“Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” A Conversation with Historian John Fea

Historian John Fea delivered a lecture on June 22, 2026, at Philadelphia’s Historic Christ Church as part of the Dialogue Institute’s Religious Freedom Trails programming for America 250.

Fea is the author of “In God We Trust: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” published by Westminster John Knox Press in September 2026. You can also watch his interview with Judy Woodruff from PBS News while sitting in Christ Church.

Fea addresses six major points regarding the historical question in the newest edition of his book. The lecture is followed by a conversation moderated by David Krueger, executive director of the Dialogue Institute. The full transcript, edited for concision and clarity, is included below the video.

11:56 - #1: "Was America founded as a Christian nation?" is a bad historical question.

It emerges as a part of our modern political culture wars rather than as an idea present at the time of the founders.  Historically, Americans have believed they lived in a Christian Nation. Fea details the historical reality of the U.S. as a demographically and culturally Christian nation and how that shaped public perception of the nation. 

26:02 - #2: How the perception of America as a Christian nation was challenged. 

The idea of America as a Christian nation was challenged from the 1940s to the 1970s through several Supreme Court cases that affirmed a commitment to the separation of church and state. A change in immigration law resulted in newcomers from countries with non-Christian majorities. 

32:50 - #3: The Bible was important to the founding generation. 

Fea highlights that the Bible was culturally prominent in the founders' lives, shaping their ideological beliefs and serving as a rhetorical source for political discourse.  

48:30 - #4: The U.S. Constitution does not refer to God.

The Constitution makes no reference to God and prohibits the Federal government from establishing or favoring any religion. It also protects its free exercise. Fea emphasizes the Constitution's uniqueness at the time.  

53:45 - #5: The Founders were advocates of religious freedom.

Fea holds that the Founders were champions of many religions, not just Christianity. None was to be discriminated against in America on the basis of religion. 

55:50 - #6: The founders supported religion as a matter of statecraft, not theology. 

The Founders thought religion, of all stripes (not just Christianity), would create good, virtuous citizens of their new republic and therefore supported it so far as to make a more stable and prosperous republic

Q & A Portion

1:00:40, Question #1: What was the founders' commitment to creating a more open and diverse cultural milieu in the United States?

1:08:10, Question #2: Why did states remove religious stipulations before they were required to if people saw themselves as living in a Christian Nation? 

1:11:48, Question #3: What do the founding documents, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, specify as the origins of the rights? 

1:15:55, Question #4: When did ideas like the Separation of Powers, representative democracy, and checks and balances start to be portrayed by some as Christian ideas and Christian values? 

1:23:43. Event concludes. 

Matthew Havens: Welcome to Christ Church. My name is Matthew Havens, and on behalf of Christ Church and Preservation Trust, it is an absolute pleasure to have each and every one of you here tonight in this historic sanctuary. Next year is another milestone for Christ Church. In 1727, they started building this exact sanctuary we are in. Next year, we're celebrating the 300th anniversary of this building and the centuries of history that have been built and spoken about. Over the centuries, this space has become a gathering space for community conservation and monumental turning points in our nation's history. It is a room that has witnessed the full yet complex spectrum of American history, from religious debates of the colonial period to the political divides of the American Revolution. And it's always incredible to have people here seven days a week, including you guys, because we don't just look to the past; we actively engage in the sanctuary through thoughtful discussion of today's world. Tonight, we are thrilled to host John Fea. It promises to be a fantastic presentation. We are also deeply grateful for the partnership of Dr. David Krueger and the Dialogue Institute, whose hard work has helped make this evening possible. Before we dive into the main program, we were thinking of passing out index cards and pens in case you guys want to write down any questions during the presentation, and then we can always have a Q&A afterward. So if anyone is interested in a pen and an index card, we are happy to hand those out. With that, I am happy to turn things over to our co-host of the evening, Dave Krueger, the executive director of the Dialogue Institute, who will share a bit more about his work and the institute's ongoing projects. So, please help me welcome Dr. Dave Krueger.

David Krueger: Good evening. I'm so glad to have you all come out tonight on this very rainy, unpredictable evening, and with all the incredible number of America 250 activities going on at the same time, including the Iraq-France soccer match that is going on right now. I welcome you on behalf of the Dialogue Institute. We're a nonprofit 501 (c) (3) based at Temple University. For the 250th anniversary of the U.S., we have taken a specific focus on public history. For several years, the organization has been offering walking tours to the general public on the theme of religious diversity in early Philadelphia, examining the significant and complex impact religion had during the nation's founding era. And illuminating the story of William Penn founding this city as a holy experiment and colony that had a higher degree of religious freedom and tolerance of practice than virtually anywhere else in North America during the founding period. So we think Philadelphia has a unique story to tell, and the Dialogue Institute is part of several initiatives to tell it. 

Back at our table, we have two wonderful public history interns who are working with us from the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Villanova University’s Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest. They're both assigned to us this summer to research various aspects of our project. 

There are a couple of things I want to draw attention to. One of our projects is a tour app you can download as you walk through the historic district, giving you brief introductions to the city's amazing historic religious sites. It also includes various public spaces where religion was practiced and contested. We're expanding the app to cover more of religious diversity in the contemporary era. I have my team working on rolling out a digital tour in the app that will include mosques, Hindu temples, and Buddhist communities, and will show the incredible diversity and interfaith, multi-faith reality of Philadelphia, both past and present. We also offer in-person physical tours. You can sign up for a couple of upcoming tours, including one in the city's Germantown section. We also have a training program for public history officials, public history leaders, and tour guides in Philadelphia. All of this was made possible with a grant from the Philadelphia Funders Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial.

And do we have any tour guides, current tour guides, or tour guides in training in the room? If you could raise your hand. Lauren's working with us. John, of course, is a veteran tour guide for Christ Church and other settings. So we're excited about these various projects. I’ll also mention that there's a banner on the fence outside called the Religious Freedom Walk, which is the title of the primary self-guided tour on our app. We're partnering with Interfaith Philadelphia to promote it, and they also have a series of events exploring the city's multi-faith reality.

Hopefully, you’ll sign up for the mailing list. You can find out more about the activities that are continuing to grow throughout the year. We're also working with a new documentary, In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America. We'll be holding a handful of screenings throughout the year, which will again provide opportunities to examine history in greater detail and engage in dialogue.

So without further ado, Professor John Fea will talk about his book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? I've had the pleasure of working with Dr. Fea for the past 10 years or so, on different projects. I've been a huge fan, and this book is particularly important. John taught at Messiah College, which is a Christian college just west of Harrisburg. He just retired, so congratulations after many years of teaching. Some of his former students are here in the room today. And he's also in town, leading a group of K-12 educators through the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, where he's been teaching for many years. And currently, he is a fellow at the Lumen Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has relocated to the Midwest, but has graciously come out east to explore history with all of us. So without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Fea.

—--------------------------------------** Presentation Begins **---------------------------------------------

John Fea: Thanks, folks, for coming out to this. This is 18th-century style, folks. A hot summer evening with no air conditioning, right? So, it’s good to be here. It's a real honor to be standing up here. For the last 25 years, I have come into this church with students and K-12 teachers on Gilder Lehrman and other kinds of teacher seminars, piled them into Washington's pew over here, taken selfies, and listened to Neil Ronk expound on the church's history. Some of you know that name. It's great to be standing up here now and giving a lecture here at the historic Christ Church.

When I lived outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I would probably get into Philadelphia maybe twice or three times a year for educational purposes, you know, either to give a lecture or do a teacher seminar or something. Since I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in August, this is my fourth or fifth visit to Philadelphia in 2026. So, it's a lot of airline miles, a lot of airline tickets, and so forth. But I'm pretty sure that's all going to dry up after December 2026, right? The phone will stop ringing. But we'll see, right? The Revolutionary War didn't end until 1783. 

