The US founders’ other revolutionary choice: Separating religion and government
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‘Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States,’ painted by Howard Chandler Christy in 1940.<br>U.S. Capitol via Wikimedia Commons
https://theconversation.com/the-us-founders-other-revolutionary-choice-separating-religion-and-government-284509
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Did the founders of the United States intend to create a Christian nation?
Political leaders who addressed a prayer rally on the National Mall on May 17, 2026, seem to think so: House Speaker Mike Johnson led the crowd in “rededicat(ing) the United States of America as one nation under God.”
Some, and perhaps many, scholars would say no: that while many founders were religious, as a group they concluded that the national government should not support any particular faith.
As a scholar of Colonial North America, I believe that history provides an answer. European colonizers in lands that became the United States did link church and state. But the architects of the new nation broke from that idea as surely as they broke from Britain.
‘Doctrine of Discovery’
‘The Virgin of the Navigators,’ by 16th-century Spanish painter Alejo Fernández.<br>Reales Alcazares via Wikimedia Commons
The European desire to expand the boundaries of Christendom played a central role in the Colonial era, as I describe in my 2026 book, “Contested Continent.”
That drive mattered greatly to Christopher Columbus, who sailed west in 1492. Upon landing in the Bahamas, he laid claim to already populated territories, writing that Christ would rejoice “as he foresees that so many souls of so many people heretofore lost are to be saved.”
The “Doctrine of Discovery,” proclaimed by the Vatican in 1493, granted European monarchs title over lands occupied by non-Christians and urged them to convert the people who lived there.
New church
Less than a generation later, the Protestant Reformation transformed Christianity, dividing Europe and spawning brutal violence.
In England, the schism reshaped the relationship between church and state. King Henry VIII severed ties with the pope in the 1530s. He ordered the dissolution of monasteries, and his followers defaced church statues of Catholic saints.
After Henry rejected Rome’s authority, Parliament passed the Supremacy Act of 1534, which made the monarch the leader of an independent national church, the Church of England.
Queen Elizabeth I, Henry’s daughter, further reduced the political power of English Catholics in 1559. Her desire to promote her Protestant faith, along with a yearning to expand England’s political authority, helped fuel a vicious campaign to take control of Ireland, where the Reformation’s teachings had not taken hold.
A plate from ‘The Image of Irelande’ by John Derrick, published in 1581, shows English soldiers during the Tudor conquest of Ireland.<br>Edinburgh University Library via Wikimedia Commons
Protestant migrants
The desire to promote Protestantism also figured in English plans for the colonization of North America.
In the 1580s, an expedition sent by Sir Walter Raleigh arrived on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina. They were eager to learn about the region’s natural resources and its peoples. English colonial planners also hoped to convert Carolina Algonquians, and to keep Catholics away. A small group of Jesuit priests had already tried to establish a mission on a tributary of Chesapeake Bay in 1571, but they were killed by Indigenous people.
Thomas Harriot, who chronicled the English efforts when he arrived in 1585, believed that Carolina Algonquians would convert to Protestantism. In fact, he wrote, Native people were so eager to accept the faith that they grabbed a Bible “to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their bre(a)sts” in order to absorb the lessons it contained.
In 1607, the Virginia Company of London established a settlement at Jamestown, promising, according to the colony’s 1609 charter, that colonization would lead to “the conversion and reduccion of the people in those partes unto the true worshipp of God and Christian religion.” To advance their goal, they tried to bar anyone holding “the superstitions of the Churche of Rome.” Colonists had to swear the oath of supremacy to the English monarch, which meant accepting the Church of England.
Within a generation, other Protestants arrived in English America, including critics of the Church of England who are now often called “Pilgrims.” Puritans, who migrated soon after, held similar beliefs. Persecuted in England for their dissenting views, they arrived eager to demonstrate to the world that they knew the best ways to advance a civilization, based on their interpretation of...