America: Founded as a Christian Nation

Thanksgiving is a window into our country’s religious heritage...

... For modern American secularists, public Christianity must be rejected as a source of intolerance and irrationality in public life...

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously observed that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. Similarly, the enemies of public Christianity are entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own history...

Public Christianity was bound up with the founding of the American nation...

In his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Justice Joseph Story admirably explained the Founding generation’s understanding of the relationship between Christianity and politics. Public Christianity, Story suggested, was part of the formative American political experience leading up to independence...

On his account, Americans of the Founding generation supported the public encouragement of Christianity not just as a matter of tradition—of holding on to the ways of their ancestors - but as necessary to the health and vitality of the free and self-governing society they were striving to establish...

In sum, for Story religion is a necessary support to popular morality, which is in turn essential to a decent and orderly society...

... we can encourage religion while also respecting individual freedom, because the government’s authority to support belief is not the same thing as an authority to require it...