Christianity and the American Experiment: Religious Liberty, Civil Religion, and Christian Witness

Abstract

The relationship between Christianity and the American constitutional order has been contested since the founding and is contested now, and the arguments on all sides frequently rest on historical claims that do not survive examination. This article examines the record. It traces the colonial establishments, which were extensive and coercive, and the dissenting traditions - Baptist, Quaker, and others - whose theological arguments for religious liberty preceded and shaped the constitutional settlement. It examines the religious commitments of the founders, which ranged from orthodox Christianity through Deism, and the specific texts of the religion clauses and their competing interpretations. It then treats the persistent phenomenon Bellah named civil religion: a set of national religious symbols and beliefs, distinct from any denomination, deployed by presidents from Washington onward. Particular attention is given to the ways Christianity and national identity have been fused, including the providential readings of national purpose, the biblical justification of slavery and its abolitionist refutation, and the contemporary movement that identifies Christian faith with national and cultural identity. The article assesses Christian nationalism against the New Testament's own political material and against the historical record, and closes with what the tradition's own resources supply for a Christian political witness that is neither withdrawn nor captured.

Research Question and Scope

What is the historical relationship between Christianity and the American constitutional settlement, what has the phenomenon of civil religion consisted of, and what do the New Testament and the church's experience supply for assessing the fusion of Christian faith with national identity?

Method and Source Selection

The historical sections work from primary documents - colonial statutes, the writings of the dissenting advocates of religious liberty, the constitutional texts, and presidential addresses - together with the principal secondary historiography. Where historians disagree substantively, notably about the founders' religious commitments and the original meaning of the religion clauses, the disagreement is described rather than resolved.

Empirical claims about contemporary attitudes are drawn from published survey research and are stated directionally, since measures of religious and political identity are highly sensitive to question wording and to how composite indices are constructed. The article notes where measurement is contested, and it does not treat findings from any single study as settled.

Theological assessment proceeds from New Testament texts cited by book, chapter, and verse and from the church's historical experience of establishment and disestablishment across several contexts. The article states its own judgments as such and does not present them as historical findings, and it addresses arguments rather than the motives of those who hold them.

1. The colonial establishments

The narrative that the American colonies were founded as havens of religious freedom is inaccurate as a general description and requires substantial qualification. Most colonies had established churches supported by taxation, and dissent was penalized. Massachusetts Bay was founded by Puritans seeking freedom to practise their own religion and did not extend that freedom to others; it banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and executed four Quakers between 1659 and 1661.

Virginia established the Church of England, required attendance, and imposed penalties for dissent that included, in the 1760s and 1770s, the imprisonment of Baptist preachers for preaching without a licence. Connecticut and New Hampshire maintained Congregational establishments. Several colonies imposed religious tests for office, and Catholics and Jews faced legal disabilities in most of them well into the constitutional period.

The genuine exceptions are instructive because their reasoning shaped what followed. Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams after his banishment, established liberty of conscience on explicitly theological grounds. Pennsylvania under Penn's Quaker proprietorship extended broad toleration. Maryland's Act Concerning Religion of 1649 granted toleration to trinitarian Christians, though it was repealed and its protections lapsed.

Williams' argument is the most theologically developed and deserves attention because it is not a secular argument. He held that the attempt to enforce religious conformity produces hypocrisy rather than faith, that the church is corrupted by state support, and that a wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world protects the church rather than the state. His concern was for the church's purity.

Disestablishment proceeded gradually after the Constitution and was not completed for decades. Massachusetts maintained its establishment until 1833, and the First Amendment as originally understood restrained only the federal government, leaving state establishments intact. The application of the religion clauses to the states came through the Fourteenth Amendment in twentieth-century jurisprudence, which is a substantial complication for originalist arguments in this area.

2. The dissenting argument for religious liberty

The most significant theological arguments for religious liberty in the American context came from dissenting Protestants who had suffered under establishment, and this origin is frequently omitted from accounts that credit Enlightenment rationalism alone. Baptists in particular were both the principal victims of colonial religious coercion and among its most effective opponents.

Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in Massachusetts, argued through the 1770s and 1780s that religious taxation violated conscience and that the church requires no state support. John Leland, a Baptist active in both Virginia and Massachusetts, made the case in still stronger terms, arguing that government has no more to do with religious opinion than with mathematics and that religion is a matter between individuals and God alone.

