Albert Mohler is free to advance his Christian nationalism, but he should be more careful when using American history to do it.

Albert Mohler believes that the United States was built, and should continue to be built, on a Christian foundation. Read his entire argument here. The piece stems from his 2024 speech to the National Conservatism Conference.

Let’s see how Mohler handles American history here. (I should add that the article does not cite a single American historian. When addressing the founding, the only scholars Mohler cites are political scientists.)

Mohler writes:

...Baptists, along with other citizens, simply assumed as a necessary and permanent state of affairs, namely that Christianity would continue to provide the essential moral culture that shaped the entire society. The founders of this nation and the framers of our constitutional order simply took for granted that marriage meant (and could only mean) the covenant union of one man and one woman, for example. Christianity and its biblically defined understanding of culture was so fundamental, so pervasive, and indeed so unquestioned that it was evidently invisible. The very Baptists who provided these clarion calls to the so-called “separation of church and state” simply assumed that the state would continue to rest on a moral foundation (and cosmological vision) that was essentially Christian (even essentially Protestant for much of our history).

Mohler suggests that the founders, if alive today, would all oppose gay marriage because everyone in the eighteenth-century assumed traditional marriage was between one man and one woman.

Mohler’s argument here reminds of a lecture I once gave at the old David Library of the American Revolution in Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania. I mentioned Thomas Jefferson’s view, articulated in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that Africans were inferior to white people. Indeed, Jefferson wrote that “blacks…are inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind” and could thus not integrate into white society. It is worth noting that Jefferson’s views of Africans were quite common in the eighteenth century. In fact, one might say, to use Mohler’s words, most of the “framers of our constitutional order simply took for granted” that Africans were inferior.

During the Q&A period following the lecture, a woman asked me if Jefferson, based on his views of Africans, would have voted for Barack Obama in 2008. (The tone of her question implied that she thought Jefferson would not have voted for Obama because of his race.) I think she was shocked when I answered: “I have no idea how Thomas Jefferson would have voted in 2008. It’s a question that is impossible to answer.” To try to answer her question would require that I reject a fundamental principal of historical thinking, namely change over time.

I am pretty sure Albert Mohler would have answered this question the same way that I answered it. Yet, he seems to know for sure how the founders would have responded to gay marriage if they were alive today.

More Mohler:

Even within our constitutional order, the establishment clause of the federal Bill of Rights—that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—was understood to apply to the national government only. Established churches continued well into the nineteenth century in some states. The America of the colonial and early republican eras understood morality to rest on a religious basis and authority—and that religion was some form of Protestant Christianity. With regard to moral issues and the foundational moral vision, the framework was unquestionably Christian and often explicitly biblical. Baptists, along with other Protestants, certainly did come to question and oppose the concept of an established church, but they never meant to disestablish Christian morality or the basically biblical definitions of civilizational order. They could not imagine any such thing. Regrettably, they did not acknowledge this, for they evidently foresaw no need to do so.

Here I want to address Mohler’s claim about “established churches” continuing well into the 19th century. He is partially correct. The Congregational establishment continued in Connecticut until 1808 and Massachusetts until 1833. Let me explore Mohler’s claim in several ways:

1. Of the thirteen original states, only Connecticut and Massachusetts had established churches into the 19th century. Mohler’s claim here is built upon the views of two states with longstanding Puritan roots.
2. If Mohler, a Baptist, lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts at the time of the founding, he and his fellow Baptists would not have complete religious freedom. They would be merely tolerated by the Congregational establishment. In fact, Jefferson’s famous 1802 “Letter to the Danbury Baptists” was actually an attempt to sympathize with a group of Connecticut Baptists who did not have complete religious freedom in the state. It is really odd to read a Baptist like Mohler making an argument for an established church. Meanwhile, in places like Virginia, which after the American Revolution did NOT have the kind of established church Mohler seems to like so much, Baptists were finally free to worship without government interference or religious taxes.
3. Once again, Mohler’s originalism has no regard for change over time. The 14th Amendment (1868) essentially said that states could no longer have laws that directly contradicted the United States Constitution. Specifically, the 13th Amendment (1865) made slavery illegal and the 14th Amendment essentially said that states now had to comply with it. In other words, a state could not legalize slavery again. In 1947, the Supreme Court applied the 14th Amendment to church and state issues in the Everson v. Board case. In essence, the court ruled that religious test oaths for office and established state churches were no longer constitutional. States must conform to Article VI of the Constitution (no religious test for office) and the First Amendment (no established church.) Mohler may not agree with the 1947 decision, but it happened.

More Mohler:

In one sense, how could they have foreseen the rise of a secular age, or even the emergence of a multi-religious American culture? At the time of the revolution, the population of the colonies was “80 percent British and 98 percent Protestant.” Or, As Mark David Hall explains, “In 1776, every colonist, with the exception of about two thousand Jews, identified himself or herself as a Christian. Approximately 98 percent of them were Protestants, and the remaining 2 percent were Roman Catholics.” Even for the rarely identified skeptics or those described as atheists, the controlling moral vision was still drawn from Christendom. Thus, the terms of their relative unbelief were settled within an essentially Christian moral vision. They could not imagine a moral regime based on secularist principles. They had never seen one.

