There is a conversation I have been having in my head for several years now, and I think I am finally able to articulate it fully enough to put it down.

It starts with the evangelical culture war: the political alliances, the coercive tactics, the transactional evangelism, the sense that the kingdom of God is one election cycle or one Supreme Court appointment away from arriving. The premise underlying all of it, stated or not, is that America was founded as a Christian nation and that the project is either to reclaim or retain that. To hold the line or take back the hill.

I want to suggest that this premise is not only historically thin, it is constitutionally incoherent. And that the culture war, followed to its logical conclusion, is not a defense of the American founding. It is a war against it.

The Founders Were Not Who You Think They Were

There is a substantial body of literature in evangelical circles making the case for a Christian founding, some of it serious scholarship, some of it less so, and much of it drawing on the genuine pietistic and Protestant cultural influence on early American life. That influence was real. The culture was saturated with Christian thought, biblical language, and Protestant moral assumptions. I don't want to dismiss that.

But there is a difference between a culture shaped by Christianity and a constitutional order designed to enforce it. And on that question, the primary sources are fairly unambiguous.

Thomas Jefferson, primary author of the Declaration of Independence, produced what is literally known as the Jefferson Bible, a version of the Gospels from which he methodically cut every miracle, every supernatural claim, every hint of the divine Christ, leaving only the moral teachings. In an 1823 letter to John Adams he described Calvinist doctrine in terms that would not survive repetition in polite evangelical company, calling Calvin's conception of God "daemonism" and writing that it would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all than to ascribe to the deity the attributes Calvin assigned him.[^1] Jefferson was not a Christian in any historically recognizable sense. He was a rationalist who admired Jesus the teacher while rejecting Jesus the Lord.

Benjamin Franklin was a Deist. John Adams became a Unitarian, explicitly rejecting the Trinity, which is to say, explicitly rejecting the central creedal claim of Christian orthodoxy. George Washington spoke almost exclusively of Providence, a notably impersonal term, and was famously evasive about Christ specifically. His own pastor noted with some concern that he would leave church before communion.

James Madison is the most instructive case of all. As the primary architect of the First Amendment, his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, written in 1785, is worth reading in full.[^2] It is Madison in his own words arguing against state support of religion, not because he was hostile to faith, but because he had watched state-sponsored religion corrupt both the church and the civil order simultaneously. He wanted them separated to protect both. His opening argument is direct: "Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence."

And then there is the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under Washington and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797 under Adams. Article 11 of the English text as ratified states explicitly that "the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."[^3] It is worth noting that modern scholarship has raised questions about whether this phrase has an equivalent in the original Arabic text, and there is debate about whether the translator Joel Barlow inserted it. What is not in dispute is that the Senate ratified it unanimously and without debate, and that President Adams signed it without objection. Whatever their private convictions, the men who constituted that government saw nothing in that language requiring correction.

These are the men and the documents the culture war claims to be defending.

What the Mechanisms Actually Do

The First Amendment does two relevant things. It prohibits the establishment of religion and protects the free exercise of it. And it protects speech.

Notice what it does not say. It does not say freedom of denomination. It does not say freedom of Christian practice. It says religion, and that word was not chosen carelessly. Given the religious diversity of the founders themselves, given Madison's explicit and documented concern about sectarian coercion, the breadth of that language almost certainly reflects intent. A nation that could not agree on theology needed structural protections larger than any single theological tradition.

The practical outworking of that is a document that protects religious expression in the broadest possible sense. That is not a corruption of the founding. That is the founding working as designed.

It is worth being precise about what legal protection actually means here. The Constitution protects the free exercise of religion not because all religions are equally true, but because the state is not competent to adjudicate that question. Those are two completely different kinds of statements operating at two completely different levels. Civic protection and theological truth are separate categories. The First Amendment takes no position on which religion is true. It simply, and deliberately, keeps the state out of that question entirely.

Free speech functions the same way. The First Amendment does not protect only speech that is true, helpful, or morally benign. It protects speech. The architecture is indifferent to the content it covers.

