Faith of the founders

Was America founded as a Christian nation? No, is John Fea's answer to the question posed in his title. But the answer is yes if we consider how Americans (especially from 1789 to 1865) understood themselves as a Christian nation. And then again, maybe it's just a bad question, Fea concludes, because it arises not from a rich understanding of the past but from present-day polemics. Only when we remove it from that context can we begin to make sense of it.

As chair of the history department at Messiah College, a professing Christian, author of an outstanding book on an 18th-century figure of the "rural Enlightenment" (Philip Vickers Fithian), a frequent public speaker and a tireless blogger at "The Way of Improvement Leads Home" (www.philipvickersfithian.com), Fea is rapidly making a name for himself as a public intellectual who brings the virtues of scholarly humility, patience and objectivity to highly controversial questions of religion and the founding era of American history. This book is a model of scholarly restraint, of patiently working one's way through the sources and of historicizing the questions and terms with which one works.

America was not "founded as a Christian nation," Fea suggests, because its founding documents were those of a fledgling nation-state and not intended as religious statements. The Declaration of Independence was a document of foreign policy aimed at persuading other nations of our independence, and the Constitution was a secular document of governance aimed at shoring up a national government that had proven far too weak during the era of the Articles of Confederation.