What is a Christian?
Jonathan Rowe on Nov 5th 2007
Kristo Miettinen raises an extremely important point about my excluding America’s key Founders from the definition of Christianity.
But here you exclude Hamilton from the extension of the label “Christian” by choosing a fairly serious specific definition of “Christian”. It is one thing for Calvinists and Catholics and whatnot to have tight definitions of “Christian” as they assess one another in sectarian squabbles, but quite a different matter to apply tight definitions when looking at historical figures in historical context.
Think, for instance of the early colonists; Quakers, Puritans, splinter groups of all sorts. Why did they come to America? Broadly speaking, to escape religious persecution. And why were they persecuted? For their unorthodoxy, by the standards of their day and home countries. Do we really want to look at history through tightly selective lenses, so that we deny that the various early colonists were Christian because of their unorthodoxy?
When viewed from a secular historical perspective, shouldn’t we group together a fairly broad swath of thought under the label “Christian”? If we do, then many of the theistic intellectuals of the late 18th century, those who are at worst ambivalent about the special character of Christ and his teaching (and at best willing to accept that there was something unique, unrepeatable, dare we say “divine” about Christ), are broadly speaking Christians.
I’ve struggled with this point before, particular on the question of whether Mormons are Christian. In a broad sense, yes, America’s key Founders [Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin], Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, cafeteria Christians, theologically liberal Christian Churches that perform same sex marriages are all “Christian.” Statistics show that 80% of America qualify as “Christian” under this understanding as did around 99% of Americans during the Founding era. Anyone who calls himself a “Christian” qualifies under this label, and as a Catholic who never went beyond baptism and does not go to church, I could too if I decided to call myself “Christian.”
Evangelicals and Catholics, though they have their own disagreements, have no problem more narrowly defining what it means to be a Christian. Given that orthodox Protestants have always accepted the legitimacy of the early Church — the one that produced the Nicene Creed, which they view as not the same Church against which Luther protested — evangelicals and Catholics have always had a common ground in traditional orthodoxy.
I think I tend to define Christianity so narrowly because of my avocation studying the philosophy of America’s Founding, particularly as it relates to religion. The historical and political dispute over the ideological underpinnings of America’s Founding is about something more than just the demographics of America, which few dispute — about 99% of the population were “Christians” in some broad sense of the term as are about 80% today. Yet, one study of Founding era America showed that only 17% of America’s population were actual Church members, that the taverns on the weekends were more crowded than the Churches on Sunday morning. James H. Hutson disputes the figure and states that as many as 70% may have been Church members. Today about 45% of the population regularly attends Church.
If “Christian” defines so broadly as to include all of the unchurched, nominal, theologically liberal, cafeteria, unitarian, universalist and perhaps even agnostic or atheistic folks, there is really not much to argue about. America is a Christian Nation and almost all of us are Christians including every single liberal Democratic candidate and all of those “Christian” Churches that would gladly marry same sex couples, and ministers who disbelieve in the Divinity and Resurrection of Jesus, and all of the miracles in the Bible.
Perhaps that is the proper definition of “Christian,” but for the research that I do, that definition doesn’t suffice. Though what I’ll try to do is qualify the term “Christian” with “orthodox” whenever I make it clear that America’s key Founders were not “Christian.”
Filed in The Belfry
The minimal acceptable definition of who is a Christian comports with this ancient statement — the Apostles Creed.
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the church universal, the communion of saints the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.
This is fairly broad, but still too narrow to accommodate the Jon’s list of Key Founders — particularly Jefferson and Adams.
And Jon is right that if Christian is defined too broadly, then perhaps America is a so-called “Christian nation.” But it’s not a “Christian nation” in the sense that David Barton (and his ilk) is selling. That is, it’s not conservative, trinitarian, Biblically-oriented, and confessing — like Barton’s followers are.
Barton is making the point because he hopes to make liberals illegitimate (a.k.a., get Republicans elected). Barton’s America is an exclusive claim (and “exclusive” in both the positive and negative sense).
Have you read anything the founding fathers have written? Compare it to the statements of any so called Christian political figure today. The founding fathers were with out a doubt Christian. Not only in there own words but also in there actions. Were they sinless? No one is. Find someone in law school and as much as they don’t want to admit it, it is clear that our laws are based on Jewish and Christian values. Now what is very clear about the Christians of today is that most of them only give it lip service.
Now anyone who can read on a 6hth grade level can see that America was founded as a Christian nation. Now where your argument holds water is. This country is no longer by any means a Christian nation. How do I know this? Prior to the late 1800’s you were considered a Christian by the way you lived your life. After the late 1800’s a popular new way of becoming a Christian swept the nation, and it is still with us today. It starts with a preacher saying “repeat after me” and if you say this magic prayer or incantation or what ever it is you are going to heaven. What? Anyway it fits right in to the American microwave society we are apart of now. So if someone says this prayer they can go home secure and live any way they want from that point on. It took the bible right out of the church.