The theological premises are worth stating because they are Christian rather than sceptical. Faith cannot be coerced, since compelled profession is not faith; the church is constituted by voluntary membership rather than by birth or law; establishment corrupts the church by making its ministers dependent on the state; and the New Testament shows a church that spread without state support and frequently against it. These are arguments from Christian conviction.

The political alliance that produced the settlement combined these dissenters with figures whose reasoning differed. Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, opposing a Virginia bill for religious taxation, argued from both natural rights and the corruption of religion by state support, and Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786 was passed with substantial Baptist and Presbyterian backing. The alliance was between people who wanted the church free of the state and people who wanted the state free of the church.

This origin has consequences for contemporary argument. Christians advocating for greater state endorsement of Christianity are opposing a settlement that their own theological forebears fought for at considerable personal cost, and the arguments those forebears made - that establishment corrupts the church, that coerced faith is not faith - have not been answered. The historical case for disestablishment is a Christian case before it is a secular one.

3. The founders and the question of a Christian founding

The religious commitments of the leading founders varied considerably, and both the claim that they were orthodox Christians founding a Christian nation and the claim that they were secularists indifferent to religion are inaccurate. The record supports a more mixed and more interesting picture that neither contemporary faction finds congenial.

Jefferson produced his own version of the Gospels, cutting out the miracles and the resurrection, and described the doctrine of the Trinity in private correspondence in dismissive terms. Franklin professed belief in a providential God while doubting the divinity of Christ. Washington's public references to Providence were frequent and his private religious convictions are genuinely difficult to determine from the record. Adams moved toward Unitarianism. Madison's later views are obscure.

Others were orthodox. John Jay, the first Chief Justice, was a serious Anglican who served as president of the American Bible Society. Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, and many delegates to the constitutional convention held conventional Christian beliefs, and the general population was more orthodox than the elite. Treating the deistic minority as representative misdescribes the founding generation.

The constitutional documents themselves are notably reticent. The Constitution contains no reference to God, prohibits religious tests for federal office in Article VI, and dates itself in the year of our Lord in a conventional formula. The Declaration refers to Nature's God, the Creator, divine Providence, and the Supreme Judge of the world - language compatible with orthodox Christianity and with Deism, and probably chosen for that reason.

The honest conclusion is that the founding was neither Christian in the sense that its documents establish Christianity nor secular in the sense that its framers were indifferent to religion. The Constitution created a government without religious foundations in a society that was substantially Christian, and the framers' reasons for doing so included both Enlightenment principle and the practical impossibility of choosing among Protestant denominations that would not have accepted one another's establishment.

4. The religion clauses and their interpretation

The First Amendment's religion clauses are brief: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The two clauses have generated distinct bodies of jurisprudence and can pull against each other, since vigorous protection of free exercise can look like establishment and strict non-establishment can burden exercise.

Interpretations of the establishment clause have divided broadly between separationist and accommodationist readings. The separationist position, drawing on Jefferson's wall of separation metaphor from an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, holds that government must remain neutral toward religion and may not aid it. The accommodationist position holds that the clause prohibits establishing a national church and preferring one denomination, while permitting general support for religion.

The historical evidence is genuinely mixed and supports neither reading decisively. Jefferson's metaphor comes from private correspondence rather than from the drafting record; the same Congress that passed the amendment appointed chaplains and issued thanksgiving proclamations; and the clause as originally adopted restrained only the federal government, which was consistent with continuing state establishments. Originalist arguments in this area are correspondingly difficult.

Jurisprudence has shifted substantially over time, from the mid-twentieth-century separationist decisions on school prayer and public funding, through the Lemon test and its subsequent erosion, to more recent decisions emphasizing historical practice and free exercise. The area remains unsettled, and Christians engaging it should be aware that they are entering an active legal debate rather than applying settled law.

Christians have interests on both sides of these questions, which is frequently obscured by partisan alignment. Robust free exercise protection serves religious minorities and dissenting Christians; robust non-establishment protects against the state's endorsement of a religion that may not be one's own. A Christian majority that weakens non-establishment protections is relying on remaining a majority, which is a wager that the history of religious demography does not encourage.

