(RNS) — When people ask Holly Hollman if America is a Christian nation, she has a simple response.

“What do you mean by that?”

The longtime general counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which promotes the separation of church and state, Hollman explains that if the question is whether most Americans are Christian, that’s yes. But if they’re asking whether Christians should have special legal privileges that others don’t have, she says her answer is a hard no.

Most historians and legal scholars agree that two things have always been true about the United States — it has no official religion, and Christianity has shaped its culture, laws and public life since before its founding. But what does it mean to be a nation of mostly Christians without a state religion? For most of the nation’s history, the country held that tension without resolving it. 

The debate over that question has gained new intensity in the Trump era, especially as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. On Sunday (May 17), the Trump administration will host “Rededicate 250,” a daylong festival of prayer and thanksgiving on the National Mall. The idea, Trump said when he announced the event at the National Prayer Breakfast, is to “rededicate America as one nation under God.” Many of the speakers at the event — most of them Christian and evangelical — espouse the idea that America was and always has been a Christian nation.

The argument is not merely historical. Some proponents of America as a Christian nation argue that non-Christians are essentially second-class citizens — and say only Christians should enjoy religious freedom or have the right to run the country. That’s turned disagreements over America’s founding into a debate over national identity with direct consequences for the country’s growing number of non-Christian Americans.

Until the 1970s, the belief that America was a Christian nation — demographically and culturally — was commonplace, said John Fea, a professor of history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and author of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?” Many of the nation’s laws, on everything from sexuality and marriage to more mundane details, such as what kinds of businesses could open on Sundays, were shaped by Christian ideas.

The notion of America as a Christian country became contested and redefined during the Reagan era and the rise of the religious right, which wanted the country’s laws to be more explicitly Christian. There were calls for official prayers and Bible readings in school and a return to “family values” in response to the sexual revolution of the ’60s and 1970s and the rise of feminism.

All of a sudden, the idea of being a Christian nation became a partisan debate, not a historical one. 

“You want to get on the side of Christian America, or you’re going to oppose a Christian America — that pretty much tells you where you are at politically today,” said Fea.

Fea is careful to note that America has never been legally a Christian country — the establishment clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly forbids establishing an official national religion. Nonetheless, from the earliest days of the republic, many Christians, on all sides of the political spectrum, have argued that all aspects of society, including governmental policy, should be shaped by their faith.

Matthew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University and author of “Chosen Land,” a religious history of America, said the country is more religious than secular Americans claim and less religious than Christian nationalists would have us believe.

White Protestants, he said, had no qualms about shaping education, politics and foreign policy, as well as the day-to-day aspects of life — especially in the first 150 years of the country’s life. There were Christian prayers in school, and political debates on issues such as immigration, slavery, the use of alcohol and other social issues were rife with references to religion.

And politicians talked a lot about God.

That’s something conservatives like David Barton, a popular evangelical author who promotes the idea that America has always been a Christian nation, get right.

“When they say that the First Amendment did not keep religion out of government but simply kept government out of religion — I think that is an accurate description of the way the First Amendment was applied,” Sutton said. 

The flags circling the Washington Monument fly at half-staff in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Much of the modern debate about America as a Christian nation has been shaped by a 1947 Supreme Court decision, Everson v. Board of Education. In that case, a New Jersey taxpayer named Arch Everson objected to a local school board policy that reimbursed parents for bus fare to school, even if kids went to Catholic schools.

Everson lost — the court ruled that since the reimbursement went to the parents, it was legal.  However, the court also ruled for the first time that the First Amendment applied to state governments — and it made Thomas Jefferson’s idea — that the First Amendment made a “wall of separation” between church and state — an explicit part of law.

“The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state,” the court wrote. “That wall must be kept high and impregnable.”

That ruling would pave the way for later ones that ended official prayer and Bible readings in school and would eventually shift the way many Americans view this issue, especially those on the political left, Fea argues.

“For people on the left, especially, Everson has reshaped the way the whole national history, going back to 1776, has been told,” Fea said. “All of a sudden, you have this wall of separation of church and state that’s high and impregnable.”

Sutton said the Everson decision was good for America. But the court’s reading ignored a lot of history. “I like that interpretation better,” he said. “I think that produces a better country, but it is a bit ahistorical.”

Legal experts like Hollman have a different view. 

Hollman, who also teaches law at Georgetown University, sees the Everson case not as a turning point but as surfacing a principle present from the beginning. 

“There’s a thread in the understanding of the First Amendment — one of the central purposes is to keep the government out of essential matters of religion,” she said. “Certainly, an essential matter of religion is how people believe about God and their relationship to God, and what Scripture they hold as important.”

Sutton pointed to “The Light and the Glory,” a bestselling book first published in the 1970s, after government-sponsored prayer and Bible reading were banned in school, as helping to inspire calls to revive Christian America. Co-written by Peter Marshall Jr., a pastor and speaker who championed the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation, the book was popular with homeschoolers and conservative Christians.

“They helped fuel this idea that the nation was once one thing and that had been lost, and that it’s up to Christians to reclaim it,” Sutton said.

Christians have been making that same argument since the earliest days in the United States, often in ways that sound like the Seven Mountain Mandate, a conservative evangelical idea that Christians should run all parts of society.