Now this caused Christians to loose there history. There history book is there bible and most of them care nothing for it. And most wouldn’t dare believe it at this point. And if you can change a people’s history you can then use it to dictate there present and future. So I understand why you want to say what did happen really didn’t happen but again I think a 6th grader can squash that argument. So the better argument would be to just say we are a new global people. Pickup the bible and show America if they really were a Christian nation we would do “x, y, and z,” Use the bible against them show them that we are no longer what we were. And therefore things must change. We are a global village. You couldn’t muster up enough real Christians in America to fill a small southern backwards hick town. Most of them are just regurgitating something they heard anyway. Most Americans couldn’t use a bible to defend there beliefs. Now here is where you will face your biggest problem. If you get to know the bible you will find that it is true. There is know other book that is as hard to debunk as the bible and the truth is the more we find out the more we learn that it is true. I dare you to read it and research it.
I myself am a Christian and I was as honest about the church in America as I could be. My challenge to you would be to find a way to tell the truth and still prove your point. The tree you are barking up can be disproved by reading anything put out by the very people you are writing about.
Thanks,
6th grader
Everything you say here seems irrelevant to your stated purpose. Also, I forget my fallacy names, but I seem to recall an informal “this-or-that” fallacy, the fallacy of thinking that there are only two (or three, or N) choices when there is really a spectrum of choice.
Christianity in America has had an evolution, a history in its own right. We have progressed from being the nuthouse of Christianity in our colonial era to being, at least arguably, the last stronghold of orthodoxy in a sea of jaded post-Christianity (and emergent Islam), and along the way we have also established ourselves as the principal modern innovators in Christianity (Mormonism, Jehovah’s witnesses, etc). Such a view of our history naturally implies that we have always been Christian, or at any rate, that if America is no longer a Christian nation then that development was fairly recent.
We cannot study such a history with any temporally fixed definition of “Christian”, e.g. any modern consensus of evangelicals and Catholics (that the consensus settled on an ancient definition does not mean that the consensus itself is ancient). This doesn’t mean that we have to rush to the other extreme, including “heritage Christians” (like yourself?) in the definition. It just means that our definition has to be imprecise, and that it probably needs to be time-varying. Indeed, we cannot rush to apply any definition of “Christian” in our scholarship; instead, the very definition of “Christian” over the course of history must be our first object of scholarship. And we have to accept that it may take a lifetime of toiling in the vinyard to get it right.
That’s not a pleasing message to secular students of the founders with modern axes to grind. Those who want to deny that America is a Christian nation will be unwilling to spend a lifetime studying what it means to be Christian. It is an anthropological fact that scholars study what pleases them, regardless of what preliminaries should be studied first to lay the foundation for what they would rather study.
Also, there is a separate angle that needs consideration: do we really mean to identify “Christian nation” with “nation of Christians”? Couldn’t we look to Christ’s teaching (render unto Caesar and all that) to learn what a Christian society would look like independent of the majority religion, and then judge by that standard whether we are (or whether the founders intended) a Christian nation? If we do, I speculate that we would be compelled to answer in the affirmative.
You say “The historical and political dispute over the ideological underpinnings of America’s Founding is about something more than just the demographics of America, which few dispute…”. What, if not what I just suggested, is that something more?
Incidentally, the idea that only 17% of the fouding era population were church members is one that I find easy to believe, without denying that they were Christian. Churches (and trained pastors/priests in particular) were in short supply in the colonial era. To study the history of Christianity in America is to realize that this was one of the factors leading to the relative emphasis on “biblical” Christianity in early America - Americans had few clergy, had few churches, but they sure had, and used, bibles. So, to study statistically whether they were churched is to miss the essence of the Christianity of their time and place.
Kristo Miettinen
Its called false dichotomy, fallacy of the excluded middle, black and white thinking, either/or fallacy, or bifurcation as in “meaning, morality, etc. can only be found in the Transcendant or else it is absent.” This is a common style of reasoning among some religionists.
Jon, instead of saying is or is not a Christian or orthodox Christian, you can say does or does not conform to the three Ecumenical Creeds or to the Nicene Creeds. Labels can always be a problem.
Jim, I disagree, though not for your purposes or mine, but for Jon’s.
An objective historian shouldn’t let Christians define Christianity for him any more than he should allow Marxists to define Marxism.
These historical phenomena admit of external analysis by objective methods. The results won’t conform to the views of committed Christians (or committed Marxists), but if done right they can teach us alot about history in the abstract.
The question of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation is, in principle, no different than the question of which nations in the world today are Muslim nations. Such questions must be answerable from an outside perspective, by objective methods.
There is no so-called about it. America is, or at any rate was founded as, a Christian nation, when such things are viewed from an outside perspective (e.g. the perspective of thoughtful Muslim intellectuals who look to our founders for clues on how to establish an enlightened Muslim nation).
In most of the world the idea that we are not a Christian nation is patently absurd, even among those who would eagerly point to our lack of fidelity as evidence that we are corrupt. They know we don’t walk the walk, and still they insist on the label. It fits.
Kristo Miettinen
We are demographically a Christian nation. We do not have a Christian government like some countries have an Islamic government. The term “Christian nation” is often utilized to confuse this distinction and imply we have a Christian government.
The problem with the term “orthodox Christian” is that it most often means an adherent of an Eastern Orthodox Church.
That’s why we keep the “o” small.
It seems more sensible to me to define as a Christian anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, or as the true Messiah. I think that issue, more than anything else, is what separates Christians from non-Christians.