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.
