Address From Douglas Wilson at NatCon 2025
Allow me to start with my gratitude. Many thanks to the organizers of this conference for the very great privilege of addressing you all again. While acknowledging the true honor of being invited last year, I wanted also to acknowledge the amazing fact that I have been invited back.
But I also want to begin with the observation that historical claims are not religiously neutral. There is really no such thing as worldview neutrality in any realm, and that most certainly includes history. There is no such thing as history raw. We can see this truth set out before us in a pretty stark way when we consider how the people of Israel pressured Aaron at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
“And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him” (Exodus 32:1).
Just as an aside, one of the reasons why I use the King James Version of the Bible is that it gives me opportunities to use phrases like we wot not. But I don’t have tons of time here, so let us not get distracted. Just a few verses later, after the golden calf was fashioned, the people did and said this:
“And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4).
Verse 1 and then verse 4. Moses had been up on the mountain for a time, and so in his absence, various rapscallions got themselves elected to various school boards and started messing around with the history curriculum.
These people were in the process of deciding between two origin stories. There was the origin story that had actually happened, the one they were consequently kind of stuck with, and then there was the origin story that they wanted to have happened. They were seeking to accomplish their apostasy by means of an adroit use of the present perfect infinitive.
The alternative they were presenting was not a matter of mere historical research or objectively examining the credentials of rival historians. They were rewriting the history of what had happened, and they knew precisely what they were doing. They began by saying that they did not know where Moses had gotten to—this man “who had brought them up out of Egypt.” They acknowledged that. That’s the history they used to have. They were therefore going to replace him historically, putting a golden calf into the role of their deliverer.
History needs to be malleable if you are going to change your gods. And as soon as the calf was presented to them, still warm from the forge, that is precisely what they did. They introduced the calf as the representative of the gods who brought them up out of the land of Egypt. These be thy gods, O Israel.
It is not possible for a nation to swap out her gods without the help of a memory hole. And because memory holes can be complicated, you need certified experts to run those things, and that is where the stately brick buildings covered with all that ivy come in. Those are the people who know how to mint the certified memory-holers. This kind of thing cannot be pulled off without help. Somebody has to echo and validate the new claims being made, and so regime historians become most necessary. Someone has to apply the oak veneer. And the same principles apply, incidentally, for regime theologians.
This is not the only time this happened. When Jeroboam was worried about his subjects in the northern kingdom of Israel retaining some loyalty to the worship of Jehovah at the Temple in Jerusalem, he also undertook a project of historical revisionism.
“Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Beth-el, and the other put he in Dan” (1 Kings 12:28–29).
So it makes quite a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum. Or better yet, who writes the screenplays? In the midst of Israel’s slavery in Egypt, a black Israelite princess named Asenath tried to lead the people to the freedom of a higher path, but their deep misogyny and entrenched patriarchy thwarted her noble efforts. This happened, naturally, in 1619 B.C. and is soon to be a Netflix special.
There is a vast difference between a dispute over a simple historical claim on the one hand—say over whether Edward de Vere was the real Shakespeare—and a dispute between competing worldviews with historical events serving as the weapons of that dispute. The Christian Founding of America is most decidedly in this latter category.
A Brief and Important Aside
A number of the things I am about to say will naturally generate appropriate and necessary questions about the place of non-Christians in the America I appear to envisage—what about Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc? This was the very good question that Yoram asked me last year. Jesus either rose from the dead or He didn’t, and that is a claim that has ramifications. Although it is not my topic, I need to say three very brief things about this before proceeding.
First, the questions are challenging ones and should be addressed by men of good will who understand history, theology, and the moral imperative represented by the two greatest commandments—i.e., our duty to love God and to love our neighbor. Excluded from that discussion, therefore, would be all trolls, cranks, antisemitic edgelords, and Crusader avatars with laser eyes.
And secondly, we need to recognize that we are not going to build any kind of comity or consensus through lies about the historical facts. Never try to build good relationships with anybody on the foundation of falsehoods. Lies always come back to bite you. And it is simply a historical fact that America was deeply Christian and Protestant at the Founding.
And third, in the meantime, it is not xenophobic to object to the immigration policies of those who want to turn the Michigan/Ohio border into something that resembles the India/Pakistan border. That kind of nonsense from our utopian social engineers is actually the root of our current set of practical dilemmas. While remaining Protestant in her ethos, Protestant America did successfully adapt to the presence of Catholics and Jews, and nothing succeeds like success. But millions of Muslims without any commitment to or mechanism of assimilation is another matter. There is only so much white sand you can put into the sugar bowl before it isn’t the sugar bowl anymore.
America Ab Origine
Not only do I want to claim that America was a Christian republic at the Founding, I want to argue that to maintain the contrary is on the same level as believing that Tammerlane was a Swede.
The popular mythology of America being thoroughly Deistic back in the day is a mythology that is, not surprisingly, backed by numerous credentialed historians—which should tell you something about our credentialing system—but please know that the real energy for this is coming from the mosh pit surrounding the golden calf.
