Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson is having a moment. The 72-year-old Christian nationalist was recently the subject of a CNN story. He just planted a church in Washington, D.C. The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is a disciple. In the age of Trump, Christian nationalists like Wilson, who once presided over a fringe wing of American evangelicalism, are becoming mainstream.
In his talk at the 2025 National Conservative Conference (NatCon) last month, Wilson argued that the United States is at war over two different “origin stories.” One of these stories, he said, is built on “lies” and is a form of “apostasy.” It is advanced in colleges and universities by “regime historians” advancing the “popular mythology” that the American founding was “thoroughly deist.”
I have been studying the relationship between Christianity and the American founding for three decades. But I am unfamiliar with any “credentialed historian” (Wilson’s phrase) who promotes such an origin story. Wilson is the latest in a long line of right-wing Christian activists to promote a flawed, tendentious reading of American history for their own ideological ends. Wilson is entitled to his own theology, as distasteful as I find it. But he’s not entitled to his own facts. Today, the scholarship on the role of religion in the American Revolution is so robust that no historian with a Ph.D. from one of the universities Wilson despises could get away with claiming that all the Founding Fathers were deists, or that the thirteen colonies at the time of the American Revolution were made up of people who embraced something akin to modern-day secularism.
Wilson is the latest in a long line of right-wing Christian activists to promote a flawed, tendentious reading of American history for their own ideological ends.
Wilson unequivocally believes that the United States was founded as a “Christian Republic” for a Protestant population. He points to early state constitutions that upheld religious establishments and had Christian test oaths for office. He claims that fifty of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were “orthodox Christians.” He notes that the United States Constitution ends with the phrase, “The Year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.” He mentions Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, the 1892 Supreme Court decision in which David Brewer, the justice who wrote the majority opinion, claimed that the United States was a Christian nation. Wilson even goes so far as to claim that during the American Revolutionary War, George Washington led an army of “Calvinists.” I hadn’t heard that one before.
Wilson chides the “regime historians” for manipulating the past to promote a progressive political agenda and secular worldview. But by ignoring a wealth of evidence that might complicate his preferred “origin story,” he engages in the same form of manipulation that he despises in his political enemies.
Was the British American population largely Protestant at the time of the founding? Yes. Did they practice their Protestant faith? Some did. But it is also true that people joined churches at a much higher rate today than they did in the eighteenth century. Church membership in the colonies was less than 50 percent, and that is a very generous estimate. (Some scholars put membership as low as 17 percent.)
Very few of the founding fathers—and none of the major figures we studied in high school history classes (including Franklin and Jefferson)—were “deists” in the purest sense of the word. They all believed in a God who sustained the world by his providence and sometimes even intervened in human affairs. Some were Christians. Some rejected Christian orthodoxy.
But they were all countercultural. They were all, even the Christians, men of the Enlightenment. They knew they were creating a government for a Christian people, but they built the republic with safeguards in place to prevent privileging one religion over others. In doing so, they drew heavily on modern ideas that were gaining traction in the eighteenth-century republic of letters.
The founders championed religious freedom, not religious toleration. The former celebrates liberty of conscience for all people; the latter suggests something akin to, “We don’t really want you here, but we will tolerate you.”
Thomas Jefferson went out of his way to make sure the Declaration of Independence said nothing about a Christian God who died for the sins of the world and rose from the dead. The framers of the United States Constitution banned religious tests for officeholding.
Would the creators of a Christian republic reject the idea of an established church or offer the free exercise of religion to all Americans, as they did in the First Amendment? If they were serious about building such a “Christian republic,” why didn’t they just openly declare that only Christians could run for office in the federal government? Why didn’t they make Christianity the official religion of the United States? History offered them plenty of examples of this sort of Christian civilization. In John Calvin’s Geneva and John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay, heretics were executed.
The founders left many of these church-state issues to the states. Wilson is correct to point out that some of the first states had religious establishments and test oaths embedded in the religion clauses of their constitutions. But others did not, with Jefferson’s and Madison’s Virginia being the most celebrated. It is worth noting that most of these religious clauses were eliminated in the decades following the American Revolution, an era when the nation was going through a national religious revival, often described as the Second Great Awakening.
By ignoring a wealth of evidence that might complicate his preferred “origin story,” he engages in the same form of manipulation that he despises in his political enemies.
Wilson mentions the Holy Trinity Supreme Court case but ignores the Treaty of Tripoli (1796). Ratified unanimously by the United States Senate and signed by President John Adams, the treaty announced to the world that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Was the Continental Army a Calvinist phalanx intent upon routing the British regulars, as Wilson seems to believe? Such a claim might surprise General George Washington (nominal Anglican), General Nathaniel Greene (Quaker), or Ethan Allen (Deist). Perhaps Wilson should read the diaries of Revolutionary War chaplains who complained endlessly about the lack of religious conviction among the soldiers. I could suggest some sound scholarship arguing that many soldiers joined the army out of economic concerns or social ambition, not religious (or even patriotic) conviction.
What about the Constitution’s reference to “the Year of our Lord”? Sure, this common way of signing documents says something about the Christian character of eighteenth-century society. However, the words were likely added to the document by William Jackson or another secretary after the signers had left the Pennsylvania State House (later known as Independence Hall).
Douglas Wilson fails to tell the full truth about our history. He and the National Conservatives are building a political movement around an incomplete view of the American founding. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, let’s tell a more thorough, complex, and, frankly, more accurate origin story.