The Two Slogans

A note in Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square Two sentences often travel together. One says Christian nationalism is inherently white nationalism. The other says America was never a Christian nation. This note is about that pair, and about why those claims cannot share one past.

The pair

The popular case against the name usually arrives as two claims.

The first is that Christian nationalism is inherently white nationalism. Public Christianity, in this country, is treated as racial rule with verses attached. The second is that America was never a Christian nation. The founding is treated as a secular machine, so any later Christian statute sounds like a coup.

Not every critic holds both. A man may cite the Treaty of Tripoli and never mention race. A man may tell the truth about colonial wars and never say “never.” Charity has to leave room for that. The package that moves through headlines, classrooms, and comment threads, however, does hold both. It needs a Christian past thick enough to blame, and a Christian past thin enough to deny. Those are not the same past.

Each slogan has a job. “Never a Christian nation” is meant to shut the statute book. If the public square was born empty of God, then a moral law in civil law is an invasion. Essay III already refused that shortcut. America was not Zion. It was not a machina sine Deo—a machine without God. The slogan treats those as the same thing. “Inherently white nationalism” is meant to shut the name. If the claim of Essay I is only a pedigree, then Psalm 2 does not have to be answered; you just diagnose the speaker and go home.

Taken together, the pair does not argue; it only corners. Any remaining public piety is made to sound like the return of a caste.

What gives the pair its heat is a third sentence, often half-said: the American beginning was white colonialism, and the faith laid on Indigenous peoples was the white man’s religion. Revisionist uses of that sentence want a monopoly on the past. Christians were villains. Native nations were a single innocent body. Every conversion was a theft. Every treaty was a fraud. That is not history. It is a wedge.

This note will not fight the slogans by polishing a legend, and it will not fight them by reciting only the worst pages either. Those pages exist. So do the others. The argument does not need a holy founding, and it does not need a damned one. Even if we grant that third sentence at full strength—that every Pilgrim and every Founder did only evil to the peoples already on this soil—the two slogans still cannot be true together. That is a steelman of the indictment, not an admission that the indictment is the record.

The stitch is a blur of two beginnings

“The founding” is a moving target in this argument. Sometimes it means the Pilgrims and the Puritan commonwealths. Sometimes it means the Founding Fathers. Those are different dates, different documents, and different wounds to the word never. The package prefers not to say which one it is using.

Start with the earlier beginning. Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were covenanted English societies. They preached. They legislated morals. They sent missions. They also made war, broke faith, and took land. In the indictment, conversion and dispossession travel together, and the Mayflower becomes an origin story of forced catechism. That indictment can be overdrawn. Parts of it are real. Parts of it treat a mixed century as if it had only one act. The first years at Plymouth included an alliance with the Wampanoag against other Native powers, not a pageant of unopposed theft. Missions were sometimes a mask for power. They were not only a mask. Native men and women believed the gospel, refused it, used it, and suffered under it. A Christian can say all of that without calling the whole of New England a single crime, and without calling it a revival.

Now the later beginning. 1776, 1787, the early republic, the men who wrote “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and also argued about establishments, westward land, and what a Native title was worth. In the indictment, the same generation that is quoted for a wall of separation becomes the face of a Christian colonial project. Some of those men, such as Jefferson, were expansionists.[1] Some of them, such as Knox (who was Washington’s war secretary), argued for purchase, treaty, and restraint.[2] Washington himself both made war on the Northwest frontier and treated purchase and treaty as the official line.[3] A mixed generation is not innocence. It is also not a covenantal plot to baptize a race.

The two beginnings do not do the same work against “never.”

If the exhibit is the Pilgrims, the slogan is weakened, but a careful critic can still try to save it. He can say: New England was a Christian colonial order; the United States, later, was not. He narrows “nation” to the federal compact. He treats Connecticut’s establishment until 1818, and Massachusetts until 1833, as leftovers rather than as evidence. The move is strained. A people still taking down state churches into the 1830s were not a people who had never heard of public Christianity. They were changing the legal form of it. Still, the move has a date in it. It concedes “once” in 1620 in order to keep “never” for 1789.

If the exhibit is the Founders, the slogan is in worse trouble. The “never” literature lives on those men. Jefferson is asked to prove a naked square by a letter to Danbury. He is also asked, in the colonial indictment, to stand in for an expansion that talked as if Native occupancy were not ownership. Adams is lined up behind the Treaty of Tripoli in one telling and behind a moral and religious people in another. The Senate that ratified Tripoli in 1797 was not a different country from the Congress that had already treated religion and morality as necessary to government in the Northwest Ordinance. If that generation was imposing a religion on a continent, it was not a generation with no religion to impose.

