Church & State 250: Faith, Empire, and the American Revolution

Was the American Revolution really a fight for religious freedom? 

Katherine Carté, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University and author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, helps separate the national myth from the historical record. Carté explains that the Revolution was not one simple story. It was both a break from British rule and the messy process of building a new United States. Religion mattered deeply, but not always in the way Americans assume. The conflict was not mainly Protestants fighting Britain for religious liberty. It was a political struggle over sovereignty, power, empire, and who had the right to rule. 

Carté shows how British imperial Protestantism connected Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, missionaries, donors, and colonial institutions before the war disrupted that order. The conversation also explores religious establishments, loyalists, Catholics, Jews, religious tests, secular citizenship, and why “Was America founded as a Christian nation?” is too narrow a question.

Guest Bio
Katherine Carté is Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where she studies early American history, the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the Age of Revolutions, early modern religion, and digital humanities. She is the author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and UNC Press, and Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Her work helps explain how British imperial Protestantism shaped colonial life, how the American Revolution disrupted that religious and political order, and why the founding era cannot be reduced to simple claims about America being either Christian or secular.

Book Mentioned
Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History by Katherine Carté
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781469662640

Relevant Links & Resources
Katherine Carté Faculty Profile
URL: https://people.smu.edu/kengel/

Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091

Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I think it's been really interesting since we're at such a divided political moment in the United States to think about that moment. And as a scholar of religion, I'm often asked about the ways that religious unity mattered then. To what extent were the colonists united or divided by religion, those kinds of questions that we've talked about today. And I think what I take from this moment of the 250th is that the people who created the United States worked really hard and made a lot of compromises and addressed, picked the issues that were threatening to their unity and worked hard to build through them. And that includes the differences they had over religion. But religion did not unify them. I don't think religion is going to unify us today. I don't think we're going to find some sort of way through which all of our divisions are going to dissolve, making it easy for us to solve our political problems. I think solving our political problems is going to be really hard. And we're going to have to do it through and thinking about those things that are dividing us, which I think is what they did in the founding.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Hey, welcome back to Church and State 250 plus years of wait, let me start again. Welcome back to Church of State 250, where we look at 250 plus years of faith in America. Throughout this series, we've been tracing how religion shaped American life long before there was a United States. And today we turn to the American Revolution. So most of us learned about the revolution as a story about taxes, representation, King George, what have you. But there's actually another layer to that entire story, one that a lot of people don't know about, and that's religion. And that's why we've asked for Professor Catherine Carte to come back on the show to help us kind of put together the pieces and better understand what is that connection of religion to the American Revolution. So Catherine Carte is an American, or she is an American, but she's also an associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, where she studies religion, politics, and the 18th century Atlantic world. She's the author of Religion and the American Revolution and Imperial History, which examines how Protestant Christianity helped shape the British Empire and how the American Revolution disrupted that religious and political order. So welcome back to the show, Catherine.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back with you folks.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Yeah, so I want to just kind of start off by doing a little bit of level setting for those that, you know, may have had quite a few decades between when their last history class was. So my my kids currently are in middle school, they're learning about a bunch of history and they're asking me questions as if I know things. And one of the questions they asked me recently, they were studying about the American Revolution, and I'm like, I don't know. Let me go ask Google. So as a professor, like, help help us understand like what was is the American Revolution. And then once you're kind of done explaining that, you know, maybe kind of layer on a 30,000-foot view of like why we should also take into consideration religion, kind of in the telling of the history.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

Those are such good questions. And I'm especially impressed that you asked what the American Revolution is, because that is actually the best place to start this conversation. And it the reason is that it's actually two answers, right? So the American Revolution is the political process and war by which 13 of Britain's many colonies, so only a portion of their colonies, but 13 of their colonies united to reject colonial rule and to become an independent country. The second thing that the American Revolution is, is the building of the United States. And those are actually, I mean, of course they're connected. You can't build a United States if you don't break up from Britain, but they're actually two different processes. So there's the process of deciding that clone that British rule was bad, of coming together and of fighting the war. And then kind of second, there's this other process of deciding what the United States should look like building a new nation.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Yeah, I that I love that description actually, because again, most of us think about we number one, we don't think about what the actual like Revolutionary War was. We just think, oh, you know, seven 1776, oh, that's when, you know, the country started. Well, yeah, that's when the declaration was signed. And yet we didn't have a constitution we have until now, until like the 1780s, and then most states had some kind of religious, you know, establishment within them, and it was only the constitution that didn't, and then that got de-established over time. And the more we've gotten into this, the more we've realized, number one, how much religion has shaped history in general, but uh especially America. I mean, you cannot separate Christianity and Christian American history from the history of America as a whole. And it's we've so we've seen that religion is extremely important. And the second thing that we've seen is that it's extremely misunderstood exactly what it did at different times. And especially right at the founding. And and you're an expert in this, and so I'm I'm very, very curious because right now there is a lot that's being propagated, being maybe preached, being disseminated about Christianity and its role in the founding of this country, its role in the Revolutionary War, its role uh in that time. And uh c could before we even get there, because everyone wants to know, was this a Christian nation? And we've been talking about this all the time, and but but what I really want to understand is like the colonial uh times that uh gave birth to this nation, uh what was religion like at that time, and especially like what like Americans here, right, where they were really brit British people, right? I mean, and so what was the British religious context? What can we h help us really sort out what was the context, even coming into the revolution, of religion in America? I hope the question makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 6:34