So, what I want to do today is one of the things I really enjoy about lecturing on this subject: the opportunities for questions and conversation afterward. I'm going to do my best to make it brief. Now, having said that, I'll probably talk for way longer than I'm supposed to, but I love the back and forth, the dialogue. So, you know, fill out those cards and, if you have questions, definitely let me know, don't be shy,  ask them. But, obviously, this is a huge question right now in the 2026 election, the 250th anniversary, and in the midterm elections. What is America, especially as we celebrate the 250th, and what role did religion play at the time of the American founding? That is the historical question that I'm particularly interested in. It's coming out in the third edition, a concise edition, with three new chapters in September. Don't ask me how we managed to pull that off. Half the size of this book, but three brand new chapters. When I talk about this book, people usually come in with their minds made up about this question. I've literally had people come up to me before the lecture and tell me the answer is yes or no. And I was like, well, at least listen to the lecture and then tell me if I've offered any nuance or complexity on this question, right? But it's a hotly contested issue, as many of you know, you're here, so you know this is a major question that goes to the heart of our culture wars in the United States today. What I want to do, in the limited time that I have with you today, is go over, let's say, five or six bedrock principles about the relationship between religion, specifically Christianity, and the American founding. And then I hope something will trigger you to pursue some of these themes more deeply on your own.

So I want to start off by stating that the question of whether America was founded as a Christian nation is more about the present than the past. In fact, it's a really bad historical question. Now, you might say, why is this in the title of your book? I think the proposed title was something like “Religion and the Founders,” but the publisher wanted a catchier title. 

Still, it's a really bad historical question. What I mean by that this is a question that emerges out of a particular moment in very, very recent United States history. I'd say it re-emerges in the last 50 years, and we'll get to this in a second. It is not a question that the founders in the 18th century were asking. So whenever you hear somebody say ask this question or debate this question with talking heads on cable news or something like that, realize that this is probably more of a discussion about present-day politics, present- day cultural agendas, than anything about the actual diversity and complexity of religion and the founding in the 18th century. And here I'm going to indict both those who answer yes and those who answer no to this question. 

During the 250th anniversary year, we're all in search of a usable past, as historians often say. We want to take from the past what we need in the present to advance our agenda, whatever that agenda happens to be. Both sides do this in this debate. We tend to cherry-pick. We tend to find what we need and then marshal that historical evidence to justify whatever cause we want to advocate for in this year, you know, the 250th, right? I'll just start with that to get your brains moving a little bit. But again, whether America was founded as a Christian nation is a question more about the present than the past. And hopefully you'll understand what I mean as I move through this lecture. You'll get a better sense of what I mean as I unpack a few things for you.

 Okay, issue number two. This one's going to be a little controversial, but just give me time to unpack it. Americans have always believed that they were living in a Christian nation. Now, that is a historical claim. I'm not suggesting they were right or wrong to believe that, right? I'm not suggesting they interpreted the founders correctly. I'm not suggesting they interpreted people who believe this, interpreted the First Amendment correctly, or even understand American history.

But historically, from roughly 1789 to, I would argue, the mid to late 1970s, most Americans, whether you were a Christian or not, believed they were living in a culturally Christian nation. Now the examples here abound on this question and really what I'm interested here is the way in which people through the 19th late 18th 19th into the 20th and 21st century use the language of what today we might call you know I hate using this term Christian nationalism because it means something today in a kind of loaded political way, but all through the 19th and 20th century people used the language of Christian America that America was somehow founded as a Christian nation and that somehow we need to restore it, renew it, reclaim it. Let me give you some examples to illustrate my point. Just bear with me here because these examples are all over the place, but I deliberately chose to kind of pick out different examples from different eras with different kinds of ideological views on them. 

So, let's start in a dark place, right? Here is the preamble of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. “We the people of the Confederate States, each state acting in its sovereign and independent character in order to form.” Those of you who know the preamble to the United States Constitution may recognize some of these phrases. And you should also note where it departs and why. “To form a permanent federal government, establish justice, value domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God. Do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.”

Now, there is this culture war in the late 19th century over the Confederate Constitution because the Confederate Constitution often used its constitution to tell all those Yankees that God was on our side. You know why? We have God, almighty God, and Christ in our Constitution. And if you remember the United States Constitution, there's nothing about Almighty God in that, right? So, whose side is God really going to be on in this war? The Confederates said, right? Someone who has, a group who has, invoked the favor of God in their constitution, or that secular thing that all you Yankees up there wrote in 1787 and passed in 1789.

This actually bothered many northern ministers, both fundamentalists and modernists, if you understand what I mean by that, all Protestant clergy. This argument that the Confederates made bothered them so much that they actually formed an organization known as the NRA, not that NRA, the National Reform Association. And the entire purpose of the National Reform Association was a northern effort to put a Christian amendment onto the Constitution. So, look, we challenge you. We have God in our constitution, too. So there's just, you know, one example. Obviously, the Confederates believed that they were promoting a Christian nation. 

This is an image of Rufus Schae. He was the predecessor to Daniel Webster in the Massachusetts Senate seat in the early 19th century. A member of the Whig party. If you know anything about the Whigs, they were your kind of Christian patriots in the early 19th century. Were really strong nationalists, but also wanted a religious and moral country. You know who often referred to America as a Christian nation. Here, I just have one small quote from him. “A united, loving, and Christian America we need to create in this country” is what he said. So there's a kind of northern example of this. Ironically enough, those in the North who were arguing for America as a Christian nation often argued on the basis of the fact that the union was somehow sacred. You would think they would argue because they're abolitionists or they're against slavery, right? But that wasn't the primary way that they argued. 

They actually argued that the Union was somehow blessed by God, right? And at least that's the way it started in the early war. Here's my favorite one. Historically, my favorite one. The man you see here is Washington Gladden. Has anyone ever heard of Washington Gladden? Washington Gladden was a liberal Protestant. He was a champion of what was known in the early 20th century as the social gospel. This was a gospel that set out to take the teachings of Jesus and bring them to bear on social ills in society, poverty, injustice, corporate greed, all of these kinds of things. And Washington Gladden, along with Walter Rauschenbusch, another name you might be familiar with, and others, founded the social gospel movement. Some historians have even suggested that Gladden was this close to becoming a Christian socialist in the early 20th century. Listen to this quote. 

“Every department of human life, the families, the schools, amusements, arts, business, politics, industry, national politics, international relations, will be governed by the Christian law and controlled by Christian influences. When we are bidden to seek first the kingdom of God, we are bidden to set our hearts on this great commission to keep this always before us as the object of our endeavors to be satisfied with nothing less than this, the complete Christianization of all life is what we pray and work for when we work and pray for the coming of the kingdom of heaven.”

Now, if you took that quote and dropped it into 2026, like, some figures I'm going to throw out here. You may or might not know them, but like very kind of Trump-supporting MAGA evangelicals. I'm thinking of a guy named Lance Wallnau who advances the idea of seven-mountain dominionism. We must conquer every region, and every area of influence must be under Christian control. If you didn't know who this was, it sounds a lot like one of these new apostolic reformation prophets out there right now. Of course, Washington Gladden, when he thought about the complete Christianization of the country, thought about it very differently than, say, Lance Wallnau or one of these independent charismatics who are now flocking to our current president. 

But nevertheless, the language there is almost identical to these kinds of things. Right? So again, the idea here is that Gladden wanted the country to be Christian. In fact, both he and Walter Rauschenbusch, his fellow social gospeler, believed that if the country were to become Christian in the way they saw it, solving poverty, solving social ills, justice, and so forth, it would precipitate the return of Jesus Christ to the earth. 

This one maybe doesn't need as much explanation, but  Billy Graham was just as much a preacher of the gospel or just as much a cold warrior, I should say, as a preacher of the gospel. He clearly wanted people to get saved, not only because he believed that they would have eternal life if they were born again, but he also believed that if more and more people became saved, America would become a more Christian nation, and that would position us better to fight the Cold War against those so-called godless communists from the Soviet Union. So if you listen to Graham's sermons from the 50s and the 60s, it is deeply, deeply embedded in this idea that the United States needs to save more people so that there will be more Christians to form a more stable and solid Christian nation that will help us win the Cold War. 

Now, this one gets me in trouble, but bear with me. This is Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from a Birmingham jail. I'm just going to read it, then I'll say something quick about it. “One day, the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up to what is best in the American dream. And for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Today, if you hear the word Judeo-Christian heritage, you immediately start to think Christian right, Mike Johnson, that's like a giveaway, a keyword, right? But here's King, “Judeo-Christian heritage thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the constitution and the declaration of independence.” 

