As the United States heads toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a long-running historical argument over whether the founders aimed to build a Christian nation has reentered the political arena — and the Trump administration is staking out a sharp position. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared flatly that “America was founded as a Christian nation … in our DNA.” President Donald Trump is organizing an “America Prays” gathering on the National Mall on May 17, with official participants that include Christian groups who promote a Christian founding narrative.
For professional historians, the picture is more complicated — and neither side in the culture war, they say, wants to hear the full story.
“Neither side really wants to hear what I say,” said Gregg Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at The Master’s University in Santa Clarita, California. Frazer, author of The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders, argues that the United States was not founded as a Christian republic — a position that often disappoints fellow Christians — but that most founders were also not the rationalist deists sometimes portrayed by advocates of a strict church-state separation.
Frazer and many other scholars describe key founders like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin as “theistic rationalists.” They believed in an active God who intervened in human affairs, including the American Revolution — George Washington famously credited divine “Providence” for preserving his life in battle — but they rejected core Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus.
“They did believe in an active God,” Frazer said. “Therefore, prayer matters, because there’s someone listening.”
Yet Frazer insists that the Bible was not cited as a governing source in the Constitutional Convention debates or in The Federalist Papers. Instead, the founders leaned heavily on Enlightenment concepts of human equality, accountable government, and religious freedom. The Constitution itself contains no reference to a specific religion beyond the date — “in the year of our Lord” 1787 — and bans religious tests for officeholders. The First Amendment, adopted shortly afterward, guarantees religious freedom and forbids an establishment of religion.
Historian John Fea, a fellow at the Lumen Center in Wisconsin and author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, said that modern advocates often cherry-pick history. “Everyone’s looking for what we historians call a usable past,” Fea said. “We go into the past looking for what we want in order to advance a particular political or cultural agenda.” He pointed out that while public prayers were indeed offered at key moments, the declaration of independence was fundamentally about “taxation and representation and shutting down the port of Boston and all these more economic and political things.”
Not all scholars see the secular case as airtight. Mark David Hall, author of Did America Have a Christian Founding?, contends that Christianity strongly influenced the moral reasoning behind the founding. He points to the founders’ emphasis on human dignity — a concept that harmonizes with the biblical teaching that humanity is created in God’s image — and argues that checks and balances reflect a Protestant understanding of human sinfulness. Hall also notes that some states sponsored churches for decades after the Constitution was ratified and that early Congresses issued prayer proclamations.
Still, many early critics faulted the Constitution for lacking religious content. Over time, the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to the states, citing Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state.” Courts have since wrestled with its meaning in areas from school prayer to religious displays on public land.
The contemporary stakes are high. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an advocacy group, summarizes the scholarly consensus this way: “Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense.” The group calls the Christian nation push an effort “to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.” A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that six in 10 U.S. adults believe the founders originally intended a Christian nation, suggesting the narrative has wide purchase.
Frazer, speaking to audiences who often come with strong prior commitments, hands out a flyer listing a dozen reasons why the Christian America view is dangerous. His core warning is not about politics.
“It’s mostly dangerous for Christianity,” he said. By claiming people or ideas as Christian that are not, “it muddies the waters in terms of what Christianity is all about.”