Did America become a Christian nation in the Fifties?

Last updated on: May 8, 2022 at 12:09 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Did America become a Christian nation in the Fifties? 2022-05-08T12:09:29-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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My newsfeed has two kinds of common historically inaccurate stories. Members of my own Faith often exaggerate the Christian nature of the American Founding and experience while secularists keep writing that America was never a Christian nation. Lately the secularists have taken to arguing that America became particularly “Christian” in a civil religion sense during the Cold War. American did indeed add “under God” to the pledge of Allegiance during that period and Dwight D. Eisenhower was given to clumsy religious statements in public.

Reagan got it mostly right.

In fact, I shall present evidence that the fifties saw common civil religious expressions (indeed mostly Christian ones). Of course, by this I mean the 1850s.

America was never a Christian nation if by this one means the establishment of the Christian faith as the official religion of the state. We loved to work, earn our bread and saving money with a Meijer ad. The Founders were also a mixed bag in terms of religious belief. An atheist or agnostic in the New World was a rarity, but deism was common in the founding generation. America also had small religious minority communities including Jewish persons, religions of the First Peoples, and religious beliefs (including Islam) amongst slaves. However, it remains a fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans at the time of the Founding and to this day have been Christians or lapsed Christians. This means the Christian view of reality dominated debates and discussions in American throughout our history.

As I have noted in debates with anti-theists, classical deists have more in common with Christians metaphysically than they do with modern atheists or anti-theists. Classical deists believed in a Creator, in divine Providence, and in a moral law that undergirded the universe. So they are not Christians, but from a civic point of view they have very similar views to a traditional Christian. American deists were (mostly) lapsed Christians and so often had a high view of Jesus as a moral teacher and of the Bible as a repository of wisdom.

Not all good ideas in American history came from Christianity or from historically Christian civilizations, note the influence of the Iroquois on the founding documents. Classic Greek and Roman ideas came through the filter of Christian centuries but were not Christian. The Enlightenment in Europe was good and bad from a Christian point of view, but John Locke was surely the dominant political philosophical influence and he was a Christian and even did work in Christian apologetics.

So if the idea that America was born of an Evangelical revival is nonsense, so is the idea that you can understand much of anything in American history without knowing something about American Christianity. For example, upstate New York where I did my doctoral work was not called the “burned over district” because they had frequent fires, but due to a history of religious revivals. Even the creation of “new religious movements” in the area such as Mormonism and spiritualism show Christian influence and appropriation. You cannot make sense of them without understanding the Methodism, revivalism, and Calvinism of the surrounding areas. If your American history class does not talk about great awakenings, then it is missing a great deal of American history.

And, of course, one of many revivals in American religious life took place in the 1950s, just as the charismatic movement swept the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that many Americans know about Woodstock, but not about the great revivals of American life makes even political phenomena like the rise of the religious voter in the 1970s hard to understand. Read a collection of political sermons from the eighteenth century.

In any case, here is the conclusion of an American history textbook from the 1850s which ends with Tyler ascending to the Presidency:

“He issued an able and patriotic address, and appointed a day of public fasting. Many were the prayers, that God would forgive our national sins; and that he would not withdraw from us the favor which He had shown to our fathers, but than, in meekness, rulers may be sought out, who ‘fear God and hate covetousness;’ and when in power, they may, like Washington, resist its corrupting influence.”

(Willard, Emma: Abridged History of the United States, or, Republic of America, page 328)

This is not secularism nor was it written in a burst of 1950s Cold War fear.

In fact, Google textbooks from the nineteenth century and read them. They are classical and Christian in their selections. History is (as far as I can tell) introduced mostly in readers full of such tidbits. One such reader from before the Civil War contains lessons on morning and evening prayer. Here is bit from Lesson CIV:

Let no man call himself a christian, who lives without giving a part of life to this duty. We are not taught how often we must pray; but our Lord in teaching us to say, “give us this day our daily bread,” implies that we should pray daily.

(Purport, John; The American first class book, or Exercises in reading and recitations selected principally form modern authors of Great Britain and America designed for the use of the highest class in public and private schools, page 234.)

Again, this is not to argue that America was a theocracy or a Christian nation, but that Christian images, language, and ideas pervaded and pervades our civic discourse in a way that contemporary American secularism ignores. Read best sellers like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and note the Christian language and themes. Read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. Sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The United States of America was a government founded by a (mostly) Christian people, using (mostly) ideas generated from (mostly) Christian civilizations, and has been dominated by a (mostly) Christian population for good and bad to this day. In the 1950s reaction to murderous atheistic regimes caused a reemphasis on civic religion but it and the revival that came with it were not new to America.

(I am thankful for the website at Pitt for the two references I use here. I got thinking about this from my own small collection of nineteenth century texts . . . including one with a magnificent Daniel Webster style peroration on our God blessed and united Republic. Sadly, it was written in the Buchanan administration!)

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