5. Civil religion

Robert Bellah's 1967 essay identified a phenomenon that observers had noted without naming: a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity, existing alongside the churches and distinct from any of them. Its God is generic and providential; its scriptures include the founding documents; its saints are Washington and Lincoln; its rituals include inaugurations, Memorial Day, and Thanksgiving.

The evidence is substantial and public. Every president has invoked God in an inaugural address, from Washington's first, while none has invoked Christ specifically in that setting. The Declaration's references to the Creator, the motto adopted in 1956, the phrase added to the pledge in 1954, and the presidential formula asking God's blessing on the country all belong to this vocabulary. It is religious and it is not the religion of any church.

Bellah's own assessment was more positive than most later treatments. He argued that civil religion at its best provides a transcendent standard by which the nation may be judged, and cited Lincoln's Second Inaugural as its highest expression - a speech that attributes the war to the offence of slavery, refuses to claim God's endorsement for the Union, and observes that the Almighty has his own purposes.

The Second Inaugural repays close attention as the counter-example to nationalist religion. Lincoln notes that both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, that the prayers of neither have been answered fully, and that if God wills the war to continue until the wealth accumulated by unrequited toil is sunk, still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. This is a national leader placing his own nation under judgment.

The critical assessment is that civil religion more often functions to sanctify national purposes than to judge them. Its God endorses rather than examines; its providential readings of national history flatter; and its capacity to bless military action, economic arrangements, and political programmes has been demonstrated repeatedly. Bellah acknowledged this and regarded the distinction between the two possibilities as the phenomenon's central issue.

6. Providence, chosenness, and the errand into the wilderness

The theme of American chosenness has a documented lineage running from the Puritan settlement onward. Winthrop's shipboard sermon, using the image of a city upon a hill from Matthew 5:14, framed the Massachusetts settlement as a covenant community under divine observation, and the image has been invoked by presidents across two centuries.

Winthrop's own use is frequently misreported and is worth stating accurately, since the misreporting is theologically significant. His sermon warns that if the community deals falsely with God, they will be made a story and a byword through the world, and that the eyes of all people are upon them for that reason. The image is a warning about visible failure, not a claim of national exceptionalism.

The subsequent development applied covenantal categories to the nation, and this is the decisive move. Language belonging in Scripture to Israel and in the New Testament to the church - chosen people, covenant, promised land, city on a hill, light to the nations - was transferred to a political entity. The transfer is theologically unwarranted on any standard reading of the New Testament, which assigns these categories to a people drawn from every nation.

Its practical consequences are documented. The doctrine of manifest destiny provided religious warrant for continental expansion and for the dispossession and killing of indigenous peoples. Providential readings supported the annexation of territory, overseas expansion, and successive wars. In each case the categories of covenant and chosenness supplied a religious sanction that political argument alone could not.

The theological objection is not that Christians may not love their country, which is a natural and legitimate affection, nor that providence has nothing to do with history. It is that applying to a nation the categories Scripture assigns to the church produces a claim to divine endorsement that no nation possesses, removes the standard by which the nation could be judged, and consistently sanctifies whatever the nation is doing.

7. Slavery, the Bible, and the churches

The most consequential test of American Christianity's relation to public life was slavery, and the churches failed it substantially. The biblical defence of slavery was made by learned ministers using serious exegetical arguments, and Mark Noll's analysis has established that on the narrow question of whether Scripture explicitly condemns slavery as such, the defenders had the stronger literal case.

Their arguments were specific. The patriarchs held slaves without rebuke; the Mosaic law regulated rather than abolished slavery; Paul returned Onesimus to Philemon; and the household codes instruct slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22; 1 Peter 2:18). Defenders argued that a plain reading of Scripture, applied consistently, permitted the institution, and they accused abolitionists of setting sentiment above the text.

Abolitionist arguments proceeded differently and generally appealed to the trajectory and the central claims of Scripture rather than to individual texts: the image of God in every person, the exodus as God's paradigmatic act, the golden rule, Paul's declaration that in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28), and the prohibition of man-stealing (Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10). Some argued that American chattel slavery differed fundamentally from biblical servitude.

Black Christians developed the most theologically penetrating critique, and it did not depend on the exegetical dispute. Frederick Douglass' appendix to his Narrative distinguishes the Christianity of Christ from the Christianity of this land and describes the latter as the climax of all misnomers, arguing that a religion sanctioning slavery is not the religion of Christ regardless of what texts it cites. The spirituals and the preaching of enslaved Christians read the exodus as a promise of deliverance.