It does. It totally does. And I want to start by saying that something that's a little challenging that we have to do when we look at religion in the past is we have to remember that it is very, very difficult, basically impossible to figure out how religious people were in the past. In other words, to compare if people in the past were more or less religious than they are now, or if one group of people was more or less religious than another group of people, unless they wrote down very specific things about it. It's very difficult to tell. So, my answer to your question about what colonial religion looked like and what British religious look religion looked like is a pretty structural answer. And within that structural answer, we can kind of start to see some of the differences between then and now. So, in most of the British Empire, certainly in all of Great Britain, um, in the what becomes the United Kingdom, including Ireland, the in those, in those places, there was an established religion, which means that the government believed it was important for everyone in this in the area to be under the same religious authority and to be required to and have access to public worship. Public worship is very, very important to them. And it it needed to all be the same religion. And the reason for that was that they wanted everyone to have the same sort of moral grounding, and because they worried that religious differences could be challenging for the state. Certainly in the British Empire, they had a lot of experience with religious wars. They had been involved in religious wars overseas against in Europe against Catholics. And so they they wanted to have one united religion. And then a further question is how much do you tolerate disagreement within that? But in theory, at least it's one united religion. And that was true for the empire, but it was true in each different place. So each colony had a religious establishment with a couple little exceptions, but those establishments were actually of different churches. So there is the Church of England in England, there's the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian in Scotland, and then there are what we th what now we would call congregational, but in those days were called Puritan churches in New England. And the Church of England was in almost all of the other colonies. So you have a set of different Protestant churches really organizing religion and performing state functions all across the British Empire. And then you add a further layer to it, which is that the British believed that being Protestant, by which they meant both not being Catholic and also tolerating those different kinds of Protestants together, made them sort of the best country, right? Or the best empire. And so being Protestant was a political identity. That's really strange for people here to hear today because Protestant isn't even a word we use much anymore, right? It it's a category of churches, right? So we don't think of it as being anything in specific. You'd be, you know, Methodist or Baptist. Being Protestant meant politically not being Catholic. And they were invested in that too. So that let them use religion in politics in a way that's kind of a few steps away from what we might think of in terms of questions of salvation or how often you go to church or things like that. It was more about fighting the Catholics and making sure the empire was righteous. So, long story short, established religion everywhere, but there were different religions established, different Protestant religions established, and they agreed about being part of a Protestant empire.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

So, so they didn't really sorry, I know Will, you got, but they didn't really like have they when they're fighting with each other about like religious freedom, did they have a sense of any kind of religious freedom that we think about today? Or is it like sorry, I just go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

Here, this is key. What you just said is so what we believe as Americans as a myth, but it's a myth. As they were fighting each other for religious freedom, they did not fight for religious freedom. They thought Americans thought that their fight was righteous, right? That that providentially God was on their side. But the American Revolution, if we go back to that part of the American Revolution that's breaking up with Britain, the reasons to fight against Britain had to do with the British violating the rights of Americans and the violating principles of sovereignty. The British did not impose a religious system on the colonies. So what we do as Americans, part of our myth is that you'll hear, you'll hear especially students, but you know, I think I I hear this from congregations I talk to also, that we came to this country to fight for religious freedom and then we fought against the British, right? So that smushes together about 200 or about 150 years of of colonial history. It is true that some of the founders of British colonies came because they were resisting religious persecution at home. And that's mostly in the early 17th century. There are also some who come to the colonies from, especially from German countries, who are resisting persecution there. But they're not fighting the British. They actually, the British actually protect their freedoms. And then the American Revolution happens, and it's really a revolution about power and sovereignty, symbolized by taxation, right? The tax we say it's about taxation, but it's not really about taxation. It's a it's about who has the right to make decisions over you, right? That's not a religious question. They they were Presbyterians fighting against Presbyterians and Anglicans fighting over Anglicans. They were not fighting over the nature of baptism. They were not fighting over whether or not there should be bishops, although they worried about that a little bit. They were fighting over power, right? And then as they're building the country, they worry a lot about religious freedom, but they didn't fight over it.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

