The early American republic had no federal establishment of religion, but it was not secular. This talk looks at a different way of understanding America as a Christian nation, for any productive discussion about America’s religious present or future must first reckon accurately with this past.

Learn how Christianity—Protestantism, specifically—was always baked into the American republic’s diplomatic, educational, judicial, and legislative regimes. Institutional Christianity in state apparatuses coexisted comfortably with disestablishment from the American Revolution until the beginning of the twenty-first century.