By PAUL KRAUSE
Which America is the founding of America? This may seem like a silly or incoherent question, but it is one that is deeply profound and consequential. Was America founded by abstract political principles in 1776 and 1787? Or does America run deeper than some ink spilled on paper that has been interpreted and reinterpreted over two and a half centuries since?
When Edmund Burke spoke about reconciliation with America he noted, “First the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen….The Colonists emigrated from you, when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to Liberty, but to Liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.”
Those Englishmen that Burke spoke of, of course, continued an older tradition of giving thanks to God for the year’s work and harvest — what we call Thanksgiving. Included in the celebration were the Native Americans who aided the Pilgrims in their first harsh year in the New World. While Thanksgiving has been thoroughly commercialized and modernized, its origins are Christian and religious.
Moreover, the Pilgrim and Puritan forefathers who landed in New England sought to erect a “city upon a hill.” These courageous pilgrims hoped “to strike a blow for the true faith by erecting a model Christian community” and “were encouraged to exercise their liberty” in this new continent as historian Francis Bremer wrote. The story of seeking liberty and property in the beginning of America’s foundation cannot exclude the religious impulse that was so essential to it.
The egalitarian faith of the Puritans led to popular participation in church and sociopolitical elections, laying the seeds for the early democratic and republican culture of the eventual United States. While it is true that the Pilgrims and Puritans were not as democratic as we are today, this misses the point of origins: the seed of civil society and democracy — imperfect to be sure — was planted by those Christian pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic and landed in the New World.
Furthermore, the First Charter of Virginia begins with the usual introduction of the King of Great Britain, “James, By the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.” John Pory, the Speaker of the Virginia Colonial Legislature (in 1619), writes about how sessions began with prayer before proceeding to the committee assignments of the day. Lest we forget until 1779, with Thomas Jefferson crafting a new constitution for the commonwealth, Virginia’s state religion was the Anglican/Episcopal Church. Christianity runs deep in the soil of the continent.
Additionally, what of the North American Martyrs, whose feast day was recently celebrated on October 19? There isn’t just a Protestant seed in North America. There is a Catholic one as well stretching across America from coast to coast, too.
The North American martyrs were a group of Catholic missionaries and lay ministers who ventured into the deep wilderness of North America in the 1640s — the true “errand into the Wilderness.”
All were killed at the hands of the supposedly peaceful Native Americans. They were tortured, their fingers cut off, and their heads bludgeoned by axe strikes before being decapitated and their bodies tossed in rivers. Their crime? For learning the language of the Huron, converting some to the holy and apostolic religion, which angered the Mohawk (who hated the Huron as well as the French) and gave them greater justification for war against the Mohawk and their newly accepted God.
Despite their cruel deaths, the North American martyrs remain eternal in the eyes of the blessed Trinity and the saints in the New Jerusalem for their love toward all men to minister the healing sacraments to injured souls in need of Christ.
Long before Abraham Lincoln took to the podium to argue that the nation was dedicated to a creed and proposition, and long before the constitutional coup launched by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers, and certainly long before 55 men signed the Declaration of Independence, we start to see America’s true seed, its true roots, from whence America sprang to which Thanksgiving turned out to be an eternal reminder of that reality.
The Founding of America was Christian, predominantly English Protestant in what would become These United States of America, but also French Catholic in the Upper Midwest whose missionary efforts planted the seeds of Catholicism in the far north, and the adventurous spirit of westward exploration and missionizing activity of Spanish Catholics who discovered California and the Pacific Coast whose missions gave their names to the cities on the golden coast. Though this is now a mark of shame for many in California. Perhaps they’ll even want to rename San Francisco and Los Angeles someday!
The very name, America, is an Anglicization of the Latin name Amerigo, the name of the Italian Catholic explorer Amerigo Vespucci. We find in the Christian and European adventurous and missionary spirit, a true multiculturalism that stands as an illuminative contrast to our contemporary false counterparts that see destruction and uniformity as “multicultural” instead of preserving the vibrancy of particularity owed from the European and Christian missionary and explorative traditions.
The founding of America was undeniably Christian, Catholic and Protestant. America was Christian in the sense that the Christian religion was the identity of the settlers and missionaries, the God to whom the legislatures invoked in their opening sessions, and to whom men, women, and children gave thanks to and even died in imitation of. No one needed a law declaring the self-evident. Just read the written diaries and minutes of the settlers and politicians of the 1600s.
Yet one can also look at the colonial charters, even the early state constitutions, which held Christianity as the true religion of the land. The 1780 Constitution of Massachusetts, in prescribing its oath of office, reads: “I, A.B., do declare that I believe the Christian religion, and have a firm persuasion of its truth; and that I am seized and possessed, in my own right, of the property required by the constitution, as one qualification for the office or place to which I am elected.”
References to Christianity and the Christian religion abound in most state constitutions in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. The non-establishment clause, for the early years of the American republic, applied to the federal government and not to state governments. In fact, Massachusetts — oh the irony from today’s perspective — was the last state to officially disestablish tax support for its state church, the Congregational Church, in 1833.
When we give thanks this year, we must remember the spirit from whence thanksgiving comes. In doing so we see that America’s true founding was in the labor and sacrifices of the men and women, missionaries and martyrs, who staked out this continent for Christ, their families, and what became known as America. That is where the roots of America lay. And those roots should be the wellspring that we gravitate to, for without these roots all other liberties and virtues which we hold dear shall wither away if we do not cling and nurture the roots that birthed them.
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