Christian Nationalism: America’s Traditional Political Order

The following remarks were delivered on Tuesday, September 13, 2022, at the third annual National Conservatism Conference in Miami.

It is such a pleasure to be with all of you “semi-fascists” and “extreme threats to our democracy,” as the President affectionately calls you. And not just you, of course. When Biden refers to “semi-fascists” and existential “threats to our democracy,” he is referring to a larger group. He is referring to half of the country. He is referring to the “MAGA Republicans,” which is to say, statistically, the Republicans, which is to say, about half the country.

Which is strange thing to think: that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could be threatened by the very existence of half of the people. That our “sacred,” two-party system faces the threat of annihilation if anyone even thinks of voting for the party out of power. Something certainly seems amiss about “our democracy.”

I suppose the first thing amiss about “our democracy” is that we don’t actually have a “democracy.” The men who built our country were deeply distrustful of democracy from the beginning — not just back in 1789, when our Constitution went into effect, or even 1776, when the Founding Fathers declared independence from Britain. It goes even further back to 1630, when Governor Winthrop described the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a shining “city upon a hill” and “a model of Christian charity,” and even further back, in 1620, when Governor Bradford and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. All of those men, and especially the Framers of the Constitution, gave us a mixed regime with an executive power, an aristocratic element, and, of course, a strong democratic representation in a federal system that balanced power between three branches of government as well as between three distinct interests — the people, the states, and the higher unity of the people and the states — in a nation.

The nation has a physical aspect: spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, above a fruited plain from sea to shining sea. The nation, in its physical nature, has a body: that is, the body politic. But our nation, just like the people who constitute it, is not merely a body. Our nation, like all nations, is also a soul. It must be. The soul is the substantial form of the body. It is the intellectual principle of the body. The soul animates the body. Without the soul, the body is dead. A body politic must have a soul in order to live. So what animates America?

For most of American history, the answer was obvious: Christianity. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower undertook their voyage primarily “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith.” Our Founders and Framers established our nation, according to John Adams, “only for a moral and religious People.” Adams spelled out what he meant by morality and religion in 1813 in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: “The general Principles, on which the Fathers Achieved Independence, were the only Principles in which, that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite . . . the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United.”

Adams’s clear articulation of the nation’s religious grounding poses a problem for the secularists who deny America’s Christian spirit because it contradicts another quote, also ostensibly from John Adams, on which the argument against America’s Christian character rests.

According to the secularists, John Adams declared in 1796 that “the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” So how do we make sense of that apparent contradiction? Here we see the proof of Alexander Pope’s warning that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Because when we look into the origin of the phrase, we find that it does not come from any founding document. It does not come from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist, or even the private papers of the men who built the country.

The statement comes, instead, from the Treaty of Tripoli, which, though signed by Adams, was not written by him. It was written by diplomat and Jeffersonian Republican Joel Barlow, and it was only written to persuade Muslim pirates to stop abducting and enslaving American sailors. The statement was not so much a statement of principle — or even of law — as it was a ransom payment by a struggling nation to international criminals.

When they were not attempting to placate Muslim pirates, our Founding Fathers spoke much more favorably of Christianity and its role in American public life. Adams, obviously, directly contradicted his own professed nonsense from the Treaty of Tripoli, and most if not all of the other Founders did as well. John Jay, co-author of the Federalist and the first chief justice of the United States,

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