“The complete Christianization of all life is what we pray and work for, when we work and pray for the coming of the kingdom of heaven,” the Rev. Washington Gladden, a Columbus, Ohio, pastor and leader of the Social Gospel movement, told the State Association of Congregational Churches of Ohio in May of 1894.

For Gladden, though, making society more Christian meant doing things such as building housing for the poor, ending segregation, giving better wages for workers, welcoming immigrants, putting limits on profits from the stock market and other social causes. 

That call to revive a God-blessed past has gained new popularity today in conservative circles, through writers such as Barton and through the rise of Christian nationalists. For them, making society more Christian means making sure conservative Christians have political power and opposing same-sex marriage and abortion.

Much of what proponents cite as proof that America was founded as a Christian nation is factually incorrect, according to Warren Throckmorton, a retired psychology professor and author of “The Christian Past That Wasn’t,” due out May 19.

Throckmorton notes that Ben Carson, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, neurosurgeon and author, claimed that prayer saved the U.S. Constitution. While on a book tour in 2024, Carson told the story of how delegates to the Constitutional Convention in June of 1787 found themselves bogged down. Then Ben Franklin suggested that the delegates start praying and asking for “the assistance of Heaven.”

“And they knelt and prayed. And they got up and they put together the Constitution of the United States, which I think is a God-inspired document if we will follow it,” Carson said, at an event Throckmorton recounted in his book.

Franklin did implore delegates to pray, said Throckmorton. But they decided not to.

“The Convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary,” Franklin would later write.

For Throckmorton, concerns about the separation of church and state go way back — all the way to his distant ancestor, John Throckmorton, a follower of the Baptist preacher Roger Williams. When Williams was exiled from Massachusetts after clashing with Puritan leaders, John Throckmorton joined him in what became the state of Rhode Island — one of the few early Colonies not to have an official state church.

“Religious freedom in America and separation of church and state does not only go back to Williams, but it goes back to the people who are willing to sacrifice everything and move to Providence with him,” Warren Throckmorton said. 

Even though most Americans have been Christians, Throckmorton said, there’s been no consensus on the most Christian way to run a country. Those disagreements started even before the country was founded — like the feud between Williams, a Baptist, and the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts, who were Congregationalists. Christians even fought over which edition of the Bible to read in public schools — leading in the 1800s to the so-called Bible War in Cincinnati and the riots in Philadelphia between Catholics and Protestants. 

Those disagreements continue today with different Christians arguing over immigration enforcement policies and claims by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that God has blessed America’s war on Iran.

“There’s no unified view with Christianity,” said Throckmorton.

In his latest book, Throckmorton debunks what he calls seven myths about America’s past — from the idea that early colonists made a “covenant” with God to the idea that America’s founders were all Christians and wanted to create a Christian homeland.

These myths are built on stories like the one about Franklin and prayer — which are partially true — in order to create a politically useful version of the past.

“One of the reasons that founding myths arise is so that we can feel a part of something bigger than ourselves — part of a really great country and a really great religion,” he said. “I mean, you don’t want to be a part of a bad religion or a bad country.”

Daniel Darling, author of “In Defense of Christian Patriotism,” is sympathetic to the claim that Christianity is a central part of America’s identity. Christianity has long served as America’s civil religion, he said, providing a common moral framework for American culture and law. 

Along with giving a sense of right and wrong, that framework taught that our fellow citizens are people made in God’s image and, as such, have inalienable rights not from government but from God, said Darling.

He said that Christianity and especially churchgoing also helped provide social capital and build community, two things that are in short supply these days as religion has declined over the past few decades. When people say they want to get back to being a Christian nation, Darling thinks they are really longing for a return to a sense of community and common purpose. They don’t want to go back to the 1950s, he said, because that would mean undoing the progress that’s been made on civil rights and other issues since then.

“But I do think there is a sense that we’ve lost something good, even if we’ve made progress. I think you can hold those two things together.”

Fea said that as a historian, he wants to know what people think being a Christian nation means. He pointed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham jail, which linked “Judaeo Christian” values to the nation’s founding.

Civil rights protesters, King wrote, drew on the heritage.

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage,” he wrote, “thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

Fea said that there has often been a backlash in American culture during times of demographic and social change. That was true in the 1800s, when Irish immigrants came to the U.S., and in the early 1900s, when Italians and other Europeans arrived, and it’s been true in recent years with Hispanic immigrants — and with Muslim and Hindu immigrants.

He believes that backlash is helping fuel the arguments that America is a nation for Christians. Recently, Jenna Ellis, a former Trump lawyer turned podcaster, argued that freedom of religion only applied to Christians — not those of other faiths.

“I mean, we don’t have all of these protections for our rights that our founders recognize come from God, our Creator, so that we can go out and live a pluralistic society and say, well, let’s recognize the dignity of Islam,” she said, claiming that the founders only wanted to protect Christians.

Fea says that’s not what history tells us. The founders knew that Hindus and Muslims might make their way to America and believed religious freedom applied to them.

 “The challenge at the 250th is to think about how we can still hold on to those ideas about equality, liberty and religious freedom and make them work in a modern context,” he said.