If you live anywhere near the Bible Belt, you’re going to occasionally come across some hardcore Christian historical revisionism. America was founded to be a shining beacon of Christ to the world, that sort of nonsense. Here is a recent example from the pages of last Sunday’s issue of the Tulsa World:
The Atheistic led abandonment of Christianity and the Bible is in stark contrast to the Christian nation our pilgrim forefathers founded. The Declaration of Independence notes, man is “endowed by their Creator (obviously from Genesis 1:1) with certain inalienable Rights…” It also mentions (1) “the Supreme Judge of the World” (Hebrews 11:23, etc.) and (2) “a firm Reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence.” These Christian sentiments are very much a part of the “public square.”
— Dale I. Royal, American Atheism in Today’s World (paid advertising from Pioneer and Bell Church of Christ, 31 May 2015, requires login)
Everyone should balk at the phrase “pilgrim forefathers” since it conflates early theocratic colonists with the enlightenment thinkers who drafted the world’s first secular Constitution. The intentions of this latter group are misconstrued as well. You are probably already aware that the author of the Declaration of Independence was not a Christian in any sense that would be recognized by the Church of Christ today.
With the help of Richard Price, a Unitarian minister in London, and Joseph Priestly, an English scientist-clergyman who emigrated to America in 1794, Jefferson eventually arrived at some positive assertions of his private religion. His ideas are nowhere better expressed than in his compilations of extracts from the New Testament “The Philosophy of Jesus” (1804) and “The Life and Morals of Jesus” (1819-20). The former stems from his concern with the problem of maintaining social harmony in a republican nation. The latter is a multilingual collection of verses that was a product of his private search for religious truth. Jefferson believed in the existence of a Supreme Being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe and the ultimate ground of being, but this was not the triune deity of orthodox Christianity. He also rejected the idea of the divinity of Christ, but as he writes to William Short on October 31, 1819, he was convinced that the fragmentary teachings of Jesus constituted the “outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.” In correspondence, he sometimes expressed confidence that the whole country would be Unitarian, but he recognized the novelty of his own religious beliefs. On June 25, 1819, he wrote to Ezra Stiles Ely, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.”
After confusing the Pilgrims with the Founders and misinterpreting Jefferson, the evangelists from the Pioneer and Bell Church of Christ go completely off the rails, favorably citing to the enslavement and subsequent Christianization of west African captives as evidential support for America as a Christian nation. Slave traders did indeed justify enslavement from the Bible, but is that really the sort of argument you want to be making as a 21st century Christian preacher? I doubt it.
If you find yourself dealing with this sort of blatant revisionism on a regular basis, I heartily recommend a book called Liars for Jesus, which was written specifically to refute the most common spurious claims given by revisionists. After reading this book (free PDF) you will generally be able to spot when pastors and apologists are trying to blusterbluff their way past you by pretending to know American history. Jefferson and Madison, drafters of the Declaration and Constitution (respectively), laid the groundwork for the strict separation of church and state, we must not allow theocratic ahistorians to tarnish this truly exceptional achievement.
