MPCooper

The Myth Begins

Imagine the scene.

A stage in Iowa is draped in velvet and backlit by a glowing LED screen. A politician leans into the microphone. 

“We need to return to our roots,” they declare to a sea of nodding heads. “We were founded as a Christian nation, and our departure from that is the source of our current decline.”

The crowd erupts. For them, the phrase isn’t a historical claim. It represents a lost era of moral clarity. It harkens to a time when the laws of man felt aligned with the laws of God. But a few hundred miles away, in a university lecture hall or a secular charity’s office, those same words are taken as a threat. They are a preamble to exclusion or even a call for theocracy. 

We hear the phrase “Christian Nation” often in our modern discourse, but it is rarely well-defined. It is used as a shield, a sword, and a battle cry, but it is foremost a marketing slogan. 

To understand the “Faith focused America,” we have to peel back the rhetorical coverup and ask: What in the world does ‘Christian Nation’ even mean?

I would argue that when conservatives invoke the “Christian Nation” mantle, it encompasses the following three ideals. 

First, there is the moral foundation that American law is a direct descendant of the Ten Commandments and that Judeo-Christian ethics are the necessary pillars on which republics are built. 

Second, there is the suggestion that the Framers designed the government to protect and promote a Christian worldview. 

Third, there is a sense of cultural identity. Many feel that being an American is, at its core, fitting into a predominately white “Christian people”. People whose holidays, social norms, and interactions are tied to the Church. 

To many Americans, this seems intuitive. 

After all, “In God We Trust” is on the money, and “One Nation Under God” is in the Pledge we’re all but compelled to recite. But the intuition of the present often masks the difficulties of the past, as these symbols are mid-20th-century additions. 

“In God We Trust” was made the official national motto in 1956, and “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, both during the Eisenhower administration as a rhetorical counterattack to “atheistic Communism” during the Cold War. Ironically, few Communist countries outlawed religion, though they did exclude it from their governance, much as the American founders intended when arranging their political system.

This highlights the central flaw in the “Christian Nation” argument. The false and dangerous assumption that ‘Christianity’ is a monolithic entity. It has been, throughout history, more like a shifting sand dune. 

If you asked a Puritan in 1640 if he lived in a Christian nation, he would say yes, but he would also tell you that the Quakers down the road were heretics who deserved to be exiled, cropped, or hanged. 

Indeed, intra-Christian conflict was a driving force for the Founders. In the 17th century, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed four Quakers, known as the Boston Martyrs, for their religious beliefs. 

Even at the time of the Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies had tax-supported churches that discriminated against one another. Virginia Anglicans jailed Baptist preachers. 

If you asked a Maryland Catholic or a Virginia Anglican, their versions of a “Christian society” would be diametrically, and often violently, opposed.

Today, the term “Christian” labels everyone from social justice activists in the AME Church to traditionalist Latin Mass Catholics and even prosperity-gospel televangelists. Yet, if a thousand Christians defined what it means for a nation to be “Christian”, you would get a thousand different answers. 

Does ‘Christian Nation’ mean we ban abortion or welcome refugees and feed the poor? Does it mean a state-sanctioned church or a freedom of conscience and action? By claiming America is a “Christian nation”, are we clarifying our identity or are we starting a fight over who gets to hold the pen and write the rules?

To understand why we must ask these questions and why the United States was built this way, we have to look at the men in the room during the founding. Or, more specifically, what they didn’t believe. 

While the pews of the 18th century were filled with devouts and zealots, many of the more influential Founders were Deists or religiously unorthodox. They believed in the “Watchmaker God”, an idea made famous by Clergyman William Paley, whose Creator set the universe in motion but played no part in daily affairs and certainly not in the vile game of man governing man.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, edited his own “Jefferson Bible” by cutting out the miracles and divinity of Jesus with a razor, leaving only the moral teachings. This was not a personal quirk. It was a revolutionary tool. By rejecting the idea of a God who micromanaged human affairs, Jefferson, and those like him, were able to dismiss the ‘Divine Right of Kings’. 

If God didn’t ordain the monarchy, then the power must not reside with them, but rather, with the people.

We also must distinguish between the believers and the blueprint. 

Many Founders were personal in their faith, but they were detached from it when looking toward the engineering of the state. 

The Constitution is a surprisingly “godless” document when compared to most other historical “instruction manuals.”

It makes no mention of Jesus Christ, Christianity, or even a generic “God” beyond clerical dating conventions. Furthermore, the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under Washington and signed by John Adams, states in Article 11 that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” 

The First Amendment is often framed today as proof of the ideal “separation of church and state.” However, its brilliance was the principle of non-preference. The Founders didn’t want to purge religion; they wanted to ensure the federal government would never play favorites. 

James Madison, in his “Memorial and Remonstrance”, argued that state support “corrupts” faith. He noted that ecclesiastical establishments have historically been used to uphold “the thrones of political tyranny.” 

The founders saw the blood-soaked history of Europe, from the Crusades through the inquisition, where one version of Christianity oppressed another. Then, they decided that the only way to protect religion was to keep the government’s hands off it.

The reality of America’s origin is more interesting than the myth. 

America was influenced by Christians. Its vocabulary, its metaphors, and its anxieties are undoubtedly and unfortunately biblical. But it was not founded as a Christian project. From the beginning, Christianity in America was shattered into competing sects that feared each other more than they feared the secular world. 

Christianity, with the Bible as its sword, was used to both justify slavery and to demand abolition. 

During the Civil War, both the Union and the Confederacy claimed to be the “true” Christian side. As Abraham Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” (Of note, the northern victory did not sway belief in the way one might think it would).

Christianity has been used to invoke ‘Manifest Destiny’ and to protect the “least of these.” 