So the package blurs the two beginnings. “The founding” means Pilgrims when the argument needs a thick church and a cruel mission. It means Philadelphia when the argument needs Tripoli and a wall. Colonialism is the stitch that makes them look like one story. “White man’s religion” is the phrase that hides the date-change.

A blur cannot be cross-examined. That is why it is useful.

Grant the blur its darkest reading anyway. Two short claims will carry the rest of the page.

Cp: the Pilgrim and Puritan beginning was a project of imposing Christianity as white colonial domination.

Cf: the Founders’ beginning was that same project, now as the birth of the United States.

Grant that Cp and Cf are both true in the worst sense the package wants. The pair still fails. The slogans do not become coherent because the past is painted black. They become coherent only if “Christian” can mean a racial crime in one sentence and an absence in the next.

How the blur appears in public

You do not have to invent the pair. You can watch the date-change happen in print.

One version denies the pious founding and keeps the Christian founding as a weapon. Anthea Butler will say that “America is a Christian nation” is a myth, and also that the myth is a “trope of exclusion,” centering white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as “the ones that are willing and should be running the country both then and now,” and teaching the country to see others as “heathens,” including enslaved Blacks and Native Americans whose land was being taken. The Christian past is false when someone wants it as a title. It is real when someone wants it as a crime.[4]

Another version names a “deep story”: America was founded as a Christian nation by white men who were traditional Christians. Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry describe that story in order to reject it. They also say the fusion is old. They find it crystallizing in the late seventeenth century, in wars with Native peoples, with New England read as a promised land. That is an accusation of a thick Christian-racial past. It is not the word never. In the same climate of argument, the Treaty of Tripoli and the unorthodox private theology of several famous founders are then produced as proof that the United States was founded as a secular nation. The seventeenth century is Christian when the subject is race. The 1790s are secular when the subject is law.[4]

A third version does not wait for Plymouth or for Philadelphia. Robert P. Jones traces “today’s white Christian nationalism” through 1493, Columbus, and the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, then through Manifest Destiny and “city on a hill,” as if one stream ran from a papal bull to the present name. A survey item about God intending America as a promised land for European Christians is treated as the inner creed of the thing. Then, when the subject shifts from pedigree to the statute book, the same atmosphere still needs “never a Christian nation.”[4]

John Blake’s CNN analysis of white Christian nationalism quotes Randall Balmer on the Christian-nation founding as a claim historians dispute, cites Tripoli, and says most Founding Fathers “do not even fit what many White Christian nationalists today would call Christian.” Nearby, Gorski is quoted saying the United States cannot be a multiracial democracy and a white Christian nation at once. Half of the air says there was no Christian nation. The other half says the Christian nation was white rule.[4]

The point is not that these writers are identical, or that each of them recites both slogans like a creed. The point is that the public package can move from one past to the other without announcing the turn. Pilgrims supply the church. Founders supply the nation. Colonialism supplies the crime that seems to join them.

Notice what the package needs Native history to be. It needs a single people, innocent as a bloc, facing a single Christian machine. That is not how peoples live. Indigenous nations were nations. They made war. They made slaves. They made alliances with the English against other Native powers and with the French against the English. Some were victims of settlers. Some were victims of other Native empires. Some were both. Jeff Fynn-Paul’s Not Stolen is one recent attempt to put that ordinary human record back on the table: endemic raiding and slavery before contact, treaties and purchases as well as seizures after it, and a refusal to treat “stolen land” as a verdict that settles every later question.[5] This essay is not a review of that book. It only needs the point the slogans cannot afford: Native peoples were moral agents, not a backdrop for a European passion play. Granting them agency does not whitewash a broken treaty. Denying them agency does not make the two slogans cohere.

The same argument without the blur

Once the two beginnings are pulled apart, the pair can be written as an argument instead of a mood. What follows is the popular package in a form that can be checked. It is not a claim that every critic affirms every line. It is a claim that the package, as a package, needs these lines.

The slogans and the stitch are said out loud. The rest is usually not. The incoherence lives in what is not said.

We grant Cp and Cf for the sake of the test. That is the steelman. If the two slogans cannot survive even then, they do not survive on a milder history either.

Explicit claims

(P1) Christian nationalism, in America, is inherently white nationalism.