The denominational consequences were institutional and lasting. The Methodists divided in 1844, the Baptists in 1845, and the Presbyterians subsequently, and some of these divisions persisted for over a century. Noll's assessment is that the theological crisis of the Civil War was in part a crisis of biblical authority: two sides reading the same Bible reached irreconcilable conclusions, and the question was settled by war rather than by exegesis.

8. The churches and civil rights

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is the counter-example, and its character is frequently misdescribed. It was substantially a religious movement, organized through Black churches, led by clergy, sustained by prayer meetings and hymnody, and using explicitly theological argument. Its principal texts are sermons, and its methods derived from a theology of redemptive suffering as well as from Gandhian practice.

King's Letter from Birmingham Jail is the movement's most substantial theological document and is addressed to white clergy who had criticized the demonstrations as untimely. Its argument distinguishes just from unjust laws using Augustine and Aquinas, invokes the prophets and the early church, and states that the contemporary church is a defender of the status quo rather than a thermostat transforming the mores of society.

The letter's sharpest passage concerns the white moderate, whom King describes as a greater stumbling block than the outright segregationist - preferring a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, and paternalistically setting the timetable for another's freedom. This is a critique of the church addressed to the church, and it remains uncomfortable reading.

White Christian responses were divided and the division is instructive. Some denominations and leaders supported the movement substantially; many were silent; and a significant number of white churches actively defended segregation on theological grounds, with arguments about the separation of nations at Babel and the curse of Ham that had circulated since slavery. The historical record on this is documented and is frequently omitted from congregational memory.

The movement's legacy for public theology is that it demonstrated a form of Christian political engagement that was neither withdrawn nor captured. It made explicitly Christian arguments in public, appealed to a standard above the nation's law, accepted suffering rather than inflicting it, and sought to convert opponents rather than to defeat them. Whether that model is available in other circumstances is debated, and it exists as a historical instance rather than a theoretical proposal.

9. Christian nationalism as a contemporary phenomenon

Recent scholarship has used the term Christian nationalism for a cultural framework that fuses Christian and national identity, holding that the nation was founded as and should remain Christian, that Christian identity is a marker of authentic citizenship, and that the state should promote and privilege Christianity. Sociologists have measured it through composite indices and have reported correlations with a range of political attitudes.

Measurement is contested and the contest matters. The indices combine items about the nation's Christian founding, about the desirability of Christian influence in government, and about prayer in schools, and critics argue that agreement with some items does not entail the whole framework and that the resulting composite may capture a wider population than the concept intends. Findings should be treated with the caution the methodological debate warrants.

What is not seriously contested is that a substantial constituency holds a version of the position and that its influence on politics has been significant. Nor is it contested that the position is distinguishable from ordinary religious participation in politics: research consistently reports that the measures correlate differently, and sometimes inversely, with church attendance, which suggests that the phenomenon is as much cultural identity as devotional practice.

The theological assessment is separable from the empirical debate and is where a Christian evaluation properly lies. The position requires the transfer to a nation of categories the New Testament assigns to the church - covenant, chosenness, holy people - and the transfer is unwarranted. The church in the New Testament is drawn from every nation, its citizenship is described as being in heaven (Philippians 3:20), and its members are called aliens and exiles (1 Peter 2:11).

A further theological problem is the reversal of the gospel's direction. Christian nationalism seeks to secure Christianity's position through political power, and the New Testament describes a movement that spread without political power, frequently against it, and whose founder explicitly declined it. Jesus' statement that his kingdom is not from this world, offered as the reason his followers are not fighting (John 18:36), is difficult to reconcile with a programme of securing the faith by controlling the state.

10. The New Testament on political authority

The New Testament's political material is limited, occasional, and less straightforward than either side of contemporary debate suggests. Romans 13:1-7 instructs believers to be subject to the governing authorities, describes them as instituted by God and as God's servant for good, and requires the payment of taxes. This is the principal text used to ground Christian obligation to civil authority.

Its context and limits require attention. Paul wrote to believers in the imperial capital under Nero, describing the state's function as restraining wrongdoing, and the passage says nothing about Christians governing. The instruction is to subjection rather than to obedience in every particular, and the same New Testament records apostles declining a direct order from the authorities on the ground that they must obey God rather than any human authority (Acts 5:29).