I'd imagine that there were probably a lot of loyalists that also would not have supported the revolution. I know like when we talk to John Fiat or Warren Throckmorton, you know, especially when we talk about the Constitution, you know, they would talk about the anti-federalists, right? That would that would be very, very upset about what it is that that you know these these folks are doing in a smoke-filled room kind of thing. So so like help help us kind of understand, like, you know, so I was talking to Josh be before we were recording, just trying to conceptualize and put put sort of you know your work in a modern context, thinking like, okay, what if assemblies of God, you know, like came and visited another country, and it's like you have your identity, you you have more of an identity of the religious group you came there with than you probably do any sort of nationalist pride. And so you're gonna take that, you know, and spread the gospel or whatever. So I I'd love just for you to kind of help us understand like what what what were the religious views of the American Revolution, the Constitution, whatever, like they they weren't all the same. I'm assuming there was probably some dissent. And then did any of that dissent kind of break down on theological, you know, denominational lines or anything?

SPEAKER_02 13:50

Well, so the the short answer is that basically every religious community, including ones like the Quakers who have teachings about war, divide over the American Revolution because it's not really a war over religion. So within that, there are some general trends. In some areas, Anglicans, members of the Church of England, are much more intensely allied to being loyalists, to being a part of the British Empire than they are to the rebellion. And that and they have religious reasons for that. And one of them is that there is that loyalty and obedience to power is kind of core part of core part of Protestant teaching, right? It's that's that's in there. And they they hold on to those teachings in particular. And the Anglican liturgy and the or oaths that the clergy take include oaths to the to the king. So abjuring an oath is a big deal. And so that so we see some trends in that direction. Of course, in the South, where there are a lot of Anglicans, though that's there, that's not a disproportionately loyalist area. So you can't say the congregations follow that. I think what you're really pointing to is something that that you raised in one of your initial questions, you know, sort of the the urge is to say, what did religion do, right, at this at this era? And I think the best thing is to remember that for people then, as for people now, religion is going to appear in their lives in very different ways. And so for some people, they made their political choices very consciously through a religious lens, and they talked about it through a religious lens. We talk a lot about those people. But then there are also people for whom you think about the example you you talk about migrating, people say German Catholics in Pennsylvania tended to be disproportionately loyalist. They probably had there are Hessian soldiers there who are also who are also Catholics, so that's that's one aspect. It also it's a it's a more conservative community at that particular moment. The Catholics in Maryland, for in in contrast, they were mostly English Catholics. And the English Catholics were very much a part of sort of English political thought, and they side pretty heavily on the side of the Americans. So being Catholic doesn't pull them together. They have those are different ethnic communities, they have different moments of migration, different histories, different levels of power, different experiences. So what's determining things is not theology.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

So when we're thinking about this, the the almost the scaffolding, right? The imperial scaffolding, you call it, of like the Protestant Protestant sects, the Protestant religions. Well you talk about local establishments, you talk about transatlantic networks, and I just I I kind of want to get my head around how was Protestantism used in these, like in the local settings and then in these like wider networks? Like how did it how did it support the empire, I guess? Because I guess that's a that's the real question. Like if it's not theology and its power, then how exactly did Protestantism as a religious force, and I guess maybe an organizational force support imperial aims and goals in this time?

SPEAKER_02 17:21

Well, that's so one of the parallels that we might be more familiar with today would be parachurch organizations or missionary organizations that often pull people from lots of denominations. So in the British Empire, there were establishments in all these places, like I said, and there's only certain establishments from certain Protestant denominations, right? Not anybody can be an establishment. There's just a f, there's just really three of them. And but then you have a fair amount of theological and ethnic diversity within those systems. And those people build a lot of networks and communities, and a big part of that is through outreach work and missionary work. So it often starts in Britain, and you'll have, you know, that's these laundry lists of acronyms, the Society for the Propagation of Gospel in Foreign Parts, the New England Society, the, you know, there's a the associates of Dr. Bray, there's a ton of them. But what happens in these, in these different communities is that you have people who are dedicated to religious causes, who want to Christianize enslave people, or Christianize people who just don't have access to public worship because there aren't enough ministers in the colonies, something like that. They raise money and they create publications and they they work together, right? And they also migrate around. And when they migrate around, they have to build connections in maybe a different establishment. So Presbyterians are the establishment in in Scotland, and Presbyterians are absolutely in favor of establishment, right? But they are dissenters in England, right? They're outside of the outside of the church in England. And then in in a place like Virginia, it's actually the Presbyterians who tend to be part of revival movements, and they're kind of struggling a little bit with the Church of England down there. But because the Presbyterian Church in Scotland and the Presbyteri and the Church of England in England have to get along, there are boundaries on how much they can persecute each other in Virginia, right? It gets it gets complicated triangulating it, but you have to remember that the people that communities were choosing to work with in each of these places forced them to work across denominational and theological boundaries as long as they were Protestants. They could, they could, you know, Catholics are are almost always legally disadvantaged, they lack civil rights, they lack access to public worship. But if you were what was considered a loyal Protestant, you could be a part of these societies. And it puts kind of breaks on the first of all, it makes them use the word Protestant, and I think that's important. It's a familiar word to them in a way, it isn't a familiar word to us. But it also puts some brakes on how much they're going to run up conflict. So if your donor base are members of the Church of England in London, even if you're angry at local members of the Church of England, you're not going to write horrible things about the Church of England because it's going to get back to your donor base. And it's literally that, right? We should think about it as donor constituencies, but also fellow travelers. If you, if you want to send a missionary to a particular place and that place has a lot of missionaries who are of a different Protestant denomination, that's good enough, right? So we'll work with them. But that means that you're saying their form of Protestantism is as good as yours, right? All of that is kind of de-emphasizing, we're familiar with this, right? We're familiar in the United States with, you know, well, the I was a Baptist, but now the Methodists are a little bit closer and they have a better daycare, right? We're familiar with that kind of logic. It's that kind of cooperation with a lot of help from the state.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

