Separation of Church and State: America’s Best Idea

Christian nationalists keep forgetting what the country’s founders kept writing down.

Let us pray: In 1774, the First Continental Congress opened with a prayer—a decision that inspired some sectarian squabbling—but in the new nation that followed, the founders were determined to keep church and state separate.

America is not, has never been, and was never intended to be a Christian nation. To modern Christian nationalists, that sounds like heresy. They’ll argue that all of our presidents have been Christian, the majority of our citizens are Christian, our elected officials swear their oaths on a Bible, and politicians and preachers alike cry out God’s name during sex with their mistresses and male escorts. Everyone knows we were founded by the Puritans, right? And they were so religiously uptight they got kicked out of England. How can we not be a Christian nation?

But the truth is that America is something far more ambitious, and far more fragile: a secular republic where every belief is protected, because none is imposed.

Yes, the founders who began this experiment had flaws—plenty of them. Yes, they were slave owners talking about “freedom.” Yes, they practiced ethnic cleansing against the Indigenous peoples of this land. And yes, they neglected to include women in their democracy.

But the founders got one very simple and moral concept just right: a system under which the government can’t dictate how you can or cannot pray, or whether you should pray at all. They knew the dangers of merging their new government, which at its best was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which was a matter of individual conscience.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the Christian right sees it. And throughout my entire lifetime, they’ve been trying to rewrite our history. White Christian nationalists have been working for decades to give America a revisionist origin story: a holy Christian republic, ordained from the start by deeply pious followers of Jesus who also just happened to own people.

So, as we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, let’s remember that the founders were quite clear about the vital importance of this being a deliberately secular nation. They even wrote it down—and more than once.

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That’s the part the right wants us to forget.

Today, we’re witnessing a nationwide push by christian-nationalist politicians to force one version of Christianity into public schools, and it’s not just the voucher programs designed to route public money toward specific religions that we all grew up with.

Louisiana recently became the first state to pass a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public-school classroom, so 7-year-olds will know not to covet their neighbors’ wives.

Former Oklahoma superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters famously ordered all public schools to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments into the curriculum, and multiple Republican-led states have approved the conservative-media nonprofit PragerU’s educational materials for classrooms—which include an animated video of Frederick Douglass explaining that slavery was a “compromise” between the founders and the Southern colonies.

Of course, like most of right-wing Christianity, none of these curricula focus on the moral teachings of Jesus, who commanded His followers—both individuals and nations—to feed the poor, care for the sick, put away their weapons, and welcome the stranger. No, this was pure indoctrination into right-wing authoritarian Christian politics.

Today, while the percentage of Americans identifying as religious continues to decline , the percentage of Christians who believe that America was founded as a Christian nation is increasing . In other words, as the religious population shrinks, the fringe is growing.

The Republican Party platforms in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky even proclaim—or, to be more precise, bear false witness—that the country was founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles. In a 2015 sermon, Republican House Speaker (and America’s Creepiest Youth Pastor) Mike Johnson proclaimed that America is—and was founded as—a Christian nation, and that Thomas Jefferson was “divinely inspired” in his writing of the Declaration of Independence.

In 2023, Johnson appeared on CNBC to gently instruct us that the separation of church and state is “a misnomer.” As the speaker explained, “Of course, it comes from…a letter that Jefferson wrote. It’s not in the Constitution. And what he was explaining is they did not want the government to encroach upon the church—not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It’s exactly the opposite.”

Johnson’s claim is the misnomer. But repetition is powerful—especially when it’s employed as part of a blaspheming spiritual grift. So the fantasy that the United States is a Christian nation remains stubbornly popular among people who don’t want the country to do on a policy level t…