Fun Facts About Religion

It's a favorite claim of the Christian Right that the Founders' generation in America was incredibly pious and intended to incorporate the Christian religion into the government. For a little reality-check on that idea, here's an excerpt from the 1964 book Anti-intellectualism in American Life by the historian Richard Hofstadter. Speaking of the colonial and Revolutionary periods , he writes:

<< The essence of American denominationalism is that churches became voluntary organizations. The layman, living in a society in which no church enjoyed the luxury of compulsory membership and in which even traditional, inherited membership was often extraordinarily weak, felt free to make a choice as to which among several denominations should have his allegiance. In the older church pattern [in Europe], the layman was born into a church [and] was often forced by the state to stay in it... The American layman, however, was not simply born into a denomination nor did he inherit certain sacramental forms; the denomination was a voluntary society which he chose to join often after undergoing a transforming religious experience.

<< There was nothing fictional about this choice. So fluid had been the conditions of American life toward the end of the eighteenth century, and so disorganizing the consequences of the Revolution, that perhaps as many as ninety per cent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790 [my emphasis]. >>

We tend to think of previous times as more religious, and our own times as becoming more and more secular. And that perception in accurate in many ways. But some assumptions along those lines come too easily. What this says is that most Americans - far and away most of them - at the time the Constituion came into effect, were not regular participants in an organized church.

So when the Roy Moores of the world start talking about the piety of the Founders' generation, it's worth remembering that evangelists in those days were so busy trying to get people to start coming to church at all that they didn't give a high priority erectings public monuments to the Ten Commandments.