And for better or worse, it has remained politically flexible, acting as an adaptable set of rules that can be molded to fit any partisan agenda.

The reality is this: the “Christian Nation” is not a historical fact to return to.

It is a dream for some, or for many, a nightmare. Some relish the idea of it and leaders reinterpret it. Meanwhile, those who are on the downside of it attempt to repel it. 

As we look at a “Faith focused America”, we see that the struggle isn’t often between the religious and the secular, but between disparate versions of the same faith mixing with vastly different faiths, with none having ever agreed with another on what they want America to be.

Let’s look more closely at the origins of the country. 

While the vast majority of the population identified as “Christian,” this label was a minefield, not a blanket. To understand why the landscape was fraught, we must stop looking for a unified “Christian Nation” and start looking at the myriad of beliefs that existed and still exist. 

At its inception, America was an assorted collection of competing faiths that were more likely to imprison or kill each other than they were to pray together.

The European settlers who arrived on the Atlantic coast did not represent a singular faith; they represented the bleeding remnants of the European Wars of Religion. The continent had been eviscerated by centuries of violent theological disagreement, and settlers brought those grudges with them.

In America, the religious sought freedom from open warfare, but they did not bring peace or order.

In the south, the Anglican Church (the Church of England) was the established arm of the British crown. To an Anglican in Virginia, the King wasn’t just a political ruler; he was the Supreme Governor of the Church, a title established by Henry VIII. This created a theological hierarchy where loyalty to the state was indistinguishable from loyalty to God. Ritual, order, and the “Divine Right” were the pillars of the southern social fabric.

Meanwhile, the Puritans of Massachusetts sought to build a “City upon a Hill,” a strict theo-centric society that had no room for dissent. They fled persecution in England, yet saw no irony in persecuting their own when they got out of line. To them, the Quakers were dangerous radicals who undermined social order, leading to public whippings and even executions on the Boston Common. 

In this landscape, Maryland stood as a fragile haven for Catholics, who were viewed with such deep suspicion that they were often stripped of their rights and forbidden from teaching in other colonies.

Beyond the European arrival and their coastal colonies, the Americas were already a landscape of complex spiritual life that the “Christian Nation” narrative has historically done all it could to erase. Native American nations held sophisticated spiritual beliefs that the settlers largely dismissed as “heathenism” to justify the seizure of territory. The idea of the savage was not a social label, but the label of an ungodly creature.

Furthermore, the “Christian majority” existed alongside a significant, and significantly suppressed, Islamic presence. Historians estimate that up to 20% of enslaved Africans brought to the colonies were Muslim. Far from being spiritual “blank slates”, many were scholars and leaders who maintained their faith through clandestine prayer and handwritten manuscripts. 

Some of the earliest documents written by enslaved people in America were actually Arabic manuscripts and portions of the Quran written from memory. This was a silent but powerful testament to a faith that the burgeoning “Christian” legal system sought to dismantle and replace.

The “Christian majority” was real, but especially in the case of the British, it was a majority defined by the exclusion of the Crown’s enemies. Both the “heretical” sects and the native non-Christian “others” were “enemies of the king, the church, and the faith.”

So, when modern rhetoric invokes the “Christian character” of the early American electorate, it often ignores the arena in which that character was defined. As I wrote about in a previous article [https://mpcooper.blog/2026/03/31/the-unfinished-revolution-from-subjects-to-citizens/], at the time of the nation’s founding, the “we” in “We the People” was an exclusive club. 

Still, political power was not a universal right of the faithful; it was a privilege tethered to property, gender, and the color of one’s skin. Only around 6% of the total population, roughly 240,000 out of 3.9 million people, met the criteria to vote.

This club was dominated by landed, white, Protestant men. While they were “Christian” by census and confession, their faith was not a unified moral compass guiding an almost aborted Republic toward equality. Instead, Christianity functioned as a bulwark to their version of a Republic, which reinforced the existing class hierarchy.

The elite Anglican planters of Virginia and the wealthy Congregationalist merchants of New England may have sat in different pews, but they did share a common view of the structure that society needed to adhere to. To them, religion was less about a personal relationship with the divine and more about stability. 

They viewed the lower class as the landless “rabble.” These brutish groups required the “civilizing” restraint of a state-sanctioned delusion of Christianity. In this context, the Gospel was framed as a manual for preserving order rather than a manifesto for birthing liberation.

The gatekeeping is written into the legal codes of the era. Many colonies and early states utilized religious tests for office to ensure that the “wrong” kind of Christian and the non-Christian could never have any real power. For example, the “South Carolina Constitution of 1778” mandated that “The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.”

Clauses like this were not a signal of widespread piety. They were a strategic fortification justified through a higher power. By codifying “Protestantism” as a requirement, the landed gentry successfully excluded Catholics, Jews, and “heretical” sects like the Quakers or Baptists from high office. And these groups had little redress, because no one could say, in any religion of the time, that God was wrong. Doing so would have led to terrifying consequences.

In Delaware, officeholders were required to sign a declaration of faith in the Trinity, while in Maryland, one had to declare a “belief in the Christian religion” to serve. Laws designed to ensure that the levers of the state remained in the hands of a specific social class that shared the same theological and economic interests did not come from religious doctrine; they were religious doctrine turned into political and social oppression.

The “Christian Nation” at the ballot box was, in reality, a Protestant Aristocracy. It was a system where your standing before God was used to determine your standing before the law, ensuring that the 6% at the top remained the arbiters of the American project. And God decided your standing based on the color of your skin and what you owned.

