Seven claims about God and the founding, tested against the record

Let me save you an evening at the next family cookout. Somebody's cousin is going to announce that America was founded as a Christian nation, period, and that anyone who says otherwise is rewriting history. Somebody else's cousin, probably the one who just finished a college course, is going to announce that the founders were all Enlightenment skeptics who built a purely secular state and would be horrified by a prayer at a football game. Both of them will be pointing at the same documents. Both of them are, to put it kindly, overselling.

I want the right side of this argument to win it with the facts, which means being willing to concede what the facts concede. If we claim too much, the other side gets to tear down our best points along with our worst ones. So here is a test. Seven claims, each stated the way people actually say it, each checked against the text, and each given a verdict: true, false, or true as far as it goes.

Claim one: "The Constitution never mentions God"

You hear this one from the secular side, and it is half right. The body of the Constitution does not invoke God. There is no preamble to the Almighty, no "so help me God" written into the presidential oath, and the only religious language in the original text is the ban on religious tests in Article VI. The framers compared their work, in effect, to a charter of government, not a creed.

But the claim leaves things out. Read the end of the document. It is dated "in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven," a dating formula that counts the years from the birth of Christ. That is not a prayer, and I will not pretend it is, but it is not a secular calendar either. Look also at Article I, Section 7, which gives the President ten days to sign or veto a bill, "Sundays excepted." The framers built the Christian day of rest into the machinery of government without comment, because nobody in 1787 thought it needed comment. And the First Amendment mentions religion by name twice, in the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.

The Declaration of Independence, for its part, speaks of the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," of a "Creator" who endows all men with unalienable rights, of the "Supreme Judge of the world," and of "divine Providence." If you want a founding document that mentions God, there it is, and the Declaration is where Americans find their claim that rights come from somewhere above government. See Where Rights Come From, and Why the Declaration Says So First for why that matters.

Verdict: true as far as it goes. The Constitution does not name God, but the claim that the founding was godless does not survive the Declaration or the dating clause.

Claim two: "The Treaty of Tripoli proves America is not a Christian nation"

This is the favorite exhibit of the secular side. The treaty with Tripoli, signed in 1796 and 1797 and ratified by the Senate in June 1797 under President John Adams, contains an Article 11 that reads in part that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." It is real, it was ratified, and the Senate approved it.

What is it? A diplomatic treaty with a North African power that had been raiding American shipping. Article 11 goes on to say that the United States has no enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims, and that no religious difference between the countries should produce war. In other words, the sentence is reassurance to a Muslim state that the American government was not waging a crusade. It is a statement about the government, that Washington did not run an established church and would not fight a religious war.

That is the same thing the First Amendment says in different words. It does not say that the American people were not Christians, that the founders were hostile to religion, or that religion had no place in public life. It says the government was not founded on the Christian religion, in the sense that the state did not claim to be the arm of a church. In 1797 that was uncontroversial even among devout Americans, since there was no national church. Treaties also get rewritten: when the United States and Tripoli negotiated a new treaty in 1805, Article 11 did not appear.

Verdict: true, but it proves less than advertised. The government was not founded on the Christian religion in a legal or institutional sense. It does not prove a secular culture or a secular intent.

Claim three: "Washington's Farewell Address calls religion and morality indispensable"

Here the religious right is on firm ground. In the Farewell Address of 1796, Washington wrote that of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, "Religion and Morality are indispensable supports." He went on to ask where the security for property, reputation and life would be if the sense of religious obligation vanished from the oaths that courts depend on. And he warned against supposing that morality could be maintained without religion, saying that whatever might be said for the effect of education on minds of a particular structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect national morality to prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Read that carefully, because it is an argument and the argument is civic. Washington was not saying the government should impose a creed. He was saying that a free people governs itself only if it has habits of honesty and self-restraint, that religion is a main source of those habits, and that a politician who wants to dismantle religion while claiming to be a patriot is making a mistake. Which is a point plenty of conservatives still make.

Remember also what Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1790: that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." That is the same man. A president who thought religion indispensable also told a Jewish congregation that they were equal citizens and that the government would not persecute. Both statements are the founding.

Verdict: true. And the balance Washington struck is the correct one: religion is good for the republic, and the state keeps its hands off it.

Claim four: "The Northwest Ordinance backed schools and religion"

The Northwest Ordinance was passed by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787, while the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, and the new Congress re-enacted it in 1789. It set up a path to statehood for the territory north of the Ohio River. Article 3 reads that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

People on the religious right cite this one a lot, and they are right about what it says. The same Congress that was setting up self-government in the territory thought religion and morality were necessary to good government and wrote that into the law.

But read the whole Ordinance. Article 1 says that no person behaving in a peaceable and orderly manner "shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments." So the same text that calls religion necessary also forbids the government to molest anyone for how they worship. It encourages schools. It does not set up a church or tell anyone which church to attend.

Verdict: true, and more interesting than the usual citation. The Ordinance treats religion as something government should encourage the conditions for, and also something it must leave free.