(P2) America was never a Christian nation in the sense that matters for law: a public civil order marked by the faith, and by a magistrate who is not a clerk of nothing.[6]

(P3) Cp ∨ Cf — at least one of the two beginnings was that imposition.[4]

Hidden premises

The package rarely writes the next sentences. It argues as if they were already granted.

(P4) A beginning cannot be charged with imposing Christianity unless Christianity was publicly thick there: thick enough to order law, mission, land, or belonging.[7] So Cp requires that thickness at the Pilgrim beginning, and Cf requires it at the Founders’ beginning. (Hidden: the indictment borrows a Christian past.)

(P5) If Christianity was publicly thick at the Founders’ beginning, then (P2) is false. (Hidden: the men used to prove “never” are the same generation used to prove Cf.)[8]

(P6) If Christianity was publicly thick only at the Pilgrim beginning, then either (P2) is false, or those commonwealths are being counted as “America.” (Hidden: 1620 and 1789 are not the same polity unless the argument makes them so.)

(P7) If Christian nationalism is inherently white nationalism, then public Christianity must have been thick at some beginning that is said to define the name. (Hidden: “inherently” requires a public past, not only a private faith.)

(P8) “Christian” in (P1) and “Christian” in (P2) are the same predicate. (Hidden: the pair is not using two different words that happen to look alike.)[9]

Conclusions

(C1) From (P3) and (P4): at least one beginning was publicly thick with Christianity.

(C2) Strong package. Assume (P1), (P2), and Cf. Then by (P4) the Founding was thick. Then by (P5), (P2) is false. But (P2) was assumed. Therefore (P1) and (P2) cannot be held with Cf. (P1) is idle in that stretch. Cf already drops “never.” The pair does not save it.

(C3) Weak package. Assume (P1), (P2), Cp, and not Cf. Then by (P4) the Pilgrim beginning was thick. Then by (P6) either (P2) is false, or 1620 is being counted as the nation. The first fork drops “never.” The second fork changes the subject. Therefore Cp alone saves the pair only by shrinking “America” or by giving up (P2).

(C4) From (P1) and (P7): some beginning in the story must be thick. From (P2) and (P5): the Founding must not be thick. Those two results stand together only by the date-shift in (P6), or by denying (P8). Therefore the pair, as a pair, is inconsistent, equivocal, or no longer about the founding.

That is the incoherence. The slogans can be spoken in one breath. They cannot be true together unless a hidden premise is doing illicit work. Painting every Englishman black does not repair (C2)–(C4). It feeds Cp and Cf, which we already granted.

Each line

(P1) is the first slogan. “Inherently” is the load-bearing word. It does not say that some men have used the name for a racial gospel. Essay IV already granted that, and refused the error. The slogan says the thing itself is racial domination: public Christianity here just is white rule. Weaken “inherently” to “sometimes abused,” and the slogan stops doing the job the package hired it to do. The name could then be kept and the abuse refused, which is the series’ own position.

(P2) is the second slogan in the sense that matters for statutes. It is not “America is not the church.” That sentence is true. It is not “Congress made no national establishment.” That sentence is also true. The slogan is the larger claim: the founding public order was not Christian in any sense that would license a magistrate under God now. Essay III called that the collapse of two senses. The slogan needs the collapse. Without it, disestablishment does not buy a naked square.

(P3) is Cp ∨ Cf. At least one beginning must be a Christian colonial imposition, or “white man’s religion” has nothing to fasten to. The package often asserts both. It rarely says which disjunct is doing the work in a given paragraph. That is the blur. We grant Cp and Cf for the test. We do not grant that they are the whole truth of either beginning. A granted premise can still be too simple.

(P4) is hidden because the indictment wants the shame of a Christian past without admitting that it has just conceded a Christian past. Cp or Cf without public thickness is not a Christian crime. A secular machine has no religion to shove. A racial caste without public faith can be wicked. It cannot be Christian colonial domination. The darker you paint Cp and Cf, the more (P4) costs you against (P2).

(P5) is hidden because the “never” literature and the Cf literature prefer not to stand in the same decade. If Christianity was publicly thick among the men of 1776 and 1789, then “never” fails in the sense the slogan sells. The writers of Danbury and Tripoli belong to the same generation as the Northwest Ordinance and the state establishments still standing. That thickness is exactly what “never” exists to erase.