While the 6% used religious tests to lock the doors of the Capitol, the culture they espoused used transplanted Biblical ideology to design the foundation of American society while often ignoring the Bible itself. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Bible wasn’t just a devotional book; it was the source from which legal and social authority was justified, even when the book made no claim for it. Still, it was frequently cited as the architecture for a rigid social stratification.

The most glaring example was the Biblical Defense of Slavery. Southern theologians and enslavers didn’t ignore the Bible to keep their human property; they leaned into a quite questionable interpretation of it. 

They popularized the “Curse of Ham” from Genesis 9, a narrative twisted to suggest that an entire race was predestined for servitude. This was bolstered by a literalist reading of the Pauline epistles, specifically Ephesians 6:5, which commanded, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.” 

By the mid-1800s, the southern Orthodoxy had expunged any racial equality suggested by the New Testament. Verses such as Galatians 3:28 were sidelined while Ephesians remained mainstream orthodoxy. For these Christians, the hierarchy of race wasn’t a choice; it was a divinely natural order. So much so, that they would give their enslaved people a “Slave Bible”, which was abridged to exclude every mention of freedom and equality including the entire book of “Exodus”.

This theological gatekeeping also extended into the soil beneath their feet. 

The concept of “Dominion”, derived from the command in Genesis 1:28 to “subdue the earth”, became the legal and moral engine for the displacement of Indigenous peoples. European settlers claimed that God’s mandate required “improving” the land through European-style agriculture and fencing. 

Because Native American nations often utilized communal land or seasonal migration, many Christians argued they had failed in the divine mandate because they weren’t doing it the “English” way. To the “Christians” of the time, a “heathen” who didn’t farm like an Englishman had forfeited their right to farm at all. This wasn’t a land grab; it was a “holy” repossession. Or as the legal scholars like to call it, “appropriation.”

Further, the social fabric of the colonies was held together by the “Great Chain of Being.” This was a theological concept inherited from Europe that suggested every person had a fixed, God-given place in a cosmic hierarchy. This was a popular ideal, as ranks ranging from God and the angels down to the King, the landed gentry, the peasant, and finally, the enslaved made it easy to sort people as needed into allowed-to-have and don’t-get-to-haves.

To challenge one’s social or economic “station” was not seen as the ambition of man; it was seen as a sin against the Creator’s design. If you were born landless, it was because God placed you there for the stability of the whole (or more to the point, to work for the prosperity of others and suffer for your place in heaven). 

In this America, the “Christian” thing to do was not to seek equality, but to accept your life as a link in the chain, no matter how rusted or kinked your part was. The Bible, in the hands of the powerful, became the manual for ensuring that the world stayed exactly as it was. The grift of God’s power was in full swing.

If the supposed “Christian Nation” were a static production, the story would end with the Great Chain of Being. But history shows that while the powerful were using the Bible as an enforcement mechanism, the marginalized and the radical were using it as a protest sign. The same, unedited book that sat on the plantation owner’s pulpit was being whispered in the slave quarters and preached in Quaker meeting houses.

Not as a manual for order or oppression, but as a guideline for insurrection and redemption.

By the early 19th century, a theological civil war was brewing. Groups like the Quakers (The Society of Friends) had begun to pivot, arguing that slavery was a “national sin” that would invite divine wrath. They relied heavily on the “Golden Rule” (Matthew 7:12) and the Exodus narrative, which depicted a God who actively took the side of the enslaved against an unholy empire.

For these Christians, the “Christian Nation” wasn’t a product to be preserved; it was a plague that needed to be purged. In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society issued a manifesto stating that slavery was “a crime against God” and that the “Curse of Ham” was a blasphemous distortion of the Creator’s intent. The Quakers and other abolitionist Christians didn’t read a different Bible than the one found south of the Mason-Dixon line; however, it was becoming clear to them that they worshipped a different God than the Southern Orthodoxy did.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of these contradictions was the way the enslaved themselves reclaimed the faith. Frederick Douglass drew a keen distinction between the “Christianity of this land” and the “Christianity of Christ.” He pointed out that the man who whipped him in the morning was the same man who led the prayer meeting at night.

In the “hush harbors”, clandestine religious gatherings in the woods, enslaved people rejected the “Pauline” Christianity of their masters. They found a hero in Moses and a revolutionary in Jesus. They saw the Bible as a record of liberation, not a mandate for submission. Figures like Harriet Tubman, who was nicknamed “Moses”, saw it as a map for the Underground Railroad. For the enslaved, the “Christian Nation” was the oppressor, while the “Kingdom of God” was the hope of the fugitive.

These internal conflicts prove that Christianity in America was never a unified moral system. It was, and remains, a contested, poorly translated language. To the Gentry: The Bible was a stabilizer, used to justify property rights, land grabs, and the Great Chain of Being. To the Dissenter: The Bible was a tool of disruption, used to demand equality, human rights, and the dismantling of the existing order.

So, when we ask if America was a “Christian Nation” at its origin, we have to ask whose Christianity we mean. Was it the Christianity of the Anglican King or the Quaker abolitionist? The Christianity of the Southern enslaver or the Muslim scholar in chains? Early America wasn’t a homogenous machine of a singular faith; it was a collection of theological civil war survivors continuing to battle over who got to hold power and which verses they were allowed to cross out. 

The “Christian Nation” isn’t a historical entity. It’s the one-sided recording of a fight that is still being won and lost today. 

By the mid-19th century, the “Christian Nation” was a house divided by an agonizing question: Did God ordain the fetter or freedom? This wasn’t a debate between the religious and the secular. This was a battle between two different versions of American Christianity, each claiming the same Bible as its sword.

In the South, the “Christian” defense of slavery wasn’t passive; it was aggressively offensive. Southern theologians claimed that slavery was not a “necessary evil,” but a “positive good”, as argued by John Calhoun, and was designed by the Creator Himself.

