Western Civilization: Christianity as a Unifying Force Within a Secular State Part One; Religion in the Colonies

While there is continued debate over whether the United States is a "Christian Nation" (with debate even over what the term itself means) or whether its founders were Christians and whether it was founded upon "Christian principles", it is not arguable, however, that the majority of people in the United States identify as Christian and that Christian values, broadly defined, have shaped our culture. The European colonizers were overwhelmingly Christian, although there were Enlightenment-influenced strains which merely gave lip service to Christianity. There were small numbers of colonists and their descendants who were of other faiths, and of course there were the religious traditions of the native peoples, but Christianity was by far the religion of the majority. So, in some respects, the United States could be viewed as a Christian nation and Christianity could be viewed as a unifying force and foundational to our culture. But only if these terms are defined broadly.

There is some disagreement regarding just how Christian the early colonists were. The popular image of pre-Revolutionary War Americans largely comes from what we know of the Puritan and Pilgrim settlers. The areas that they colonized in New England were founded as religious refuges and were self-consciously religious in character. There was no separation of church and state - the church was the state. This image of the ultra-religious super-Christian early colonist is engraved in our consciousness, but the other colonies, despite some of them having established churches, were not as devoted to their faith as an everyday part of life as were those in Massachusetts and the other New England settlements. There was also the matter of disagreement, often violent disagreement, over what precisely constituted Christianity and who was a Christian. To the majority of Protestants, the Catholics practiced a false religion, Quakers were subversive due to their pacifistic views; various denominations anathematized other denominations and the Puritans thought everyone else was wrong and would gladly have a government that enforced that view.

Looking back over 300 years we sometimes mistake what people meant when they used the words "God" or "Creator". Actual atheists were rare back then, non-religious people, including those who rejected or ignored Christian ritual and mythology, often still believed in a creator of some sort, even when disbelieving in that creator's intervention in human affairs. Some of these people were the Deists, who formalized the language of disbelief and gave it a philosophical basis, but many more simply ignored religion altogether, while still vaguely acknowledging a "God".

There were undoubtedly a lot of Christians in the early days of European settlement, surely a majority, but many of them were Christians in name only, and even among the committed, there was such disagreement that one could hardly call it a unifying force.