Is America a Christian nation? It’s a question that sparks fierce debate—but what if “a Christian nation” is not a status to be claimed, but a reality to strive for?
Esau McCaulley invites us to reframe the conversation, exploring America’s “Christian nation” claims through the lens of the Black Christian experience. As Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. argued, a truly Christian nation isn’t defined by its labels, but by how it lives out its ideals. Rather than striving to simply claim Christian values, we’re challenged to embody them—showing Christ’s love to the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the oppressed.
Transcript:
Is America a Christian Nation? How you answer that question will depend on who you ask. Let me explain. There are different ways answer the question “Is America a Christian Nation.” We can look deep at history and try to discern the relative levels of Christian piety amongst the founding fathers. We can talk about the religious elements in the founding documents. Or, we look at church attention across time. Talking about church attendance is often linked to nostalgia, the sense that America used to be a Christian nation, but has now lost its way. Fewer people go to church and the number of people who identify as Christian is down. Christian values seem to be disappearing from the public discourse. Therefore, many think American used to be a Christian nation, but is in danger of losing that status.
But ask Black Christians, “Is America a Christian Nation?” and you usually get a different response: “Which period of our American Christian past was the ‘golden age’ to which we shall return?” Would the enslaved black Christians who petitioned for freedom during the revolutionary war on Christian grounds consider America a truly Christian nation? Would those suffering under Jim Crow in the 1950s think of the post-WWII boom in church attendance and family values as a period of freedom for all? For many Black Christians, the issue of America’s Christian identity cannot be separated from America’s history of race-based slavery or segregation. It has been precisely the presence of these twin evils that has led African Americans to question American Christianity throughout our history.
Flannery O’Connor called the American South as “Christ Haunted.” She meant that the memory of Jesus in the Southern landscape troubles the conscience of those who do evil there. O’Connor gets at how America’s Christian status has been posed in Black Christian spaces. The question has not been, “Is America a Christian nation?” But rather, “How can a nation with so many professed Christians allow so much evil and injustice in its midst?”
For example, Frederick Douglass made this point in a particularly biting portion of his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He wonders what the Christianity of this land means for people in chains. He said,
"The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions,) does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.”
Frederick Douglass’ critique only has power because he knew that America claimed to be a nation where Christian values predominate. For Frederick, “a Christian nation” is not a status to be claimed but a reality to strive for. In effect he says, “You want to say that the Church holds sway in this country? You want to claim that this place is filled to the brim with Christians? Fine. Free the enslaved and then I will take you seriously.” This same basic claim was made over a century later in Martin Luther King’s Letter to a Birmingham Jail. He critiques white Christian moderates for opposing, rather than supporting, claims for Black civil rights.
For leaders like Douglass and King, the question “Is America a Christian country?” is not primarily a historical question, but a moral one. How can a nation filled with so many Christians allow for injustice and oppression to exist in our midst?
This might be the better path for us as a church today. Rather than trying to settle the question of whether America can be, is, or ever was a Christian country, we should try to be better Christians in this country today. In other words, we should see our vocation as on that is aspirational. Are we witnesses to Christ and his kingdom through how we care for our most vulnerable neighbors: the frightened mother worried about how she is going to make it financially, the growing child in her womb, the homeless man on the street having a mental health episode, the criminal we have decided isn’t worth a second chance, the immigrant, the abused, the traumatized, and the trafficked?
Frederick Douglass’ question still rings true, and it only has power because for all our flaws, the teachings of Christ do indeed haunt this land. What does our supposed Christian faith in this country mean to the knocked around and stepped on peoples in our midst? The question, “is America a Christian nation” is not a historical question, but again a moral one, and it is not a question we want answered by looking to the past, but by the church living as the people of God in the present.
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