They leaned heavily on the Old Testament, pointing to the fact that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the fathers of the faith, were enslavers. To the Southern gentry, if God had allowed the Patriarchs to hold property in people, then the institution was woven into the fabric of holiness.

Pro-slavery preachers frequently cited Leviticus 25:44-46, which allowed for the purchase of “bondmen and bondmaids” from neighboring nations. They argued that if God had given the Israelites a legal framework for slavery, then the American South was following a divine blueprint to create a new Christian Kingdom in the south, just as the Jewish people had been granted the kingdom of Israel.

This wasn’t just the individual opinion of radical clergy; it was institutional. The major American denominations: Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, all experienced violent splits over slavery decades before the shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

In 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed because the broader Baptist body refused to appoint enslavers as missionaries. The message from the Southern pulpit was clear: to be a good Christian was to uphold the “divine order” on the plantation. They preached a “Gospel of Subordination,” where the Great Chain of Being was forged and locked by the Holy Spirit.

For the Southern gentry, any move toward abolition wasn’t just a threat to their economy; it was spiritually no different from atheism. To challenge slavery was to challenge the “inerrancy” of the Word of God as they had chosen to define it.

To counter the Southern “Battlement” of the Old Testament, the Abolitionist movement constructed a “Battering Ram” theology. They didn’t just disagree with the South; they argued that the Southern version of Christianity was a heresy. Or, more succinctly, a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” as William Lloyd Garrison famously put it.

While the South looked to the Patriarchs of the Old Testament to justify the chain, Northern Christians and the enslaved looked to Christ to justify the break. Christ’s actions were the greatest evidence that the “Christian Nation” was a myth.

Abolitionists like the Quakers and Northern Evangelicals pivoted the debate from property rights to the “Golden Rule”. They argued that if you would not wish to be enslaved, you could not, under Christ, enslave another. They championed a “Higher Law”. The idea that God’s law of love and liberty superseded any human constitution or property deed was the truest definition of a Christian Nation. To them, a law that protected slavery was not a law at all; it was a sin against the Creator and His creation.

They reclaimed the verses that the Southern Orthodoxy had expunged. They pointed to Galatians 3:28 as a mandate for the present. They argued that if all were “one in Christ,” then the “Great Chain of Being” was a fiction designed to steal the image of God from fellow human beings, and craft a god in the image of man. Idolatry at its worst.

This theological civil war was made more acute by the fact that the American South was becoming a global pariah. By the mid-19th century, the majority of Europe had rejected slavery, often because of religious movements. The British Empire had passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, fueled by a Christian “moral outrage” that saw the institution as a blight on civilization. 

While Southern theologians were busy building a “New Israel” based on the ancient, and misunderstood, idea of  shackling heathens, the rest of the “Christian world” was moving toward a theology of universal personhood.

Meanwhile, the Exodus narrative became an anthem for revolution. God was not seen as the “Supreme Governor” who demanded order; he was the “Rebel Hero” who toppled Pharaohs. The gospel abolitionists preached wasn’t a “Gospel of Subordination”; it was a “Gospel of Liberation.” For these Christians, the “Christian Nation” was the Egypt of the modern era, and the holy path that needed to be followed was the one that escaped the false kingdom or dismantled it.

The result was a total theological collapse. By the 1850s, the “Christian” label had become a trigger for violence. When a Northern Presbyterian looked at a Southern Presbyterian, they didn’t see a brother in faith; they saw a servant of the Antichrist. The “unified moral system” of the country shattered into a thousand pieces of stained glass, and the people in the pew were ready to use each shard to draw the blood of the other side.

This is not just poetic observation; it is a literal description of events. 

By the time the first shells hit Fort Sumter, the “Christian Nation” had suffered a fatal schism. The country’s largest denominations: Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians had ripped themselves apart over the morality of slavery. These regional splits were so pronounced that they didn’t survive the war or mend shortly after; some took over a century to heal. 

The “Gospel of Subordination” in the South and the “Gospel of Liberation” in the North were no longer speaking the same language despite reading the same book, and they would not speak a similar language for some time.

When the smoke cleared from four terrible years of war, the “6% Club” faced their greatest existential threat: Reconstruction. For a brief, radical moment, the “We the People” grew to include those previously deemed “the rabble.” Freed slaves were voting, holding office, and building their own independent Black churches.

However, the response from the white “Christian” establishment was swift and religiously codified. As the federal government withdrew its protection, the old “Great Chain of Being” was dusted off and rebranded for a new era of segregation.

White Southern theologians began to preach that God was the “Original Segregationist” rather than the original enslaver. To prove it, they performed the miracle of selectively reading “Acts 17:26.” While the verse begins by declaring that God “made from one man every nation of mankind,” the segregationists conveniently ignored the “one man” unity and focused entirely on the second half: that God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”

By extracting and amplifying the word “boundaries,” they claimed that while all souls might be equal in heaven, God demanded they remain separate and unequal on earth. It was the “Great Chain” refitted for the Jim Crow era.

The defeat of the Confederacy was reframed not as a moral failure, but as a “divine testing.” The “Lost Cause” became a pseudo-religious cult, complete with its own saints (Lee and Jackson), its own martyrs (Confederate Soldiers), its own Judases (Longstreet, Southern Abolitionists), its own heretics (Seidule), and its devils (Northern Abolitionists, carpetbaggers, and freed Black citizens). This movement successfully sanitized the “Christian Nation” myth, editing out the brutality of slavery and replacing it with a false narrative of “heritage” and “refined tradition.”

Elsewhere and continuing well into the late 20th century, Christianity was used as the primary tool to reinforce power structures. The same pulpits that defended the whip now defended the “Whites Only” sign, framing white supremacy as a defense of “Christian Civilization.”