So in other words, next time you hear Mike Johnson give a speech where he talks about how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are informed by Judeo-Christian values, like that we're all created with dignity. Think about Martin Luther King, who said identically the same thing at least rhetorically. Probably meant something very different about that, though, than Johnson does or someone on the Christian right today. Nevertheless, my point is that, however they defined a Christian nation, Americans always believed they were living in such a nation and needed to apply the Christian faith as they understood it. And they understood it all differently and emphasized different things for the advancement and betterment of the country. So there's the introduction to that second point. 

Now, some of you may be asking, when did this become a debated question? The idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. I'm sorry for the small print here. walk you through this a little bit, but I would argue that there were several cultural changes that took place between 1947 and 1976, the bicentennial, that led to this idea of whether America was founded as a Christian nation being a contested issue for the first time. So I've already suggested that everyone believed they were living in a Christian nation in one form or another, and wanted to advance a Christian nation in one form or another. Right? But in the 40s to the 70s, you see a series of events that led conservative Christians for the first time to advocate that their Christian nation was under attack and needed to be renewed, restored, or at least their vision of what a Christian nation was needed to be renewed and restored. And thus, more secularists pushed back against the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. And now, this question becomes contested for the first time. 

What were those things? I'll just run through them very quickly. In 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion, which concerned a busing case involving parochial schools and so forth. But the key takeaway here was Black’s statement that there is a wall of separation between church and state. And that wall is “high and impregnable.”

That decision was applied again in 1963, for the first time in Engle v. Vitale; Black was still on the court. Based on what happened in Everson, mandatory, teacher-led prayer was removed from public schools. A year later, Abington v. Schempp was a local case here in Philadelphia, up in the suburbs. Mandatory Bible reading was removed from public schools following the 1947 decision on the wall of separation. 

The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, for the first time, opened the doors to the United States to non-Western immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. And of course, these groups brought their religious beliefs with them when they immigrated. The religion scholar Diane Eck has written about this. This created a much more diverse, religiously pluralistic society after 1965. But it also posed a threat to those who believed America was a Christian nation and should remain such, and that these intruders were somehow undermining the Christian fabric of the nation. Again, I can answer more detailed questions about this in the Q&A. I'm moving through them really quickly. 

 1971, Green v. Connelly. Here the United States Supreme Court says that if an academy, either a K-12 academy, most of them in the south, or a university or college and they specifically had this,  often known as the Bob Jones case, they often refer to Bob Jones the university, if they discriminated based on race, if they segregated based on race, they would not be able to receive federal grant money or federal funds. Some of these southern academies did desegregate, but others were strongly resistant. And this is the first time where you see within southern evangelicalism or really evangelicalism generally in the United States, this idea that the big government is coming in and taking away our rights and telling us how to live.  They're saying we can't get federal money unless we desegregate. And I mean it's essentially the same argument that the Confederates made in the 1850s, right? You know, we can't have this big government coming in. Now, it really hurt their feelings when a southern president named Jimmy Carter, who was also a born-again Christian, sided with the Supreme Court on this. And historians have cited this as the main reason evangelicals turned to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Roe v. Wade challenges certain patriarchal views of society that have long been held in the United States. And then you had the bicentennial, where you know, much like this year, it's a time to reflect on who we are as a people, who we are as a nation. And much of the Christian right at the time believed that we had gone astray. The 60s and 70s had derailed the Christian country that everyone took for granted. Something needs to be done, and they began to organize politically. And this is where we have the so-called religious right.

Probably the most prominent figure was Jerry Falwell, the pastor of a Baptist megachurch, Thomas Road Baptist Church, in Lynchburg, Virginia. He later became the chancellor of Liberty Baptist College, now Liberty University, and began mobilizing Christians; part of that mobilization was to fight for the idea that America was a Christian nation. It had been lost, and now we need to get it back. And I think Jerry Falwell is probably one of the most important political figures in modern American post-World War II politics. He and his Moral Majority movement were able to mobilize millions upon millions of largely white evangelical Christians to vote a certain way in every election. It is a huge, huge political story, but Falwell often only gets, like, a paragraph or something at the end of a chapter in the second half of a US survey history textbook. If you want to understand why Evangelicals vote 81% for Republican candidates, you need to understand the impact of this man and the Christian right movement again. That's a historical claim I'm making. I'm a historian, I'm not here to say it was good or bad; some of you who know me, though, may know my personal opinion on that.

Number three, now let's get into the 18th century. We did our homework. We did all the background. We set the stage here in terms of the way the past speaks to the present and so forth, or the way in which people think about it. Let's say a few words about the 18th century. Here is my third claim. The Bible was important to the founding generation. What do I mean by that? Let's look at some statistics. This is from a political scientist named Donald Lutz. He's a political scientist who certain people on the right, like David Barton or Eric Mataxis, I don't know if these names ring a bell to anybody, love quoting this study. Donald Lutz, a political scientist at the University of Houston, decided to study all the citations and quotes that the founding fathers used in their published writings. So, it's limited to published writings. The Founding Fathers are defined as anyone who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the United States Constitution. 

So, they went in and found, in the 1770s, 554 citations among these people where the founders actually quoted somebody. They referenced who they were quoting. More than any other book or document, the Bible was quoted 44% of the time in the 1770s. And then 20% political writings. This normally means writings by contemporary political writers. They're often referred to as not necessarily 1770s but Commonwealth writers, these kinds of political writers of the day. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Locke, and Hume were cited 18 times. Classical thinkers, meaning Roman and Greek, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, these kinds of things. Legal and then other, right? 

If you look at the 1780s, again, I haven't looked into why the Bible dipped, but that's not the point here. The point is the Bible is still number one. And then the enlightenment grows a little bit more political. There are, of course, many more citations in the 1780s because they're also tapping into the Federalist Papers and a bunch of other documents. So, yes, the Bible is the most-cited book. As an 18th-century historian of religion, I'm not surprised one bit. I don't think it should surprise any 18th-century historian who doesn't even study religion. That the Bible was an important book, and that culturally, people read the Bible and understood the Bible more than any other book. Of course, one other way statistics are funny things. There's another way to look at this, too. You could say that in both the 1770s and the 1780s, non-biblical sources, whether they be political, enlightenment, classical, or legal, outnumbered the number of times that the Bible was quoted, right? So sometimes those who want to say well the Bible was at the heart of the revolution forget about the fact that the Bible actually had a pretty good head start, except for classical,  compared to these Enlightenment and political writers. So you know that's interesting. I don't make a big deal about it. I don't think you can make a really strong interpretive case. I mean, it does say the Bible was important, right? 

But, what interests me the most is the way the Bible was used in these documents and particularly the way the Bible was not only used in these founding documents but the way the Bible was also used from the pulpit and just in kind of everyday life in terms of print and what's been the documents that have been left behind. So, just to show you real quick, I'll go back to the point of the influence of the Bible here. This is an address by Sam Adams. He gave this speech to the Continental Congress in September of 1777. And what I have here is just a small caption of the speech. And then over on the right, I have all the Bible verses that Samuel Adams seems to be clearly drawing from here. So, let me read it real quick because I know it's far away for some of you. “Let us awaken then to a different spirit.” I mean, think about this in terms of politics, right? He's making a political speech over at the state house. “Let us awaken then and evince a different spirit, a spirit that shall inspire the people to persevere in this glorious struggle until their rights and liberties shall be established on a rock.” Matthew 7:25. “And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the wind blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock.” That's probably the least kind of direct connection, right? 

“We have appealed to heaven for the justice of our cause, and in heaven we have placed our trust. Numerous have been the manifestations of God's providence in sustaining us. In the gloomy period of adversity, we have had our cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. Ecclesiastes 7:14. “That the day of prosperity be joyful, but the day of adversity consider God also hath set the one over against the other to the end that man should find nothing after. And then Exodus 13, where it talks about the Israelites following a pillar of cloud to lead the way. Adams goes on, “We have been reduced to distress in the arm of omnipotence. He has raised us up.” Psalm 136 with a strong hand and a stretched out arm for his mercy endureth forever. Let us still rely in humble confidence on him who is mighty to save.” Isaiah 63:1. “Good tidings, Luke 10 and others will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.”