Revelation supplies the counterweight and is frequently omitted from discussions built on Romans 13. Its imagery of the beast, of Babylon the great, and of the harlot drunk with the blood of the saints is directed at imperial power that demands worship, and the book was written to communities under pressure to participate in the imperial cult. The New Testament thus contains both a theology of legitimate authority and a theology of demonic authority.

Jesus' own engagement with political power is consistently oblique. He declines the crowd's attempt to make him king (John 6:15), answers the question about the tribute coin in terms that commit him to neither position (Mark 12:13-17), tells Pilate that his kingdom is not from this world, and is executed by a Roman procurator on a charge of sedition that the Gospels present as false. The pattern is neither withdrawal nor pursuit of power.

The interpretive conclusion is that the New Testament supplies materials for a critical engagement with political authority rather than a theory of Christian government. Authority is legitimate and limited; obedience is owed and is not unconditional; the state may be God's servant and may become the beast; and the church's own life is the primary political fact about it. Traditions have built different political theologies on these materials, and none can claim the text unambiguously.

11. What the church loses when it holds power

The historical record on Christian establishment is available and is not encouraging for those seeking it. Where the church has held political power it has generally used it against dissenters, minorities, and its own reformers, and the pattern holds across Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, and Reformed establishments. This is not an argument that Christians should be politically inactive; it is evidence about what happens when the church controls coercive instruments.

The specific costs are identifiable. Establishment produces nominal adherence, since membership becomes socially or legally required and ceases to indicate conviction. It compromises the church's capacity for prophetic speech, since a church dependent on state support finds criticism of the state difficult. It corrupts the ministry by making it a career path with secular advantages. And it makes the church responsible for what the state does in its name.

European experience supplies the clearest evidence and is directly relevant to arguments for closer alignment. The countries with the strongest historical establishments are now the most secularized, and the correlation is at minimum a difficulty for the claim that state support sustains Christianity. Established churches in Scandinavia and Britain retain formal status alongside minimal practice, which suggests that the arrangement preserves the institution rather than the faith.

The dissenting argument examined earlier anticipated this and made it on theological grounds before the evidence accumulated. Williams held that the church is corrupted by state support; Backus and Leland held that faith cannot be coerced and that establishment produces hypocrisy. These are Christian arguments made by Christians who suffered under establishment, and they have not been answered by those now seeking closer alignment.

The countervailing consideration should be stated fairly. Disestablishment has coincided with decline in several contexts, and defenders of establishment argue that it maintains a Christian presence in public life, funds pastoral provision in places that could not sustain it, and supplies occasions of national religious observance that would otherwise disappear. These are real goods and they should be weighed rather than dismissed, and they do not address the corruption argument.

12. Religious liberty as a Christian commitment

Religious liberty is frequently treated as a concession Christians make to a pluralist society, and the tradition's better position is that it follows from Christian convictions. Faith that is coerced is not faith; the church is constituted by voluntary response rather than by law; conscience is answerable to God and therefore not to the magistrate; and the person compelling belief has assumed a judgment that belongs to God alone.

Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious freedom, states the Catholic version of this argument and represents a significant development in that tradition's teaching. It grounds the right in the dignity of the human person as known through revealed and natural means, and it holds that the truth cannot impose itself except by the force of its own truth, which enters the mind gently and powerfully.

The commitment must be genuinely universal to be credible. Christians advocating religious liberty for themselves while supporting restrictions on others - opposing mosque construction, supporting blasphemy laws where they are the majority, or seeking privileged status for their own tradition - have adopted a position that is not about liberty at all. The test is whether one defends the freedom of those whose beliefs one regards as false.

Christians have a strong practical interest in this as well as a principled one. Christian communities are minorities facing legal restriction and persecution in a substantial number of countries, and the argument available to them is precisely the one that religious liberty is a universal right. Christians in majority positions who weaken that argument locally are undermining the case their fellow believers depend on elsewhere.

Contested applications remain, and honesty requires acknowledging them rather than pretending the principle resolves everything. Religious exemptions from generally applicable laws, the rights of religious institutions in employment and provision of services, the treatment of religious practices that conflict with other legal protections, and the limits of parental religious authority over children are all genuinely difficult and are not settled by asserting religious liberty. Christians can hold the principle firmly while acknowledging that its application requires judgment.

