America at 250: What Kind of Nation Were You? And What Kind of Nation Will You Be?
In 1854, the “father of modern church history” and the most important church historian in America, returned to his native land. For ten years, Philip Schaff had taught in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. Recruited to teach at Mercersburg College, Schaff came to America at the age of twenty-four. And after a decade of learning the customs of America, he returned to Germany, where he gave three lectures on America.
Those lectures were quickly copied, translated, and distributed in Germany (1854), America (1855), and the Netherlands (1855). Today, they can be found in a volume titled, America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character.[1] In 1961, Harvard Press published this book with an introduction by famed Puritan scholar, Perry Miller. And in this slim volume, Schaff outlines with impressive detail the character of the American people, their Christian faith, and their social customs.
Written by a church historian with Reformed theological convictions, America is a book that rivals, if it does not surpass, its more famous precursor, Democracy in America. Two decades before Schaff, Alexis DeTocqueville, a French aristocrat, came to America to examine the penal system. Only his time in America (1831–32) did more than produce ideas for prison reform. Far more important, he wrote a masterpiece of American history, a time capsule of what America was when it was young. Released in two volumes (1835, 1840), Democracy in America is book that examines the democratic impulses of the young American country.
In his reflections, Tocqueville observed the peculiar way a free society (America) emerged without a national church (like all of Europe). He reasoned, as one historian put it that, “Modern democratic freedom . . . developed as a result of Christianity’s influence on European civilization, and more particularly as a result of Puritanism’s influence on American civilization.” Going further, Tocqueville said that without official government support, the church was strong, because it was America’s “first political institution.” In other words, the church(es!) in America are what shaped the culture and the political structures. So, if freedom was going to continue, the Christians that forged the character of America would need to continue, too. As he put it, Americans must “maintain Christianity . . . at all costs.”[2] For without Christianity, America as it was originally founded could not continue.
Philip Schaff’s Unique Perspective
Returning to Philip Schaff: He witnessed the same features of American life. Only he did not travel the land as a foreigner set to depart; he was sent as a missionary to serve the churches in Pennsylvania and beyond. In this way, he came to America to stay. And when he returned to his native homeland, he came as an apologist for America, seeking to allay fears and overturn accusations. For the Germans who never visited America in his day, these men and women had a predisposition to dislike the new world, because of the reports they heard of its rude citizens and untamed frontiers. Yet, in reading the elegant prose of his lectures, Shaff makes plain all the ways Christianity had forged the nation and its inhabitants.
Indeed, as he explains America to his countrymen, he says that the new nation is undeniably “Christian” (76). Yet, such a statement raises a host of questions today. For instance, what does a Christian nation mean to him and to those who heard him? And what does it mean to us, who stand 250 years removed from America’s founding? If America was truly a Christian nation in its youth, is it still? And is recovering our Christian heritage a fool’s errand, or the very thing that God would have us do?
These are debated questions and ones that invite reflection that exceed the length of this blogpost. But limiting ourselves to Schaff’s place in space and time, I think we can learn a number of facets of what made America a Christian nation and what the church can and should do today to proclaim Christ among the ruins of our once-Christian civilization. To that end, let me offer five observations about the church and state in America. Drawn from Schaff’s America, these reflections help us to see what kind of Christian nation America was and what kind of Christian nation we might be again, if the Lord would restore the foundations of our nation.
What Kind of Christian Nation Was America?
First, America was founded because of Christian motivations.
As he begins his section on “Religion and the Church” in his first lecture, Schaff shows how “religious motives” drove the founding of America. He states, “the first emigrants left the homes of their fathers for faith and conscience’ sake, and thus at the outset stamped upon their new home the impress of positive Christianity” (72). Without denying other motivations, Schaff describes the cradle of America wrapped in the swaddling clothes of Christianity. And from its birth, America has never been without a formative, one might even say a constitutive, Christian influence.
Stressing this point, Schaff continues by saying that the original imprint of Christianity “now exerts wholesome influence even on those later emigrants, who have no religion at all” (72). This will need further explaining, with respect to the laws and customs of the state, but it is notable that the first founders of America came to this land with a commitment to settle this place for Christ. Therefore, unlike the nations of Europe that had to be converted from paganism, America was founded by men and women wholly devoted to Christ and his commission to disciple the nations.
Second, America was Protestant in character.