How would how would that period in time have viewed like pluralism? Like if when I think of pluralism today in America, I think of, you know, hey, you know, we all have different religions, we kind of live in harmony with one another, or at least we try. And then the biggest religion, you know, will try to, you know, gain as much power as they can. So so like like in that day, is it is is is that does that does that definition today still apply like back then?

SPEAKER_02 21:22

I I think, yeah, that that that pretty much applies. I think what's really what's interesting about this era is that, and so exciting about sort of the second part of the American Revolution, which is founding the United States, right? So in the in the colonial period, I think what you just described makes a lot of sense. And but there are some guardrails on that system, especially things like you can't, you know, there are no the disabilities on Catholics and things like that, right? So there's some there's some government limits around what's going on there. But there are also some differences of opinion about how best to make that system work. In England, they believed that the the Church of England and the bishop system. Protected the rights of dissenters because it protected, it would police religious disturbances, police true outsiders, so that, and by that I mean, you know, a crazy cult that's, you know, burning Bibles in the street, right? That's a civil crime. And the, and, but then the bishops and the people within the system are going to protect, you know, the Presbyterians who just happen to not be part of the established church here, or the French Huguenots who have come in who, you know, they're not a part of the Church of England, but they haven't done anything wrong. They've just migrated, right? So they believed that that church establishment actually protected religious liberty. What happens in the colonies, and then in the or in the United States after after the revolution, is that it's impossible to create that kind of church structure. They're very worried, the framers are very worried about, you know, there's all of these different establishments and different states and different kinds of systems. They're worried about trying to pick between them. And so they kind of back up from religion and they protect it. They talk about rights of conscience, but they don't define it and they don't create an institution that's capable of defining it. That really changes what it means to have religious freedom, right? And this is where we see people talking about moving from being tolerated, like there's somebody in control who's allowing you to be there. That's toleration, that's what they had in Great Britain, moving to a system where you have a right to be there because you're a citizen. And your citizenship is not based in your religion. It's the creation of secular citizenship, which is a huge change from what had existed before in the early modern era. You are not a citizen of the United States by virtue of being a Protestant.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

So this is also fascinating, by the way. It's like I there's so many threads that I want to pull on when I talk, and I'm like, oh my gosh, but you know, we do have something we need to accomplish. And so here's here's how I want to frame this question, right? So we have the colonies very diverse, I mean, not but Protestant, but there's diversity within it. Obviously, what you're saying is that I mean, there are obviously there are Catholics in Maryland and and and other places in the colonies. Um, but you're describing some of this religious diversity that we don't tend to think about. And yet there was probably dominant religions, right, leading up into the war. But I I really want to think about the impact of the war, the impact of the Revolutionary War on this, because if we're thinking about how these religious communities really thought through and processed taking sides, right? Whose side do we take? Do we take the British sides or do we take the colonial sides? If I take the British side, I might still have family back in Britain, or I might have, you know, or or I just I think it's the right thing to do. I still feel like I'm a British, I'm a subject of the British Empire. The king is my king, right? Uh, the Church of England, uh any number of things right there. How did people essentially what I'm trying to get to is how did they navigate this uh, I'm sure, extremely um arduous process and d uh yeah, dangerous process almost of trying to figure out how how do we pick loyalties here?

