"The Origins of American Religious Nationalism."
By Sam Haselby Sam Haselby is a historian, an editor at Aeon Magazine and the author of "The Origins of American Religious Nationalism."July 4, 2017 at 6:00 AM EDT
Then, as now, most Christians in the world were Catholics. Claiming that people moved by deep prejudice against most of world’s Christians wanted to form a “Christian nation” makes no sense. The problem cannot be solved by simply devolving to “Protestant nation.” Britain was known as the sword and shield of Protestantism, set against a hostile Catholic Continent. In what form of Protestantism, exactly, did the United States rise up in rebellion against the 18th-century world’s standard-bearer of Protestantism? Possible answers quickly begin to look rather sectarian, rendering any understanding of “Christian nation” into something very narrow, perhaps some kind of provincial country denomination.
So there are insuperable obstacles to the Christian nationalist position. But there is also a neglected and fascinating history, key to American independence. Quite simply, America’s first patriots were acutely Christian and did envision, at least, an acutely Christian, which to them meant Protestant, nation. They issued the first calls for American independence. More specifically, America’s first nationalist movement was a small group of young New England writers at Yale College who were fiercely Christian. Timothy Dwight and John Trumbull were the group’s founding members, and by 1769, at the Yale College commencement, they publicly protested for American independence. Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, would later come into the group, too.
These young writers, who called themselves the Connecticut Wits, were terrible poets, but they were visionary American nationalists. Dwight’s epic poem, “The Conquest of Canaan,” portrayed an independent America as the new Holy Land. He began it in 1771. Most Americans, by contrast, supported reconciliation with Britain well into 1776. Years later, Dwight would complain that for their early, open advocacy of American independence they had suffered years of ridicule and contempt. John Trumbull’s 1773 poem “An Elegy of the Times” is a clear, repeated call, steeped in New England Protestantism, for nationalist revolution. Though I’ve never met anyone today who has read it, Trumbull’s 1775 poem “M’Fingal” was the best-selling poem of the American Revolution. It went through 30 editions, a feat no other American poet managed until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1847. M’Fingal is a lampoon of the Scottish Enlightenment and a sclerotic Great Britain in the name of enlightened and vital independent, Protestant America.
One, ironically, is that the Wits wrote too much, in too much detail, about how Christian America should look. As a result, it’s obvious that their vision does not easily fit with that of today’s Christian nationalists. America’s 18th-century Christian nationalists, for example, were interested in God and theologizing. Today’s Christian nationalists prefer Jesus and evangelizing. America’s 18th-century Christian nationalists wanted the state to regulate almost every aspect of life, from education to commerce to religion. Today’s Christian nationalists depend politically on an alliance with anti-statist capitalists; indeed, this in some ways odd alliance forms the basis of modern conservatism.
Second, in the story of American national history, America’s 18th-century Christian nationalists are losers. They lost a battle for political control of the United States to the deists Jefferson and Madison, and to the rest of the Southern planters, whom they despised. In December 1814 and January 1815, during the War of 1812, these early Christian nationalists’ alienation culminated in the Hartford Convention, in which a group of their close allies, state and federal officeholders from Connecticut and Massachusetts, met and issued a series of demands. Their most radical demand? They wanted the three-fifths clause, which in effect gave Southern planters 66 votes for every 100 slaves they owned, banished from the U.S. Constitution. If their demands were not met, the Hartford Convention threatened to secede from the United States. The threat misjudged the political climate, however, and helped destroy the Federalist Party that served their political vehicle.
Jefferson exulted at the Hartford Convention’s miscalculation — their “mortification,” he called it. Under any other government, he wrote,
“their treasons would have been punished by the halter,” that is by execution. Hartford, to Jefferson, illustrated the New Englanders’ “religious and political tyranny.” He compared them to prostitutes, “bawds,” who found in religion “a refuge from the despair of their loathsome vices.” Strong words, from one of America’s founders, against the first American patriots, and the country’s original Christian nationalists
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