Did the founders of the United States intend to create a Christian nation?

Political leaders who addressed a prayer rally on the National Mall on May 17, 2026, seem to think so: House Speaker Mike Johnson led the crowd in “rededicat(ing) the United States of America as one nation under God.”

Some, and perhaps many, scholars would say no: that while many founders were religious, as a group they concluded that the national government should not support any particular faith.

As a scholar of Colonial North America, I believe that history provides an answer. European colonizers in lands that became the United States did link church and state. But the architects of the new nation broke from that idea as surely as they broke from Britain.

‘Doctrine of Discovery’

The European desire to expand the boundaries of Christendom played a central role in the Colonial era, as I describe in my 2026 book, “Contested Continent.”

That drive mattered greatly to Christopher Columbus, who sailed west in 1492. Upon landing in the Bahamas, he laid claim to already populated territories, writing that Christ would rejoice “as he foresees that so many souls of so many people heretofore lost are to be saved.”

The “Doctrine of Discovery,” proclaimed by the Vatican in 1493, granted European monarchs title over lands occupied by non-Christians and urged them to convert the people who lived there.

Less than a generation later, the Protestant Reformation transformed Christianity, dividing Europe and spawning brutal violence.

In England, the schism reshaped the relationship between church and state. King Henry VIII severed ties with the pope in the 1530s. He ordered the dissolution of monasteries, and his followers defaced church statues of Catholic saints.

After Henry rejected........

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