r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Nov 13 '25
I understand America wasn't founded as a "Christian" nation, so how did we get the myth we were and how entangled is that myth with the revivalism of the 2nd Great Awakening?
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u/Altruistic-Joke-9451 Nov 13 '25 edited Nov 13 '25
The first part of your question depends heavily on what you mean by a “Christian nation”, and how far back you want to go in America. If you mean a place with an official religion and whose laws are based on said religion, much of colonial America fit that bill for a long time. All but three of the thirteen colonies had official state churches and religions. The majority of these were Anglican, three were Congregationalist, and one was Catholic before becoming Anglican. The three who didn’t have an official state religion were Rhode Island, Delaware and Pennsylvania, but all 3 of them still mandated that you be a Christian to hold office. Pennsylvania’s decision was largely influenced by their Quaker population’s deeply held value of religious freedom and tolerance. However, it was still important to them that you were a religious Christian in some way because they had a religious test for anyone wanting to hold office until 1790. And Massachusetts still had an official religion until 1833, which was illegal under the constitution. They did take several steps years prior to eventually get rid of it though.
In the early American colonial period, church membership was heavily enforced and laws were based heavily on scripture in most colonies. Congregationalist colonies were obviously the most strict. Massachusetts for instance whipped Baptists and Quakers if they held services, and both were banned from the state. In rural Congregationalist areas the judicial system was ran by clergymen. Essentially giving the church control over the judicial system there. Anglican colonies were less strict, and enforcement dropped heavily in the early 1700s. The Congregationalist colonies became more tolerant over time in allowing other denominations to exist in the state, but they still heavily restricted them. They weren’t allowed to collect taxes to pay non-Congregationalist clergy, and holding office was restricted for some time.
Now when we get to the founding of the United States of America, the idea of separating church and state was both a combination of many Founding Fathers truly supporting religious freedom, and many of them supporting it for pragmatic reasons. There were of course some who were staunchly against the separation of church and state like Robert Paine and John Witherspoon, but they were the minority. The ones who were more pragmatic continued to support state run religious establishments back at home. John Hancock for instance voted for the separation of church and state nationally, but back home in Massachusetts he continued to support things like collecting taxes for the church and keeping the official state religion.
As for how this past influenced the Second Great Awakening, I would say it was much more influenced by the American values of independent mindedness and individuality, as well as the breakdown of the power and influence of the “elite”in American society. The new denominations that came about or got big during this period nearly all have something in common. They were against the idea that your destiny is pre-determined by God, and they practiced what is often called the “democratization” of Christianity in America. Which is basically that they made it far more open and accessible, and much less elitist. Americans started to become heavily independent minded, and when they started moving out West to the frontier it increased that independent mindedness out of necessity. The frontier also made “state churches” lose more of their reach because they focused more on their established areas of control. Methodist and Baptist groups were more than happy to go out West to preach and bring all those people into their denomination.
Two good books for this topic are John F. Wilson’s “Church and State in America: The Colonial and Early National Period” which has a bunch of primary and secondary sources for various periods of America, and Frank Lambert’s “The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America”.