The “grift of God’s power” did not end with the abolition of slavery; it evolved. The Bible remained the manual for ensuring the world stayed exactly as the Gentry intended it to be. They needed “the power of faith” to keep the rhetorical and figurative chains they forged in place, even after the physical ones had been cut. Segregation was part of a new secular religion masquerading as “Christianity.”

As modern “heretics” like Ty Seidule have documented, the Gentry’s greatest skill was not in winning the war (they for the most part lost), but in winning the memory of it. By sanitizing the past into a “refined tradition” of God-given order, they created a theological baseline that viewed any expansion of rights, whether for Black Americans or for women, not as progress, but as a rebellion against the divine.

By the early 1900s, the battle for the “Christian Nation” shifted from the color of a man’s skin to the “divine station” of a woman’s soul. To the gatekeepers, the movement for women’s suffrage was a crack in the Great Chain of Being that must be welded shut.

Opposition to the 19th Amendment was not solely a political preference; it was framed as a defense of the “Christian Home.” Anti-suffragists, led by both male clergy and elite “Gentry” women, leaned on a literalist reading of the Creation Narrative and the Pauline Epistles.

They argued that because Eve was created from Adam’s rib to be his “helpmeet” (Genesis 2:18) and that “he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16), a woman seeking a vote independent of her husband was committing the “sin of Eve”. Namely, she was attempting to subvert the divine hierarchy.

Preachers frequently shouted “1 Corinthians 14:34” (“Let your women keep silence in the churches”) and “1 Timothy 2:12” from the pulpit, arguing that if God forbade women from speaking in the church, He certainly forbade them from speaking in the halls of government. To the Gentry, the ballot box was a “masculine altar” in a “masculine temple” that women were unqualified to approach.

However, just as the abolitionists had in the century prior, the suffragists, many of whom were deeply devout, refused to cede the Bible to the powerful. They argued that the “Christian thing to do” was to recognize the individual moral agency of every soul.

They returned to Galatians 3:28, arguing that in the eyes of Christ, there was “neither male nor female.” They posited that a nation claiming to be Christian could not deny the spirit of God in half its population.

A great example of this faith-in-action was Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. Rankin’s politics were not secular; they were aligned with “Christian Pacifism”. Her votes were not a radical application of this doctrine yet that is how they were seen.

When she voted against American entry into World War I in 1917, she didn’t do it out of political calculation. She did it because she believed the “Christian Nation” should be a peacemaker, not a warmonger. And others joined her.

“I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she stated.

Following the same moral principle, she would later be the only Congressperson to vote against declaring war against Japan during World War II.

Rankin was punished politically for acting on her beliefs, proving once again the central thesis of the “Grift”: The Gentry only supports “Christian values” when those values protect their power. The moment a Christian like Rankin used her faith to challenge the military-industrial ambitions of the Gentry, she was branded a traitor to the very “Christian Civilization” they claimed to uphold. 

And when she followed those beliefs despite popular sentiment, what power she had was stripped away entirely. Rankin was excommunicated from the “Christian Nation” for being the pacifist Jesus Christ was. 

When faith is a leash, it is loved by the powerful. When it’s a compass toward peace, it becomes anathema to them.

While the Gentry were busy welding the “Great Chain of Being” back into the “Rule of Law”, America was teeming with “wrong” Christians. For the Gentry, religious pluralism was a legal annoyance to be managed and a moral equality never to be embraced. Groups like the Quakers, Catholics, and Shakers found themselves in a spiritual and legal paradox: they were allowed to exist, but they were barred from having any real say in the “Christian” authority that defined the nation.

The Society of Friends was perhaps the most dangerous threat to the Gentry’s order because they practiced the equality the Gentry only preached.

Quakers believed every individual possessed a “Divine Spark,” which led them to abolish formal clergy and social titles. Further, in a society built on “Dominion” and “Subordination,” the Quaker refusal to bow to magistrates or swear oaths was seen as civic treason. By the mid-19th century, their relentless push for abolition and women’s rights made them “theological insurgents.” To the Gentry, the Quakers weren’t a different sect; they were a saw slowly cutting its way through the “Christian ordered” civilization.

If the Quakers were seen as internal insurgents, Catholics were viewed as foreign invaders. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the “Christian Nation” was defined explicitly as a Protestant nation.

The Gentry-led “Nativist” movements argued that Catholics could never be true Americans because their primary allegiance was to the Pope in Rome. Further, Catholics rejected much of “Pauline” doctrine, as they believed Peter had been made the rock upon which the church was founded. 

But the Gentry labelled Peter and the Pope as monarchical figures not to be lauded, but seceded from much like Great Britain’s crown.

This friction was more than social or theological; it was systemic and structural. Riots burned Catholic churches in Philadelphia (1844), and the “Know-Nothing” Party rose to power on the promise of keeping “Romanism” out of public office. To the Gentry, a Catholic at the ballot box was no different than a Pagan at the door. It threatened the purity of the Anglo-Protestant “temple.”

Meanwhile, the United Society of Believers (Shakers) represented the ultimate rejection of the Gentry’s “Christian Home.” By practicing celibacy and communal living, they bypassed the Christian family structure and the private property laws that the Gentry used to measure “divine favor.”

Because they didn’t participate in the “multiplication” commanded in Genesis (at least not the biological and sexual interpretation of it), the Shakers were dismissed as a fringe cult. Their “limited political influence” was a choice of withdrawal, but the Gentry used that isolation to paint them as a cautionary tale of what happens when “Christianity” is taken too literally and loses its social utility (by which they meant its ability to control the masses).

