Maybe Early America Wasn’t So Christian After All

Much of the controversy surrounding the Texas Board of Education centers on whether the early United States was a Christian nation. Claude Fischer over at The Immanent Frame contends that it was not:

“Some Religious Right activists believe that were it to be accepted as a fact that pre-1800 Americans were deeply Christian, a new light would be cast on current debates about where (if anywhere) to draw a line between Church and State today. In the sense of the Supreme Court’s search for “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, Christian dogma would be an originalist justification for, say, reintroducing prayer into schools. But the story of Early American religion is, in fact, a quite different one.

The impression of great piety among the settlers is a common view of the past, probably rooted in the outsize role that the Puritans play in our mental pictures of Early America. The Puritans, however, were an odd lot in America—the exception, not the rule.”

He also maintains that our modern understanding of a highly religious American population is a projection of 1950s life into the past. Now, I don’t know if this is an accurate picture or not, but I do know that it’s very easy for people to project their current circumstances into the past, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Fischer is basically right. I think his piece probably should point us toward a more nuanced picture of American history: the United States was never either an exclusively Christian nation or an exclusively secular one, and one’s analysis of this issue depends on when and at what level one examines American history.

–Aaron Bekemeyer