Christian Nationalism in Strange Places

This press release from Yeshiva University caught my eye:

From Esther to Exodus: Tracing the Biblical Roots of the American Founding

In the release, two speakers are quoted Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern and David Barton. Halpern is Senior Advisor to the Provost and Deputy Director and Chief Strategy Officer of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Barton is listed as a historian which makes the whole thing suspicious from the start. The event was sponsored by the Museum of the Bible.

Barton did what he often does - distort the study of colonial political literature by Donald Lutz.

Barton argued that the Bible was the single most important intellectual and legal foundation for the American experiment. He noted that the United States had endured under the same Constitution for 250 years, and he tied that exceptional longevity to biblical ideas embedded in the founding. Citing a University of Houston study of 15,000 founding-era documents, he highlighted that 34% of quotations came from the Bible — far more than from thinkers like Montesquieu or Blackstone — with Deuteronomy, Psalms, Proverbs, Jeremiah, Chronicles, Judges, John's Gospel, and 1 Peter especially prominent.

Barton’s misuse of Donald Lutz’s study has been refuted so many times, I have lost count. In my new book, The Christian Past That Wasn’t, I devote many pages to this study and why Barton is wrong in his claims. I have also examined this claim here and here. Kyle Mantyla has also been over and over this territory. Colonial writers referred to the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that the framers of the Declaration and Constitution were influenced by their writings. In fact, in his only analysis of the Constitutional period, Lutz found that the Bible was not cited at all by those who favored the ratification of the Constitution. I guarantee that aspect of the Lutz study did not come up in this seminar.

Concerning the Rabbi’s presentation, he focused on the metaphorical uses by colonial preachers of the books of Esther and Exodus. I don’t know as much about this area as I would like to, but I can offer an observation. It is certainly true that patriot ministers in the colonial and revolutionary period preached a Christianity of revolution. They used Old Testament imagery to motivate their hearers to take action and resist England. However, there were loyalist clergy using the Bible for exactly the opposite purpose. Saying the Bible had a positive influence on the founding is only part of the story. The Bible was an influence on those who opposed the founding of America as an independent nation as well.

I can’t help but think about the story of Jacob Duché. He was the preacher who gave the stirring prayer in favor of independence at the beginning of the 1774 Continental Congress. His prayer is often referred to by Christian nationalists as indication that the founders sought God’s favor. What is less often mentioned is that Jacob Duché later recanted his support for the Revolution and begged George Washington to surrender. To say that the Bible was used unambiguously to support the American founding isn’t the whole story.

Finally, according to the press release, Rabbi Halpern linked the founders to Old Testament imagery.

He [Halpern] connected this idea directly to the American founding, suggesting that the Exodus story had given the founders a template for imagining their own project: a people freed from tyranny not to wander without direction, but to build a shared life around lasting truths. In his view, this was the deeper logic behind America's approach to religious liberty — not merely keeping government out of belief, but actively protecting the space where communities could live out their convictions.

One can only take this so far. Yes, it is true that, in the midst of the Revolution, Jefferson and Ben Franklin suggested images with Moses and themes from Exodus for the national seal. However, we should recall that Jefferson also suggested that the reverse of that same seal carry an image of "Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed."[1] Moses provided a picture, but, according to Jefferson, our political principles derived from legendary pagan, pre-Christian chiefs.

America’s “approach to religious liberty” is complex and cannot be reduced to any one influence. Some religious people found religious freedom in the Bible, but we must be honest and acknowledge that many religious people looked, and still look, in the Bible and find teachings that constrain religious freedom. Puritans did not want religious freedom for Roger Williams or Anne Hutchinson or Mary Dyer. Many modern day Christian nationalists don’t want religious freedom for all Americans today.

I will close with a quote from University of Notre Dame emeritus historian Mark Noll. This is found on page 201 of The Christian Past That Wasn’t.

The founding of the United States was due to as much conspiracy thinking, as much abuse of the Bible as good use of the Bible, as much demonization of opponents as it was honorable actions, and as much sheer hypocrisy as anything in the eighteenth century. There were a few people in England and actually a few in the American colonies who said, “You Americans, you patriots, are worried about liberty. Well, good for you to worry about liberty. But why, if you’re so concerned about liberty, do you have hundreds of thousands of Black slaves in the United States?” Well, there was no answer to that question, except just to ignore it. And those kind of factors lead me to conclude now that any serious attempt to understand that historical founding of the United States should recognize some Christian contribution but should never think that the founding of the United States was uniquely or in a very special way a Christian enterprise.

Are there biblical roots of America’s founding? Perhaps, but there are many other roots as well. Reductionistic efforts like this aren’t about accurate history, but about finding a past which can be useful politically in the present.

For more information about The Christian Past That Wasn’t, go to christianpast.com.

[1] https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/seal-united-states