13. Partisan capture and its symptoms

The most consequential contemporary risk to Christian public witness is not withdrawal but capture: the alignment of churches with a political party such that the party's positions become the church's and the church's members derive their views from the alignment. This has occurred in various forms across the political spectrum and in many countries, and it is documented in the American case in both directions.

The symptoms are identifiable. A congregation whose position on any issue can be predicted from its political alignment rather than from its theology has been captured. So has one that cannot bring itself to criticize a political ally, that treats members with different political views as suspect, or that adjusts its moral teaching to accommodate the conduct of politicians it supports.

The mechanism is generally gradual and is not experienced as capture by those undergoing it. A church aligns with a party on issues where they agree, acquires influence within it, becomes dependent on that access, finds criticism increasingly costly, and eventually discovers that its members' primary formation comes from partisan media rather than from the congregation. Research on the influence of media consumption on religious attitudes supports this description.

The Barmen Declaration of 1934 remains the tradition's sharpest statement of what is at stake. Written by the Confessing Church against the German Christian movement that had aligned itself with National Socialism, it rejects the false doctrine that the church may recognize as sources of its proclamation, apart from the one Word of God, other events, powers, figures, and truths. The declaration is directed at a church that had allowed a political movement to supply its message.

Practical safeguards are available and are not complicated. Congregations can teach the theology rather than the political position; can say things that displease their own members' affiliations; can notice when their public statements consistently favour one side; can ensure that people with different politics are present and heard in leadership; and can refuse the material and access that alignment offers. Each of these costs something, which is what makes them effective.

14. The churches and indigenous peoples

Any account of Christianity and the American order that omits indigenous peoples has omitted the population most directly affected by the fusion of Christian mission with national expansion. The doctrine of discovery, articulated in fifteenth-century papal bulls and incorporated into United States law through the Supreme Court's decision in Johnson v. M'Intosh in 1823, supplied a legal framework in which lands occupied by non-Christian peoples could be claimed by Christian sovereigns. The theological premise was explicit rather than incidental.

The boarding school system is the clearest institutional instance and its record is documented. From the late nineteenth century, federal policy removed indigenous children from their families to schools operated substantially by churches, where indigenous languages, dress, and religious practice were suppressed. The stated aim, in the formula attributed to the founder of the Carlisle school, was to kill the Indian and save the man. Investigations in both the United States and Canada have documented widespread abuse and substantial numbers of deaths at these institutions.

Christian responses to this record have developed unevenly. Several denominations have issued formal apologies, some have funded reparative programmes, and the doctrine of discovery has been formally repudiated by a number of Christian bodies including, in 2023, a joint statement from two Vatican dicasteries. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission produced findings that named church involvement directly and issued calls to action addressed to the churches.

Indigenous Christians occupy a position that complicates simple narratives in both directions. Substantial indigenous Christian communities exist, some with long histories, and their members have generally resisted both the assumption that Christianity is inherently colonial and the assumption that indigenous identity and Christian faith are incompatible. Indigenous theologians have developed accounts of the gospel in indigenous categories, and their work is a significant and under-read body of theology.

The relevance to this article's argument is direct. The fusion of Christian identity with national purpose was not an abstraction; it produced the legal doctrines and the institutions described here, and the people who bore the cost are present and can be asked. Christians assessing whether the fusion of faith and nation is theologically acceptable have this evidence available, and a discussion of civil religion that treats it as a matter of presidential rhetoric alone has not confronted what the doctrine was actually used for.

15. The stranger as a test case

Immigration provides a useful test of whether a congregation's political positions derive from its theology or from its alignment, because the biblical material is unusually extensive and unusually clear while the policy questions are genuinely difficult. The combination means that a congregation can be assessed on whether it engages both.

The Torah's provisions concerning the ger, the resident alien, are among its most frequently repeated. The alien is not to be wronged or oppressed (Exodus 22:21; 23:9); is included in sabbath rest (Exodus 20:10) and in the festivals (Deuteronomy 16:11-14); receives gleanings and the third-year tithe (Leviticus 19:10; Deuteronomy 14:28-29); is to be judged impartially (Deuteronomy 1:16); and is to be loved, with the stated reason that Israel was itself alien in Egypt (Leviticus 19:34; Deuteronomy 10:19). The command to love the neighbour and the command to love the alien appear in the same chapter.