(P6) is hidden because “the founding” is allowed to mean Plymouth when the argument needs a church, and Philadelphia when it needs a wall. Thickness at 1620 does not, by itself, decide 1789. A critic who wants both Cp and “never” must either treat those commonwealths as the nation, or admit that he has left the founding untouched. In the second case, “never” has shrunk to a claim about the federal compact, and the Pilgrims no longer kill the point.

(P7) is hidden inside the word “inherently.” If the name is racial rule by nature, public Christianity must have been thick somewhere in the story that is said to define the name. A merely private faith cannot be an inherent racial order. The first slogan therefore requires the same thickness that the second slogan cannot afford at the founding.

(P8) is hidden because equivocation works only while it is unnoticed. Let “Christian” in (P1) mean a racial culture with churches in it. Let “Christian” in (P2) mean a baptized national church, a little Israel. Then (P1) and (P2) do not meet. They only look as if they meet. Essay III refused that collapse. Charity can admit that a given writer is using two meanings. Honesty has to say so. A package that needs two meanings, and writes as if it had one, is not a history. It is a pun.

One last confusion is moral rather than formal. Christians sinned against Indigenous image-bearers, and Indigenous nations sinned against one another and against settlers. Particular cases can be true. None of that yields (P2). Hypocrisy presupposes a standard. “Never” erases the standard and then borrows it back in order to say hypocrite. Villainy on the other side of the frontier does not cancel a broken oath. It cancels the fable that only one people in the story had a will.[10][5]

(C2) is the clean result for the stronger popular story: the two slogans plus Cf cannot all be true. (C3) is the clean result for the weaker story: the two slogans plus Cp alone survive only by changing what “America” means. (C4) is the clean result for the pair as such: held in tandem, they are inconsistent, equivocal, or no longer about the founding they claim to settle.

Even if. That is the point of granting Cp and Cf. The pair does not fail because we hid the worst English acts. It fails because those acts, if they were Christian acts, are public thickness, and thickness is what “never” cannot use.

What follows, and what does not

None of this baptizes the Pilgrims. None of it turns the signers into a session of the church. None of it makes America Zion. None of it makes Native nations a single choir of victims.

It does not say that every mission was only a mask, or that none were. Native men and women have believed the gospel without becoming extras in a white pageant, and without becoming extras in an anti-white one. To treat every conversion as theft is another way of denying persons.

It does not say that the magistrate should baptize a race or rank peoples by blood. Essay IV refused that error. Blood is not a covenant. Impartial judgment is not a naked public square.

It does not say that a writer who holds only one of the two slogans is therefore dishonest. It says that the popular pair is doing two jobs with one past, and that the past will not bear both jobs unless Pilgrim and Founder are allowed to trade places without notice, or unless “Christian” is allowed to change meaning in the middle of the sentence.[11]

If Cp is the exhibit, say so. Then “never” has to shrink until it means that Congress did not establish a church in 1791. That sentence is true and small. It does not forbid a people from knowing the moral law in civil use. It does not make Christ a private hobby.

If Cf is the exhibit, say so. Then stop quoting the Founders as if they built a clock without a Maker. Use the mixed record as a mixed record: the Declaration’s public God-talk, the state establishments still standing, the territorial ordinances, disestablishment, Danbury, Tripoli. Several instruments. Not one meme.[8]

If the real claim is that particular Englishmen sinned against particular Indigenous nations, say that, and name the case. If the real claim is that particular Indigenous nations made war, took slaves, or broke faith, say that too. Peoples are not stained-glass windows. They are peoples. We will not answer a case with a slogan. We also will not let a slogan turn every public piety into a racial state, or every Native polity into a shrine.

The claim these essays keep does not need a holy founding. It needs a Lord of the nations, a real people, and a magistrate who is not God. If the colonies had baptized at sword-point, that would still have been a confusion of keys and sword. If the republic had been a machine without God, that would still have been a lie about the office. The two slogans, held in tandem, are useful only if those distinctions are forbidden.

Keep the name. Keep the two senses of “Christian nation.” Keep 1620 and 1787 from dissolving into one fog. Keep Native nations from dissolving into one innocence. Then the pair has to argue like everyone else.

