The Constitution of a Christian Country

Looking back to the founding of the United States, is it right to say that the Constitution is the Constitution of a Christian country?  The answer has to be: “yes and no.” 

That is to say there is an ambiguity in the question. Taking the question to be “Was the population of the US at the time of ratification Christian?” the answer is yes. It was overwhelmingly, even though not exclusively, Christian, and its Christian character significantly affected all of civic life.

The somewhat less obvious disambiguation of the question is whether the voting segment of the population in ratifying the Constitution constitutionalized their own religious commitments, and the answer is that they clearly, dramatically, did not. 

The typical person on the street of one of the former colonies would strike us today as aggressively religious and well steeped in Christian bible learning, doctrine, and practices. With limited exceptions, notably in Maryland, the doctrine would have been uncompromisingly Protestant, often accompanied by a bigoted hatred of Catholicism. 

There is a good deal of debate about the religion of the founding founders, but that debate is largely beside the point. The founders are a skewed sample. Drawn from the educated elite, the founders over-represented deism. In its pure form deism takes the existence of a creator God to be inferable from our experience of the natural world. This is to say, deists embrace one or more arguments in the cosmological and teleological families. Their defining difference from theists, many of whom, of course, also accept these arguments of “natural theology,” is that the deists, at least the pure deists, reject all forms of revelation and, in particular, scriptures. The several arguable deists among the leading founding fathers tended towards some accommodation with Christian scriptures and practices and were firmly onboard with what was popularly understood to be Christian morality. At the Convention deists were better represented than Catholics and Jews, of which there were, respectively, two and none. 

What is remarkable is that a population that was so overwhelmingly Christian and Protestant ratified a constitution that gave Christianity no special status at all. The constitutions of the states were full of preamble obeisances to God or Christ, a feature also of the Articles of Confederation and, as everyone knows, of the Declaration of Independence. The Preamble to the Constitution, in what cannot but have been intentional, gave the pride of place to “the People,” letting God go unmentioned. (Jefferson Davis and his friends quite consciously reversed this important symbolic omission by invoking, in the Preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States, “the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”)

Most of the states at the time of the drafting of the Constitution had religious tests for voting or holding office. Only believers in God or in God and immortality or only Trinitarians or only members “of any Protestant sect” were eligible. The US Constitution not only lacked a religious test clause, it had a clause prohibiting any religious test. (Article VI.) As conservative constitutional scholar Michael McConnel emphasizes that this was a “dramatic departure from the prevailing practice in the states.” (“The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free Exercise of Religion,” 103 HARV.L.REV. 1409,1474(1990).  Anti-federalists in the ratification debates paraded the horribles that Papists, Pagans, or “Mohametans” could, under the proposed Constitution, become President of the United States. Yet the vote in the Convention on the No Religious Test Clause had been unanimous, and the Constitution was, of course, ratified by the states.

The Constitution of the United States was not a secular revolution. The No Religious Test clause survived for two reasons. First, there was some trend towards religious tolerance. Washington, for example, took pains to distribute his church attendance when traveling among different faiths, even the Catholic. (His church attendance when home at Mount Vernon was Episcopalian and occasional.) Second, and more important, religion was generally thought to be best left to the states. So there is a significant “states’ rights” component to the radically non-religious nature of the Constitution. Still, it was, and is, radically non-religious. It was the national charter of a people at that time overwhelmingly Christian, but it is not a Christian charter.