Did America Have a Christian Founding?

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Welcome to the conversations that matter podcast. My name is John Harris. And today I have with me a very special guest

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Mark Hall Who works at George Fox and he has written a number of publications academic publications on history he's a distinguished professor of politics there and Mark your most recent book.

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Can I can I call you mark? I'm sorry, dr. Absolutely. No. No, call me mark, please Mark your most recent book is did

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America have a Christian founding and I'm intrigued by this The timing of it I think couldn't not have been better.

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What inspired you to write this? Well, I've been working in this area for about 25 years

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I've done a number of academic books as you've mentioned and I've decided that at this stage of my career

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I want to try to bring these arguments to the general reading public And so this is my first book aimed at the reading public

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It's published by Nelson books. It's very accessible, although fully documented And basically,

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I hope to convince my fellow Americans that America had a Christian founding and this is very good news for all of us

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Why is that good news? Because I think some secularists might think that's horrible news that America might have had a

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Christian founding That's right. So what I argue is that America's founders drew from Christian ideas when they designed her constitutional order

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And so just to give a few examples America's founders to a person believe that humans are created the image of God the

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Mago day and therefore should be worthy of Should be treated with respect and dignity They believe that humans for sinful and so the national government should be strictly limited in power and power should be separated and checked

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And I could go on and on but those are two examples And so today with all the change we still live under this constitutional order that I think very healthy in a very healthy way limits power and checks power and Says prevented the nation from sliding into tyranny as well

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I argue that America's founders embraced a very robust understanding of religious liberty because of their

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Christian convictions and this is a understanding of religious liberty that includes Muslims and Jews and atheists and so really everyone should be happy that America's founders embrace this very broad understanding of religious liberty

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Now I don't know if you caught the video I know I had sent you a link of Ron Reagan doing a promo for the

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I think was a freedom from religion Foundation during the last Democratic debate. Hi. I'm Ron Reagan an unabashed atheist

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And I'm alarmed by the intrusions of religion into our secular government that's why I'm asking you to support the freedom from religion

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Foundation the nation's largest and most effective association of Atheists and agnostics working to keep state and church separate just like our founding fathers intended

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Please support the freedom from religion foundation Ron Reagan lifelong atheist not afraid of burning in hell what what do you make of someone like Ron Reagan who just Claims that and it seems to be something that everyone buys especially on the left

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Mm -hmm. No, that's exactly right So I have an entire chapter dedicated to the question

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Did America's founders desire to separate church and state or create a wall of separation between church and state?

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And the answer is no Absolutely, not even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who wanted a greater degree of separation between church and state

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Did not desire to build a wall of separation even though Jefferson uses that term in a letter to the

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Danbury Baptist for instance Let me just give you one story the literally two days after Jefferson drafted the letter to the

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Danbury Baptist he went to church services at the US Capitol building where he heard

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John Leland the great Baptist itinerant minister in himself an opponent of established churches preach

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Jefferson also made the War Department and Treasury Department buildings available for church services

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And so again, I want to concede that Jefferson wanted a greater degree of separation between church and state than did most founders

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But even he did not act as if there was a wall of separation between church and state and when we turn from Jefferson and Madison to the rest of the founders

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There is utterly no evidence that they desired the sort of wall of separation now

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They clearly were turning against established churches But they opposed established churches for exactly the same reason you and I would oppose them today

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They believe that when governments run churches, this is very bad for the church So we need to keep the government out of the business of running churches

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But presidents can issue calls for prayer and fasting Legislators can hire Legislative chaplains and on and on there's all sorts of ways in which it's appropriate for the church in the state to cooperate

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They just did not want an established official state church Yeah, that's interesting.

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Do you think part of the misunderstanding about this might have to do with the expansion of national?

