Erasing Christianity from American History

It is a historical fact that Christianity played a central role in the colonization of the New World and the formation of the United States (the missions of California, religious freedom sought by the Puritans, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan, the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements, the poems of Whitman and stories of Hawthorne, and so forth). A well-known study from 1984 reviewed more than nine hundred public political writings published between 1760 and 1805 in order to determine what sources most influenced the discourse of the day. The Bible was the clear winner—with Deuteronomy being the most-cited book—easily beating whole groups of thinkers in the survey (Enlightenment, Whig, Classical). The author of the study was careful to note “the prominence of biblical sources for American political thought, since it was highly influential in our political tradition, and is not always given the attention it deserves.”