In America, “everything had a Protestant beginning” (72). Whereas Christianity in Europe had “historical connections with Catholicism,” in America “the Catholic Church has come in afterwards as one sect among others, and has always remained subordinate” (72).[3] Even more, he explains that the source of America’s “spirit and character” came from “the Puritans in New England, the Episcopalians in Virginia, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Dutch in New York, . . . the Presbyterians from Scotland and North Ireland, and the German Lutherans and Reformed from the Palatinate” (73).
All told, the Christian character of America was rooted in the historic doctrines of the Reformation. And specifically, that means that American Christianity would be uniquely centered on the Bible, a feature that caused Mark Noll to label America a “Bible civilization.”[4] Capturing the same spirit, Schaff says of American Christianity that it gave “zealous support of Bible and Tract societies, or domestic and foreign missions, the numerous revivals, the general attendance on divine worship, and the custom of family devotion” (76).
Going further, he adds, “In every new city district, in every new settlement, one of the first things thought of is the building of a temple to the Lord, where the neighboring population may be regularly fed with the bread of life and encouraged to labor, order, obedience, and every good work” (79). By comparison then, “the Americans are already in advance of most of the old Christian nations of Europe.” And how did this happen? Not by governments establishing churches, but by the free and voluntary worship of the people. Indeed, this is a feature that is rooted in the Protestant Reformation and one that distinguishes American Christianity from that of Europe.
Third, American Protestantism separated the church from the state.
As a son of Switzerland and a student trained in Germany, Schaff knew by experience and by education that many European nations were Protestant. By this measure, it was not Protestantism alone that formed American religion. Rather, it was the unique way that Protestant Christianity, as it developed in the new world, separated church and state in America.
Tracing the history from the “rigid Calvinistic church-state system” of the Puritans in Massachusetts (74) to the introduction of religious liberty by Roger Williams and William Penn, in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, respectively, Schaff arrived at the period of the American Revolution and the disestablishment of the church in the constitution (74–75). Speaking to his German audience, he acknowledged the imperfection of the American system, because of the way Christ’s kingdom “is to penetrate and transform like leaven, all the relations of individual and national life” (75). Yet, instead of critiquing this novel system, he extolled the unparalleled freedoms that it created (75–76).
For, in fact, the American system of separation did not, as it would come to be defined in the twentieth century (after 1947), erect a “high and impregnable wall” between church and state.[5] Instead, it made possible a “voluntary system,” which “calls forth a mass of individual activity and interest among the laity in ecclesiastical affairs, in the founding of new churches and congregations, colleges and seminaries, in home and foreign missions, and in the promotion of all forms of Christian philanthropy” (79).[6]
Observing these features, Schaff puts his finger on the genius of the American system. On the one hand, the church is protected from being dominated, and in some cases persecuted, by the state. And on the other hand, the state is strengthened by the vitality and moral accountability of its citizens, who are either Christians worshiping God according to their free consciences, or if they are not Christians, they are so far surrounded by the institutions of Christianity, that society is reformed for the better.[7]
This is kind of religious liberty can only be found in Christian nations, and Schaff makes this point explicit in his second lecture, when he says, “the principle of religious freedom rests there on a religious basis, as the result of many sufferings and persecutions for the sake of faith and conscience; and thus differs very materially from some modern theories of toleration, which run out into sheer religious indifference and unbelief” (91).
Tragically, the religious liberty that is peddled today by modern Americans, and not a few Christians, is one based wholly on “religious indifference and toleration.” Such religious liberty, however, is worlds apart from the separation of church and state that Schaff saw in 1854. Indeed, if the church in America will have a place to worship freely, as 1 Timothy 2:1–4 invites us to pray, it must reject the type of separation on offer today and recover the type of separation where free churches strengthen the state and the free state is suffused with true churches.
In short, the church and state in America were separated in Schaff’s day, but they also enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that should be the aim of every Christian today. Still, if such a Christian vision of the state is going to be recovered today, it will require a church that finds its bearings in American Protestantism, not classical liberalism.
Fourth, American Protestantism developed a symbiotic relationship between church and state.
Immediately after Schaff identified the separation of church and state, he clarified himself, saying, “For it is by no means to be thought, that the separation of church and state there is a renunciation of Christianity by the nation” (76). This might be the most needful corrective to errant views of church and state today.
