The approach of Thanksgiving invites us to turn our minds to the relationship between religion and the American regime. We now encounter controversy where we once found consensus. With the rise of modern secularism, many Americans now believe that religion should play no role in the nation’s public life, while many other Americans continue to hold to the traditional view that it should.

These divisions were illustrated strikingly in the homestretch of the presidential campaign. Speaking in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris was interrupted by hecklers who called out, “Jesus is Lord.” Harris responded by saying, “You guys are at the wrong rally.” A few days later, in the same state, and apparently in response to this exchange, someone cried out, “Jesus is king!” during a speech by J.D. Vance—and Vance replied, “That’s right. Jesus is king.”

Many in the Harris camp, and maybe even many independents and certain kinds of Republicans, found Vance’s public affirmation of Jesus’ kingship as weird, creepy, or even illiberal. They saw it as further evidence of the rise of Christian nationalism, the dangers of which have been the theme of many articles and books in recent years. For modern American secularists, public Christianity must be rejected as a source of intolerance and irrationality in public life, and even as incompatible with America’s fundamental identity as a free society.

In truth, such opinions have a long and distinguished pedigree. For the last several hundred years, many thinkers of the radical wing of the Enlightenment have condemned public religion as hostile to the modern world. Such thinkers have not been shy in expressing their hope that religion would fade away as modernity progresses, and that the public realm would come to be ruled not by traditional religious beliefs but by the authority of secular reason and science alone.   

But whatever intellectual prestige secularism may possess, it is not an accurate account of America’s traditional political identity. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously observed that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. Similarly, the enemies of public Christianity are entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own history.

Public Christianity was bound up with the founding of the American nation. Accordingly, public Christianity should be viewed as an expression of America’s traditional identity rather than an alarming departure from it.

In his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Justice Joseph Story admirably explained the Founding generation’s understanding of the relationship between Christianity and politics. Public Christianity, Story suggested, was part of the formative American political experience leading up to independence. Almost “every American colony,” he observed, “from its foundation down to the revolution…did openly, by the whole course of its laws and institutions, support and sustain, in some form, the Christian religion.” Indeed, we are still reminded of this history by the celebration of Thanksgiving, which inevitably calls to mind the Pilgrim settlers of Plymouth who came to America to establish a more faithful Christian society.

Nevertheless, the proponents of a secular America might respond that the First Amendment’s prohibition of “any law respecting an establishment of religion” put an end to all that. Not really, according to Story.

In his view, when the First Amendment was adopted it was “probably…the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America” that “Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship.” Story contended that the aim of the amendment was not “to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference.” It was rather “to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give” to one denomination “the exclusive patronage of the national government.”

Story’s Commentary is useful also as a window into the thinking that affirmed a public role for Christianity. On his account, Americans of the Founding generation supported the public encouragement of Christianity not just as a matter of tradition—of holding on to the ways of their ancestors—but as necessary to the health and vitality of the free and self-governing society they were striving to establish.

As Story observed, the importance of publicly supporting Christianity “will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.” He held that the “great doctrines of religion”—such as the existence of “Almighty God,” our “responsibility to him for all our actions,” the “future state of rewards and punishments,” and “the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues”—could “never be a matter of indifference in any well ordered community.”

In sum, for Story religion is a necessary support to popular morality, which is in turn essential to a decent and orderly society. This view was certainly not idiosyncratic. It is essentially the same view expressed in George Washington’s “Farewell Address.” In that famous speech the Father of our Country admonished his fellow citizens that “the mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish” both “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports” to “all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.” No doubt such thinking informed Washington’s decision to issue the first presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation, calling on Americans to dedicate a day of prayer to “acknowledge the many signal favors of Almighty God.”  

Story’s account reminds us not only of the purposes and value of public religion but also of its proper limits. The “duty of supporting religion, and especially the Christian religion,” Story noted, “is very different from the right to force the consciences of other men, or to punish them for worshipping God in the manner which, they believe, their accountability to him requires.” It is quite possible, Story teaches us, for our politics to both encourage a particular religion—Christianity in this case—while at the same time leaving dissenters alone. Indeed, the Founders held that this was not only possible but also a duty, since they viewed religious liberty as one of the rights that governments are established to protect. Thus Story equally emphasizes—and praises—the Constitution’s “securing to all citizens the free exercise of religion” and its prohibition of all religious tests for public office.

On the Founding view, and contrary to the fears of contemporary secularists, we can encourage religion while also respecting individual freedom, because the government’s authority to support belief is not the same thing as an authority to require it.

These reflections are timely not only in relation to Thanksgiving but also in light of the recent election. Restoring public respect for religion while at the same time scrupulously respecting individual freedom of conscience is a key element of any movement that seeks to make America great again.