That crowd wanted to sound sophisticated at the beginning of the party and so started by chanting sapere aude, “dare to know.” It was all about Enlightenment, and the crowd projected the sunshine of their own enlightenment back onto a blinkered colonial America, giving the early Americans credit for things that would have appalled them. So they started out by chanting how secular and enlightened and Deistic we all were at the Founding. But they have now apparently moved on to a different chant—now they are urging the women to take their tops off. Keep in mind that may have been the long game all along.
But the United States was a Christian republic at the Founding. Some of our individual states had a hard establishment of religion, meaning that there was a particular denomination that was the official denomination of that state. Just as Denmark had the Lutheran Church, and England had the Anglican, so Massachusetts had the Congregational Church. So these would be states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire—keeping those establishments well into the 19th century. And even after the Constitution was ratified, and Vermont came in as the 14th state, she did so with the Congregational Church being the established religion of that state. Now, whether hard establishment at the state level is a good idea or not—I think it is not—it was plainly not an unconstitutional idea. A state with an official religion could be admitted to the Union, and why not?
The other states had some form of soft establishment—the most tenuous being Rhode Island, kind of. Rhode Island, founded by religious liberty absolutist Roger Williams, actually denied citizenship to a Jewish merchant named Aaron Lopez, who was an enterprising fellow who then went up to Puritan New England and got his citizenship there. Calvinist New England had a scary reputation, but in the immortal words of Coleridge, let us factor in the reality that Calvinism is a sheep in wolves’ clothing. Rhode Island, in the meantime, also had Sunday blue laws and denied political office to Roman Catholics. In the colonial era, on those kinds of religious liberty issues, that was the radical left.
But the best example of a principled soft establishment would be South Carolina, which in 1778 loosened their formal ties with the Anglican Church, while at the same time including the following in their Constitution: The “Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.”
In between those two categories were those states that retained a formal relationship with a particular denomination, usually Anglican, but because of pressure coming from the jostling presence of other Christian denominations, the claims were not pressed too hard. These would be states like New York, North Carolina, or Georgia.
Please note. Overwhelmingly, the pressure to back away from established churches at the state level was not because of a godless secularism. The pressure was actually the result of all the evangelical churn, with the Presbyterians, say, not wanting to be taxed in order to pay the Anglican vicar’s salary.
And so what about the men involved? There were 55 men at the Constitutional Convention . . . 50 of them were orthodox Christians. This was not the French Revolution. From the Founding era, we do remember the names of the dodgy ones when it comes to orthodoxy—Jefferson and Franklin—but they were not representative, unless you were to work really hard to make them representative in a revisionist sort of way. And on top of that, they were also dodgy when it came to Deistic “orthodoxy” as well. Both of them believed God intervened in human affairs. And if we had the time, we could focus on the explicitly Christian and very stalwart men—Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, John Witherspoon, et al.
The Treaty of Paris ended our War for Independence, and it opens with these words—“In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.”
In one scholarly review of the political writings of the Founders, it was demonstrated that the apostle Paul was quoted as frequently as Blackstone and Montesquieu. And Deuteronomy was quoted almost twice as much as all the citations from Locke altogether. On the floor of Parliament, Horace Walpole said that “cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson,” referring to Witherspoon. One of the names for our War for Independence in England was the “Presbyterian Revolt.” And because of their black Geneva gowns and ardent support for independence, Presbyterian ministers were known as the “black regiment.”
A Supreme Court case in 1892 determined that the United States was a Christian nation and had been since the Founding. Hey, where did all the defenders of stare decisis go? Roman Catholic immigrants in the 19th century established their own parochial schools, not because the public schools were secular, but because they were so Protestant—Protestant prayers, Protestant Bibles, Protestant catechisms.
According to the Declaration, our rights did not come to us via some blind, evolutionary process—nor could they. We are endowed by our Creator with these inalienable rights. I would encourage you all to meditate on the fact that if there is no Creator God, then there are no God-given rights. And if you have no God-given rights, then what you actually find yourself with are man-bestowed privileges, and rapidly vanishing ones at that. And if you take the language of the Declaration the way I do, as representing a covenantal reality—still relevant, still true, and still binding—you quickly realize that we cannot walk away from God without walking away from who we were and are as a people.
Washington’s Continental Army was 50% Presbyterian, and about 30% Congregationalist, with others like Baptists filling in the remainder. And all of them were Calvinists. That is enough to warm this Calvinist’s heart . . . well, to the extent that any Calvinist’s heart can be warmed anyhow.
So the Constitution forbade a Church of the United States on federal grounds. It did not do this on secular grounds. The same logic applied to the prohibition of a religious test for holding federal office. Religious tests for office were a state issue and were to be applied at the state level, not federal. Religious tests for office were commonplace at the state level. Religious tests for office were reserved to the states, the same way administration of elections was reserved to them.
