A child in a Hawaiʻi classroom learned this spring that the Founding Fathers wanted church and state kept apart. She wrote it on her worksheet, earned a gold star, and carried home a version of the founding that is tidy, confident, and backwards. By the Fourth of July most of us will repeat some form of it without thinking twice.
The men who wrote the Constitution were not trying to push religion out of public life. Most of the 13 states still had an established church or a religious test for office, and the convention that drafted the document was Protestant almost to a man. What they barred was a national church — one denomination, set above the rest and backed by federal power. They had reason to fear it.
Most of the colonies had been founded by people running away from state churches. The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth had fled England, then the Netherlands, rather than worship as the king ordered. Rhode Island filled up with men and women banished from Massachusetts for their “wrong” beliefs about God. The dissenters, it turns out, had dissenters of their own. A government that crowned one church would only be choosing which refugees to disappoint.
So the names matter — Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Quaker. Many history classes skim them as clutter, hurrying along to the “real” story. But the arguments over how to worship God were not the background to colonial politics. They were colonial politics.
The fair point is that several founders were plainly not orthodox. Jefferson kept a Bible he had gone through with a razor and glue. Franklin called himself a Deist and meant it. But a man can only reject what he first understands.
Jefferson attacked the deity of Christ and cut the miracles out of his Gospels — but he knew what he was removing. He wanted the ethics of Jesus without the divinity. The modern man cannot be bothered with either.
Franklin knew the creed well yet never bowed the knee. He printed George Whitefield’s sermons and counted the great evangelist a friend for 30 years, but was not moved an inch toward Christ.
The wall kept the federal government off the church. It was never meant to keep the faith out of the country. The men who built the wall were sheltering a fire, not smothering one.
And there had been a fire. A generation before the Revolution, a great revival swept the colonies. Crowds gathered in open fields to hear Whitefield’s voice carrying over thousands, while Jonathan Edwards preached to farmers who wept where they sat. The children raised in the warmth of that awakening grew up to found a country. The awakening came first, and the reform came after.
The Hawaiian islands would follow the same path. The awakening of the 1830s ripened into a kingdom Christian in its laws and life. But that is a story for another week.
The order is worth getting right, because an anniversary tempts us toward the wrong kind of nostalgia. The secularist wants the founding with the religion trimmed away — the same razor Jefferson took to his Gospels, turned now on the country’s own story. There is a Christian version of the same error, more seductive because it flatters us. It is the urge to wave the heritage like a banner while setting down the obedience that came with it. No country is made Christian by fireworks, or by Scripture chiseled over a courthouse door. Revival built this nation, and a plaque cannot stand in its place.
The child with the gold star will grow up. What she keeps of her country depends on what we hand her — a living faith, or a relic under glass.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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