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Governmental powers the incorporation doctrine so forth and so on because I think at the time you had mentioned nine of the 13 states had official churches the time of the ratification of the

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Constitution and And now I think it's assumed that the national government is

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We just think of the national government. I don't think of states as being involved in religion at all, but they were

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Absolutely in the First Amendment as you know reads Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion clearly in Indisputably only a restriction on the national government through the doctrine of incorporation through the 14th

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Amendment This is now binding on the states and I do think it has substantive content. This means that today

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Virginia, Alabama, California cannot create an official established church But there's still all sorts of rooms to have a voucher program that parents can use to send their children to private religious schools

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Governors can issue calls for prayer and fasting you can have legislative chaplains prayer before legislative

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Legislative sessions and on and on you go now we can debate the prudence of these things

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But what I want to argue and what I do argue is that there's no Constitutional barrier to states or the national government doing these sorts of things

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Now I want to ask you about something Someone actually sent me an article from the gospel coalition that they did not know

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I was doing an interview with you But there was an author there another historian who had taken issue with your book and he made the assertion that you were interpreting everything that the founder said and did according to the assumption that they were

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Christians and Subsequently anointing the institutions that they established as Christians and I did not get that from your book

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I was hoping though. Maybe you could respond to that because there does seem to be some questions about what constitutes a

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Christian nation Do they all have to be Orthodox Christians? Which I think this author was trying to say that that would be a

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Christian nation or what's the barometer that we use? Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. So this is my friend

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I do consider him to be a friend Craig Frazier at the Masters College, but in all honesty I think he simply misreads a book in the introduction and I explore a variety of different reasons that we might say

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America had a Christian founding and I consider the very first thing I consider is What America's founders have identified themselves as Christians and I say yes 98 %

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Protestant 2 % Roman Catholic about 2 ,000 Jews, but then I go on to say that's not an interesting finding

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I then suggest it might be more interesting if we could show that they were all sincere Christians or Orthodox Christians But I then clearly say that we don't have the records to demonstrate that one way or the other now

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We can with some founders but with many founders They're just simply it's not the records to show it and so in my book

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I do not argue that all of America's founders were sincere Orthodox Christians I argued they were informed by Christian ideas and this to me is a far more interesting claim because of course it's possible that nominal

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Christian might be influenced by non -christian ideas and it's also possible that someone who is

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Maybe not even a person of faith might still be influenced by Christian ideas And so I focus on the influence of Christian ideas such as the fact that humans are created in Mago day the image of God that they're sinful that they embrace a

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Christian conception of Liberty that is the freedom to do what is right not the freedom to do what is wrong And this is how

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America had a Christian founding. So the review just totally misreads a book One of the other things that in this review said it but it's actually a broader discussion

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Which is why I want you to comment on it is the influence of enlightenment thinkers like John Locke And I think one of the things you mentioned is

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Locke actually he's kind of downstream from a lot of biblical ideas He's taking them and he's applying them.

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Maybe not giving the the Bible verses for the different ideas He's advocating but I've always thought that someone like a

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John Calvin like a theologians had Influenced the culture so much that people like John Locke were picking up these concepts and that was an extension of Christian influence but secularists want to say that no that's separate and I'd like to hear your thoughts on that Sure.

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Well, there is an entire cottage industry debating how to properly read John Locke Some people read him as a secularist who kind of hides his very secular ideas with Bible verses and theological language

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Other people and I'm sympathetic to this camp read him as being far more compatible with Orthodox Christianity I think part of the problem is a lot of political philosophers don't read

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Calvin or Poney or Goodman or these other earlier Calvinist in Locke is writing in this

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Tradition his father was a Puritan in English Puritan and even if he himself was not an

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Orthodox Christian I think he probably was not One could certainly still read him as being very influenced by this idea, but however, we read

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Locke I think it's indisputably the case that the few Americans who read him in the 18th century

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Read him as being compatible with Christianity And so I don't think there's any tension at all between a founder who might cite the

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Bible and then cite Locke They simply did not see the two in conflict I think you had mentioned a statistic which

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I believe you you might have gotten it from Daniel Dreisbach I'm not sure but at the percentage of quotations the founders used and it was overwhelmingly biblical and That was a conservative estimate

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As far as I can I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head But that was fascinating to be just overwhelmingly biblical language being used the

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Constitutional Convention Sure. Well, there's two things going on My friend Daniel Dreisbach is written a book reading the

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Bible with the founding fathers and he shows that America's founders were well -versed in the Bible. They regularly referenced it.

