One strand of the debate has surged as the U.S. nears the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4: whether the founders intended the country to be a Christian nation. As America 250 events roll forward, some Christian activists and authors are pressing claims of a Christian founding and tying them to modern political arguments about the meaning of church and state.
In recent weeks, that narrative has gained prominent visibility through the Trump administration. Trump has been promoting “America Prays,” culminating in a May 17 gathering on the National Mall in Washington, where official participants include Christian organizations and individuals, including some who endorse the concept of a Christian founding. Cabinet officials, in their official capacity, are issuing Christian messages in connection with the initiative.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has added force to the administration’s message, proclaiming that “America was founded as a Christian nation … in our DNA.” The remarks, along with the administration’s broader promotional campaign, have become part of a renewed public contest over how to read the founding-era relationship between religion and government.
Critics have pushed back, saying the “Christian nation” framing conflicts with the Constitution. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for example, said “Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense,” and it decried efforts “to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.”
The controversy also reflects a question of intent as much as evidence: a 2022 Pew Research Center report found six in 10 U.S. adults surveyed say they believed the founders originally intended America to be a Christian nation. Historians interviewed for the debate say the difference between what many people want the past to show and what the historical record supports has become harder to separate as the anniversary approaches.
“Everyone’s looking for what we historians call a usable past,” said John Fea, author of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” Fea said such framing can drive advocates toward a particular political or cultural agenda, arguing that for example, the existence of prayers offered by officials at key moments does not necessarily answer whether religion was the central story of independence itself.
Gregg Frazer, a historian of politics and history who teaches at The Master’s University in Santa Clarita, California, has argued that the founders did not create a Christian republic. Frazer said several key founders either rejected core Christian doctrines or were vague enough to leave historians debating what they believed, while he said the founders were not simply a “cluster of rationalist deists” or anti-religious skeptics as sometimes portrayed.
Frazer also described the founders’ religious language in ways he says are meant to be broadly acceptable across Christian and non-Christian believers. In his view, there is no Bible citation as a source for governing principles in the documented proceedings of the Constitutional Convention or in the influential Federalist Papers. He said the founders instead drew on influences including Enlightenment thinking about human equality, accountable government and freedom of religion.
Mark David Hall takes a different emphasis on Christianity’s role, arguing that Christianity strongly influenced the founding even if core founders did not hold traditional Christian beliefs. Hall said “There’s plenty of evidence Christianity had an influence,” and he pointed to a convergence between founders’ attention to human dignity and Biblical teaching of humanity created in God’s image. Hall also said the system of checks and balances reflected teachings about human sin that, he said, permeated a largely Protestant culture.
Both historians also draw attention to early public practices and later legal disputes that followed. Hall said early presidents and Congresses issued proclamations for prayer and thanksgiving, and he said some states sponsored churches for decades after the Constitution was ratified, as well as promoting what he described as toleration without eliminating the importance of real religious commitment among differing adherents. Frazer, meanwhile, pointed to the First Amendment framework: there is no reference to any specific religion in the Constitution beyond the date “in the year of our Lord” 1787, and it forbids religious tests for officeholders; the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom and forbids “establishment” of a national religion.
Supreme Court rulings applied the First Amendment’s limits to states through the Fourteenth Amendment, and courts have since grappled with the principle in disputes ranging from school prayer to healthcare, labor law and crosses on public lands. The question of what “founding” means can also complicate claims: some arguments treat the founding as beginning with early colonial settlements—such as Massachusetts Bay and Virginia charters that declared the spread of the Gospel as a fundamental purpose or Puritan Boston’s “city upon a hill” idea—while others focus on the period beginning in 1776.
Under either approach, historians say the nation’s religious development was not uniform. Frazer wrote that by the Revolution, rationalistic approaches to religion influenced many college-educated and propertied elite men who helped produce the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, while he also said Freemasonry, a fraternal order based on beliefs in a universal God and morals, played a role for some. He said some founders were devout Christians, such as John Jay, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, while others believed in God but not in Jesus’ divinity, including figures like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.
Frazer also challenged a popular misconception that most founders were deists, saying instead that he describes many founders as “theistic rationalists.” He cited George Washington’s belief in an active God—saying Washington believed Providence saved him in battle and intervened on America’s behalf—along with other founders who, Frazer said, believed in an active God such that “prayer matters, because there’s someone listening.” Frazer also contrasted those views with the broader constitutional outcome, saying that the First Amendment has helped create conditions he compared to a “religious free market,” where Christianity and other faiths have flourished.
Despite the continued disagreement, Fea and others said advocates often steer around historical nuance, prompting a recurring question for the next anniversary cycle: whether focusing on prayers and religious references is the main measure of what happened when the country declared independence, or whether the legal and political architecture of the new republic tells a different story.