Here Mohler does not give the founders credit for their foresight about religious diversity in America. For example, Richard Henry Lee, writing to James Madison in 1784 during the Virginia debates over religious freedom, believed that the government should not force people to practice religious faith, but he also favored a religious tax to support religion–all religions. (He eventually lost this fight to Madison, who wanted no religious taxes whatsoever.) Here is part of that letter:

“Refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals—and he must be a very inattentive observer in our Country, who does not see that avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion, for want of a legal obligation to contribute something to its support. The declaration of Rights, it seems to me, rather contends against forcing modes of faith and forms of worship, than against compelling contribution for the support of religion in general. I fully agree with the presbyterians, that true freedom embraces the Mahomitan and the Gentoo as well as the Christian religion. And upon this liberal ground I hope our Assembly will conduct themselves.” 

The United States might have been 98% Christian, but the founders were forward-looking and imagined a country with Muslims and Hindus. That sounds “multi-religious” to me.

In his Autobiography, Thomas Jefferson, in a discussion of Virginia’s 1779 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, wrote: “Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it should read, ‘a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Jefferson clearly envisioned a nation that would have included at least Jews, Muslims and Hindus.

And then there was Jefferson on the future of American Christianity. He may have been wrong about this, but he certainly envisioned a “secular” or at least an unorthodox (by Mohler’s standards of orthodoxy) “age.” Here is a taste of his 1822 letter to Benjamin Waterhouse:  “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free enquiry and belief, which has surrendered it’s creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of one only God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian.”

The whole letter is worth a read, but it is clear that Jefferson was thinking about a possible American future where orthodox Christianity was not part of the nation’s “moral vision.”

I think if one looked hard enough, they could find plenty of evidence to counter Mohler’s claim that the founders could not have foreseen the rise of a secular age, or even the emergence of a multi-religious American culture. The views of the founders were a lot more diverse and complex than Mohler makes them out to be. When it came to religion, the founders rarely spoke in one voice.

More Mohler:

Some of this lack of imagination shows up in the debate over the Constitution, sometimes with specific reference to the religion clauses. The fact that the Constitution makes no acknowledgement of any transcendent order or theistic commitment did not pass without notice or objection. Mark David Hall reminds us that William Williams of Connecticut (who signed the Declaration and served on his state’s ratification convention) “believed that it was a mistake not to overtly acknowledge the Deity in the nation’s fundamental law.” The proposed amendment offered by Williams would have stipulated the unity of the American people “in a firm belief of the being and perfections of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the world, in His providence and the authority of his laws. . . .” Nevertheless, the pressing and urgent need for ratification prevented such proposed amendments from receiving real consideration.

Two responses to this:

1. Mohler seems to imply that if there was more time, William Williams’s amendment would have passed. There is no evidence to suggest this. The fact that Williams’s amendment was rejected is the real story here.
2. Williams’s opposition to the lack of a reference to God in the Constitution meant that, at least on this issue, he was closer to the Anti-Federalists (the opponents of the Constitution) than the Federalists (the supporters of the Constitution). One could argue that if Mohler held the views expressed in his essay in 1787, he would have opposed the United States Constitution.

Here’s more from Mohler:

My point is that the framers of the Constitution understood their own document—and our national charter—to rest on an explicitly theistic foundation and they further understood that theistic foundation to be defined in essentially Christian terms. John Adams argued that the bedrock foundation of the American order was “religion and morality alone” sometimes expressed as “religion and virtue.” Charles Carroll said that those who would deny a theological structure to the founding of the nation “are undermining the solid Foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of a free government.”

Theistic, maybe. But Mohler’s claim that the framers built the United States on “essentially Christian terms” suggests that all the founders believed Christianity was the only source of morality or national virtue. I address this issue in two of my books: The Way of Improvement Leads Home (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2012). Again, the founding was much more complex than Mohler makes it out to be, but those like Mohler who are in search of a usable past usually do not do complexity very well.

The notion of a “godless constitution” and a secularist vision of the American order are misrepresentations of American history. Those who argue for such a secularist vision have to deny the actual words used by the framers and the even more basic fact that the moral order that gave birth to the American experiment in self-government rested on a Christian foundation.

We historians need to see evidence–clear evidence–that the founders were trying to create a distinctly Christian state. Where in the records of the Constitution does it say that they were creating a nation that privileged Christianity? Mohler is certainly free to argue that America in the year of our Lord 2024 should uphold or privilege Christian principles (for Mohler, this usually means abortion and sexual ethics, not poor relief, the environment, or social justice), but he should probably be more careful when he tries to use the American past to justify this view.

Here’s more:

Put bluntly, I do not want the government of the United States of America to establish a church or to take on any liturgical function, but I most certainly do want to see the federal government define human life in terms consistent with historic biblical theism and to define marriage (according to the limited jurisdiction of federal policy) as exclusively the union of one man and one woman. I do want to see boys kept off of girls’ athletic teams and I want our government to be able properly to distinguish male and female. That hardly seems too much to ask.

Furthermore, it cannot be argued with a straight face or any honest conscience that the founders of this nation and the framers of our Constitution foresaw—much less intended—to offer constitutional protection to the confusion and corruption we now see all around us.

I will argue that no secular or non-theistic foundation will prove substantial enough to sustain the necessary moral order. That sad but inevitable reality is evident all around us, but it is particularly evident in the current reign of revisionist historiographies and leftist ideologies, especially within the ramparts of academe and the halls of elite law schools.

Let me say it again: Mohler is free to make these arguments. But don’t invoke a cherry-picked view of American history to do it. I am saying this with a straight face.

Mohler’s piece is a cautionary tale for those who try to use American history to advance political agendas. It is a common problem on both the left and the right.