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They regularly quoted it They oftentimes did not include the biblical citations. So we oftentimes secular scholars

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Anyway, don't pick up on this the study of reference though is by Donald Lutz and he did a content analysis of a whole bunch of political literature from the founding era and he simply looked at Citations who are the founders citing and he finds that about 32 % of these citations are to the

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Bible Something like 18 % are to all Enlightenment thinkers combined

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And so this would be your lock your Montesquieu your Smith your Bakari And so they are far more likely to cite the

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Bible than all the Enlightenment thinkers and lock Of course is only a fraction of the Enlightenment thinkers and I think and I say in the book that this

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Understates this quotations to the Bible because oftentimes the founders do not include the citation

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They do not include Micah 4 4 Micah 6 8 and so biblically illiterate scholars just miss these quotations

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Yeah, that's excellent. And yeah, that is the study I was thinking of I think I just associated it with Dreisbach because he also quotes that in his book.

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He does there's two Objections as far as I can tell two major ones in modern

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Christian circles So to discredit the founding fathers and objections to perhaps the thesis you're advocating the first one

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I think is on the Romans 13 issue on they they had a revolution How could they have done so when that's in violation of Romans 13?

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I'd like to hear what you had because you said some really good things at Liberty University when I was there on this Sure, so I actually address this in the conclusion to my book in the draft of the conclusion

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But then I suggested to my publisher I addressed in about five pages I said, you know this really could be a chapter in and of itself and So we agreed that I would take that out of the conclusion and put it in a sequel to the book that I'm working on Now, so what

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I argue in in this fully fleshed out chapter is that the church did indeed interpret

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Romans 13 for about 1 ,200 years to say that Christians cannot revolt against governing authorities

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However, some Catholic scholars in the 13th century started thinking

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Well, does Roman 13 really refer to a tyrant or is it referring to a just ruler and they started toying around with the idea?

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That maybe a tyrant could be resisted the Protestant reformers pick this up and run with it

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So John Calvin is among the more conservative of the Calvinist on this question And he says that inferior magistrates clearly have the power to resist a tyrant

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But even as Calvin is writing this he got John Knox up in Scotland saying that people themselves

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May resist a tyrant and so the way the biblical argument works I've already suggested it but just to make sure it's clear is that Romans 13 refers to the just ruler if you have a ruler

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Who is unjust a ruler who routinely punishes good people and rewards bad people?

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This is not the sort of ruler that must be respected and obeyed and the people may and perhaps even have a duty to Resist him and so America's founders 50 to 75 percent of Calvinists are coming out of this tradition

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They're coming out of the tradition of the English Civil War with the Puritans Of course, the English Puritans resisted what they considered to be an unjust

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King This is in the air now someone like a great Frazier simply thinks that all these folks are wrong

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And he has a right to that opinion. Absolutely. He does but I think a bit more charitable of an interpretation

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Incidentally, I think that the Reformers have it right in this respect but at a minimum we can say that these folks had very good reasons for believing that Resisting an unjust ruler a tyrant is both biblical and just yeah

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I would add to that to just from a theological standpoint It seems to me that the instructions in Romans 13 are being given to individuals

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Living in culture. It's not being given to lesser magistrates Which a lot of these royal colonies and so forth they would have been their own governments resisting

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So you were under the authority of of the local government and which one do you submit to right? And in the word diakonos is used there to the word for deacon.

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The government is a servant a minister of God And and so there it seems like there's a function a spiritual function that the government's supposed to be

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A role that they have and in a church if a deacon does not meet qualifications Well, they they're not a deacon anymore, right?

