(The Conversation) \u2014 Did the founders of the United States intend to create a Christian nation?<\/p>\n
Political leaders who addressed a prayer rally on the National Mall<\/a> on May 17, 2026, seem to think so<\/a>: House Speaker Mike Johnson led the crowd in \u201crededicat(ing) the United States of America as one nation under God.\u201d<\/p>\n Some, and perhaps many, scholars would say no<\/a>: that while many founders were religious, as a group they concluded that the national government should not support any particular faith.<\/p>\n As a scholar of Colonial North America<\/a>, I believe that history provides an answer. European colonizers in lands that became the United States did link church and state. But the architects of the new nation broke from that idea as surely as they broke from Britain.<\/p>\n \u2018The Virgin of the Navigators,\u2019 by 16th-century Spanish painter Alejo Fern\u00e1ndez.<\/span> The European desire to expand the boundaries of Christendom played a central role in the Colonial era, as I describe in my 2026 book, \u201cContested Continent<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n That drive mattered greatly to Christopher Columbus<\/a>, who sailed west in 1492. Upon landing in the Bahamas, he laid claim to already populated territories, writing that Christ would rejoice<\/a> \u201cas he foresees that so many souls of so many people heretofore lost are to be saved.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cDoctrine of Discovery<\/a>,\u201d proclaimed by the Vatican in 1493, granted European monarchs title over lands occupied by non-Christians and urged them to convert the people who lived there.<\/p>\n Less than a generation later, the Protestant Reformation transformed Christianity, dividing Europe and spawning brutal violence<\/a>.<\/p>\n In England, the schism reshaped the relationship between church and state. King Henry VIII severed ties with the pope<\/a> in the 1530s. He ordered the dissolution of monasteries<\/a>, and his followers defaced church statues of Catholic saints.<\/p>\n After Henry rejected Rome\u2019s authority, Parliament passed the Supremacy Act of 1534<\/a>, which made the monarch the leader of an independent national church, the Church of England<\/a>.<\/p>\n Queen Elizabeth I, Henry\u2019s daughter, further reduced the political power of English Catholics in 1559<\/a>. Her desire to promote her Protestant faith, along with a yearning to expand England\u2019s political authority, helped fuel a vicious campaign to take control of Ireland<\/a>, where the Reformation\u2019s teachings had not taken hold.<\/p>\n A plate from \u2018The Image of Irelande\u2019 by John Derrick, published in 1581, shows English soldiers during the Tudor conquest of Ireland.<\/span> The desire to promote Protestantism also figured in English plans for the colonization of North America.<\/p>\n In the 1580s, an expedition sent by Sir Walter Raleigh<\/a> arrived on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina. They were eager to learn about the region\u2019s natural resources and its peoples. English colonial planners also hoped to convert Carolina Algonquians, and to keep Catholics away. A small group of Jesuit priests had already tried to establish a mission on a tributary of Chesapeake Bay in 1571, but they were killed by Indigenous people<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thomas Harriot, who chronicled the English efforts<\/a> when he arrived in 1585, believed that Carolina Algonquians would convert to Protestantism. In fact, he wrote, Native people were so eager to accept the faith that they grabbed a Bible \u201cto embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their bre(a)sts\u201d in order to absorb the lessons it contained.<\/p>\n In 1607, the Virginia Company of London established a settlement at Jamestown, promising, according to the colony\u2019s 1609 charter<\/a>, that colonization would lead to \u201cthe conversion and reduccion of the people in those partes unto the true worshipp of God and Christian religion.\u201d To advance their goal, they tried to bar anyone holding \u201cthe superstitions of the Churche of Rome.\u201d Colonists had to swear the oath of supremacy to the English monarch, which meant accepting the Church of England.<\/p>\n Within a generation, other Protestants arrived in English America, including critics of the Church of England who are now often called \u201cPilgrims.\u201d Puritans, who migrated soon after, held similar beliefs<\/a>. Persecuted in England for their dissenting views, they arrived eager to demonstrate to the world that they knew the best ways to advance a civilization<\/a>, based on their interpretation of Scripture.<\/p>\n \u2018Pilgrims Going To Church,\u2019 painted by George Henry Boughton in 1867.<\/span> Among these migrants was John Winthrop, a leader of the Massachusetts Bay colony. In 1630, he wrote what became the most famous sermon<\/a> in early America \u2013 although he was not a minister and likely never delivered it to a congregation.<\/p>\n Winthrop advocated the blending of church and state<\/a>. As he put it, drawing on the Bible\u2019s Book of Matthew<\/a>, \u201cWe shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.\u201d Colonists\u2019 failure, he suggested, would be a victory for the enemies of God.<\/p>\n English advocates of colonization were aware that Catholics had been erecting churches in modern-day Mexico and Peru<\/a>. Protestants feared that Rome\u2019s influence might spread across the East Coast, moving southward from French Canada and northward from Spanish Florida. While English authorities allowed limited migration of Catholics<\/a>, especially to Maryland, their Colonies remained Protestant strongholds.<\/p>\n No single official church establishment stretched across the 13 Colonies that would eventually join in the American Revolution. But church and state were closely related in each.<\/p>\n Towns across New England taxed residents to support local Congregational churches<\/a>, which evolved out of Puritan traditions. Colonial governments established the Church of England in Virginia in 1619<\/a> and in New York<\/a> in 1693.<\/p>\n Pennsylvania\u2019s 1682 frame of government<\/a> promised that law-abiding people would not be persecuted for their religious views or forced to worship. But those who held public office needed to \u201cpossess faith in Jesus Christ.\u201d Even Rhode Island, famous for its tradition of tolerance, specified in its 1663 charter<\/a> that residents should edify \u201cthemselves, and one another, in the holie Christian faith.\u201d<\/p>\n By the mid-1770s, many Colonial Americans decided that the time had come to separate from Great Britain<\/a>. Many also wanted to separate church and state.<\/p>\n Virginia\u2019s Statute for Religious Freedom was one of the three accomplishments Thomas Jefferson wanted inscribed on his tombstone.<\/span> In 1777, just a year after he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote Virginia\u2019s Statute for Religious Freedom<\/a>. As he put it, one\u2019s ability to serve the public should \u201chave no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry.\u201d When the statute became law in Virginia in 1786, it protected freedom of worship and ended taxes to support the Church of England<\/a>.<\/p>\n Article 6 of the United States Constitution<\/a>, written in Philadelphia in 1787, forbade any religious oaths for those who wanted to hold office<\/a>. The First Amendment<\/a>, which became part of the Constitution in late 1791, held that Congress \u201cshall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.\u201d<\/p>\n\u2018Doctrine of Discovery\u2019<\/h2>\n
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Reales Alcazares via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nNew church<\/h2>\n
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Edinburgh University Library via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nProtestant migrants<\/h2>\n
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New York Historical via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nCompetition for American souls<\/h2>\n
A revolutionary achievement<\/h2>\n
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Christopher Hollis\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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