But if you want to start getting into more depth than that, Mark David Hall's Did America Have a Christian Founding: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth (2019) is a great place to start.
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"Scholars and popular authors routinely assert that America's founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state...Even prominent Christian college professors such as Richard T. Hughes argue that "most of the American founders embraced some form of Deism, not historically orthodox Christianity." Examples of authors who make such statements may be multiplied almost indefinitely. These claims are patently and unequivocally false. This book demonstrates why." (xv)
Why Should You Read This Book?
If you live in America today, you probably have been raised to believe one of two views of the United States' early relationship to religion:
Option 1: Europe had been rent by wars of religion since the Reformation, and most of America's settlers had fled from religious oppression to the New World. When they arrived here, they wisely decided to create something new in the world--the first secular (as in non-religious) nation state. Deists and freethinkers like Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Madison, and Adams eventually made this a heroic reality, erecting a "wall of separation" between church and state that endures to this day (except for the rising threat of Christian Nationalism, aka fascism). If you believe this, you were probably public schooled, learned it from a TV documentary with cool music, or went to any run-of-the-mill college.
Option 2: The United States was founded as a Christian Nation, full stop. There were churches full of believers on every street corner. People prayed before every important event, including the Constitutional Convention. All the Founders everybody says were deist were actually Christians, right down to Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The Constitution blatantly mentions God ("In the Year of Our Lord"). America was as Christian as it gets. This only changed because of an evil atheist plot that pulled prayer out of schools in the 1960's and gave us this hellhole of a society we have today; they've layered over these obvious truths with a bunch of myths and obfuscations and we need to get back to our real roots! If you believe this, you were probably homeschooled, your mother read way too much David Barton, or you went to some tiny college where everybody spoke with a thick Southern accent.
Any careful historian would tell you that both of these options are overblown propaganda--or if that's too harsh a word, both are at minimum simply lazy history. Both project modern meanings and outcomes over the men who crafted our early government and that government itself. It is not enough to simply read quotes out of context like "a wall of separation" or "In the Year of Our Lord" and throw them like darts at our opponents' foreheads. We need to know not just the words, but the contextof the words. What did Jefferson mean when he wrote that? What else did he write? What other events were going on? Did anyone else comment on them at the time?
And this is why you need to read this book. Mark Hall has done the hard work of reading and collecting the sources. He lays out in detail not just what the founders wrote, but who they were (why do you hear so much about Thomas Jefferson or Paine, but not Roger Sherman or Elias Boudinot?) and what their words meant according to their actions at the time (what did "a wall of separation between church and state" actually mean in Virginia in the eighteenth century?).
Historical Ignorance/Scholarly Insulation
This book is a great reminder that if you want to understand an era, you have to read way more than the little area you are concerned with. There are heaps and heaps of scholars (and pseudo-scholars) who have only read, say, Thomas Jefferson's writings, and then make generalizations about what the entire era meant by a phrase, word, or office. There is also the fact that moderns scholars discount, by definition, all the sermons of the period as political sources--something that certainly would not have occurred to anyone at the time.
Hall points all of this out, and shows it up as sloppy scholarship. The increasingly siloed nature of the halls of academia doesn't do this any favors. On the kindest reading, many of these folks simply don't know any better. They read words like "liberty" or "church and state" and import the 20th century understanding of these terms into the 18th. And the less trained/more credentialed you are, the more likely this is. Did America Have a Christian Founding? is a splendid antidote to this tendency. Be a wide reader and be careful.
If you're at all interested in Christianity, American government, the current potpourri of Christian Nationalism, or the Founding Era, get this book and read it. Even if you don't like it, you'll learn something.
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Introduction: My name is Kerri Lueilwitz, I am a courageous, gentle, quaint, thankful, outstanding, brave, vast person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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