These marginalized sects prove that the “Christian Nation” was never an arena in which all were seated; it was a gated community with an HOA ready to fine you not just for breaking a rule but for following a rule “too well.” 

The Gentry tolerated the existence of these groups to some extent, allowing them to pray in their own way, but weren’t about to provide them with the keys to any earthly kingdom

This sets the stage for the 20th Century, where the Gentry realized that “toleration” wasn’t enough to get them everything they wanted. To fight the “rabble” of the New Deal and the threat of Communism, they would have to stop fighting other sects and instead Industrialize a generic, corporate “Judeo-Christian” brand that looked like faith but functioned like a business contract.

By the mid-20th century, the “Christian Nation” had been rebranded as a white, middle-class, suburban paradise. But the Gentry and their gatekeepers were about to face a familiar “battering ram.” 

The Civil Rights Movement was not a secular uprising; it was a sophisticated theological assault on the “Original Segregationist” god of the Gentry.

The white religious establishment didn’t just disagree with integration; they viewed it as a violation of God’s geography.

Southern pulpits continued to scream about the “divine boundaries” between the races. To them, the “Christian Nation” was a dormitory of separate rooms and beds that God forbade from being mixed.

The Gentry-funded “Corporate Jesus” of the 1950s provided the perfect slur. Leveraging a known and visible enemy, the Gentry used the Red Scare to delegitimize the voices of those who would rise against them. Any Christian who preached social justice or equality was branded a “Godless Communist.” To the Gentry, Dr. King wasn’t a preacher; he was an agent of the Antichrist, sent to dismantle the “Order” and break the “Chain.”

Meanwhile, in the “Hush Harbors” that had grown into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a different Bible was being read.

For Black Americans, the “Christian Nation” was once again Egypt. Dr. King didn’t appeal to secular law alone; he appealed to a “Higher Law.” He argued that an unjust law was a “human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

The Black Church used the Bible as the battering ram for peace and equality it is, proving that the Gentry’s version of faith was a centuries-old grift. They forced the country to choose between the God of the Status Quo and the God of Justice.

Looking back at the expansion of rights for slaves, women, and minorities, a cynical pattern emerges. The “Christian Nation” is not a moral beacon; it is a “Moral One Hour Cleaner.”

When a new group (the “rabble”) reaches for rights, the dominant Christian groups, the Gentry and their defenders use the Bible to bleach what they see as a stain. They cite “Divine Order,” “Creation Mandates,” and “Traditional Values” to justify their actions.

A new theological civil war ensues. The marginalized use the “Higher Law” of Christ to attack the “Subordination” of the Gentry.

Once the “rabble” wins, once the 19th Amendment passes, or the Civil Rights Act is signed, the Gentry performs a miracle of memory. They stop fighting the change and start claiming it was their idea all along while still actively doing whatever they can to oppose or undo it.

The verses once used to defend the whip are tucked away, and the verses used to dismantle it are branded as “The Core Values of our Christian Nation.” The Gentry doesn’t change their hearts; they only update the brand to ensure they remain the high priests of the new status quo while working tirelessly to restore the old hierarchy.

In America, rights are not given; they are seized from the hands of a God who was built to hold them back. Progress happens only when the “Gospel of Liberation” makes the “Gospel of Subordination” too expensive or too embarrassing to preach. And only then is any true aspect of the Bible or God allowed to be worshipped.

By the 1950s, the Gentry realized that the “Great Chain of Being” needed an upgrade. The old language of “Subordination” was becoming too expensive to preach in a post-WWII world. To maintain their grip on power, they needed a new enemy and a new shiny version of the “Christian Nation” that could be mass-produced for the Cold War.

The threat of “Atheistic Communism” provided the opportunity for a massive rebranding campaign. The Gentry didn’t just want to fight the Soviets; they wanted to trademark America as the sole property and champion of God. This wasn’t a grassroots revival; it was a top-down marketing plan designed to make dissent look like heresy.

The Pledge of Allegiance had existed for sixty years without a religious reference. But in 1954, propped up by the Knights of Columbus and the corporate Gentry, Congress added “Under God.” It was a theological stake driven into the heart of the school day, forcing every child to recite the Gentry’s brand as a test of loyalty. 

Prayer became compulsory. Fealty to the Almighty was non-negotiable.. 

But that wasn’t enough branding. 

For nearly two centuries, the national motto was E Pluribus Unum (“Out of many, one”). The Gentry found this suggested an equality between the “rabble” and the “chosen.” A suggestion they did not want. They lobbied to replace it with “In God We Trust” on all paper currency, printing the “Grift of God’s Power” onto the very money that fueled their boardrooms.

By turning religion into a national identity marker, the Gentry achieved their goal: they made “American” and “Christian” synonymous. If you questioned the 6% Club’s economic policies, you weren’t just a political opponent; you were an “Atheist Communist” threat to the “Christian Nation.”

But this nation wasn’t the only thing on the Gentry’s mind.

As they solidified their brand at home, they began looking for “strategic partners” abroad. This is where the “Grift” became even more cynical in ways many still struggle to explain cogently. The same theologians who once argued that Catholics were “foreign invaders” found themselves in bed with regimes and nations that didn’t share a single line of their Apostles’ Creed.

The most glaring example was the burgeoning alliance with Israel and Middle Eastern oil powers.

Despite a theology that viewed non-Christians as “heathens” in need of shackling, the Gentry performed a rapid pivot. They began to frame the support of Israel not as a complex geopolitical issue, but as a “Biblical Mandate.”

This wasn’t driven by a sudden love for the “other”; it was driven by the checkbook. The Gentry needed a foothold in the Middle East to protect the oil interests that powered their industrial empires. They used the “end times” theology of the pulpit to justify the military expenditures of the boardroom.