So again, you can't argue with the fact that the Bible was used heavily. There's a great book by a political scientist named Daniel Dreisbach, who has gone deeply into this and shown how the scriptures are used. Thomas Payne quoted the Bible all over Common Sense, right? To try to convince people that God liked democracy better than monarchs, right? But how is the Bible being utilized, and how are these people using it in this sense? The second most cited verse in America in public, now I'm not just talking about the founders, but I'm talking here about published literature in the 1770s, was Galatians 5:1, New Testament, written by, most scholars believe, the apostle Paul. Galatians 5:1 “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourself be burdened by a yoke of slavery.”

Now, when I saw this verse everywhere, and there are actually some really good books that have done the homework to tell me that these were the most cited verses. I was really fascinated by how often this verse was used. So I went back and studied it through church history. I read about the origins of the early Christian founders. I read St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Martin Luther, the Protestant reformers, and John Calvin on this. They all commented on this verse. And usually the interpretation changes here and there for the theological intricacies and so forth. But generally, the argument went something like this. A Christian argument that Christ died on the cross for our sins and has set us free from the yoke of slavery. The burden of slavery, which was normally interpreted as sin, the sinful nature, original sin, was sometimes referred to as having set us free from the bondage of our sinful character, right? Again, changes here and there depending on who you read. But this was the general interpretation. 

So I'm down at Rutgers University Special Collections about 20 years ago, and I'm reading through the papers of a Presbyterian minister named Enoch Green from Deerfield, New Jersey, down in Cumberland County. I'm looking through his sermon notebook, right? I'm just paging through it, and I see a sermon he delivers on Galatians 5:1. I already knew this about the verse. So it caught my attention; it was in 1763, when he preached this sermon, and I read it. I said okay, nothing new here. He's just articulating the exact same thing I just said. Then I kept paging through, and I got to the 1770s. He was still the pastor of the same church, and I found a sermon on Galatians 5.1. Now this is May 1775. Some of you who know your American history, this is after Lexington and Concord.  The second Continental Congress is meeting, and it says "Galatians 5:1" at the top of the sheet. 

So you know, I've been around enough pastors and ministers in my life where I'm like, okay, 13 years, you know, he's got the file drawer, sees the Galatians 5:1 sermon, 13 years, they're not going to remember this. It's been a rough week, you know. I think I'm going to preach this sermon again, and I doubt anyone will remember.  So that's what I was expecting, but this time in his notes, he defines freedom, not in spiritual terms, but in political terms, and literally writes that. This is a manuscript sermon he never published, so you have to take my word for it or go to Rutgers’ special collection and find the Enoch Green letter books. Go and dig up for yourself. Freedom, he says, is freedom from the tyranny of parliamentary taxation, right? He literally writes, " Do not be burdened by a yoke of slavery.” Anyone who knows the political language of the 18th-century revolution knows that there was this kind of Whig language in which slavery meant bondage to tyranny, political slavery, right? The founding fathers were always like, despite what was in their backyard in Monticello and other places, they were always talking about we're enslaved, we're enslaved, right? But slavery was a political term that meant we were burdened by someone who was taking away our liberties, our rights. And that's the way Enoch Green described it this time. Not slaves to sin. 

But here was the kicker again. Go to Rutgers, look this up. In the sermon, and this is my interpretation, but it has the word Christ then with an equal sign, literally an equal sign, and then writes the word Continental Army. Right? So think about this. It is for liberty, political liberty, that the Continental Army has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourself be burdened by a yoke of taxation

Now, you might think, this is just one crazy example, right? Go get the book. I don't even have all the examples in the book, but this was the standard interpretation of Galatians 5:1 in the 1775-77 years among many, many ministers, all patriotic, of course. So don't let anyone tell you that it's such a shame how pastors are bringing their politics into the pulpit these days, right? Enoch Green was clearly using the Bible to advance a political cause here. Now, I said Galatians 5:1 was the most popular or second popular, the first popular was Romans 13?  I'm going to read this part of Romans 13 to you. Think about it in terms of the revolution. Okay? “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” Right there, you have this mandate about rebellion being a bad thing. be subject to the powers. “For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power resists the ordinance of God. And they who resist shall receive to themselves damnation,” right? Obey the government. Favorite verse of any loyalist Anglican preacher in the 18th century.

Some of you know the Hamilton musical, right? There's this character there, Samuel Seab Murray, who appears early in the play. He's relentlessly mocked by Hamilton and his buddies in the musical because he comes across as very effeminate and wimpy, essentially arguing this interpretation of Romans 13. He preaches an entire sermon on this. There are others, too. Charles English, a pastor from New York, preaches a sermon on this. And essentially, their argument is that the American Revolution was conceived in sin, a violation of Romans 13, right? And you're gonna rebel against this. You're gonna rebel against the parliament over high taxes. How do you justify breaking Romans 13 over high taxes? This is the argument.  

Seabberry makes a really interesting argument when he says, "When was the book of Romans written?" Well, at that time, most people believed that the book of Romans, as many do today, was written around the time when Nero was emperor of Rome. Now, some of you know about Nero's relationship with Christians, right? Burned them at the stake, lit the colosseum with the burning bodies of Christians, and so forth. And Seabberry almost laughs this off like how pathetic the patriot interpretation of Romans 13 is, right? The Christians were dying under Nero, and Paul was telling them in 64 AD to submit to authority because authority comes from God, and you're upset about taxes. So nevertheless people like Seabberry, people like English people, like many loyalist Anglican clergy, especially those in, you know I don't think there's any evidence of people here at Christ Church like Jacob Duche or William White or others who would have used this, but it was mostly New York Anglicans who were much more conservative and much more loyalist than  Philadelphia Anglicans which tended to split there were a lot of patriots as well. So the Bible's used, how it's used is also an interesting thing to think about, to take it one step deeper

The next ones I'm going to be very quick on because I realize my time is almost up. Fourth, the United States Constitution is godless, but nearly all the state constitutions established between 1776 and 1780 are not. Now, if you were to look at the United States Constitution, we talked about this a little earlier, you will find two references, well, one reference to religion in the original document. That is Article Six, which says that there is no religious test for federal office. Notice the word federal. If you look at the First Amendment, you find two other references to religion in the First Amendment's religion clauses. You have the disestablishment of religion, right? There will be no state church. There will be no state religion. In other words, government funding will not go towards promoting religion. A state church, you all know what that means. It means like, say I'm a Baptist, I'm not, but if I were, I still have to pay taxes to the established Anglican church because they're the establishment, right? They're the established church. I have to pay for the upkeep of that. So, no established church. And of course, then the free exercise clause, right? Free exercise of religion. 

You might hear this in certain circles. Sometimes someone calls me out on this. They'll say, "It's wrong. God is mentioned in the Constitution because it ends with the year of our Lord 1787, right? You got me. You know, now what's interesting, it bugged me so much that people would bring this up that I actually did some research on it and I found out that those who make this argument make it sound like they were like sitting there deliberating over whether to write the year of our Lord, but on the mean, that was a typical way of dating a document, right? But also, this would have been clearly written at the end of the document, after everyone left Philadelphia. It was the scribe who would have signed in the year of our lord 1787. But anyway, the state constitutions are interesting, which leads to this question, like what is a nation in the 1780s, right? Under the Articles of Confederation, of course, all of these states had their own individual ways of dealing with church and state, and they were free to do that in any way they wanted. So, look at the Pennsylvania State Constitution of 1776, often described by historians,  those of you who are with me this week in the Gilder Lehrman program, I'm going to talk a little bit about this in a couple of lectures from now.

But look at this. I do believe in one God, the creator. This is the oath you have to swear to be a member of the government. I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration. Who does that leave out? At least one group it leaves out is Jews. And actually, there's a great story which I think the Dialogue Institute’s Religious Freedom Trails app is telling about the way that Jews fought this, and then in the 1790 constitution, the divine inspiration of the Old Testament was removed. But if we're thinking about the actual founding of 1776, it's clear that most of them were backcountry Presbyterians who wrote this thing. It's clear that they want Christians running their state, ironically, in what is often described as the most democratic constitution that was probably ever written at that point, the Pennsylvania state constitution. 