SPEAKER_02 25:25

It it was a dangerous process. And I think that's really, really essential to remember. So we used to say that Americans were divided kind of a third, a third, a third, a third for, a third, a third against, a third in the middle. Those numbers have shifted over the years, and we're really thinking about it in a in a different way. So now we might say more like a fifth or even a sixth of Americans were ideologically committed on either side, but that leaves the vast majority of Americans somewhere in the middle. And what we have to remember is they don't just choose once which side to support. They have to choose over and over and over again for eight years. And the circumstances of those choices change. And religion for some people is gonna be a key factor there. For a lot of people, it's gonna be much more practical. Where am I safe? Where are my where is my community aligned? Who has power in this certain circumstance, right? So I've been working on Savannah, Georgia recently, and and the starvation in all of the occup all of so all of the major cities were occupied at some point during the revolution. And in the cities where there was occupation because of the armies, because of the disruptions of war, a lot of starvation, right? How do you decide in a moment of starvation which side you're gonna support? But personally, and I say this as a as a member of a faith community, I'm working which with a with whichever side is gonna feed my children, right? For me, that's that is not a moment of theological principle, or or or maybe my theology there is my ultimate duty to feed my children, right? Um then things, so for the majority of Americans, we need to think of the war years as arduous and difficult and practical. It means kind of backing up from the idea that there was like one moment of choice, and someone was either a loyalist or a patriot, and then that carried through. That is certainly true for some individuals, and some people are very clearly in one camp or the other. It really makes one of the key questions, it sort of highlights the importance of the Congress's and Washington's capacity to stay in the field as long as they did and sort of tip the tide towards American victory, so that over time, more and more people have reason to support the United States. But I would suspect that if you asked people in 1783, white right when the war ended, before the Constitution, there's still a lot of social unrest, how do you feel about this new government? That some of them, or actually probably even most of them, would have said, well, this was better before, but this is better now, but you know, this happened, or I changed this was the breaking point for me, you know, it would be different for each each community and each place. And those discussions are not sort of abstract theological discussions. What because even the people who had the most theological or or ideological positions would have seen those positions challenged and and for some of them changed. Bottom line, occupying armies are terrible advertisements for themselves. And the the British made no friends, right? I mean, Oh, it doesn't, I mean that that story's not that's not a religious story. That's that's just truth, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:44

Yeah. I I I I'm curious about the the theology. And I I I I know you're not a the theologian, so I'm not gonna ask you a deep, like, you know, babington quadrilateral question, which I don't even know what that question means, but but like I can do that like quadrilateral, but I don't know that I would call it theology. I I learned like one or two fancy religious words from Josh, and then I just use them like to pretend that I'm a lot smarter than I really am. So my problem is I tell people that I don't know what it means, so then I sort of like, how do I do it to myself? Anyways, my question is, you know, you know, thinking about just like the theology of the folks and what they believe and what they don't believe, you you alluded a little bit to it when you talk about, hey, I'm gonna support whoever's gonna let me feed my kids. And that's not necessarily a theological, you know, response, but if if it if it does marry itself to one theology, like like one could look back and say, yeah, there's a bunch of people that all of a sudden became Methodists or whatever, you know? And and I think we see a lot of that even today. Like we see motivated reasoning doing a number on people to sort of justify things that they probably wouldn't normally be okay with. I mean, you know, from 22-foot golden statues to, you know, belief that, you know, blacks were descended from from ham, right? And and I and I'd love to get your thoughts on like, you know, what what sort of like, you know, belief shifts existed if there were any, you know, and maybe you can sort of elaborate on the kind of the tensions people had to sort of like face, you know, trying to decide like, am I gonna, you know, hitch my wagon to that horse or or that horse?

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Well, so uh I first I want to give a shout-out to a great historian named James Byrd, who you guys may have may have talked to, who wrote a great book called Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, where he talks about the he he worked through just uh so many sermons that were were both printed and just in manuscript form during the era and and really worked through what how did revolutionary Americans use the Bible. And okay, so we're talking when we're saying that, we're talking about people who were scripturally engaged, right? And so we we have to remember there were a lot of people who weren't. But for those people who were, the they deal with a series of questions. One question is when is it right to protest your legitimate ruler, right? W under what terms? And there's a lot of biblical reasoning that goes into that. What is what is a just prince? Is are the things that the the king of England is doing before the revolution worthy of real protest or of revolt, right? And they argue that. They argue it on on both sides. So you have loyalists saying, absolutely not. This is this is not a, you know, John Wesley in in in Britain argues this, right? That this is this is not, these issues don't rise to that level. And then you have other people in the colonies, particularly in New England, saying, yes, they do rise to this level. And then there's the question of just war. Once it turns into military force, the Americans have a big asset on their side that the British, regardless of who shot the shot around her around the world, the British can easily be portrayed as the aggressors at Lexington and Concord. And so, so the Americans can then say these occupying troops are are shooting us and they can go back to the Boston Massacre and they can, you know, pull that kind of narrative out. And so the just war arguments work pretty well for the Americans in that period. For the British, just war arguments become very easy once the Americans declare independence, because then they're clearly in a state of rebellion, and that allows that justifies the fighting. So they they uh it gets it gets pulled into those kinds of religion gets pulled into those kinds of discussions, and you can really say that for Americans who are inclined to think that way, you know, scripture becomes an essential way to understand the righteousness of what they're doing and to for people to verify for themselves and for each other that they're being careful and thoughtful in the choices that they're making, that it's not fanaticism or rash, right? Even the revolutionaries are concerned both about how they're perceived and also about presumably being too rash, right? They they were largely state-building types, right? They're they're not anarchists. And so they're they're working towards that kind of thing. And and and I think scripture is one of the vocabularies. We also see them using Enlightenment thought and other, I mean, it's not the only vocabulary, but scripture is absolutely one of the vocabularies they use to bring themselves around to acts of revolution, violent revolution.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