Whereas many well-meaning Christians want to argue that nations cannot be Christian, because not all citizens are born again and the “holy nation” must be limited to the church, such a simplistic way of thinking ignores the important role that nations, and their governors, play in the purposes of God. Paul was called to preach the gospel to kings (Acts 9:15) and throughout the book of Acts (as well as church history), the civil magistrates, who are God’s servants (Rom. 13:1–7), play a role in affirming or denying the proclamation of the gospel. That is say, that while the church is called to preach the gospel, the state will either permit and maintain such efforts or stand in their way.[8]
Indeed, while governors are not called to use the sword to coerce faith or criminalize the conscience, Schaff is right when he says that in America, “the church, indeed, everywhere enjoys the protection of the laws for its property, and the exercise of its functions,” even as “it manages its own affairs independently, and has also to depend for its resources entirely on voluntary contributions” (73–74).
In this way, Schaff distinguishes the establishment of one sect of Christianity that comes at the expense of others from the lawful encouragement of Christianity by the magistrate who supports and strengthens the church.[9] In fact, he goes so far as to approve of the ways “the state, as such, to some extent officially recognizes Christianity” (76). And he illustrates his point with examples taken from America.
These are the ways that the American government supported the church in the nineteenth century. And they are ways that a nation can maintain spiritual separation between church and state, all the while protecting and promoting Christianity. Indeed, this is what Schaff saw in America and reported to Christians in Germany. And it is why he rightly labeled America a Christian Nation.
And more, with all the unique ways that church and state functioned in the past, it should teach us about how nations can be Christian and how, in particular, America was a Christian nation. For indeed, to let Schaff have the last word on America’s unique church-state relationship.
In America, disestablishment was the law of the land.[10] But in no way did the First Amendment outlaw the magistrates from encouraging Christianity as the true religion. In fact, the inclination of the young nation was just the opposite. The relationship in America between church and state was one of symbiosis, not stand off.
Fifth, America was a nation with the soul of a church.
Writing a generation later, one year before Philip Schaff died in 1893, Supreme Court justice David Brewer wrote his opinion in the case Trinity v. United States (1892). And in his statement, he argued that America was a Christian nation.[11] This argument follows on the work of the National Reformation Association (NRA), who sought to amend the constitution in 1863 to acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ.[12] And this argument comes three decades before G. K. Chesterton declared in his 1922 book, What I Saw In America, that America is “a nation with the soul of a church.”
Put all of these testimonies together, and it is impossible to deny the way in which America was more than a nation with a Christian founding or simply nation-state with lots of Christians or Christian ideas—though these claims are undeniably correct. Rather, when time is taken to define the terms, America really was a Christian nation.
The Protestant Church in America Must Maintain Christianity At All Costs
Whether America continues to be a Christian nation is another question altogether. And it is one that will need to be considered another day. For today, it is worth knowing that when the father of church history took up the task of defining America, he declared this young country a Christian nation. And this year, as America celebrates her 250th anniversary, we would do well to learn again what it means to be a Christian nation and how American Protestantism impressed its Christianity on this country.
As Alexis DeTocqueville said, with respect to America’s democracy, Americans must “maintain Christianity . . . at all costs.” And specifically, American Christians must maintain a genuine American Protestantism for the sake of Christ and his Church.
For not only are the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation the ones that founded our country, but they are also the doctrines that are most true to the Word of God. And because the mission of Christ is more than the preservation of one nation, because the mission of the church is the exaltation of Christ among all nations, we must play our part in God’s grand scheme. For truly, if Christians are to be faithful in our generation, we must learn from those who have gone before us. And so, as Philip Schaff has helped us to see a few things about America as a Christian nation, let us be reminded also of God’s plan with all nations, America included.
At all events, whatever may become of the American denominations and sects of the present day, the kingdom of Jesus Christ must at last triumph in the New World, as elsewhere, over all foes, old and new. Of this we have the pledge in the mass of individual Christianity in America; but above all, in the promise of the Lord, who is with his people always to the end of the world, and who has founded his church upon a rock, against which the gates of hell shall never prevail. And his words are yea and amen. (81)
From one generation to the next, this is our hope—that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the nations. And whether America returns in fresh ways to honor the Lord or is rightly cut down for her refusing to humble herself before God, the Lord will establish his kingdom.
As citizens of heaven we have a colonizing work to do on earth. And today, as he has planted us in America, let us seek the Lord for the good of our families, our church, and our nation. So that we might, with gratitude, sobriety, thanksgiving, and energy, might be faithful in this generation, until he calls us home or makes all things new.