To smooth over the centuries of antisemitism and “wrong Christianity” they had preached, the Gentry invented the term “Judeo-Christian values.” It was a linguistic suspension bridge designed to hold up a faux-common ground, and included anyone who held a resource the Gentry needed, while still excluding the “rabble” at home who threatened their domestic order.

They traded the “Prince of Peace” for the “Prince of Petroleum,” proving once again that the Gentry’s God always seems to want exactly what the Gentry’s stock broker recommends. The “Christian Nation” was no longer a faith based one; it was a franchise protected by the military-industrial complex and funded by the resources once claimed to be  the “spoils of the heathen.”

Still, in the early 1960s, the “Evangelical Movement” was not the political monolith we recognize today. Many evangelicals were focused on the “Gospel of Liberation,” marching alongside Dr. King or remaining apolitical. But as the “Moral One Hour Cleaner” began to scrub the stains of Jim Crow, the Gentry faced a new crisis: the federal government began threatening the tax-exempt status of “Segregation Academies.”

The 6% Club needed a way to protect their private institutions without sounding like the white supremacists they were and that the world had rejected. They needed a new “Moral High Ground.”

The modern Religious Right was not born out of a concern for the unborn; it was born out of a calculated search for a more marketable “Crisis of Faith.”

When Roe v. Wade was decided, the Southern Baptist Convention supported the ruling as a matter of religious liberty and personal agency. At the time, abortion was seen as a “Catholic issue”, and the Gentry still viewed Catholics as “foreign invaders.”

However, Political operatives like Paul Weyrich realized that “protecting tax-exempt status for segregated schools” was a losing campaign. He famously noted that they needed a “moral issue” to galvanize the masses. He and other members of the Gentry spent the late 70s extracting the anti-abortion movement from its predominantly Catholic roots and grafting it onto the Evangelical pulpit.

By 1980, the Gentry had convinced the pews that the “Divine Order” wasn’t about the color of a man’s skin anymore; it was about the “traditional family” and the “lives of babies.” They swapped the “Whites Only” sign for the “Pro-Life” banner, using the exact same “Creation Mandate” logic to maintain control.

Under the leadership of figures like Jerry Falwell, the “Christian Nation” was more powerfully weaponized. This wasn’t a spiritual movement though; it was a political PAC pretending to be a revival.

The Gentry (the corporate elite as they would come to be known in time) and the Evangelicals (the populist pews) signed a blood-pact. The pews would provide the votes for the “Culture War” (abortion, school prayer), and in exchange, the Gentry would get their “Corporate Jesus” policies (tax cuts, deregulation, and the dismantling of unions).

To keep this “rabble” mobilized, the Gentry began to preach that Christians were a “persecuted minority” in their own “Christian Nation.” By framing secularism as an “Agent of the Antichrist,” they ensured that any vote against the 6% Club’s interests was seen as a betrayal of God Himself. Of note though, is that in this movement, while Jesus is seen as a savior, very little of what he said or did is used as dogma.

Regardless, by the mid-1980s, the “Grift” was complete. With the help of Ronald Reagan, and his slow, bought-and-paid-for induction into the Gentry, the Club had successfully “Industrialized” faith, turning the pulpit into a 24/7 campaign commercial. They had moved the “Great Chain of Being” from the plantation to the voting precinct.

The “Christian Nation” was no longer about the “Golden Rule” or the “Prince of Peace”; it was a Political Brand designed to protect the resources of the few by fanning the flames of fear in the many. The Gentry had finally found a way to make the “rabble” vote for their own economic downfall, all while singing hymns to a God who had been rebranded as a venture capitalist.

Nevertheless, at the close of the 20th century, the Gentry realized that the “Cleaner” was working overtime. To stop the non-compliant “rabble” from constantly citing the First Amendment or the secular nature of the Enlightenment, the 6% Club decided to perform their most audacious miracle yet: they would reach back into the 1700s and “baptize” the Founding Fathers.

This was the gift, or rather grift, of “Heritage.” Led by pseudo-historians and bankrolled by the corporate elite, a narrative emerged that the United States was designed as a biblical theocracy.

Much like their ancestors did with “Acts 17:26”, modern gatekeepers began “extracting and amplifying” private letters from historical actors like John Adams and Patrick Henry while ignoring the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), which explicitly stated that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

They argued that because the Founders were vestigially (though poorly so even at that) Christian, their intent was for the Law of the Land to be the Law of the Pews. The “Rule of Law” was not a subjugation of all people under it. It was the right of the few to subjugate others under it, while ignoring it for themselves, just as their God, created in the Genty’s image, could choose to ignore whatever rules he pleased. This allowed the Gentry to frame any secular law, from environmental protections to LGBTQ+ rights, not as a policy disagreement, but as a “rebellion against the Founders’ God” and the power of the chosen to do as they have been ordained to do.

The most glaring problem with this narrative was, of course, the Constitution itself.

The Gentry ignored Article VI, which forbids any religious test for public office. As previously mentioned, if the Founders wanted a “Christian Nation,” they failed to include the word “Christian,” “Jesus,” or even “God” in the entire working document of the government.

But not to worry. The 6% Club had a plan to get around that. They rebranded the Establishment Clause. They argued that “Freedom of Religion” meant “Freedom for Our Religion” to influence the state, while the state was barred from ever influencing (or taxing) them. And other religions were free to do so too, at least in theory, but no other had any pull or much of a pocketbook.

The Gentry’s history was a magic trick. It relied on the omissions of facts and the suspension of reality. They claimed a “Golden Age” of Christianity was responsible for our founding while ignoring that only about 10–15% of Americans were active church members in 1776. The “Christian Nation” was a prop pulled out of an illusionist’s box that everyone had already seen was empty.