That is fascinating because to have all of that like scaffolding that's underpinning, supporting this revolution, this almost this religious justification, right? They they wouldn't have been able to do it if they hadn't been able to justify it, right? Or or at least print present it in some way. And just correct me if I'm wrong, but to present it in some way that God was, you know, either okay with this or behind this, whatever it was. They had to, it w it was part of their way of thinking, their cognitive furniture, I guess, so to speak, or context to try to they had to bring in that biblical justification and yet moving then to the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence and seeing some of the lack of that. And and even just like in some of my exchanges I've had online, people challenging me on, you know, the role of Scripture and how it influenced the this nation and influenced the Constitution. And of course, the Constitution doesn't mention God. The only thing it talks about, you know, religion is basically give granting freedom, constricting the government and and and outright banning any test, right, of faith. And so it's like it's a godless constitution, in other words, and yet it wasn't it certainly wasn't a godless people. And so I guess like how do we work through that tension? I guess that's the whole point of what we're talking about here, and part is working through the tension there. And I do have a question about religious liberty, but I'll stop there. I'd like I'd just love to get your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

I think the for me, what I think about as an answer to this question is that religion is incredibly powerful. Religion, I think of religion as where people park what's most important to them. And the potential of religion to divide the colonists or divide the states from one another was really, really powerful. John Adams talks about how wonderful it is to get 13 clocks to strike together at the same time. He says that in in the early 19th century. In 1776, right before the Declaration of Independence, he uses the same metaphor of how hard it is to get 13 clocks to strike together. And his next sentence is, as in a letter to a friend, his next sentence is, I hope the Congress does nothing with religion other than say their own prayers and go to church on days of fast and thanksgiving and leaves everything else to the states. So at the national level, the national level is new, right? There had been no nation over these 13 states before. The national level, the the idea that religion could drive them apart would made it too dangerous to touch. So it's for some people, there is very much an embrace of secular citizenship, and yes, we should have a have a secular constitution. But for religious people, it is also very, very, very important that religion not become an issue that divides. In the same way, we're so used to talking about this for slavery, right? That the constitution could not touch slavery. The word slavery isn't in the constitution. It's very easy to make the argument that the constitution is a s is a pro-slavery document. It was too dangerous to touch. They knew, and and you know, South Carolina explicitly says there will be no nation if you don't protect slavery, right? So I we don't have that kind of explicit statement for religion, but I think we can make the same kind of assumption. Religion was really important, and it was better left to the states. So, but keep in mind the Constitution does not disestablish religion at the state level. The First Amendment does not apply to the states, even though you know Mormons ask for it explicitly ask for federal religious protection and don't get it, right? Religion is a disestablishment does not apply to the states until after the 14th Amendment. But establishments are left at the state level.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

That is like that that is so just unknown among so many people, right? That I know that that essentially like the complexity of that, like it was the 14th Amendment that really brought that, you know, that you couldn't essentially have this establishment that would now at the state level, at least that's what I'm hearing you say.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it was dead letter by that point. Massachusetts is the last state to this establishment and they do it. Yeah, yeah. So it's it it wasn't it no establishments were taken apart by that move. But the Supreme Court did decline to protect people, did decline to apply the the First Amendment to the states, to state establishments before that.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Aaron Ross Powell, yes, yes, yes. I remember when when essentially they didn't allow for polygamy, right? They they they didn't allow maybe we don't need to get into all that. Yeah. I don't want to get us on a trail. Yeah. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

It's a pr it's a religious persecution case, so it's not about pre-polygamy. The m the Mormons ask for protection for persecution and and by I think it's from Ohio. And and the Supreme Court says, no, we're not. That's that's a state matter.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

And then oh, that's amazing. So maybe we'll have to talk about that another time. But but but it does make me think about this idea that we don't like, do we see religious liberty and freedom the same way as they did in the revolution? And obviously I think there are some differences here, even from the context of our conversation. But I would just love for you to just describe that a little bit for us, right? Because we get religious liberty, the the the free exercise clause, the establishment clause, essentially granting this free liberty or this religious freedom on a federal level, and yet to even to what you said, it wasn't made a reality, or it was made a reality gradually at the state level. And I guess what does that say about what they thought about what religious freedom was compared to what we think about religious freedom today? Could you kind of help us understand how people in the revolution conceptualize that and how that compares to what we do today?

