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.