Now, if you go to other states, you have religious establishments. Massachusetts had a religious establishment until 1833. Connecticut had a religious establishment until 1819. You have tests, oaths all over the place. The only real major example is Virginia. And Virginia, I'll get this to segue into my next point here. Thanks to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, specifically with the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty in 1786,  is the only colony that does not have a test, oath, or an established church. All the other colonies have either one or the other or both. So this makes the Virginia statute of religious liberty, which essentially argues that no person should be required and forced by the state to, it literally says this, to I'm paraphrasing, to pay taxes for the promotion of a religion that they do not believe.

So you often hear the separation of church and state only goes one way, right? It's to keep the government out of the church, but you know, the church can give you in the government all they want. Well, the statute of Virginia and the statute of religious liberty simply say that no, if the government is promoting a particular form of religion with taxpayer dollars, that is a violation of religious freedom. 

My fifth point is that founders were champions of religious freedom. George Washington, for example, when he was president, wrote a letter in his first term to almost every religious denomination and group in the United States, securing their religious freedom. The most famous one, often discussed, is his letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. He also wrote to this…this is really going to test your knowledge of religious history here…he even wrote to this tiny little sect, which actually has a church or something out in the area, Bryn Athyn, the Swedenborgians. He wrote a letter to them and said we will protect your right to worship, and most people saw the Swedenborgians as this strange cult that existed outside of Christianity, but they were on Washington's mind, and he wrote that letter to them to say they could worship freely.  

Now this is where it gets tricky. This gets a little complicated, right? But under the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania, Jews could worship freely. The government was not going to interfere, but until 1790, they couldn't hold office. So it's still a little messy. It's still a little complicated, right? And that's why this question, " Was America founded as a Christian nation,” is so problematic when you try to superimpose this idea onto the 18th century. What was a nation? Were we a nation under the Articles of Confederation? Did we become a nation when we passed the Constitution? Did we become a nation in 1776? Did we become a nation in whatever theories of nationalism exist? The War of 1812 or 1860, right? But clearly, there's a period in which these states do not have to abide by Article Six of the US Constitution or the First Amendment. That actually doesn't happen till after the Civil War. They're forced to do that for the 14th Amendment.

Okay, final point, and then I'll wrap up. The founders believe that religion was good for the republic, even those who were skeptics, like Jefferson and Franklin. They believed that religion could create good, virtuous citizens. And virtue was absolutely essential because they learned this from the Greeks and Romans. Virtue was essential to a successful republic. But what did they mean by virtue? Virtue was a political term, not a moral or theological term, to the founders. A virtuous person was someone who, at times, not always, because you have rights too, right? But at times was willing to put aside those rights for the greater success and good of the republic. That was a virtuous person in the 18th-century world. It was largely a masculine trait because men were the ones who were doing the public works. We tend to think of virtue today as a feminine trait because we're looking at it through the lens of the Victorian era, right? But masculine traits, men were virtuous, and religion thus created virtuous citizens because the founders believed that people who knew how to sacrifice their own self-interest to something greater, God, might also be good candidates for sacrificing their self-interest at times for the success of a republic. 

You have to remember these founding fathers were not theologians. They were not pastors. They were statesmen. They were here to build a republic. And if religion was a good way to create good, virtuous republican citizens, let's support it. As a matter of fact, let's promote it if we have to. As George Washington said, religion and morality are the pillars of republican government. If this is going to work to help us sustain this republic, then we want to promote it the best we can, and many of them thought that perhaps Christianity or religion generally was the best game in town for promoting good Republican citizens. 

Now I often say this, I can't prove this, but I'd like to try at some point if I live that long. My thesis is this: if there was a form of religiosity, of Christianity even, that spoke in a prophetic voice that spoke truth to power to the government. In other words, you're creating this republic, but my religion says that this republic is a slaveholder's republic, for example, and I'm going to, based on my religious faith, be a prophetic voice against what you're doing, Founding Fathers. You might find these kinds of ideas swirling around in certain Anabaptist communities, right, among Mennonites on the Pennsylvania frontier somewhere. You might find parts of Quakers making these cases. I'm not convinced yet because I haven't studied it, but here's my thesis. If there was a religion that spoke truth to power against the moral sins of the republic that the founders were building, I don't think the founding fathers would have any use for that form of religion, right? Because religion was meant to support the republic. These were statesmen, right? And religion was a necessary pillar in helping them advance their nation.

So there you have it. Was America founded as a Christian nation? And that's a question about the present. Americans saw themselves as a Christian nation until the 1970s, for reasons I mentioned. The Bible was important to the founders. How they used it is also interesting. The Constitution does not mention God, but the states are filled with test oaths and religious establishments. The founders believed that religious liberty should be championed and that religion was good for creating good republican citizens. There's my argument. Thanks for listening. 

David Krueger:  Thanks, everyone. At this point, we're going to ask some questions. Hopefully, you've written down a few questions on note cards, and if Matt, if you'd be willing to collect those and kind of bring them up to the front, and John, you and I are just going to grab a couple of chairs and we're going to sit in the front.  As we are collecting some questions, I just had a couple of thoughts while you were speaking, one of which was your mention of a quote by Martin Luther King.  Reference to this kind of Judeo-Christian culture, which wasn't surprising. He was a Christian minister speaking from that tradition, but I always wonder whether King, in a different time period, would articulate things differently in a different cultural milieu. I think this image of King marching with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a moment of interfaith cooperation in the civil rights movement, and that type of thinking to today, if King were in a new situation, a new context, he would be recognizing a multi-faith America of people of many different religious backgrounds, fighting for civil rights, fighting for other issues. Some of the folks that are here today were at the American Atheist sponsored organization event a couple weeks ago at the Quaker meeting house and it was called in search of religious pluralism and it was sponsored by the American atheist but there were a number of people of faith that were a part of that organization and I remember Bishop Dwayne Royster who's a UCC  minister and also the national clergy organizer and he was the keynote speaker at an American Atheist event. And clearly, the framing of this event was such that in America today, there needs to be an effort to have people of multiple backgrounds, faith or no faith, working together. The specific theme of that conference was the challenges of Christian nationalism. And even Maggie Sadiqqi, a Muslim speaker with the Interfaith Alliance, was there. So I'm thinking about the founders that you mentioned at the end, even at the founders and even at the founding period, which was deeply saturated in Christianity, Christian language was expressed through the biblical text. It was kind of like a literary, cultural language that people used because they learned to read by reading the Bible. I was so immersed there. So I don't have any quibbles with that, but it just reminds me of the founders setting a kind of framework that we could grow as a nation into a multi-faith reality. Even thinking of folks like Benjamin Franklin, who, just down the street, there was a civic initiative to found a public preaching house at that site, and Franklin, in his autobiography, talks about that preaching house being a place where people of any religious persuasion could come and share their faith. So that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to come to Philadelphia and to preach Muhammadism, he could find a pulpit at his service. And even thinking of Jefferson, I think when he was arguing for passing the  Virginia Constitution, I think there was a quote that I read recently

John Fea: Jefferson in 1821, reflecting back on the Hindus and the Muslims

David Krueger: Yeah, Hindus and Muslims. Yeah,  that's right. So, if you could comment a bit more on the founders, their commitment, and the space they created in conversation with the larger cultural milieu.

John Fea:  You kind of answered the question for me. Well, first, I thought you were going somewhere with MLK. You know I'm a historian, to me it's an ahistorical move to try to put Martin Luther King in another time period, right? He's a product of a specific time period. So maybe if you have a theologian, an ethicist, or someone else, they can do that. I'm not trained to do that. I'm trained to understand Martin Luther King from a historical perspective. My the reason why I taught at a liberal arts college for so long is that you could have me speaking about the the same topic historically and then the students could walk down the hall and take a class in ethics or a class in theology or whatever and they'll get or politics and they'll get the same discussion from a different disciplinary perspective. Right?