SPEAKER_02 39:46

So I think we've all disagreed about what religious freedom allows for a really long time. And that they also would have disagreed with one another about some of that. It's it on the one hand, states pretty easily granted incorporated statements of religious freedom or religious liberty into their constitution. So religious free exercise, what we would what we think of as free exercise comes to people fairly easily. Although what they mean by that is really access to to worship, right? They they mean a fairly limited kind of thing. And we know that you just referenced polygamy, right? We know throughout all of American history have we have argued about what kind of rights you can claim by virtue of free exercise, right? So in that, in that in that era, they're thinking really about not being banned from a particular religious practice. So don't pass a law that says you can't go to a Catholic Mass, or don't pass a law that says you can't own a ritual object that's essential to a different tradition, something like that. Laws targeting people like that. That part's fairly easy. It's the establishment part of things that's really, really hard. And when we say religious freedom, we're often conflating free exercise, like, oh, sure, you can go ahead and practice your religion how you want to practice it. And establishment, what it what should the actual relationship between church institutions and church power and church wealth be with state institutions and state power and state wealth? That's a really thorny different era, a different question. And in the founding era, I think you would have had a huge amount of disagreement about not just the best way to accomplish to sort of protect and practice religion in an establishment sense, but also how do you achieve basic state functions in the absence of church establishments? Who keeps track of vital statistics? Who who provides education? How do you know that a teacher is qualified? Like all those kinds of questions. And those are questions that Americans take a very long time to work out. So do they believe in in religious freedom? Mostly I would say they agreed on what we largely agree about, which is if you want to worship your God more or less in private, in a way that speaks to you, go have fun, right? It it what's Jefferson's line, it doesn't trick my pocket or or break my leg, right? I think that would also have been fairly accepted then. Some people would have still worried that Catholics would be dangerous to the state, but through the period of the revolution, they stopped worrying about that kind of thing. They're opening up Catholics and Jews can have secular citizenship. Then and now, people really disagree about the role of religion in education, the role of religion in public education, the role of public, you know, charity if if we're doing poor relief, who's responsible for that? Who gets money for that? Who gets tax money for that? Should churches be tax exempt? When should they lose those things? Those they argue about those questions too.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

You know, we're we're almost at time, and I and I I wanted to actually ask this question earlier, so I'm I'm gonna kind of r rewind the interview just a little bit to ask you about the effect of religion kind of within the individual colonies, because when when the individual colonies decided to disestablish or get rid of their religious tests, like their religious tests were kind of all over the map, right? Like one was like a Trinitarian, another is like, okay, you disbelieve God or you disbelieve Jesus, whatever. But but I'd love for you just to kind of help help us understand how did the different rel religions kind of affect, you know, religiosity within within the colonies.

SPEAKER_02 43:28

So religious tests for office are the are so there's we when we talk about about civil rights, we're talking about two different things, right? There's your right to fully participate in the state as a citizen and your right to lead. And those two things are not necessarily the same thing, right? We have different qualifications for being a president than for voting, right? So same thing is true then. So that one of the places we see states really kind of working through what religious freedom means and who's acceptable is they have to work through these. Statements of who can be in a position of leadership, right? So the Constitution famously says there will be no test for federal office. That's really important because a hundred years before in the British Empire, almost exactly a hundred years before, they oust a Catholic prince because a Catholic prince cannot be head of a Protestant people. That's the the a papist can't, you know, the that's the phrase they use, right? So that remove towards getting rid of religious tests at the federal level is really important. At the state level, what we see is we can kind of see them brainstorming. What's what do we really mean by this? What do we really mean by we want a virtuous person in office? What ensures that a person is going to be a good leader? Do they have to be a Protestant? Well, if they have to be a Protestant, you're going to have to say they have to be a Protestant. And sometimes they, sometimes they work with language like that. Can they be Protestants and Cat or Catholic, right? So a sort of broader sense of Christian. Well, then they might say, affirm the divinity of two of both halves of the amount of scripture. What they're doing that there is they're saying no Jews, right? And that the Jews are, there are, there's about one-tenth of one percent of Americans at that time were Jews, but they they're the they they are there, and they are so they're a non-t non-hypothetical population. Whereas, as far as they knew, we know there were enslaved Muslims, but as far as the political class was concerned, Muslims were a hypothetical outside group, right? So if you go, if you went farther than that, you you could find language that would include Jews but might include exclude Muslims. Or sometimes they would go look for, they they talk about a future state of rewards and punishments. So that's a more theological way of saying we need to make sure the person has some sort of of higher stakes than their own personal gain. They must, they have to know that somebody at some point is going to judge their actions. Because if we're going to give them this much power, they have to, they have to have that. Otherwise, there's no guarantee on their on their virtue. Over time, those tests for religious office fall away because they're impractical. And they're impractical not just because you're talking about greater religious diversity, they're really impractical because it becomes very clear that a person who lies can get through those tests. You know, having those tests is not a guarantee for virtue, right? It's very easy. We had liars back then too. Oh my god, isn't it amazing? Let me introduce you to Benedict Arnold. Yeah, who by the way claimed he was a very good Protestant. So the yeah, so those tests become not the way that we ensure virtue in our leaders. We find other ways. We have so much anxiety about having a virtuous citizenry and having virtuous leaders, and those religious tests are not adequate to the task. And so they they we have to move that to a different part of the culture.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. That, you know, the logic of it is really straightforward. You know, people can lie, and so they can just lie about being a Christian. All right. So that has to be, or whatever it is. Like it, so it it it it's like, oh yeah, well, that makes sense once you say it. And yet, of course, their logic of wanting someone with a higher standard, you know, that makes sense too, especially within their context. Like, how do we restrict tyranny? And yet again, did that really restrict tyranny?

