Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This book makes a subtle and engaging contribution to the on-going public conversation about the nation's religious past and the relationship of church and state in the new Republic. Fea is a fine historian, as evidenced by his carefully researched and well-argued first book on an eighteenth-century Presbyterian diarist. In this second book, Fea is prompted by the polemics of the modern-day culture wars to weigh in on the side of responsible interpretation of historical material. "One of my goals," Fea says, "is to get Christians to see the danger of cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a political and cultural agenda in the present" (xvii). Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah College, has written "an historical primer for students, churchgoers, and anyone else" who wants help sorting it all out. He hopes his book will reach "historically minded and thoughtful" readers and be "read and discussed in schools and congregations" (xv).This, then, is Fea's response to the likes of David Barton's WallBuilders ministry with its blatantly skewed history, and one of the best chapters examines the main concerns and arguments of the contemporary defenders of a Christian America. But despite Fea's measured tone and his presentation of complex historical material, the book is not the politically neutral and intellectually disinterested investigation it purports to be. While Fea offers a welcome respite from the polemical tone deployed by culture warriors on both sides of the "Christian Nation" question, his framing of key issues leads readers to draw certain kinds of conclusions. Fea does not admit to making an argument, but his book makes one anyway.Fea opens with a 75-page historical survey of the United States and finds that Christian nationalism has persistently marked popular sentiment. (Non-Christians make no appearance here.) Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, pro-slavery Southerners, abolitionists--all of them upheld the conviction that the country is, has been, and should be a Christian nation. Fea notes their differences, but by downplaying the strife, by bundling together under a purportedly shared Christian agenda between slaveholders and Civil Rights advocates alike, and by making even Martin Luther King, Jr. a proponent of a "new kind of Christian nation" (53), Fea rhetorically combines people with starkly different politics into a singular American "we" with a shared religious nationalism. This overarching "Christian nation" concept is so capacious that we lose sight of the deep rifts between people who fought for very different versions of a future America. The result is that Fea's intended readers cannot be blamed if, when asked whether "Americans" have always wanted the United States to be a Christian nation, they answer with a misleadingly simple and homogenizing "yes."Part II asks whether the American Revolution was a "Christian event" and focuses on the founding political documents to find an answer. The framers' "original intent" is often called upon to make the argument for a particular reading of the First Amendment, and this is especially so because the Constitution itself never refers to God. Fea says "two views have been the most popular": 1) that the framers "set out to create a secular nation" (150) and 2) that the framers believed only states should regulate religious matters. The first position appears instantly discredited, as no politician of the founding era favored (or even discussed) an entirely secular nation. The second option remains standing and has the additional advantage of being factually correct: the First Amendment constrained only the federal government in matters of religion, notwithstanding Madison's efforts to have it applied to the individual states as well. …