For His glory and your joy in Christ,
Pastor David
[1] Philip Schaff, America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1961). All page numbers are parenthetical references.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 279–280, 519.
[3] Schaff notes the way that Maryland, established by Catholics, “was by no means specifically Roman.” Instead, “it was found expressly on the thoroughly anti-Roman, and essentially Protestant, principles of religious toleration” (72–73).
[4] Mark A. Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization (1794–1911) (New York: Oxford, 2022).
[5] Everson v. Board of Education (1947) was the genesis of our modern understanding of a strict separation between church and state. Reinterpreting the language of Thomas Jefferson, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black made the infamous case that “the First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”
[6] Remember, Schaff wrote at a time when America had no income tax. A national income tax was introduced in 1861, as an emergency measure to fund the Civil War. After that tax was repealed in 1872, the federal income tax was made permanent in 1913, with the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment.
[7] One remarkable example of this cultural influence is the number of churches that stood in New York City. In a footnote, Schaff counts 300 churches: “In 1854 there were in New York city, forty-eight Episcopal churches, forty-eight Presbyterian, thirty-five Methodist, nineteen Reformed Dutch, twenty-nine Baptist, eight Congregational, five Lutheran, and twenty-four Roman Catholic; besides the church edifices of several smaller denominations and sects, which must swell the number now to nearly 300” (78). By his estimation, it is the prominence of these churches, which filled the city with their Sabbath-keeping, that prevented New York City from becoming a “second Paris” (52).
[8] This is the point I made, when I preached Zechariah 1:18–21 on the four horns.
[9] As the state commits itself to no particular form of Christianity, there is of course also no civil requisition of baptism, confirmation, and communion. Religion is left to the free will of each individual, and the church has none but moral means of influencing the world. (73–74)[
10] At the federal level, at least.
[11] Copies of his argument can be found on the bookshelf or here.
[12] Later this year, my introduction to William Symington’s book, Messiah the Prince, will be released with Canon Press. As a part of their amendment campaign, the NRA republished and distributed Messiah the Prince.
Those lectures were quickly copied, translated, and distributed in Germany (1854), America (1855), and the Netherlands (1855). Today, they can be found in a volume titled, America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character.[1] In 1961, Harvard Press published this book with an introduction by famed Puritan scholar, Perry Miller. And in this slim volume, Schaff outlines with impressive detail the character of the American people, their Christian faith, and their social customs.
Written by a church historian with Reformed theological convictions, America is a book that rivals, if it does not surpass, its more famous precursor, Democracy in America. Two decades before Schaff, Alexis DeTocqueville, a French aristocrat, came to America to examine the penal system. Only his time in America (1831–32) did more than produce ideas for prison reform. Far more important, he wrote a masterpiece of American history, a time capsule of what America was when it was young. Released in two volumes (1835, 1840), Democracy in America is book that examines the democratic impulses of the young American country.
In his reflections, Tocqueville observed the peculiar way a free society (America) emerged without a national church (like all of Europe). He reasoned, as one historian put it that, “Modern democratic freedom . . . developed as a result of Christianity’s influence on European civilization, and more particularly as a result of Puritanism’s influence on American civilization.” Going further, Tocqueville said that without official government support, the church was strong, because it was America’s “first political institution.” In other words, the church(es!) in America are what shaped the culture and the political structures. So, if freedom was going to continue, the Christians that forged the character of America would need to continue, too. As he put it, Americans must “maintain Christianity . . . at all costs.”[2] For without Christianity, America as it was originally founded could not continue.
Philip Schaff’s Unique Perspective
Returning to Philip Schaff: He witnessed the same features of American life. Only he did not travel the land as a foreigner set to depart; he was sent as a missionary to serve the churches in Pennsylvania and beyond. In this way, he came to America to stay. And when he returned to his native homeland, he came as an apologist for America, seeking to allay fears and overturn accusations. For the Germans who never visited America in his day, these men and women had a predisposition to dislike the new world, because of the reports they heard of its rude citizens and untamed frontiers. Yet, in reading the elegant prose of his lectures, Shaff makes plain all the ways Christianity had forged the nation and its inhabitants.
Indeed, as he explains America to his countrymen, he says that the new nation is undeniably “Christian” (76). Yet, such a statement raises a host of questions today. For instance, what does a Christian nation mean to him and to those who heard him? And what does it mean to us, who stand 250 years removed from America’s founding? If America was truly a Christian nation in its youth, is it still? And is recovering our Christian heritage a fool’s errand, or the very thing that God would have us do?
