The Case for Christian Nationalism

10. The Foundation of American Freedom | III. Religious Liberty in the Founding Era (Part 5)

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

Wolfe relies almost exclusively upon Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding? to make his argument that Madison was not as integral to the drafting of the First Amendment as most historians claim.¹ Though Hall, in the selected quotes, does not mention George Washington, Wolfe references him twice in this chapter as someone who disagreed with Madison “on the role of government in religion.” Washington’s religious beliefs are a subject of great debate among historians. Wolfe evokes him as an endorser of church establishment, but his personal practice was less than exemplary; though he attended Anglican churches, he was never confirmed. One can technically champion the establishment of a state religion while not devoutly practicing that religion, but, as with Jefferson, Washington’s personal practice again brings into question Wolfe’s claim of the founders’ supposed unanimity regarding the role of religion in society. Joseph Waligore notes that Englishmen and Americans “who ridiculed Christianity often went to church because it was their social duty,”² suggesting the founders likely held an assortment of beliefs that are not easily compartmentalized. He writes of Washington:

Until his early forties, he went to church on average only once a month. The other three Sundays of the month, he transacted business, visited relatives, traveled, or even went fox hunting. When he was in the public eye right before and during the Revolutionary War, his church attendance increased to two to three times a month. When he was president, and very much in the public eye, he attended church almost every Sunday. After he resigned the presidency and returned to Mount Vernon, he went back to going to church only once a month…

Washington’s habit of not taking communion when he was president was very much noted by his congregation and the church’s assistant minister, D. James Abercrombie. Instead of partaking in communion, Washington would leave the church early… Abercrombie then lamented during one mass about “the unhappy tendency of the example of those dignified by age and position turning their backs upon the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.” Washington knew this remark was aimed at him, but rather than taking communion, he stopped going to church on days when communion was given. Abercrombie later said about Washington’s refusal to take communion: “I cannot consider any man as a real Christian who uniformly disregards an ordinance so solemnly enjoined by the divine Author of our holy religion, and considered as a channel of divine grace.”³

Wolfe is correct in his assertion that the First Amendment was meant to only curtail the establishment of religion on the federal level, and that multiple members of Congress supported establishment at the state level. But their reasons for prohibiting a federal endorsement of Protestant Christianity were the same as Madison’s convictions at the state level, namely “the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians,” and a governmental authority that has such power ultimately has the power to force the citizenry “to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever”. Citing political scientist Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Wolfe affirms that Anti-Federalists feared “the new Congress would impose one form of church-state relations throughout the nation.”⁴

Even if one concedes that a near-homogeneity of religious belief in some states allowed for peaceful establishment at that level - though the history of inter-religious violence in the 19th century brings that into question - there is no place in the modern United States that would meet this criteria. This is why Wolfe’s theory requires a call for revolution and continued violent suppression of religious dissent, because there is no other practical way to form a geological boundary of religious homogeneity. The concerns around federal establishment in the 18th century have become hyper-local concerns in our time, unless one resolves to force his neighbors from their land and mass banish them, at the end of a gun.

We should not overemphasize the “founding” of the American founding, as if every consideration used to construct the federal government is generally applicable, reflecting some universal arrangement for all governments. In other words, despite the fact that the Constitution lacks Christian language, we cannot forget that the American people in the founding era and early American republic were Protestant Christians, animated by religious concerns, who viewed themselves as a Christian people and relied on Protestant principles and biblical argumentation.⁵

While this statement is correct on the surface level, there is no such thing as a national self-conception devoid of some negative effects. Wolfe has failed, at every point in this chapter, to give even passing mention to a downside, opting to paint 17th- and 18th-century American Protestant views of civil government in a wholly positive light. This does not hold up to scrutiny; many colonists who settled the region of New England were members of Protestant sects who left their home country to escape persecution from other Protestants, yet they mostly formed governments that emulated the one they left, but for their sect of Protestantism being made the established church.

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 425-426.

2. Joseph Waligore, The Spirituality of the English and American Deists: How God Became Good (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), 174.

3. Ibid., 173, 174.

4. Stephen Wolfe, 426-427.

5. Ibid., 429.