Essay V will take the myth that the public square can be morally empty. That myth is what “never” is trying to buy.[12]

Notes

1. Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, 27 February 1803: push trading houses so that influential Indians “run in debt,” and “when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands”; in that way “our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.” Founders Online / Library of Congress transcriptions of the letter.
2. Henry Knox to George Washington, 7 July 1789: “the Indian tribes possess the right of the soil of all lands within their limits respectively and … they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States.” Founders Online.
3. Washington to James Duane, 7 September 1783, preferred “purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country,” and held that soil taken by Indian war “can be had by purchase at less expense.” Founders Online. The war side of the same administration is not a slogan: Harmar’s 1790 campaign and St. Clair’s 1791 defeat were federal expeditions against Northwest confederacies under Washington as president.
4. Cp and Cf are not one date. For the Pilgrim and Puritan beginning treated as evangelism bound up with conquest, see the recent critical literature on New England missions and land, and the older popular form that calls the settlers’ faith “the white man’s religion.” For the longer stream that starts before Plymouth and runs the name “Christian nationalism” back through the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, Columbus, and Manifest Destiny, see Robert P. Jones, “The Roots of Christian Nationalism Go Back Further Than You Think,” TIME, August 31, 2023. Jones also reports a 2023 PRRI/Brookings survey item: “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” For the “deep story” that America was founded as a Christian nation by white men who were traditional Christians, dated in part to late-seventeenth-century wars with Native peoples, see Philip Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross (Oxford University Press, 2022), and Gorski’s public summaries of that book. Anthea Butler has called the Christian-nation idea both a myth and a “trope of exclusion” that teaches others to be seen as “heathens,” including Native peoples whose land was taken (Peter Smith, “Was the US founded as a Christian nation? Constitution experts disagree,” AP, February 17, 2024). John Blake, “The biggest myth about White Christian nationalism,” CNN, January 25, 2026, quotes Randall Balmer on Tripoli and the unorthodox theology of several famous founders, and quotes Gorski’s line that the United States cannot be both a multiracial democracy and a white Christian nation at once. Not every one of these writers recites both slogans as a creed. The package can still move from Cp to Cf without announcing the turn.
5. Jeff Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (Bombardier Books / Post Hill Press, 2023). Fynn-Paul’s useful point for this page is narrow: Native societies were not a peaceful exception to ordinary human politics. Warfare, raiding, and slavery were endemic before European settlement; some land was purchased and some was taken; “stolen land” as a total description is a slogan, not a record. He also grants that some seizures were real. This note does not adopt his every conclusion, and it does not reopen the whole colonial file. It refuses two whitewashes: the English as only villains, and Indigenous nations as only victims. Some were villains. Some were victims. Some were both. That is what peoples are.
6. Essay III distinguished two senses of “Christian nation.” The first is a church with borders, a little Zion. We refuse that sense as our claim. The second is a people whose common life has been marked by the faith, and a magistrate who does not pretend he is morally empty. (P2) is the slogan’s denial of that second sense, not a denial of a national church. On the record the slogan cannot erase—the First Amendment’s actual target, state establishments into the nineteenth century (Connecticut 1818; Massachusetts 1833), the Northwest Ordinance, the Declaration’s public God-talk, Danbury, and the Treaty of Tripoli—see Essay III.
7. “Thick” in (P4)–(P7) is not a census of the regenerate and not a claim that America is elect. It means public Christianity of the sort that can appear in law, mission, charters, schools, and the ordinary assumption that the magistrate is under God. That is the second sense from Essay III.
8. The 1797 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, art. 11, in the Barlow translation ratified by the Senate, says “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Essay III already treated that clause as diplomacy, not as a theology of the republic. The Confederation Congress’s Northwest Ordinance (1787), put in force under the Constitution by the First Congress in 1789, said that “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists gave the later slogan its “wall.” A letter is not an amendment, and a treaty clause written to quiet a particular Muslim power is not a verdict on the state establishments still standing when it was signed.
9. Equivocation here means two uses of “Christian” treated as one. In (P1) the word often means a racial culture with churches in it. In (P2) it often means a baptized commonwealth with a coercive national church. If those are different predicates, (P1) and (P2) are not yet in contradiction—and they are also not yet a pair. The popular use presents them as a pair.
10. A moral charge, even when true in a particular case, is not a premise in the derivation of (C2)–(C4). Sin is not a founding creed. It is a fall from a standard. The same grammar applies on every side of the frontier.
11. Charity still holds: a man may affirm (P2) and never mention race; a man may affirm Cp or Cf and never say “never.” (C2)–(C4) concern the tandem. Granting Cp and Cf for the test is not an admission that they are the whole of the record.
12. Later pieces take up the myth of neutrality (Essay V) and the state’s habit of using religion (Essay VI). Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) is one case of Christian language secularized into land title: that is not “never,” and it is not the church holding the sword.