To address King really quickly. I think King is a prophetic voice, and his understanding of America comes from a liberal tradition in which he still believes in the founding fathers. He still believes in the ideals, maybe not necessarily the fact that they own slaves, but he believes in the ideals, and he wants to cash that check, right? As he puts it, right? So I think King, unlike some other more radical approaches coming out of the black power movement. I think King is deeply rooted in a liberal founding tradition that holds that all men are created equal. I want to cash that in. Right? I mean, the founders had a good idea there. Right? So I think that's what he's saying when he's talking about, and he clearly sees this as rooted…if you read a letter from a Birmingham jail, he's also talking about theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Paul Tillich and so forth. So, it's hard for me to take King out of his historical context.

In terms of, you know, you stole my thunder a little bit with the 1821 Jefferson letter, but yes, I think there were some founding fathers who envisioned their ideas of religious liberty moving beyond simply Christian. Jefferson and Madison are prime examples of this, who clearly envision a religiously diverse society. You know, Hindus always spelled it with the two Os in the 18th century. Hindus, right and Muhammadans, they mention, and infidels, Jefferson mentions right, so there's the sort of atheism part of it, or skeptics part of it, so I do think they had a vision. I do think you find, again historian here right, I'd love things to be a certain way but I study the 18th century as it played out, I do think there were others like most of the anti-federalists, people like Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, those who opposed the United States Constitution, some of them were very upset that there was no reference to America as a Christian nation in the United States Constitution. And they literally said if we don't have a Christian reference in this United States Constitution, there's a chance that Hindus and Muhammadans and all these other people could hold office in our country. We’ve got to reject this thing unless we get a Christian statement. So it's messy, but certainly you could find founders looking towards the future and thinking of a nation that was welcoming, at least on the religious liberty front, welcoming to all kinds of people, believers in all kinds of faiths, and non-believers.

David Krueger: Here is a question: Why did the religious stipulations in state constitutions pass away in the early 19th century if people saw themselves as living in a Christian nation? So if you could talk about that transition.

John Fea: Yes. So just to sort of rephrase the question a little bit. Technically, this sort of goes to the point the person asking is making; it fortifies their question a little bit. I think you find all of these states removed establishments, Massachusetts being the last in 1833, but test oaths and so forth, well before they had to. It's not until the 14th Amendment. Now, remember that the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery after the Civil War. The 14th Amendment basically says that all states that had slavery no longer have the right to do their own thing because, now, the 13th Amendment says slavery is illegal. So the 14th Amendment says to states, no more doing your own thing. The union won the war. You're done with all this stuff. Hugo Black actually applies the 14th Amendment to religion in the 1947 Everson case. That's the first time the 14th Amendment has actually been applied to religion, which essentially says it is now illegal for you to have a state church or a test oath. Now, having said that, all the states did it well before they had to. 1947 was when they were forced to do it. There's not a straight trajectory here. It depends on the state. So in Massachusetts and Connecticut, I think you have other Christian dissenting groups that are just growing to such a great extent, especially during this revival known as the Second Great Awakening, in which Baptists, Methodists, and other sorts of dissenters, if you will, religions are flourishing and developing, and these churches are growing, and they're challenging the establishment churches. I mean, this is the whole part of Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, right? They're itching to get out from under Connecticut's congregational establishment. So,I think many of these dissenters win positions in office. They become lawmakers. And I think that's the main way I think to describe that. Pennsylvania is really interesting because, in Pennsylvania, there's a strong attempt to, after 1790, when the old and new testaments were taken out, in the next debates over the constitution in the 1830s, for the state constitution, you actually have a strong movement to restore those things, and bring back the religious test oaths. You know, the other great example of this is in the 1776 Constitution, free blacks are given the right to vote in Pennsylvania. But in 1838, those rights were taken away. So it's like we think about history as kind of a story of progress, right? It's all over the place. Yeah.

David Krueger: We have a question here about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I think the question is really asking where these documents specify as the origin of these rights? I think the Declaration of Independence is maybe clear about that, but could you say anything more about the Constitution?

John Fea: Well, let me say something about the Declaration of Independence real quick. I was talking to some people about this today. All those rights in the declaration, those first two paragraphs, that we all know. Most people, when they quote the Declaration of Independence, don't quote the grievances, which is the bulk of the document. They tend to quote “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights”. In certain circles, the Creator and nature's god are emphasized. If you talk to some, those ideals in the first two paragraphs are like any British person would have embraced. Loyalists would have believed that they were endowed by the creator with rights to life, liberty, and property, right? John Locke was British, right? Now, what struck me about actually touring today was just how quickly it becomes a document on rights. There's a great book by Pauline Meyer called American Scripture, in which he shows that the Declaration of Independence was originally meant as a foreign policy document more than anything else. We're declaring our independence, so help us, right? Meyer argues it's in the early 19th century, with abolitionists, women's suffrage, women's rights, and Seneca Falls, and with Abe Lincoln in 1863 mentioning "four score and seven years ago," that they all invoke the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. It becomes kind of American scripture that was not, you talk about the original intent of the Declaration of Independence, I would argue was not to promote those ideals, and in fact Jefferson, John Adams and later John Quincy Adams said it had nothing to do with those ideals, but later they were it was reappropriated, to be used for these social reform movements in the 19th century. So I mean that's a theological question to me. Where do our rights come from? I'm not equipped to answer that question. But certainly all the founders believe that, they believed. You can decide whether they were right or wrong. That and all British people would have believed that their rights came from God. I mean, it's in every document. It's not really an arguable point, right? The Constitution and the First Amendment are much more complicated because many of these things stem from the 1780s and from what the founders lived through during that decade. As a result, they begin to see the dangers. They've already seen the dangers well before the revolution of established churches. They saw the threat of established churches from just watching the colonial period. Baptists getting dunked in rivers in Virginia. They can recall Mary Dyer and her four Quaker martyrs being taken in Boston Common and hanged. All of these kinds of things. There was a long history of established churches being seen as bad, and they didn't want to model this country after the European idea of a state church. So that was in the air for a long time, but the 1780s also prompted them to suggest that religious freedom would be the way they would approach this issue, at least at the federal level.

David Krueger: I'm not sure I fully understand this question, but I'll take a crack at it. One of the most interesting facets about this discussion is that political values considered secular, such as representative government, checks and balances, and cohereditary monarchy, I'm not sure what that is, were transformed into Christian values. Do you think there was a primary point in history where that happened for America as a whole? Was it the revolution or earlier? 

John Fea: When you mean things like the separation of powers became portrayed as like

David Krueger: Would the person who asked that question be willing to ask it directly?

Audience Question: Yeah, trying to fit this into a note card was tough. So I apologize. I think in the readings I've done, one of the things that's most interesting to me is, I mean, I remember growing up in Evangelical circles where things like the Constitution were clearly seen as a Christian document because there's the separation of powers and checks and balances. One of the interesting things like it seems like over time now some of that I think makes sense even your timeline, about you know cold war the 40s and stuff like that, but one of the things that's interesting that language even as you referred to in Enoch Green occurred much earlier of like these things that really were enlightenment values of you know of things of like against hereditary monarchy, having those checks and balances against those became to be considered popularly Christian values.

