At Turning Point USA’s recent far-right “AmericaFest” gathering, Vice President JD Vance presented a wide-ranging closing address in which, among other things, he essentially confirmed what many people left-of-center have understood for as long as JD has been on the political scene: that JD advocates a platform of white Christian nationalism.

While attempting to appear accepting of human differences in the United States, he told his audience, “We have relegated DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] to the dustbin of history — which is exactly where it belongs.” He implied that this is because we, as a country, have eliminated all the many forms of bigotry.

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JD Vance joined Bluesky & posted an anti-trans message. Users immediately paid him back.

He, therefore, followed with, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

The Turning Point USA gathering in Phoenix, Arizona signaled the first major event since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed in September.  

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The vice president added, “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God we always will be, a Christian nation.” This remark met with loud and sustained applause.

“I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American,” Vance continued. “I’m saying something simpler and truer: Christianity is America’s creed.”

Vance’s remarks amounted to nothing less than historical revisionism. One would think that someone from Vance’s privileged educational background should have known that his claims were not only ahistorical but were more in the realm of hogwash.

No, JD! While the majority of people living in the United States may define themselves as “Christian,” the true “anchor” in our supposedly secular nation is our Constitution.  

If we were to ask some of the early founders of the United States whether the country is a “Christian nation,” many would voice the opinion that the United States is not a Christian nation. They would point to what has come to be called “The Treaty of Tripoli” (Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary) in advance of the first war fought between the United States and Muslim states — North Africa, independent Morocco, and the Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — from 1801 to 1805.

The Treaty was signed in 1797 to ensure commercial rights and to protect U.S. ships in the Mediterranean from Barbary pirates. The U.S. Congress ratified the Treaty on January 3, 1797, and President John Adams signed it. Article 11 is often referenced in discussions about the role of religion in the United States’ government.

Article 11 states that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” It was worded to put at ease the delegates in Tripoli (Libya) that the U.S. did not hold animosity against member states in the Muslim world. It’s too bad that Donald Trump knows virtually nothing of history.

Virginia was one of the first states following the Revolutionary War to address the issue of religion and government when Thomas Jefferson, who held deist beliefs, drafted “An Act for the Establishment of Religious Freedom” in 1786.

Jefferson’s proposal was passed into law in 1786 in Virginia. Then, constitutional framers such as Jefferson and Madison negotiated a compromise with Protestant sectarians, which led to the clause written into the First Amendment of the United States Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

Though nowhere in the Constitution does the phrase “separation of church and state” appear, it was originally drawn from a letter President Thomas Jefferson sent on January 1, 1802, to the Danbury Baptists Association in Connecticut.

Jefferson held concerns over the possibility of the erosion to First Amendment religious freedoms, a development later confirmed by Alexis de Tocqueville, French political scientist and diplomat, who traveled across the United States for nine months between 1831–1832 conducting research for his epic work, Democracy in America (published 1840).

He was astounded to find a certain paradox: On one hand, he observed that the United States promoted itself around the world as a country separating “church and state,” where religious freedom and tolerance were among its defining tenants, but on the other hand, he witnessed that: “There is no country in the world where the Christian religions retain a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”

He answered this apparent contradiction by proposing that in this country with no officially sanctioned governmental religion, denominations were compelled to compete with one another and promote themselves in order to attract and keep parishioners, thereby making religion even stronger.

While the government was not supporting Christian denominations and churches, per se, religion to Tocqueville should be considered as the first of its political institutions since he observed the enormous influence Christian churches in tandem had on the political process.

Though he favored U.S. style democracy, he found its major limitation to be in its stifling of independent thought and independent beliefs. In a country that promoted the notion that the majority rules, this effectively silenced minorities by what Tocqueville termed the “tyranny of the majority.”

People on the political far-right continue this long-established tyranny of thought and action. The history of religion in the United States shows, nonetheless, that the supposed “wall of separation between church and state” discussed by our founders, especially Jefferson and Madison, has all these years been an illusion.

From the moment Christopher Columbus and his crew stepped onto the sands surrounding what would become “North America,” an overarching Christian power has been exerted over the continent’s land and people. It has underpinned the very foundations of our civil law, which forms the basis of who can own land, be considered a “legal citizen,” not be indentured or enslaved, and who can engage in civil and professional life.

From the Christian “Doctrine of Discovery” established by Catholic Popes of the Middle Ages, to the Puritans establishing their religion as the only acceptable religion at the time in North America, to the Salem “Witch Trials,” to the no-sales-on-Sunday “Blue Laws,” to forced Christian conversion of enslaved Africans, to Congress passing the “Civilization Act” of 1819 (which provided U.S. government funding to subsidize Protestant missionary educators to convert Indigenous peoples to Christianity, there are endless examples of the delusion of the proclaimed separation.

Then from General Ulysses S. Grant expelling “Jews as a class” from Tennessee, to the active pursuit of “Manifest Destiny” granted by “Providence” expanding the United States, to Congress officially declaring Christmas as a national holiday in 1870, to the Naturalization Act of 1870 revising the 1790 law and Fourteenth Amendment so that naturalization became limited to white persons and “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” thereby effectively excluding Chinese and other Asian immigrants of all religious faith backgrounds from naturalization.

Then from the motto “In God We Trust” first appearing on US coins issued during the Civil War and added to paper currency in the 1950s, to “under God” added to the Pledge of Allegiance in reaction at the height of the Cold War against a “godless” Soviet Union, to Annuit Coeptis (He [God or Providence] has favored our undertakings) embossed on the Great Seal of the United States and printed on the back of the one dollar bill, to religious invocations presented at presidential inaugurations, and primarily Christian Chaplains hired at taxpayer expense to open sessions in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives each day.

No, JD! Christianity has not been an anchor, but it has, rather, operated as a sword of tyranny of the majority against minorities on the political right’s ultimate path towards creating a fully Christian theocratic autocracy.

And while the vice president asserted that “Christianity is America’s creed,” I would counter that more accurately, Christian white supremacy has always been and continues to be America’s creed, at least by those on the political right.

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