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And so I've never had a problem with this really but I understand why people do on a cursory

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You know reading of Romans 13, but I appreciate you weighing in on that very clearly The other question that comes up a lot is and it's an objection really is well

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The Founding Fathers did not immediately abolish slavery It's an embarrassing thing to admit But the people who wrote the

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Constitution did not understand that slavery was a bad thing and did not respect civil rights So, how could they have been

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Christians and you I think gave a really good answer to this at Liberty when you were speaking

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But this question came up three times. So it's on a lot of folks minds. I was hoping you could talk about that Sure, I actually addressed three issues in the conclusion of my book and slavery was one of three just like rebellion

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And I pulled that from my book and I'm putting it in the sequel I think that is the most solid objection, but I think a little context is necessary almost all societies

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Have embraced slavery all Christian societies embrace slavery by the time you get to the late 18th century

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The unique thing is many founders were coming to oppose slavery something like six to eight of the states voluntarily abolished slavery between 1776 in 1804

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There are founders who understand this is an unjust institution I think

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Southerners generally are so bought into the institution that they fight it

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With you know dragging their feet tooth and nail and this sort of thing But even they I think have an understanding that in some ways this is an unjust institution

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Thomas Jefferson the slave owner He writes in his notes in the state of Virginia that I tremble when

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I remember that God is just and his justice will not remain abated forever something to that effect

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So Jefferson seems to understand that slavery is unjust and yet he was so addicted to the goods that came from slavery the goods

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The wine and the Monticello and this sort of thing that he could not bring himself to release many of his slaves

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He released a few of them. And so I think one could critique America's founders on the issue of slavery

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I do think that my argument does not require that America's founders were perfect Christian statesman

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We can recognize that everyone falls short you fall short. I fall short Jerry Falwell fall short

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We all fall short in one way or the other My argument is that America's founders were profoundly influenced by Christian ideas not that they were perfect and one of the things

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You know, I think you had mentioned this at Liberty that they tried to do was progressively admit get rid of the institution by making the slave trade itself illegal by 1808 and so there there does seem to be an

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Understanding there in all parts of the country that we need to somehow do something about this

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But we don't know how to get rid of it immediately. Is that a fair reading? Oh, absolutely

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So the Constitution says that slave international slave trade cannot be made illegal until 1808

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That was a concession to the slave states as soon as 1808 came around actually in 1807

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Thomas Jefferson encouraged Congress to ban the slave trade and Congress did do this the international slave trade.

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So after 1808, it's illegal to bring humans from Africa to America Now you still have an internal slave trade, right slaves from Virginia are sold down to Louisiana and that sort of thing

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But I think this is a good example of how really everyone recognized that slavery was a bad thing.

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It was an evil thing It's not until about the 1820s or 1830s that anyone argued that slavery is a positive good

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So again, almost everyone in the 18th century everyone saw that slavery was an evil

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The only question is what to do about it, right and that and that's a practical Question really more than anything else

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So yeah, that's really good. I what advice do you have for I'm gonna say

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Christians specifically students who want to get into the historical field or the political field and They want to study the founding fathers.

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Um, I'd be curious to hear maybe what sources they should be reading How should they be approaching these men?

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Yeah, I think Indisputable you have to go to the primary sources There's just so much nonsense in the secondary literature and I've contributed to secondary literature and I'd like to think my works are not

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Nonsense, but still if you are interested in Roger Sherman, I have an entire book on Roger Sherman published by Oxford University Press You might begin by reading that book, but then you should read

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Chris Collier's biography of Sherman But then you have to get into the primary source documents and then use these documents to evaluate my arguments and his arguments and other

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Arguments, so yeah, absolutely get to the primary sources. You must do that That's a non -negotiable as far as I'm concerned if people want to find your book and purchase it, which

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I would recommend I listened to it on audible and just really enjoyed it. Where do you want to send them? Thank you,

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John. That's a great question Probably amazon .com because they sell it at a discount The book is listed for $26 and something we can buy it on Amazon for $18 and 42 cents

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I think that's again. It's not really in my interest, but it's an interest of your listeners to go to Amazon get it

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Okay, perfect. Any final thoughts you have things you want to share? Yeah, well, I sure appreciate you

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John doing this podcast and I again I would encourage folks to not take my word for it to go to the primary sources and Yeah, now leave it there.

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All right. Well, thank you. Dr. Hall I really appreciate you coming on and it's an honor to speak with you and God bless you while you're doing your work