“Is America a Christian country?” That’s the title of a new Bible class series I’m leading at our church. It is NOT about contemporary politics, but about the history of church-state relationships in our country.
God’s people in the Bible lived under various forms of government, theocracy, anarchy, monarchies, and dictatorships, but not under democracy or a republic. In England, Anglicanism was the established state religion. “English ecclesiastical law formally required use of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible and of the liturgies, rites, prayers, and lectionaries of the Book of Common Prayer. It demanded subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith and the swearing of loyalty oaths to the Church, Crown, and Commonwealth of England. When such ecclesiastical laws were rigorously applied…they led to all manner of state controls of the internal affairs of the established church, and all manner of state repression and coercion of religious dissenters.” (John Witte, Jr., Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, 51)
Given their European experience, dominant Christian groups in the thirteen colonies (Congregationalists, Quakers, Anglicans, Protestants), gave legal preference to Christianity, aka Protestantism. “In eighteenth-century America, government patronized religion in a variety of ways. Officials donated land and personalty (moveable property) for the building of churches, religious schools, and charities. They collected taxes and tithes to support ministers and missionaries. They exempted church property from taxation. They incorporated religious bodies. They outlawed blasphemy and sacrilege, unnecessary labor on the Sabbath and on religious holidays. They administered religious test oaths.” (Witte, 53)
You might think that’s appealing, but here’s another quotation, this from the 1641 charter of Massachusetts. ‘If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death.” What it meant to ‘have any other god’ was spelled out by another law that warranted the death penalty for anyone who cursed or blasphemed ‘the name of God, the Father, Son or Holy Ghost.’” North Carolina excluded Jews and Catholics from holding office.
Spoiler alert: The Constitution of the United States (1787) did not establish a “Christian” nation, although most Americans at the founding were Protestant Christians. What’s Christian in America today? You and I are, but to be effective we must know both the Scriptures and American history.