These are debated questions and ones that invite reflection that exceed the length of this blogpost. But limiting ourselves to Schaff’s place in space and time, I think we can learn a number of facets of what made America a Christian nation and what the church can and should do today to proclaim Christ among the ruins of our once-Christian civilization. To that end, let me offer five observations about the church and state in America. Drawn from Schaff’s America, these reflections help us to see what kind of Christian nation America was and what kind of Christian nation we might be again, if the Lord would restore the foundations of our nation.
What Kind of Christian Nation Was America?
First, America was founded because of Christian motivations.
As he begins his section on “Religion and the Church” in his first lecture, Schaff shows how “religious motives” drove the founding of America. He states, “the first emigrants left the homes of their fathers for faith and conscience’ sake, and thus at the outset stamped upon their new home the impress of positive Christianity” (72). Without denying other motivations, Schaff describes the cradle of America wrapped in the swaddling clothes of Christianity. And from its birth, America has never been without a formative, one might even say a constitutive, Christian influence.
Stressing this point, Schaff continues by saying that the original imprint of Christianity “now exerts wholesome influence even on those later emigrants, who have no religion at all” (72). This will need further explaining, with respect to the laws and customs of the state, but it is notable that the first founders of America came to this land with a commitment to settle this place for Christ. Therefore, unlike the nations of Europe that had to be converted from paganism, America was founded by men and women wholly devoted to Christ and his commission to disciple the nations.
Second, America was Protestant in character.
In America, “everything had a Protestant beginning” (72). Whereas Christianity in Europe had “historical connections with Catholicism,” in America “the Catholic Church has come in afterwards as one sect among others, and has always remained subordinate” (72).[3] Even more, he explains that the source of America’s “spirit and character” came from “the Puritans in New England, the Episcopalians in Virginia, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Dutch in New York, . . . the Presbyterians from Scotland and North Ireland, and the German Lutherans and Reformed from the Palatinate” (73).
All told, the Christian character of America was rooted in the historic doctrines of the Reformation. And specifically, that means that American Christianity would be uniquely centered on the Bible, a feature that caused Mark Noll to label America a “Bible civilization.”[4] Capturing the same spirit, Schaff says of American Christianity that it gave “zealous support of Bible and Tract societies, or domestic and foreign missions, the numerous revivals, the general attendance on divine worship, and the custom of family devotion” (76).
Going further, he adds, “In every new city district, in every new settlement, one of the first things thought of is the building of a temple to the Lord, where the neighboring population may be regularly fed with the bread of life and encouraged to labor, order, obedience, and every good work” (79). By comparison then, “the Americans are already in advance of most of the old Christian nations of Europe.” And how did this happen? Not by governments establishing churches, but by the free and voluntary worship of the people. Indeed, this is a feature that is rooted in the Protestant Reformation and one that distinguishes American Christianity from that of Europe.
Third, American Protestantism separated the church from the state.
As a son of Switzerland and a student trained in Germany, Schaff knew by experience and by education that many European nations were Protestant. By this measure, it was not Protestantism alone that formed American religion. Rather, it was the unique way that Protestant Christianity, as it developed in the new world, separated church and state in America.
Tracing the history from the “rigid Calvinistic church-state system” of the Puritans in Massachusetts (74) to the introduction of religious liberty by Roger Williams and William Penn, in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, respectively, Schaff arrived at the period of the American Revolution and the disestablishment of the church in the constitution (74–75). Speaking to his German audience, he acknowledged the imperfection of the American system, because of the way Christ’s kingdom “is to penetrate and transform like leaven, all the relations of individual and national life” (75). Yet, instead of critiquing this novel system, he extolled the unparalleled freedoms that it created (75–76).
For, in fact, the American system of separation did not, as it would come to be defined in the twentieth century (after 1947), erect a “high and impregnable wall” between church and state.[5] Instead, it made possible a “voluntary system,” which “calls forth a mass of individual activity and interest among the laity in ecclesiastical affairs, in the founding of new churches and congregations, colleges and seminaries, in home and foreign missions, and in the promotion of all forms of Christian philanthropy” (79).[6]
Observing these features, Schaff puts his finger on the genius of the American system. On the one hand, the church is protected from being dominated, and in some cases persecuted, by the state. And on the other hand, the state is strengthened by the vitality and moral accountability of its citizens, who are either Christians worshiping God according to their free consciences, or if they are not Christians, they are so far surrounded by the institutions of Christianity, that society is reformed for the better.[7]
This is kind of religious liberty can only be found in Christian nations, and Schaff makes this point explicit in his second lecture, when he says, “the principle of religious freedom rests there on a religious basis, as the result of many sufferings and persecutions for the sake of faith and conscience; and thus differs very materially from some modern theories of toleration, which run out into sheer religious indifference and unbelief” (91).