John Fea:  Yeah, I get your point. So, thanks for the question. I think I understand it now. It depends on what part of the founding you're talking about, right? So the revolution itself was inherently political. It was about stamp taxes, enumerated articles, Townshend duties, and coercive acts; it was a political-economic event. That doesn't mean there were people in the colonies who saw these developments in the political world taking place in the 1770s and 1780s and did not understand them through the lens of their understanding of Christian faith. What I just said is different from the idea that the American Revolution happened because of Christianity. So you hear in certain circles in the ways you were raised and heard, growing up, you hear in certain circles that the American Revolution was an inherently Christian event. I know people at Bob Jones University and Liberty University who are actually teaching from standard US history textbooks that describe the American Revolution as a political and economic event. These are right-wing schools. Everyone teaches it that way. Except for people who have a political kind of axe to grind. So, I do think you can find, you know, people making, ministers make, one of the new chapters in the third edition of the book is on this thing called the black robe regiment. Has anyone ever heard of this thing? Well, maybe I'll teach something on this. It was a handful of ministers in Boston in the 18th century who preached politics from their pulpits. They were patriots and so forth. And Peter Oliver, who was the loyalist tax collector, randomly, in passing, called them the black robe regiment. He was referring to these preachers who used the pulpit to preach patriotism. I mean, it really got ugly, too. There are legitimate cases of them preaching political sermons from their churches, and then people literally running out and tearing apart Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of the Massachusetts House, right? Literally running from the church and creating violent acts. But that's neither here nor there to this. The point here is that these ministers, right or wrong, clearly understood the political events in Boston at that time through some kind of theological lens. Does that mean the American Revolution was about that? No. But that's how some people interpreted it. When you get to the Constitution, checks and balances. I've heard these arguments, and I can't repeat them. I don't know how they work. I haven't studied them close enough, but you know, I've heard executive, legislative, and judicial branches that come right out of Leviticus, something. These arguments are always out there, and the Constitution, the most unchristian of all the founding documents or unreligious, is sort of a sacred religious document. I just don't know as much about the arguments that they're making there. But I would argue your question was when did this happen? When did this start? And I would argue it really doesn't start until the late 70s, 80s, right? I know of no founder, and I by all means I don't know every word that they wrote, but founders were not like the – there's nothing in the Federalist papers or the minutes of the constitution that is quoting Leviticus.  I'm a historian. I need a smoking gun. I need evidence. I need to see this. I need to see a debate on the floor of the constitutional convention where they're saying, because of Leviticus, we need to have three branches of government, right? I often debate these conservative political scientists, and they say, "Well, it was in the air. It was the culture, right? You know, they would have just assumed it came from Leviticus in this example, right? They didn't have to say it. They didn't have to argue it, right? 

I was debating a guy at a college once on whether America was founded as a Christian nation, a political scientist who was kind of making a soft case for a Christian nation. He was making this case that they didn't have to say it. They all knew that the branches of government, all these things were biblical ideas, Hebrew ideas, right? And I made the smoking gun argument, you know? I said, I don't see it anywhere. I can't bring that to my audience in a book or a lecture. It's not in there. Like no, but it would have been the culture, right? So, I went back to the hotel after the debate and it was the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. I turned on the TV, you know, and like there's one, some of you know what I'm talking about. There was a one seed against the 16 seed, right, playing each other, and the announcer goes like, "This is a real underdog battle. It's David and Goliath, whatever." And I'm like, "IT'S A CHRISTIAN BASKETBALL GAME!!, You know? They're referencing the Bible, you know?" But some of it's just silly, right? You know, yes, it's in the vernacular, but that doesn't mean that they were trying to create some kind of Christian, you know, that separation of church and state is biblical. 

David Krueger: We're coming up on the end of our time together, and it's a warm night, and we probably all need to make our way. But I really appreciate Dr. Fea's ability to challenge us all to think historically, and one of his books illuminates that topic. 

John Fea: It’s an unnatural act, as the famous Stanford educator Sam Weinberg once said: historical thinking is an unnatural act. 

David Krueger:  And it's a trained skill as well, and you've done a great job for us tonight to train us to think in some new and critical ways, so let's show our appreciation. I would encourage you to sign up for our mailing list by the door, and we'd love to follow up with you. There's a great video. John's very humble, and he didn't mention this, but Judy Woodruff from PBS NewsHour interviewed John Fea recently in this very room. I would be happy to send along that clip to all attendees.  We're going to have a number of really exciting events throughout the rest of the year, and we would love to stay in contact. We encourage you to take a tour with us and to download the app to explore more. 

John Fea: Quick Judy Woodruff story. We went into the Washington Pew, but she wouldn't step in. She was like,  “This is not right. This should be preserved.” So, and I said, I've been taking people here, and I've been getting selfies in this pew with students for the last 20 years, you know, like you could come in, Judy, feel free. So, anyway, yeah, watch the video.

Featured J.E.S. Author: Raimundo César Barreto, Jr. on "José Míguez Bonino and the Third-World Challenge to the Ecumenical Movement"

Issue 59.3 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is now available! It features essays originally presented as papers for the North American Academy of Ecumenists annual meeting at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, November 16-17, 2023.

For each issue, the Diablogue features one author and makes a full-text PDF version of their article available for 60 days on Project Muse. In this issue, we feature Raimundo Barreto’s "José Míguez Bonino and the Third-World Challenge to the Ecumenical Movement,” which can be accessed HERE.

Raimundo C. Barreto is an associate professor of World Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he has been teaching since 2014. He holds a bachelor’s degree in theology from Seminário Teológico Batista do Norte do Brasil, an MDiv degree from McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, and a PhD in religion and society from Princeton Theological Seminary. Before coming to Princeton, he taught at various institutions in Brazil and was the director of the Division on Freedom and Justice at the Baptist World Alliance.

Barreto is the author of Protesting Poverty: Protestants, Social Ethics, and the Poor in Brazil (Baylor University Press, 2023) and Base Ecumenism: A Latin American Contribution to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology (Augsburg Fortress, 2025). He is working on a new book titled Christians in the City of São Paulo: The Shaping of World Christianity in a Brazilian Megacity (Bloomsbury). He is also the co-editor of the Journal of World Christianity, the general editor of the World Christianity and Public Religion Series published by Fortress Press (2017–24), and a convener of the World Christianity Conference since 2018. In addition to his publications, which include numerous journal articles and book chapters, he has served on boards and committees of various organizations, including the Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO), Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI), Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC), Baptist World Alliance (BWA), Aliança de Batistas do Brasil, American Baptist Churches (ABCUSA), the Alliance of Baptists, the National Council of Churches USA, and the World Council of Churches (WCC).

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In a few sentences, what is the main argument of your J.E.S. article?

This article explores the role of José Míguez Bonino in the ecumenical movement, focusing on his emphasis on a third-world perspective and the significance of addressing social justice in Christian unity. In this context, the term 'third world' refers to an emancipatory project that emerged in the 1950s, influenced by the struggles of the global South against colonialism and imperialism. This project, which influenced Bonino and other theologians from the global South, encouraged them to conceive a more inclusive and justice-oriented approach to unity. Bonino stressed the importance of basing the concept of unity in history and context, rejecting an idealized view in favor of a nuanced understanding that recognizes conflict, division, and differences. He highlighted the radical contextuality of human existence and the essential location of discourses, emphasizing the struggle for meaningful unity within a broadened understanding of oikoumene, grounded in justice and solidarity with the oppressed. This perspective makes the urgency and importance of a more inclusive and justice-oriented approach to unity a key focus for future ecumenical efforts.

How did you get interested in the topic?

This topic came to me as a result of my personal and academic journey. Raised in an anti-ecumenical evangelical church in Brazil, I was initially presented with resistance and misrepresentation towards the ecumenical movement. Paradoxically, this experience sparked a strong desire in me to understand and contribute to this movement.

As I delved into the history of Brazilian Protestantism, I discovered the significant role of ecumenical engagement in the struggles of the impoverished majority of the Brazilian people. This was particularly evident through a movement called Iglesia y Sociedad en America Latina (ISAL), which laid the foundations for what can be termed a Protestant branch of Latin American liberation theology. In studying this movement, featured in my book "Protesting Poverty: Protestants, Social Ethics and the Poor in Brazil" (Baylor University Press, 2023), I came to realize the significant role of José Míguez Bonino as an ecumenical figure since the early 1960s. He progressed from being a Methodist pastor advocating for local ecumenical relations in Mendoza, Argentina, to co-founding ISAL. Bonino was also the only Latin American Protestant to attend Vatican II and one of the first to interpret it in the region. His participation in the second meeting of the Catholic Episcopal Conference of Latin America in Medellin, which sparked liberation theology in the continent in 1968, was a pivotal moment in his journey. This event, along with his tenure as a regional president of the Faith and Order Commission and member of the W.C.C. Central Committee, solidified his presence and leadership in many ecumenical initiatives in Latin America and beyond.

Furthermore, as a liberation theologian in dialogue with partners from a broader ecumenical network, he contributed to reshaping prevalent perspectives in the pursuit of unity within the ecumenical movement. An invitation to discuss his role as a Latin American Protestant interpreter of Vatican II at a conference in Louvain last year finally provided me with an opportunity to highlight the theological influence of this still relatively unknown Latin American theologian on the ecumenical movement and its understanding of unity.

How do you think Bonino's understanding of "oikoumene" is helpful in thinking about ecumenical efforts?