Claim five: "The founders were all deists"

This is a staple of undergraduate lectures, and it will not survive a roll call. A deist, roughly, believes that a creator made the world and then left it alone, with no revelation and no miracles. Thomas Jefferson went furthest. He edited the Gospels to remove the miracles, and his private religion was far from orthodox. Benjamin Franklin was skeptical about much of Christian doctrine, although he asked for prayer at the Convention, a motion that was not adopted. John Adams was a Unitarian in his later years.

Now look at the others. John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration, was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey, today's Princeton. Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration and the Constitution, was an active Congregationalist. John Jay, the first Chief Justice, was a committed Episcopalian. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer, was a Catholic. Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were active in their churches. Washington was a vestryman in the Anglican church, although historians argue about the details of his private belief.

The founders were a mix: devout Protestants of several kinds, a Catholic or two, and a few skeptics, with plenty of men in between. The claim that they were all deists falls apart at the first name.

Verdict: false. And the opposite claim, that all of them were orthodox evangelicals, is false too.

Claim six: "The First Amendment builds a wall between church and state"

That is a metaphor, not a clause. The phrase "wall of separation" comes from a letter Jefferson wrote in January 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, and the First Amendment itself contains no such words. What it says is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Two clauses, one about the government not setting up a church, and one about the government not blocking the exercise of religion.

The Supreme Court adopted Jefferson's phrase in Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, and it has driven a lot of the case law since. The full history of the phrase, and what Jefferson meant by it, is in where 'a wall of separation' really comes from and what it was built for. The short version: Jefferson was writing to Baptists who feared being at the mercy of a state-established church in Connecticut, and the wall was meant to keep the government off the churches, not to keep the churches out of public life.

Meanwhile the First Congress that wrote the First Amendment hired chaplains for both chambers and, in the same season of 1789, asked President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving and prayer. The Supreme Court cited this practice in 1983 in Marsh v. Chambers when it upheld a state legislature's chaplain. People who wrote the Amendment did not think it forbade prayer in public settings.

Verdict: true in one sense, misleading in another. The principle of non-establishment is real and it is the law. The "wall" language comes from a letter and is no constitutional text, and the people who wrote the Amendment lived comfortably with public religious practice.

Claim seven: "America was founded as a Christian nation with an official faith"

The religious right makes this claim, and it also needs checking. If "Christian nation" means that most Americans in 1787 were Christians and that Christian ideas about human dignity shaped the founding, then the claim is on solid ground. If it means the new national government established a Christian church or required a Christian creed, it is flatly wrong. The Constitution created no national church, banned religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment barred Congress from establishing religion.

Here is a wrinkle that makes the point sharper. The First Amendment at first limited only Congress. Some states kept their own established churches after 1791. Connecticut did not end its established church until its constitution of 1818, and Massachusetts did not until an amendment in 1833. The reason is that the First Amendment was written, in part, to keep the national government from interfering with those state arrangements. Later the Supreme Court applied the religion clauses to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. What matters here is that an "official faith" is, if anything, a state-level story and not a national one.

The founders were also well aware of the history of religious persecution. Madison's work in Virginia, described in Baptists, Madison and the Virginia fight that put religious liberty first, was a fight against established religion, and plenty of the strongest opposition to establishment came from devout Christians who saw it as bad for the church. That is part of why the idea of a government without a state church won the day.

Verdict: mostly false, if the claim is about government. A nation whose people were mostly Christian, and whose government was forbidden to establish any church, is exactly what the record shows.

What the seven tell us together

Let me collect the verdicts in a table, since the pattern is worth seeing at a glance.

The pattern is easy to read. The founders believed religion was valuable to a free people, and they refused to let the government run it. Both halves matter. A person who quotes only the first half, or only the second, is giving you an advertisement and not history.

If you want to see how that balance plays out in modern disputes, Seven Things Americans Get Wrong About the First Amendment covers the rest of the First Amendment, and Article VI, the atheist notary and the clause every believer should defend tells the story of the one clause in the original Constitution that deals with religion directly. For the school side, Two Ten Commandments cases on one day, opposite results, and the reason shows how the courts apply all this to a classroom wall. And if you want the method behind reading these documents, Originalism Explained for People Who Skipped Law School explains it.

The bottom line

• Don't overclaim. The founders were not all secular and they were not all orthodox Christians, and the documents show a free people who treated religion as valuable and the government as having no business running it.
• When someone quotes the Treaty of Tripoli at you, read Article 11 with them: it is about what the government was founded on, not about what the people believed.
• When someone quotes Washington or the Northwest Ordinance at you, remember to read the other half: Newport in 1790 and Article 1 of the Ordinance.
• Read the primary texts yourself. The Constitution, the Declaration, the Farewell Address and the Northwest Ordinance are all short and free online, and the National Archives and the Library of Congress both publish them.
• Win the argument by conceding what is true. It is the surest way to persuade the cousin across the table.