God and Republic: Christianity’s Role in the Early American Republic
After America gained independence, one of the most debated topics was how Christianity fit into the new country. Was the United States truly a “Christian nation” in a way that mattered? Did Protestant values support being a citizen? People back then were pretty sure about these questions, and their answers give us a good idea of how religion, law, and being a citizen came together in the early days.
Stephen Colwell, a lawyer and social reformer from Philadelphia, tackled this question head-on in his book, The Position of Christianity in the United States, published in 1854. He believed that the founders, no matter what they personally believed about religion, had created a republic where the laws, systems, and how people lived together were clearly influenced by Protestantism. “We are a Christian people,” he wrote, “our morals come from Christianity, our society is based on Christianity, and our way of life is Christian.” What’s important is that Colwell made it clear that this wasn’t about officially making religion the law. He didn’t see the Constitution’s rules against religious tests and its promise of freedom of religion as signs of not caring about religion. Instead, he thought they came from the Protestant idea of Christian tolerance—the belief that true Christianity needed freedom of thought. So, the American system wasn’t about keeping Christianity separate from public life; it was the most political way Christianity could be shown.
Colwell’s argument was backed by strong legal precedents. Back in 1822, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled in Commonwealth v. Updegraff that “Christianity—general Christianity—is, and always has been, a part of the common law of Pennsylvania.” Chief Justice Kent of New York also agreed, believing that upsetting the Author of Christian teachings was a big breach of public decency and social order. These decisions showed what historian Daniel Walker Howe has called how deeply Christianity was involved in the young republic’s civic life: religious groups, without public funding, filled the educational and moral gaps left by weak state governments. They ran schools, colleges, and voluntary associations that helped citizens become self-governing. The Second Great Awakening, in particular, was a huge educational movement that spread Protestant norms to a growing and more literate population.
But the Protestant agreement wasn’t always without challenges. As Kirsten Fischer has pointed out, the deist thinker Elihu Palmer criticized evangelical Calvinism in the early republic, arguing that the religion of fear and damnation preached from American pulpits didn’t really fit with being a republican citizen. While evangelicals saw God’s judgment as essential for moral order, Palmer and his fellow freethinkers thought it was a tool of priestly control that weakened people’s abilities to govern themselves. The big increase in Baptist and Methodist congregations after 1790 only made this debate stronger, as these lively popular movements pushed Christianity into the public eye while also insisting on keeping the church and state separate.
Colwell didn’t shy away from these tensions, but he ultimately brushed aside the deist challenge. He was more focused on the Constitution than on theological debates, and his main point was clear: a republic that distanced itself from Christianity would lose the moral foundation that kept its institutions strong. Whether you agree with him or not, his stance on Christianity is a crucial piece of the puzzle for understanding how many Americans in the pre-Civil War era saw the connection between their faith and their government. In the early republic, Christianity wasn’t fully established or completely private; it was somewhere in between, and Americans have been figuring that out ever since.
Bibliography:
Colwell, Stephen. The Position of Christianity in the United States, in Its Relations with Our Political Institutions, and Specially with Reference to Religious Instruction in the Public Schools. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926.
Fischer, Kirsten. “‘Religion Governed by Terror’: A Deist Critique of Fearful Christianity in the Early American Republic.” Revue française d’études américaines, no. 125 (2010): 13–26.
Howe, Daniel Walker. “Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–24.