Tragically, the religious liberty that is peddled today by modern Americans, and not a few Christians, is one based wholly on “religious indifference and toleration.” Such religious liberty, however, is worlds apart from the separation of church and state that Schaff saw in 1854. Indeed, if the church in America will have a place to worship freely, as 1 Timothy 2:1–4 invites us to pray, it must reject the type of separation on offer today and recover the type of separation where free churches strengthen the state and the free state is suffused with true churches.
In short, the church and state in America were separated in Schaff’s day, but they also enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that should be the aim of every Christian today. Still, if such a Christian vision of the state is going to be recovered today, it will require a church that finds its bearings in American Protestantism, not classical liberalism.
Fourth, American Protestantism developed a symbiotic relationship between church and state.
Immediately after Schaff identified the separation of church and state, he clarified himself, saying, “For it is by no means to be thought, that the separation of church and state there is a renunciation of Christianity by the nation” (76). This might be the most needful corrective to errant views of church and state today.
Whereas many well-meaning Christians want to argue that nations cannot be Christian, because not all citizens are born again and the “holy nation” must be limited to the church, such a simplistic way of thinking ignores the important role that nations, and their governors, play in the purposes of God. Paul was called to preach the gospel to kings (Acts 9:15) and throughout the book of Acts (as well as church history), the civil magistrates, who are God’s servants (Rom. 13:1–7), play a role in affirming or denying the proclamation of the gospel. That is say, that while the church is called to preach the gospel, the state will either permit and maintain such efforts or stand in their way.[8]
Indeed, while governors are not called to use the sword to coerce faith or criminalize the conscience, Schaff is right when he says that in America, “the church, indeed, everywhere enjoys the protection of the laws for its property, and the exercise of its functions,” even as “it manages its own affairs independently, and has also to depend for its resources entirely on voluntary contributions” (73–74).
In this way, Schaff distinguishes the establishment of one sect of Christianity that comes at the expense of others from the lawful encouragement of Christianity by the magistrate who supports and strengthens the church.[9] In fact, he goes so far as to approve of the ways “the state, as such, to some extent officially recognizes Christianity” (76). And he illustrates his point with examples taken from America.
Congress appoints chaplains (mostly from the Episcopal, sometimes from the Presbyterian and the Methodist clergy) for itself, the army, and the navy. It opens every day's session with prayer, and holds public worship on the Sabbath in the Senate Chamber at Washington. The laws of the several States also contain strict prohibitions of blasphemy, atheism, Sabbath-breaking, polygamy, and other gross violations of general Christian morality. (76–77)
These are the ways that the American government supported the church in the nineteenth century. And they are ways that a nation can maintain spiritual separation between church and state, all the while protecting and promoting Christianity. Indeed, this is what Schaff saw in America and reported to Christians in Germany. And it is why he rightly labeled America a Christian Nation.
And more, with all the unique ways that church and state functioned in the past, it should teach us about how nations can be Christian and how, in particular, America was a Christian nation. For indeed, to let Schaff have the last word on America’s unique church-state relationship.
The nation, therefore, is still Christian, though it refuses to be governed in this deepest concern of the mind and heart by the temporal power. In fact, under such circumstances, Christianity, as the free expression of personal conviction and of the national character, has even greater power over the mind, than when enjoined by civil laws and upheld by police regulations. (76)
In America, disestablishment was the law of the land.[10] But in no way did the First Amendment outlaw the magistrates from encouraging Christianity as the true religion. In fact, the inclination of the young nation was just the opposite. The relationship in America between church and state was one of symbiosis, not stand off.
Fifth, America was a nation with the soul of a church.
Writing a generation later, one year before Philip Schaff died in 1893, Supreme Court justice David Brewer wrote his opinion in the case Trinity v. United States (1892). And in his statement, he argued that America was a Christian nation.[11] This argument follows on the work of the National Reformation Association (NRA), who sought to amend the constitution in 1863 to acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ.[12] And this argument comes three decades before G. K. Chesterton declared in his 1922 book, What I Saw In America, that America is “a nation with the soul of a church.”