The act was bad. But it was effective.

The reason: the endgame of this trick was simple: Legitimacy. Something that every religion wants, especially in the face of growing scientific scrutiny and secular sentiment.

If America was “founded” as a Christian nation, then the Gentry are the rightful heirs to its power. By this logic, the “rabble”: the secular, the non-Christian, the “wrong” Christians are not citizens; they are guests. And as any HOA member knows, guests don’t get to vote on the rules of the house or community. They don’t even get to park on the street.

This narrative moved the “Great Chain of Being” out of the realm of theology and into the realm of History. It ensured that the Gentry could defend their “Gated Community” by saying, “We’re just getting back to our roots.”

This leads to the lament among modern moderates and liberal Christians that the Religious Right “hijacked” Christianity in the late 20th century. This narrative is, in itself, a bad trick. It suggests a Golden Age of Unity that never existed.

The reality is more uncomfortable. Christianity wasn’t hijacked; it was utilized. It has always adapted to whatever power structure holds the checkbook. Its internal contradictions make this easily done, so long as the core tenets of peace and equality are ignored.

For every verse the “rabble” used to demand equality (Galatians 3:28), the Gentry had a verse to demand order and submission (Romans 13:1). The Bible never changed; only the interests of the people reading it did.

From the “Great Chain of Being” in the 1700s to the “Corporate Jesus” of the mid-1900’s and the “Pro-Life” pivot of the 1970s, the Gentry’s greatest skill has been their ability to rebrand their own economic desires as “Biblical Mandates.”

The “Right” didn’t take over Christianity. They simply out-funded and out-organized the other side, using the same tactics that the 6% Club has used since the first pews were built in the New World. They didn’t change the religion; they perfected the Grift.

If the historical Jesus, the Palestinian Jew who preached the redistribution of wealth, the welcoming of the stranger, and the rejection of the sword were to appear at a Gentry-led “Christian Nation” rally today, he wouldn’t be recognized as the guest of honor. He would be seen as the paragon of the “rabble.”

He would be the “wrong” kind of Christian. He would be a threat to the “Divine Order.”

Many of the defenders of the “Christian Nation” would be the first to call for his deportation, incarceration, or silencing. Why? Because his “Gospel of Liberation” is the one thing their “Moral One Hour Cleaner” can’t wash away. It is the “stain” that perturbs the Gentry at every hour.

It is the demand that power be surrendered, not hoarded.

The “Christian Nation” is not a historical fact; it is an ever-changing political and cultural narrative. It is an Exclusive Trademark owned by the Gentry to ensure that the “Great Chain of Being” remains unbroken.

The “Christian Nation” isn’t about Christ. Again, it’s about Legitimacy.

It’s about making the “Rule of Law” a tool for the few and a trap for the many. It’s about ensuring the 6% Club can look at the other 94% and see “staff” rather than “brothers.” As long as the Gentry can keep the pews focused on a “Heritage” that never existed and a “God of Order” who favors their stock options, the Grift will continue.

Progress in America has never come from the “Christian Nation” brand. It has only come from those brave enough to stop buying, or better, smashing that brand to pieces in the name of real, tangible justice.

 The “Christian Nation” is a gated community. 

True faith and true democracy begin when we decide to take down the fences.

To take them down, we have to understand how they were built. We have to look at the blueprints and realize that the “Founding” the Gentry talks about is not the same as one the history books record. 

And now, after tracing the “Great Chain of Being” from the colonial plantation to the corporate boardroom, we arrive back at the foundational question: Is America a Christian Nation?

The answer is both Yes and No, because the truth depends entirely on which “version” of Christianity you are talking about.

If by “Christian Nation” you mean a country where the majority of the population has historically identified with that particular faith, the answer is a resounding Yes.

Christianity provided the vocabulary for American life. It influenced the architecture of our towns, the dates on our calendars, the holidays we celebrate, the figures we cherish, and the morality of millions.

From the abolitionists in the “Hush Harbors” to the suffragists citing Galatians, thousands of Americans used faith as a genuine guide for justice. For them, the Bible was not a leash, but a light.

However, if by “Christian Nation” you mean a country founded on a unified Christian doctrine or a legal biblical mandate, the answer is a definitive No.

As we have seen, there has never been one “Christianity” in America. There has only ever been a civil war between the Gospel of Subordination and the Gospel of Liberation. It is an ethical battle that will continue to be waged so long as the Gentry maintains their grip on power.

The Founders were meticulous in their exclusion of the divine from the gears of the state. From Article VI’s ban on religious tests to the Treaty of Tripoli’s secular declaration, the “Christian Nation” was legally non-existent at the start.

Indeed, a nation cannot be “Christian” in any coherent sense when one half of its pulpits used the Bible to justify the whip while the other half used it to break the chain.

So, while America is not a “Christian Nation” in any legal sense, it is a nation where Christian ideas, though conflicting and politically weaponized, have always competed for the soul of the country.

But the “Grift by the Gentry” only works as long as we believe there is only one way to be a “Christian American.” It only works as long as we allow the Gentry to hold the keys to the “Gated Community.”

Progress in this country has never come from the command of the pulpit or the complacency of the pews; it has come from the “Rabble” who realized that a truly “Christian” act and a truly “Democratic” act is to demand equality for all, regardless of their positioning on the “Great Chain.”

But rather than riding the fence; here at the end, I will pick a definitive side in this debate.

America is not a Christian nation. 

It is a Republic dependent on democratic ideals that is still trying to decide if it believes its own founding promise: that all are created equal. 

The “Christian Nation” myth is the fence. 

True faith, and true freedom require that fence to fall.