SPEAKER_02 47:25

Well, and and both in both Britain and in America at that time, there's some some both sort of legal and theological or or political places where people make exactly that argument, that those tests are only keeping out people who are ethical enough to be honest in those tests. So would you rather have an ethical person you've excluded or an unethical person who you haven't, right? Like so it's it and that those arguments are being made at the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

That that's that's really awesome. Because I'm like, dude, that is exactly what I would say. Anyway. So I want to think about just for a moment, like when we think about the idea of Christian nation, we've been doing that this whole time, but more specifically, like can you help us like even kind of bring it together for why this question of whether or not America was founded as a Christian nation, like why is it even the right question, I guess? And why is it too narrow of a question when we're looking at it? Can you help us understand why that's an inadequate question, just to simply ask, was this nation founded as a Christian nation?

SPEAKER_02 48:33

So I think there are a ton of answers to that question, but the one I'm I'm liking at the moment is that we need to think of the nation as a new thing coming out of the late 18th century age of revolutions, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution. What we mean by nation today is really being created at that time. And it's a state that is of the people, for the people, by the people, that has some kind of common bond holding those people together. And, you know, we see history since that time, people kind of struggling, what is this nation, right? That and meaning something common about the people in that. Before that era, the bonds, political bonds, were more likely to be empire or hereditary or based in some other kind of system. And religion had a really clear place in that. In that early modern world, you were part of the Protestant empire and you fought against Catholic empires that were, you know, doing their Catholic thing and that was opposed to you. And, you know, so religion was very much part of that pre-national understanding of politics. The nation is a new thing, and part of what they did there was create secular citizenship. But they did it with a lot of religious people. So the the were the people who were in the colonies or who were in the United States, what held them together as a nation was not their shared Christianity because they created a new idea of nation that allowed the Catholics, among other things, but the Catholics and the Jews and and you know non-religious people to all be American, right? They did that very consciously when they created secular citizenship. That wasn't an accident. But they didn't necessarily become less religious when they did that. So it's not that the United States was or was not a Christian nation. It's that they, in their creativity, created a new kind of thing that was separate from that question.

SPEAKER_01 50:38

Catherine, this is our last question for you. And it's a question that I've been asking all of our all of our guests in this series because the uh the Church and State 250 project was created just as a resource for people to just you know take a moment, reflect, to think about that America's history didn't really start 250 years ago. It actually started much earlier than than that. And religion has sort of been this through line throughout the entire American story. And and I'd love just to kind of have you, you know, just reflect, you know, on what America's 250th signing, not I guess you didn't sign it 250 times, right? Uh the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. I'd love for you just to kind of just reflect on like what does this moment mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 51:27

I think it's been really interesting since we're at such a divided political moment in the United States to think about that moment. And as a scholar of religion, I'm often asked about the ways that religious unity mattered then. To what extent were the colonists united or divided by religion, those kinds of questions that we've talked about today. And I think what I take from this moment of the 250th is that the people who created the United States worked really hard and made a lot of compromises and addressed, picked the issues that were threatening to their unity and worked hard to build through them. And that includes the differences they had over religion. Religion did not unify them. I don't think religion is gonna unify us today. I don't think we're gonna find some sort of way through which all of our divisions are going to dissolve, making it easy for us to solve our political problems. I think solving our political problems is gonna be really hard. And we're gonna have to do it through and thinking about those things that are dividing us, which I think is what they did in the founding era.

SPEAKER_01 52:42

Wow. Well, thank you so much, Catherine, for uh coming back and visiting us. Always a pleasure talking to you and learning all. And thank you to our audience for uh stopping by again. Make sure you stick around for the rest of our Church State 250 Plus series. Uh, we've got a whole bunch of uh really, really cool and interesting speakers coming your way. Um, John Fio, Warren Throckmorn is gonna talk about the Constitution and the framers and myths, and then we're gonna have Robert Jones come on and talk about yeah, some really depressing stuff that happened around slavery and Jim Crow. I mean, it's gonna be action packed, so make sure you stick around. Thanks as always for stopping by. And as always, make sure you keep our conversations not right or left, but up. We'll see you next time. Take care.