This came into sharp relief recently when the Supreme Court issued an 8-1 decision reviving a counselor's challenge to Colorado's ban on therapy aimed at changing a young person's sexual orientation or gender identity. Conservatives will broadly welcome that ruling. And constitutionally, the court was simply being honest about what the First Amendment actually says: the government cannot prohibit a category of speech simply because a majority finds it harmful. It is worth noting that the same constitutional logic protects that category of speech regardless of its direction. The document does not adjudicate the content. It protects the category. That is the mechanism working as designed, and it works that way for everyone.

You cannot celebrate the mechanism when it rules your way and campaign against its underlying logic when it doesn't. Or rather, you can, but you are not a constitutional originalist at that point. You are a pragmatist using whatever tool is available, and that is a different thing entirely.

Newbigin's Distinction and Why It Matters

In the second chapter of Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin makes a distinction I have found increasingly useful. A pluralist society is not the same thing as the ideology of pluralism. And within pluralist society he distinguishes between cultural and religious pluralism.

Cultural pluralism is the attitude that welcomes the variety of different cultures and life-styles within one society and sees this variety as an enrichment rather than a threat. Importantly, Newbigin does not collapse this into moral neutrality. Accepting cultural pluralism does not mean that all cultural practices are equally good. Culture contains both good and bad elements and he is direct about that.

But Newbigin's more searching contribution here is his interrogation of how we classify knowledge itself. He raises the question: what are facts? His example is pointed. It is certainly not more than a hundred years since children in Scottish schools learned at an early stage that "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." This was taught as a fact in the same register as the movement of the stars or the Battle of Bannockburn. Today it has been relocated, to a syllabus of religious studies perhaps, offered alongside the beliefs of other religions, acknowledged only as a fact that some individuals hold this belief. We no longer ask whether the belief is true. We ask whether the believer is sincere.

Newbigin notices the asymmetry. We do not ask whether someone's belief in physics is sincere. We ask whether it is correct. The question of correctness has been quietly withdrawn from religious claims and replaced with the question of sincerity, and this withdrawal is treated as self-evident, as the natural and obvious arrangement. Newbigin wants to know when that move was made, by whom, and whether it was actually justified.

His claim about the resurrection follows from this. He is not arguing that the resurrection is one belief among many that deserves its place at the pluralist table. He is arguing that the resurrection is a fact, a public event in history, witnessed, recorded, entering the world in a specific time and place, that has been misclassified. Every discipline has what he calls a boundary event, the foundational claim upon which its entire structure of knowledge rests. The natural sciences are not unique in this. The resurrection is Christianity's boundary event, and to treat it as a private belief while treating the findings of physics as public facts is to have already accepted a philosophical framework that Newbigin refuses to concede.

This is where the piece requires precision. Newbigin is not making a case for Christianity's right to coexist peacefully alongside other religions as one option among many. He is making that case, but it sits inside a larger argument that Christianity's central claim is true and publicly so. Legal protection and theological truth remain separate categories. The Constitution protects religious freedom as a civic arrangement, not as a theological endorsement. It neither validates nor invalidates any religious claim. But Newbigin is operating at a different level entirely, the level of truth itself, and on that level he is not a pluralist in the ideological sense.

Holding those two things together carefully is, I think, more honest than collapsing them. The state should stay out of the truth question not because the truth question doesn't matter, but because the state has no business answering it.

Not a Culture War. A Constitutional One.

This is where the argument lands, and I want to be precise about it.

The evangelical culture war is not, at its deepest level, a war against secularism or progressive ideology. Those are downstream effects of a constitutional system working exactly as it was designed to work. The real conflict, followed honestly to its conclusion, is with the Constitution itself.

To achieve what the culture war actually wants, a legal and cultural order consistently shaped by conservative Christian moral convictions, would require a fundamentally different document. It would require dismantling the First Amendment architecture that produces outcomes the culture war finds intolerable. It would require replacing the deliberately broad language of religious freedom with something more like an established religion. It would require, in short, a return to something like pre-constitutional Christendom, with state-enforced moral and religious conformity.

