During his first term as president, Donald J. Trump walked a short distance from the White House and stood in front of St. John’s Church, an Episcopal church in Lafayette Square. He held up a copy of the Bible and said: “We have the greatest country in the world. Keep it nice and safe.”
It was the summer of 2020, and the protests that followed the death of George Floyd had sprung up across the country. The church was set on fire during riots the night before, and Mr. Trump had vowed to end “widespread violence and looting.”
George Washington, during his first term as president, suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion. He did so without posing with the Bible outside of a church. In Washington’s private correspondence, he never referenced Jesus Christ, instead favoring “Providence” to name the divine.
Nowadays, it is common to hear that America was founded as a Christian nation. The history is a bit more complex. Various thinkers influenced America’s founding fathers, including Cicero, the Stoics and Enlightenment figures. St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of natural law indirectly influenced documents such as the Declaration of Independence, and the framers tapped into biblical language to unify a religious people. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson designed a republican system of government thanks to a thorough understanding of the history of ancient Rome and the separation-of-powers theory of French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu.
Religion may not have been the only influence, but it played a pivotal role in the development of the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian who wrote Democracy in America about the burgeoning nation in the 1830s, detailed how faith was crucial.
“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other,” he wrote. Later in the volume, he adds, “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; and it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others.”
The founders may not have been overtly Christian, but residents of the 13 colonies certainly were. They founded a nation where the people were sovereign and, in Tocqueville’s words, “the sovereign authority is religious.” And the religion in question was Christianity.
Despite religious fervour, or perhaps because of it, the young nation enshrined freedom of religion in the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. The Constitution itself had not been ratified until 1788, after a long debate in newspapers between the Federalists and the antifederalists over its finer points.
“It is true, we are not disposed to differ much, at present, about religion,” an antifederalist known as Federal Farmer wrote in 1787, “but when we are making a constitution, it is to be hoped, for ages and millions yet unborn, why not establish the free exercise of religion, as a part of the national compact.”
Today, the politicization of Christianity is commonplace. One candidate for the Senate, James Talarico in Texas, has claimed the Annunciation justifies abortion. At a Pentagon prayer service, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth read a prayer asking God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
And President Trump issued a lengthy statement praising the U.S. bishops for consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart on June 12, saying, “the love of Jesus Christ has stood at the center of our identity and way of life.” He said the United States confronts “a new set of menacing ideologies seeking once again to cast God out from our society.”
Political leaders championing their cause with religious tropes would have made Tocqueville deeply uncomfortable. As he made his way through America, he noticed that despite a deep Christian devotion among the people, religious leaders stayed out of politics. And government leaders stayed out of religion.
Today, American society is, unquestionably, less religious than it was in the 1830s. Last December, a Pew Research Center survey found that 28 percent of U.S. adults claimed no religious affiliation. And only 55 percent of young adults claimed a religion, much less than the 70 percent of the general population who did so. Politicians have been quick to exploit what remains of religious affection. And they have rushed into the breach and offered themselves as moral guides.
If Tocqueville was right, religious disaffiliation threatens to undermine the principles of the Constitution. He wrote that “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” But religion, which he described as “the foremost of their political institutions,” can only have this positive influence when it is freely practiced.
The United States will regain its moral stature only through a religious revival. Americans must freely choose this revival, and it must be inspired by God, not a political class that seeks only to manipulate religion for its own gain. Renewal happens when people of faith refuse to allow God to be displaced by politics.
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