One reason Christian Nationalists are wrong is that they tell and believe lies
A new book seeks to hold them to account
Finally, we American citizens have an accounting of the untruths and half-truths that Christian Nationalists have been telling — and continue to tell.
The Christian Past that Wasn’t: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History, by Warren Throckmorton, was published yesterday — and not a moment too soon.
Christian Nationalists want Americans to believe that God has uniquely blessed and thus favored the United States and that the nation should be governed by certain Christians according to their theological understanding of what God wants.
Nearly all of which seems bonkers to anyone who knows American history. Like Warren Throckmorton, who also is author of the 2025 let’s-tell-the-truth book called Getting Jefferson Right: Fact-Checking Claims About Thomas Jefferson.
In his new book, Throckmorton describes — and then demolishes — seven myths that Christian Nationalists cling to. Among the worst misleaders is David Barton, who runs something called WallBuilders, the website of which you can view here, though be careful little eyes what you read there.
(This photo of David Barton is credited to Gage Skidmore and came from this site.)
These myths, Throckmorton writes, run from “the days of the first European arrival to the present.” And together these seven myths form the foundation of the belief that America had a Christian founding.
I recommend you read this book, but for those who skip that, here’s a list of Throckmorton’s seven myths:
America is a covenant homeland for European Protestants.
America is a Christian nation because the colonies had state churches.
America is a Christian nation because the founders were orthodox Christians.
The founders created a Christian government.
The charter documents are based on the Bible and Christianity.
America’s virtues justify America’s sins.
Christianity should be promoted in public education.
Throckmorton acknowledges that “there are multiple Christian nationalisms,” and then does a careful historical analysis to prove that every one of those myths is bunk — or, at best, only a little bit true.
The history he examines to reach his conclusions often has been twisted by such people as Barton to advance the ideas of Christian Nationalism instead of the ideas contained in our founding documents about a nation that protects religious freedom for all its citizens.
Throckmorton wisely goes back to and before the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery in which the Vatican told European explorers that the Catholic Church gave them the right to go into unexplored lands anywhere and, by any means necessary, take charge of that land and convert the residents — often called “savages,” including in our Declaration of Independence, where it’s expanded to ‘merciless Indian savages’ — to Christianity.
That doctrine — and the idea of “manifest destiny” that flowed from it — led to physical and cultural genocide of Indigenous people throughout what came to be called (falsely and arrogantly) the New World.
One of the strangest and most radical forms of Christian Nationalism, as Throckmorton notes, is “Seven-Mountain Dominionism,” which teaches that “Christians are commanded by God to take power over the entire American culture,” including education, family, religion, government, business, media and entertainment.
As for Throckmorton’s take-down of David Barton, he begins by noting that “Barton once said he had an earned doctorate and that he played basketball for Oral Roberts University; both claims turned out to be false.”
(And, no, despite what Barton claims, the Constitution does not quote the Bible word for word. Indeed, as Throckmorton writes, “the Constitution contains no references to God or religion other than to forbid a religious test for public service in Article VI.”)
One problem with these and many other falsehoods or half-truths about America and its early days is that they continue to get repeated today as full truths, including by Rep. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who once told the House about a prayer that he had read aloud at an event, a prayer that he said Thomas Jefferson often recited.
“Simply put,” Throckmorton concludes, “the prayer was not written or spoken by Thomas Jefferson.” But you can find it in a 1928 edition of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
Where did the idea that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation come from? Throckmorton writes this: “As the founders were dying during the early nineteenth century, the myth of a Christian nation was born and nurtured by mythmakers, historians and Christian leaders alike.” And, he writes, this “narrative of America being founded by the providence of God for a special purpose has found expression throughout the nation’s history.”
In the end, he writes, “the historical claims surrounding the belief that God intended America to be a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (or Christian) homeland via a covenant are nearly all false, and the ones that have some truth are irrelevant to the myth.”
(This image came from this site.)
Rather, he writes, “separating the church and state has been an American innovation from the beginning.” Indeed, he argues, “the founders intended to separate church and state when they crafted the governing documents.”
The reality, as Throckmorton makes clear, is that if the U.S. clearly began as a Christian nation living out Christian ideas, there never would have been genocide against Indigenous people and there never would have been slavery of people stolen from Africa. (“The passivity,” he writes, “of the orthodox Christian delegates surrounding slavery is one of the most significant challenges to Christian nationalists in the historical record.”)
But Christian nationalists, he writes, “whitewash history for ideological purposes.”
And for the sake of both historical clarity and religious freedom, they need to stop. Now.
Finally, this P.S.: The Associated Press recently offered this story about the question of whether the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. It’s worth a read.
The pope and an A.I. leader have messages for us
Ever since I learned earlier this month that Pope Leo XIV planned to issue his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”) addressing artificial intelligence and human dignity, I’ve been anxious to read it.
You and I will get a chance to do that this coming Monday, when it’s released. And I will be intrigued to see what I presume will be the consistency of Leo’s careful thinking about the dangers and possibilities of A.I.
Charles C. Camosy, a professor of medical humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Nebraska, has written this helpful article about that encyclical.
(This image came from this site.)
“(T)he Pope himself,” Camosy writes, “will attend the Vatican press conference to mark its release. Remarkably, he will deliver an address alongside Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude large language model. Let that sink in. The head of the Catholic Church and one of the most consequential AI researchers and leaders in the world, on the same stage, presenting the same document. This has never happened before.”
But here’s Camosy’s caution about all of this: “The timing of ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ is not primarily an occasion for celebration. It is an occasion for clarity about the grave and perhaps existential dangers that make this encyclical necessary. The Church is not releasing a social document because things are going well.”
Indeed, although the potential benefits of A.I. are many, so are the potential dangers — dangers that can dehumanize people and cause huge disasters that the theological world is only now waking up to. A.I., in fact, has vast potential to be more life-changing (often in destructive ways) than even the computer/internet revolution.
So let’s pay attention to the encyclical and see if there’s something for each of us to do in response.
Thanks for the restack.
Look forward to reading your book.