I don't think the evangelical project has caught up to this implication. The rhetoric remains about defending the founding, protecting the Constitution, honoring the framers. But the actual goal, if pursued consistently, requires the opposite. It requires remaking the document they claim to revere. And that is not a conservative project. That is a revolutionary one. The very structure they invoke when the Constitution works in their favor is the structure they would need to dismantle for it to work in their favor consistently.

History is not encouraging about what that dismantling produces. Christendom generated nominal faith, institutional corruption, and coerced belief, which is not belief at all. The separation, the pluralism, the freedoms the culture war now resents, created the conditions under which genuine faith could be freely chosen. There is a deep irony in fighting to destroy the environment that makes authentic conversion possible.

The Incarnation and the Question It Asks

Here is where I want to sit for a moment, because I think this is the sharpest edge of the argument.

The Incarnation is the definitive Christian statement about how God moves in the world. The Word became flesh. Not decree, not coercion, not imperial leverage. Flesh. Particular, vulnerable, located: a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, subject to the very powers that would ultimately kill him.

He was offered political power and refused it. He was expected to restore the Davidic kingdom by force and declined. He operated almost entirely outside the mechanisms of institutional power and was executed by them. The cross is not a symbol of cultural dominance. It is the absolute inversion of it.

When you place the Incarnation alongside the project of remaking the Constitution to enforce Christian moral order, the contrast is not subtle. The logic runs in exactly opposite directions. The Incarnation moves toward the world as it is: it persuades, witnesses, serves, suffers. It does not compel. It does not reach for Caesar's tools to build what Caesar could never build anyway.

And the church has reached for those tools before. The pattern is consistent and the results are in. The church gains the mechanisms of power and loses the thing that made it the church. Christendom is the record of that exchange: institutional dominance purchased at the cost of gospel integrity.

The culture war project, followed to its logical end, does not simply require remaking the Constitution. It requires abandoning the Incarnation as the model for how God acts in history. It substitutes Christendom for Christ. That is not a debatable political preference or a secondary theological question. It is a betrayal of the gospel's own internal logic.

Newbigin understood the church's posture within a pluralist society as witness, not conquest. The gospel makes its way through proclamation, through embodied community, through people who live differently not because they have legislated everyone else into compliance but because they have been genuinely transformed. That is a harder and slower work than winning a Supreme Court case. It is also the only work that actually produces what the gospel promises.

The culture war will keep winning occasional battles using the Constitution's own mechanisms, and losing the larger argument by revealing that what it actually wants is a different Constitution altogether. The Incarnation already answered the question of how the kingdom comes. It does not come that way.

Bibliography: Primary Sources on the Faith of the Founders

Thomas Jefferson

[^1]: Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823. Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-19-02-0400. Jefferson's personal religious practice is also evidenced by the Jefferson Bible (formally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, c. 1820), held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

James Madison

[^2]: Madison, James. Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, ca. June 20, 1785. Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163. Also available via the National Constitution Center: https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/james-madison-memorial-and-remonstrance-against-religious-assessments-1785.

Treaty of Tripoli

[^3]: Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary, Article 11 (English text as ratified). Signed at Tripoli, November 4, 1796; ratified by the U.S. Senate unanimously, June 7, 1797; signed by President John Adams, June 10, 1797. Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp. Note: Modern scholarship has raised questions about whether Article 11 has a direct equivalent in the original Arabic text. The phrase appears in the English translation by Joel Barlow and was ratified by the Senate without debate or objection. The translation question is genuinely contested; the unanimous ratification is not.

Washington's Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport

Washington, George. Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790. Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135. Notable for framing religious liberty in entirely civic rather than Christian terms.

Further Reading

Brooke Allen, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Ivan R. Dee, 2006). A scholarly treatment of the religious heterodoxy of the founding generation drawing extensively on primary sources.

Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton University Press, 2003). Provides historical context for both the Christian influence on early American culture and the deliberate secularism of the constitutional framework.