Oikoumene is a word derived from the Greek, which generally means "the whole inhabited world," and which, since its absorption into Christian vocabulary, has been defined both religiously and politically. The question is, who defines oikoumene? And, who is part of the oikoumene, and who is left out? There was a time when this word referred to those who lived within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Later, it became a reference to the Christian world while preserving the memories of the church's connections with the empire. Over the centuries, it has been used in different ways. Yet, oikoumene has often been defined by those in positions of power and privilege.

In the modern era, it was adopted by the ecumenical movement in reference to the Christian ideal of universal unity inspired by Jesus's prayer in John 17. What José Míguez Bonino and others have brought to the table is the need for ecumenical efforts to take seriously those who have been made invisible in those conversations and for Christians everywhere to do a self-examination to see how they have been complicit in the exclusion and erasure of others. Thus, the terms in which oikoumene is defined must be revisited, and the voices of the victims of oppression, the poor, and all those who remain excluded must be heard. His understanding of unity is broader than the classical call for church unity, and it challenges not only ecumenical conversations on Christian unity but also Christian self-understanding and priorities. I engage in a fuller conversation on this topic in my new book, Base Ecumenism: A Latin American Contribution to Ecumenical Praxis and Theology, (Series: Shapers of Ecumenical Theology) with Augsburg Fortress Press, which should be out in Spring 2025.

Featured JES Author: Rev. Dr. Gisela Uzukwu on "Crisis of Faith: Today's African Christians and Mami-Wata"

Issue 59.2 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is now available! For each issue, the Diablogue features one author and makes a full-text PDF version of their article available for 30 days on Project Muse. In this issue, we feature Gisela Uzukwu’s "CRISIS OF FAITH: TODAY’S AFRICAN CHRISTIANS AND MAMI-WATA.” A full-text PDF version of the article can be accessed HERE.

Dr. Gesila Nneka Uzukwu is a scholar of New Testament Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria. She holds a bachelor’s in Philosophy, bachelor’s in Theology, M.A and Licentiate in Theology and Religious Studies, and PhD in New Testament Studies (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium).

Her research interests are in New Testament Studies, Pauline literature, gender studies, and African Spiritualities and Theodicy. She is currently the Head of Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Nasarawa State University. She is the author of The Unity of Male and Female in Jesus Christ: An Exegetical Study of Galatians 3:28c in Light of Paul’s Theology of Promise. With her doctoral defence in New Testament Studies, she became the first African Woman to have obtained a Doctorate in Biblical Exegesis in Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. She has written several articles in both National and International journals. She is also a member of several editorial boards, such as, (a) Sapientia Logos: A Journal of Biblical Research & Interpretation in Africa; (b) THE CATHOLIC VOYAGE African Journal of Consecrated Life. A Publication of the Conference of Major Superiors of Nigeria; (c) Rubicon – NSUK Journal of Philosophy and Religion.

What is the argument of your J.E.S. article?

The J.E.S. article examines African Mami-wata spirituality in conversation with the present crisis of faith witnessed by many African Christians at the grassroots. The works of David Barrett, Philip Jenkins, and Andrew Walls have reiterated the intriguing shift in the center of Christianity to the Global South. In spite of all the creative theological enterprise that this paradigmatic shift has brought about, the issues of theodicy and Mami-wata spirituality have not been given the attention they rightly deserve. Yet, at the grassroots of African Christianities, Mami-wata spirituality in different forms has been used as an interpretative grid to explain the harsh existential problems confronting many African Christians. Unfortunately, systematic theologies in the Western traditions and their low-cost imitations in Africa have not engaged this crisis of faith at the grassroots of African Christianity, which is readily caused by the pragmatic appropriations of Mami-wata spirituality as a hermeneutical tool in order to interpret the existential problems of many African Christians. 

How, in your view, has the figure of Mami-Wata offered a solution to the problem of theodicy that Christianity has not?

The failure of African Christianity in its inability to solve the political and economic crisis of the African continent has further led many African Christians to seek help and solutions within the cultural precinct of traditional African spirituality. Historically, African Pentecostal Christianity has, for more than four decades now, mouthed the promises of wealth and prosperity to the African continent. Yet, most African Christians are living daily within the purview of enormous poverty and underdevelopment. Consequently, many African Christians are turning away from this Pentecostal message and seeking wealth and prosperity promised now by African Mami-wata advocates. Consequently, it seemed both African Pentecostal Christianity and Mami-wata religions were competitively at the long head in their quest to win over the soul of the African people.  Beyond this contestation, African Mami-wata spirituality appears to be winning in spite of the superficial victories of African Christianity in its populous character. For example, Mami-Wata spirituality deploys a realistic interpretative lens to the problem of good and evil. The theoretical and dogmatic nature of the Christian faith and its theology is not always at home with the African people since Africans are very practical in their representations of culture, traditions, and spiritualities. Guided by this understanding, some Africans would readily engage their African problems and solutions within their spiritual and traditional worldviews. Within this context, Mami-Wata spirituality has provided some Africans a fitting prism to engage their problems and find solutions. Similarly, the belief in witchcraft or spiritual manipulations is so prevalent and deeply embedded in the psyche of many Africans, (and Nigeria particularly) that it is almost impossible to explain the presence of evil without recourse to the mishap of spiritual beings.  Despite the many deliverance centers and prayer houses all across Africa, yet many African Christians underneath still romance with traditional African spiritualities. In Nigeria, this cultural romance embraces the inclusiveness of Mami-wata spirituality rather than the excessive dualism between good and evil as found in mainstream Africa Christianity.

How do Mami-Wata’s various positive and negative qualities provide a model of feminine divinity beyond the passive form of the Virgin Mary?

Mami-Wata spirituality fiercely engages African problems through the recognition of its active power, energetic presence, and aggressive personality. The fierceness of her anger is traditionally acknowledged particularly in combative defence of her devotees and to punish persons acts of sacrilege against her. In contrast, the traditional picture of the Virgin Mary embodies the opposite of this Mami-wata spirituality. The Virgin Mary is largely passive and operates only within the restrictive context of the Catholic faithful, while Mami-wata is directly connected to all human beings who use water. Interestingly, the usual praise of the Virgin Mary for her docility and submissive nature does not entirely resonate with the present African drive, spirit and energy which aggressively in tandem with Mami-wata personality advocate for the confrontation of all the dehumanized condition of their corporate existence instead of merely submitting to the status quo. In this regard, rather than the Virgin Mary model of submissiveness, the subversive personality of the Mami-Wata deity appears dynamically intriguing for many African Christians at the grassroots.

Why have Western and African Christianities alike struggled to engage seriously with the informal sites of religious expression such as those you surveyed in this study in this study?

African Christianity remained methodologically enslaved to the approach, areas of research interests, and concerns of Western Christianity. This paternalistic control and cultural hegemony of the West on African Christian theological discourses do not allow very often the engagement of contextual and local realities, which may be weird or strange to the Eurocentric interests of Western scholarship. Breaking this hegemony, research in Mami-wata repositioned past studies in theodicy, particularly in the discourse of systematic theology, to engage the contextual realities of the African people. Most importantly, the emerging field of World Christianity needs these local discourses in order to show the variegated character of Christianity, and the regional contours in expressions, struggles, and presentation of Global Christianity.  

How did you get interested in the topic?

I was brainstorming together with` Dr Matthew Michael, a colleague of mine at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies here in Nigeria, when we suddenly realised that the standard discourses on theodicy in systematic theologies have not given recognition to the local discourses in theodicy which do not take the traditional path of talking about theodicy in direct relationship to God, but did not include the cultural significance of other supernatural beings in the discourses of theodicy. Dr. Michael encouraged me to pursue this important academic trajectory, and I am so glad I did because it clearly suggests the need to rewrite works on theodicy to include discourses on local deities or other contending spiritual entities. Consequently, this research interest already suggests that discourses on theodicy as done in the West should not be paternalistically imposed on other contexts such as Africa because the nature of discourses on theodicy is a little bit different here.

What is your next project?

As for my next project, I am working in collaboration with Dr. Michael on a book on “Mami-Wata spirituality and Theodicy.”  We hope that this work will bring to mainstream discourses on African Christianity and European systematic theologies the intriguing conversations on how local discourses on theodicy could enrich global Christian theology.