Put all of these testimonies together, and it is impossible to deny the way in which America was more than a nation with a Christian founding or simply nation-state with lots of Christians or Christian ideas—though these claims are undeniably correct. Rather, when time is taken to define the terms, America really was a Christian nation.
The Protestant Church in America Must Maintain Christianity At All Costs
Whether America continues to be a Christian nation is another question altogether. And it is one that will need to be considered another day. For today, it is worth knowing that when the father of church history took up the task of defining America, he declared this young country a Christian nation. And this year, as America celebrates her 250th anniversary, we would do well to learn again what it means to be a Christian nation and how American Protestantism impressed its Christianity on this country.
As Alexis DeTocqueville said, with respect to America’s democracy, Americans must “maintain Christianity . . . at all costs.” And specifically, American Christians must maintain a genuine American Protestantism for the sake of Christ and his Church.
For not only are the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation the ones that founded our country, but they are also the doctrines that are most true to the Word of God. And because the mission of Christ is more than the preservation of one nation, because the mission of the church is the exaltation of Christ among all nations, we must play our part in God’s grand scheme. For truly, if Christians are to be faithful in our generation, we must learn from those who have gone before us. And so, as Philip Schaff has helped us to see a few things about America as a Christian nation, let us be reminded also of God’s plan with all nations, America included.
At all events, whatever may become of the American denominations and sects of the present day, the kingdom of Jesus Christ must at last triumph in the New World, as elsewhere, over all foes, old and new. Of this we have the pledge in the mass of individual Christianity in America; but above all, in the promise of the Lord, who is with his people always to the end of the world, and who has founded his church upon a rock, against which the gates of hell shall never prevail. And his words are yea and amen. (81)
From one generation to the next, this is our hope—that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the nations. And whether America returns in fresh ways to honor the Lord or is rightly cut down for her refusing to humble herself before God, the Lord will establish his kingdom.
As citizens of heaven we have a colonizing work to do on earth. And today, as he has planted us in America, let us seek the Lord for the good of our families, our church, and our nation. So that we might, with gratitude, sobriety, thanksgiving, and energy, might be faithful in this generation, until he calls us home or makes all things new.
For His glory and your joy in Christ,
Pastor David
[1] Philip Schaff, America: A Sketch of Its Political, Social, and Religious Character (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1961). All page numbers are parenthetical references.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 279–280, 519.
[3] Schaff notes the way that Maryland, established by Catholics, “was by no means specifically Roman.” Instead, “it was found expressly on the thoroughly anti-Roman, and essentially Protestant, principles of religious toleration” (72–73).
[4] Mark A. Noll, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization (1794–1911) (New York: Oxford, 2022).
[5] Everson v. Board of Education (1947) was the genesis of our modern understanding of a strict separation between church and state. Reinterpreting the language of Thomas Jefferson, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black made the infamous case that “the First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”
[6] Remember, Schaff wrote at a time when America had no income tax. A national income tax was introduced in 1861, as an emergency measure to fund the Civil War. After that tax was repealed in 1872, the federal income tax was made permanent in 1913, with the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment.
[7] One remarkable example of this cultural influence is the number of churches that stood in New York City. In a footnote, Schaff counts 300 churches: “In 1854 there were in New York city, forty-eight Episcopal churches, forty-eight Presbyterian, thirty-five Methodist, nineteen Reformed Dutch, twenty-nine Baptist, eight Congregational, five Lutheran, and twenty-four Roman Catholic; besides the church edifices of several smaller denominations and sects, which must swell the number now to nearly 300” (78). By his estimation, it is the prominence of these churches, which filled the city with their Sabbath-keeping, that prevented New York City from becoming a “second Paris” (52).
[8] This is the point I made, when I preached Zechariah 1:18–21 on the four horns.
[9] As the state commits itself to no particular form of Christianity, there is of course also no civil requisition of baptism, confirmation, and communion. Religion is left to the free will of each individual, and the church has none but moral means of influencing the world. (73–74)[
10] At the federal level, at least.
[11] Copies of his argument can be found on the bookshelf or here.
[12] Later this year, my introduction to William Symington’s book, Messiah the Prince, will be released with Canon Press. As a part of their amendment campaign, the NRA republished and distributed Messiah the Prince.
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