As part of the Treaty of Tripoli, 1797, President John Adams approved the following statement: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Yet that didn’t mean Christianity wasn’t influential during the Revolutionary era, and the relationship between religion and the nation’s founding remains complex.
With the United States marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Vanderbilt professor and historian James P. Byrd offers perspective on the role of religion in the nation’s founding and its enduring influence on American life.
“The United States was not founded as a Christian nation, but the founders created a political world that enabled Christianity to flourish,” said Byrd.
“Studying the past is important to living in the present, and when we look to the past, we should be mindful of religious influences on various areas of life, including politics,” he continued.
Byrd is the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies and professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is also the author of Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (2013), a leading study of the Bible’s influence during the Revolutionary era. Byrd writes, “The Revolution may be the most important event in American history, and the Bible was arguably its most influential book.”
For those who want to continue reflecting on religion’s role in American history, Byrd recommends these additional readings.
Recommended reading on religious faith and the American Revolution
Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (2010)
Kidd is a historian who has written religious biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. His book, God of Liberty, is a comprehensive narrative history of religion during the American Revolution.
Daniel Dreisbach, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (2016)
Dreisbach focuses specifically on the leading founders and their views on and interpretation of scripture to argue that “both pious and skeptical founders were familiar with the Bible, referred often to it in their political discourse, and commended Jesus’s ethical teachings as recorded in the Gospels.”
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Gordon-Reed’s groundbreaking study provides an extensively analyzed account of the moral ramifications of slavery and the nation’s founding, located in the context of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and especially on the previously neglected but critical story of the Hemings family.
John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (2nd ed., 2016) and Mark David Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding? (2019)
While their conclusions to the posed questions may differ, Fea and Hall present two well-researched perspectives that explore the influence of religion on the founding of the nation.
Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (2021)
Carté focuses on the Revolution’s destructive effects on “Imperial Protestantism,” which she calls “the system of government privilege, protestant institutions, and social networks that made Britain’s empire and its religion protestant.” This is a book about “how the American Revolution changed religion.”