The New Testament continues this and intensifies it. The holy family flees to Egypt as refugees (Matthew 2:13-15); the judgment scene includes I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matthew 25:35); hospitality to strangers is repeatedly commanded (Romans 12:13; Hebrews 13:2; 1 Peter 4:9); and the church itself is described in the vocabulary of alien status (Ephesians 2:19; 1 Peter 2:11). The biblical material on this subject is not marginal or ambiguous.

The policy questions are nonetheless genuinely difficult and Christians should not pretend that citing texts resolves them. Nations have legitimate interests in regulating entry; the scale of contemporary displacement exceeds any historical precedent; the effects of migration on receiving communities and on countries of origin are contested among economists; and the biblical provisions address a covenant community's treatment of aliens within its borders rather than supplying an immigration policy for a modern state.

What the material does establish is a disposition and a set of constraints. Whatever policy a Christian supports, it cannot involve treating migrants with contempt, describing them in dehumanizing terms, or being indifferent to their suffering, and a Christian's first question about any measure should be what it does to the vulnerable people it affects. A congregation whose members' views on this subject are indistinguishable from their party's, and who have never encountered the biblical material, has been formed by something other than Scripture.

16. What congregations can practically do

The analysis supports a set of practices that are within reach of any congregation and that do not require agreement about policy. The first is to teach the biblical material on the subjects members actually argue about - wealth and poverty, the alien, the exercise of authority, war, justice, and the state - rather than leaving members to receive their framework entirely from partisan sources. A congregation that has never taught what Scripture says about the resident alien has left its members with nothing but their politics.

The second is to make the congregation's own composition a matter of deliberate concern. A congregation in which everyone votes the same way is receiving no internal correction, and its political positions will drift toward the consensus without anyone deciding. Ensuring that people with different views are present, are heard, and are in leadership is a structural safeguard that no amount of teaching replaces.

The third is to distinguish, explicitly and in public teaching, between what follows from Christian commitments and what is a prudential judgment about means. Christians may agree that the poor have claims and disagree about which policies serve them; may agree that human life is to be protected and disagree about legislative strategy. Collapsing this distinction turns disagreements about means into questions of faithfulness, which is how congregations divide over politics.

The fourth is to notice the pattern of one's own public statements. A congregation whose pronouncements consistently favour one side, or which has never said anything that displeased its own members' affiliations, should treat that as evidence rather than as vindication. The test proposed earlier applies: a body that can criticize its allies has demonstrated that its standard comes from somewhere other than the alignment.

The fifth is to keep the congregation's own life primary. The early church's political effect was substantially its existence as a community that crossed the divisions of its society and cared for its members and its neighbours materially, and that remains the church's most credible contribution. A congregation that is deeply engaged in the politics of its nation and has no relationship with the poor of its own street has inverted the order.

17. A Christian political witness

The alternative to both withdrawal and capture is a witness whose content comes from the tradition rather than from a political programme, and the tradition's resources are substantial. Its account of human dignity grounded in creation rather than capability, its insistence that the poor have claims rather than needing charity, its scepticism about concentrated power, and its practice of institutional care for the destitute are each distinctive and are not straightforwardly available from other sources.

Such a witness will not align neatly with any party, and this is a feature rather than a defect. A tradition committed to the protection of unborn life, to the welcome of the migrant, to the care of the poor, to religious liberty for all, to the dignity of prisoners, and to restraint in the use of lethal force is not going to find a party that shares its whole position, and a church that finds itself comfortable within one has probably adjusted its position.

The church's most substantial political contribution is generally its own life rather than its advocacy. A community that includes people of different classes, ethnicities, and political affiliations, that cares for its members materially, that resolves conflict without expulsion, and that treats the vulnerable as central rather than marginal constitutes a political demonstration that argument cannot supply. This was the early church's principal effect and it remains available.

Speech is nonetheless required and silence is a position. The churches' silence during periods of grave injustice - on slavery, on segregation, in Germany, and elsewhere - has been more damaging than their misdirected speech, and the tradition's prophetic material makes clear that failing to speak for those who cannot is itself a failure. The relevant question is what one is willing to say when it is costly rather than when it is popular.

