America at 250: A “Christian Nation,” But Which Christianity?

Guest Blogger

Arvind Kurian Abraham

As fireworks lit up the sky this Fourth of July, the United States of America turned 250. Barring the heatwave, the celebrations were spectacular, the patriotism genuine, and the questions, as ever, complicated. Among the most persistent: Was the United States founded as a Christian nation? The question has gained fresh attention this year. The White House’s Rededicate 250 initiative, hosted under its America Prays framework, has made faith central to the semiquincentennial, inviting Americans to see prayer and religious heritage as inseparable from the founding. Vice President J.D. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, recently remarked in an interview, “I do think in a very foundational sense the country is a Christian nation.” However, if we are going to invoke the Christianity of the Founders, we need to ask which Christianity they had in mind. The answer, buried in the fine print of the Declaration of Independence itself, is more uncomfortable than the celebration suggests.

The Founders were, broadly speaking, Christian. Most of the signers of the Declaration were Protestants, though some were proto-Unitarians and Deists. They invoked providence and prayer. However, “Christian” in 18th-century colonial America carried a very specific, often exclusive meaning, and it frequently meant not Catholic. As historian Maura Jane Farrelly documents in Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860, anti-Catholic prejudice was not a fringe sentiment in the colonies; it was structural. From the earliest settlements, Roman Catholicism was coded as the religion of tyranny, superstition, and foreign domination. Colonial anti-Catholicism was not homegrown. As historian Linda Colley has argued, Protestant identity forged through centuries of war against Catholic kingdoms was central to what it meant to be British — and the colonists carried that inheritance across the Atlantic with them.

This brings us to a clause in the Declaration of Independence that has largely been forgotten: the grievance against the Quebec Act of 1774. We remember the Declaration for its creedal preamble — that all men are created equal, and that among their unalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, the Declaration was primarily a list of charges against King George III. The Declaration lists among its indictments against the King that he had given his assent to legislation “for abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” That “neighbouring Province” was Quebec. That “Arbitrary Government” was, in large part, the legal accommodation of the Roman Catholic Church. The Continental Congress passed a resolution on October 14, 1774 decrying the law as “establishing the Roman Catholic religion” in Quebec.

The Quebec Act of 1774 was actually a decade in the making — a measured, even painstaking attempt by Prime Minister Lord North’s ministry to govern a colony largely made up of French Catholics who had been left in a legal vacuum since the Proclamation of 1763, which had made no specific provision for this overwhelmingly Catholic population, despite there being only a few hundred British Protestant settlers in the colony. The Act restored French civil law and the right of Catholic clergy to collect tithes from their parishioners. The intention, as the historical record shows, was pragmatic governance of a complex colonial situation.

However, American colonists saw it very differently. As historian Peter D.G. Thomas establishes, the Quebec Act provided two pieces of explosive propaganda for the American cause. First, what colonists portrayed as the alleged creation of a “Papist absolutism” on their northern border that could serve as a base for curbing Protestant liberty further south; and second, a boundary extension that hemmed in American westward expansion. Critics back in London, Thomas notes, “mainly sought to exploit religious prejudice,” resorting to what he calls “quite unscrupulous misrepresentation.” The London Evening Post wildly claimed that Protestants in the enlarged Quebec “may not even enjoy the toleration of the Protestant religion, and may be hanged or burned as heretics.” When George III made his way through Whitehall to give his royal assent, the London Evening Post the next day reported that “the universal cry was 'No Popery! No French laws!'”

It is worth being precise about what the Quebec Act actually did with respect to the Catholic Church, because the colonial propaganda often obscured this. The British were careful to contain the scope of Catholic ecclesiastical authority. Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, explicitly told critics that the Catholic Bishop of Quebec “would only have the minimum powers necessary for the practice of the Catholic faith.” The King’s supremacy, Dartmouth insisted, “must certainly be understood to be that which precludes all jurisdiction by authority of the see of Rome.” This was not an embrace of Rome, rather, it was a tightly managed, minimalist toleration, designed to keep a large Catholic population governable while explicitly blocking any broader papal authority.

The tithe provision sits at the heart of the church-state questions the Quebec Act raises. Colonial critics viewed the state enforcement of payments to Catholic priests as a form of religious establishment that violated Protestant liberties. However, the irony is pointed: many of the colonies protesting state support for the Catholic Church in Quebec had their own established Protestant churches at home. The objection was not to state-church entanglement as a general principle; it was to that church being supported by the state.

Anti-Catholicism, as Farrelly’s scholarship makes clear, was woven into the very fabric of how colonial Americans understood religious liberty. Anti-Catholic sentiment in colonial America had its own popular ritual: “Pope Day,” the American equivalent of England’s Guy Fawkes Day, which featured mock processions and burning effigies of the Pope. The alliance with Catholic France during the American Revolution began to shift this culture. George Washington, recognizing the contradictions of celebrating anti-Catholicism while accepting French Catholic support, forbade his troops from observing Pope Day altogether. Anti-Catholicism was not immune to realpolitik. The Continental Congress did attempt to woo Canadian Catholics into the revolutionary cause, even as its own resolutions rang with anti-Catholic rhetoric, an overture that found few takers. It is also worth noting that Charles Carroll, a Catholic, did sign the Declaration. He most likely believed that supporting the revolutionary cause would help integrate Catholics into an overwhelmingly Protestant society. Furthermore, he was no champion of expansive papal authority.

The founding era brought further, if uneven, change. The Federal Constitution broke with colonial practice by prohibiting Congress from imposing any religious test for public office, a significant departure from the restrictions that still appeared in various state constitutions. The promotion of religious tolerance by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison helped soften official hostility further, and gradually state constitutions began dropping their clauses limiting the civil liberties of Catholics. Yet anti-Catholic rhetoric did not disappear; it migrated into partisan politics, finding a home in the language and culture of the Federalist Party. It was only with the defeat of the Federalists and the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800 that this particular strain of politically organized anti-Catholicism was significantly quieted, at least for a generation.

As America celebrates 250 years of independence, the question of what it means to be a “Christian nation” deserves this full, unvarnished history. Christian moral language undeniably permeated the founding era. However, the Christianity of many Americans in 1776 was also a Christianity that counted the legal toleration of Catholicism, even in its most limited and carefully hedged form, among its grievances against the Crown. We cannot fully understand what religious liberty meant to the founding generation without acknowledging what it did not yet mean, and for whom. That reckoning is not a threat to the American story. It is part of the American story.