has been most effective, he argues, when it’s concentrated at the state and local level and on matters, such as education, with an unavoidable formative dimension. Neither withdrawing nor attempting to dominate, he argues, institutional strategies respected the separation of church and state while understanding that most of life lies somewhere between these poles. 

Smith warns that there’s no way to simply recover conditions that prevailed in the 19th century. But he suggests it’s a more promising model than the all-too-familiar dichotomy of secular society and a unitary “Christian nation.” 

There is much to admire in the religious settlement of the early republic. As Tocqueville observed, Americans of the period largely believed that religious and civil liberty were practically inseparable. They were not pluralists by today’s standards. But they were remarkably tolerant of sectarian differences that remained a cause of social conflict and even violence in Europe. 

At times, though, Smith’s depiction seems almost too idyllic. At a sufficient level of abstraction, most Americans probably did agree that the United States was in some sense a Christian nation, despite or because of its policy of national disestablishment. Beyond that consensus, however, they found plenty to fight about. Precisely because open secularists were few, debates over such matters as religious tests for office, Sabbath observance, and temperance laws were intra-Christian disputes. 

The insufficiency of an abstract commitment to a pious republic was eventually demonstrated by the crisis over slavery. Americans “read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” Lincoln noted, but that did not stop them from killing each other by the hundreds of thousands. The Civil War, as historian Mark Noll has argued, was not only a political cataclysm. It was a “theological crisis” that shattered the old vision of a pious republic. 

The idealizing quality of Smith’s account has something to do with his scholarly methods. Smith makes good use of the large but somewhat diffuse secondary literature on these matters. Where he adds primary sources, they are often sermons in honor of Independence Day or other ceremonial occasions. In the 19th century as today, this kind of set-piece oratory is likely to express a degree of pride in national history and ideals and to celebrate national consensus that may not be strictly justified by existing conditions. One wonders, though, whether Smith’s sources might be expressing aspirations more than they are describing reality. 

The authors of these documents had particular reasons for stressing their institutional strategy, moreover. Largely Episcopalians and Presbyterians, they represented or belonged to denominations that faced proportionally declining membership and (for Episcopalians) suspicion of lingering Anglophile sympathies. It is worth noting the incentives that might lead these divines and prominent laymen to rhetorically place their activities and institutions at the center of national life. 

Finally, Smith’s admiration for a more explicitly Christian—and specifically Protestant—phase of American history raises questions about religious minorities. Smith includes a chapter on relations with Indians, pointing out that missionary organizations tended to oppose removal policies, which were supported by the Jeffersonian coalition. He says less about the status of Catholics and Jews (and Mormons, whose distinctive understanding of the appropriate relationship between revealed and civil law made them especially problematic). Religious tests that prevented members of these groups from holding office in many states are the dark side of Protestant America—and help explain the appeal of a Jeffersonian understanding of religion as a private matter. 

There is a demographic justification for this emphasis. We tend to forget that before roughly 1848, at least 90% of Americans were Protestants. In that respect, the United States really was a Christian nation in a way that it has ceased to be. When citizens of the early republic spoke about religious minorities, it was usually on the assumption that they would remain that way. Widespread tributes to religious liberty should not be mistaken for endorsements of a “diverse” society in the modern sense. 

Yet increasing diversity in the later 19th century encouraged Protestants to shift their allegiance from Christian institutionalism toward strict separationism. Unable to sustain their hegemony on demographic or theological grounds, they argued that originally Protestant institutions were in fact religiously neutral, while rivals were defined by sectarian agendas. Many of the laws and precedents that inhibit government support for religious schools, for example, were promoted by elite Protestants who worried about a growing and increasingly assertive Catholic population. Christian institutionalism, it turned out, was a contingent strategy for securing influence as well as a principled position. 

Yet the time when Protestants could hope to retain their influence by disclaiming religious motives is long gone. Beyond its exploration of the past, Religion & Republic offers Protestants—and indeed any religious citizens—an option for civic engagement that avoids the extremes of apolitical submission and full-spectrum aggression. America may never again be Christian in the sense understood in the early republic. But we can hope to have Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and other institutions that flourish in the wide open space between “church” and “state.”