The measure of a Christian political witness, on the tradition's own terms, is whether it can criticize its allies. A church that speaks against the injustices committed by those it opposes has done nothing that ordinary partisanship does not do; a church that speaks against those committed by its own side has demonstrated that its standard comes from somewhere other than the alignment. Lincoln's Second Inaugural remains the model in American public speech, and it is notable that it came from a politician rather than a preacher.

The historical record surveyed here supplies the reason for that standard rather than merely commending it. The churches were most seriously wrong when they were most closely identified with the interests of those around them - on slavery, on segregation, on indigenous dispossession, and in the European instances that produced the Barmen Declaration. In each case a Christian critique was available, was made by a minority, and was resisted by the majority precisely because it required criticizing an alignment that had come to feel like faithfulness. That pattern is the strongest available argument for a witness whose content comes from somewhere the alignment cannot reach. In each case, too, the minority who spoke were vindicated by history and were treated at the time as divisive.

Limitations

• The article's scope is the United States, and its analysis does not describe the relationship between Christianity and political order in other contexts, which differ substantially. Established churches in Europe, minority Christian communities under non-Christian majorities, and the political situations of the majority-world churches each require their own treatment.
• The religious commitments of the founders, the original meaning of the religion clauses, and the interpretation of the historical evidence on establishment are contested among historians and legal scholars. This article describes the principal positions and the evidence bearing on them without adjudicating, and readers should consult the primary historiography.
• Empirical claims about contemporary Christian nationalism rest on survey research whose measurement is methodologically contested. The composite indices used in this literature have been criticized, and findings should be treated with corresponding caution. No original survey research was conducted.
• The article states theological judgments as such and does not present them as historical findings. Christians who hold different political theologies - including those in traditions with established churches, and those holding integralist or theonomic positions - will assess several arguments here differently, and the article addresses the arguments rather than the motives of those who hold them.
• Contested applications of religious liberty, including exemptions from generally applicable laws and conflicts between religious practice and other legal protections, are identified rather than resolved. These require case-by-case legal and moral analysis beyond this article's scope.

Conclusion

The colonies were not founded as havens of religious freedom in general; most had establishments and penalized dissent, Massachusetts executed Quakers, and Virginia imprisoned Baptist preachers into the 1770s. The constitutional settlement emerged from an alliance between Enlightenment figures and dissenting Protestants - Williams, Backus, Leland - whose arguments were theological: coerced faith is not faith, and establishment corrupts the church.

That origin bears directly on contemporary argument. Christians seeking greater state endorsement of Christianity are opposing a settlement their own theological forebears fought for at personal cost, and the arguments those forebears made have not been answered. The historical evidence since is unfavourable to establishment: the countries with the strongest historical establishments are now the most secularized.

Civil religion is real, has been invoked by every president, and can function in two ways. Lincoln's Second Inaugural placed the nation under judgment, refused to claim God's endorsement, and observed that both sides read the same Bible; the more common pattern sanctifies national purposes and supplied religious warrant for manifest destiny and for successive wars. The distinction between these is the phenomenon's central issue.

The fusion of Christian faith with national identity requires transferring to a nation the categories Scripture assigns to the church, and the transfer is unwarranted: the church is drawn from every nation, its citizenship is described as elsewhere, and its members are called aliens and exiles. The alternative to both withdrawal and capture is a witness whose content comes from the tradition, which will align with no party, and whose test is whether it can criticize its own allies.

References

1. The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. (2021). National Council of Churches.
2. Williams, R. (1644). The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience.
3. Madison, J. (1785). Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.
4. Jefferson, T. (1786). The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
5. Winthrop, J. (1630). A Model of Christian Charity.
6. Lincoln, A. (1865). Second Inaugural Address.
7. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
8. King, M. L. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail.
9. Confessing Church. (1934). The Theological Declaration of Barmen.
10. Bellah, R. N. (1967). Civil religion in America. Daedalus, 96(1), 1-21.
11. Noll, M. A. (2006). The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. University of North Carolina Press.
12. Noll, M. A. (2002). America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press.
13. Hamburger, P. (2002). Separation of Church and State. Harvard University Press.
14. Second Vatican Council. (1965). Dignitatis Humanae: Declaration on Religious Freedom.
15. Raboteau, A. J. (1978). Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press.