The Constitution was dated in the year of our Lord 1789, and in that year, the year of the adoption of the Constitution, seven of the thirteen colonies had some kind of a formal tie to a Christian denomination, and most of the remaining states referenced Christianity more broadly. And in no way did the non-establishment clause of the Constitution conflict with what the majority of the states were doing.
So what changed? After the War Between the States, the incorporation doctrine gradually developed, a constitutional innovation, that applied the restrictions in the Bill of Rights to the states, with the federal government now as the newly appointed guardian. It used to be that the states jealously guarded the central government, but the supplanting and centralizing forces after the War flipped that. And we are now at the point where what Congress couldn’t do in 1800 is prohibited to states and municipalities, down to the Christmas creche on the steps of the county courthouse—with the Feds as the enforcers.
All of this was done very gradually. The erosion took a very long time. This Christian consensus of ours had numerous dents in it and had shown some wear, but it was still largely functional down to the time of the Second World War. Here is Calvin Coolidge, the man who was president when my father was born.
“Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberty, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in the world. One rests on righteousness, the other rests on force. One appeals to reason, the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in a republic, the other is represented by a despotism” Calvin Coolidge, 1924, which was just 29 years before I was born
Just Yesterday
The Supreme Court said, in that Holy Trinity case of 1892, “this is a religious people . . . [T]his is a Christian nation.” Moreover, the Court said that we always had been, from the beginning—and I am quoting SCOTUS now, they referred to the “liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess.” That decision was 61 years before I was born. And before you say that that was such a long time ago, 61 years ago from today was 1964. LBJ was president. Anyone here remember him?
Today, we are 133 years away from that case. Because we are Americans, we think of that as a really long time. But we have not been in existence as a nation for long enough to really understand the life cycle of foundings, expansions, cultural declensions, and reformations. Solomon introduced idol worship into Israel, and the last year of Solomon’s reign was 922 B.C. The eighth year of Josiah’s reign was when that marvelous king began his great reformation in 632 B.C. That was 290 years later, almost a half-century longer than our entire history as a nation. It is, in other words, not too late for us to strengthen the things that remain.
So when it comes to reformations, for us to go back to the time when we were self-consciously a Christian nation is, in effect, to go back to just yesterday. But the official line is that we are supposed to think that the radical and strident secularism of today must have been the way it always was.
Remember your lessons from The Silver Chair:
“Slowly and gravely the Witch repeated, ‘There is no sun.’ And they all said nothing. She repeated, in a softer and deeper voice. ‘There is no sun.’ After a pause, and after a struggle in their minds, all four of them said together, ‘You are right. There is no sun.’ It was such a relief to give in and say it” (The Silver Chair, pp. 178-179).
You may recall that on that occasion, the instrument of their deliverance was the smell of burnt marshwiggle. And although it is not at all an enchanting aroma, a point which we must all grant, it is nevertheless one that I am attempting to reproduce for you here. Some might argue that I specialize in burnt marshwiggle smells.
That Wall of Separation
Whenever the magic phrase separation of church and state is invoked, the thinking stops immediately. One of the reasons why progressives have such a hard time understanding that conservative Christians really do believe in the separation of church and state—we were the ones who developed that doctrine, after all—is that they do not and cannot believe in separation of church and state. Progressives actually cannot separate church and state in their minds for the simple reason that the state is their church.
But if we were to say we favor the separation of church and state, what are we saying by this exactly? That famous wall of separation . . . where is it located precisely?
Separation of church and state, rightly understood, is separating two distinct kinds of governments—civil government and ecclesiastical. Done rightly, separating church and state is a prudent and wise thing to do. The principle behind it is a biblical one. Uzziah, although the king of Judah, was not allowed to offer incense before the Lord (2 Chron. 26:18). But done up in a muddle, the way we have tried to separate them has led us into villainous and toxic absurdities.
The central absurdity is that it creates the chimerical illusion that we can separate morality and state. And because of our commitment to evasiveness on these very basic questions, we have pulled the deep tricksy down upon our own heads. We glibly say that we can’t legislate morality, but what on earth do we mean by that? If we mean that we cannot pass legislation to address sins of the heart, sins like covetousness, or lust, or gnawing ambition, I quite agree. But if we are seriously saying that you want no connection between our statecraft and morality, I will just stare at you stupefied.
If you say there must be a separation of morality and state, I will ask, “Then what’s with all these land acknowledgments?” Why do you think we are on stolen land when the state can’t steal? Stealing is a matter of morality. And if no human being is illegal, then why do you maintain that all those Manifest Destiny Europeans were illegal? And if Ahmed, who got his papers stamped yesterday, is “fully American,” then why am I considered an interloper when my people have been here for centuries? You, my friend, are a bundle of confusions and conceits that somehow grew a pair of feet.
But there may be a reason you don’t want to admit the connection between morality and state. Is it because you just know that I will have some follow-up questions? Which morality? By what standard? As I once argued in another place . . .
“The Ten Commandments? The Noble Eight-fold Path? The Five Pillars of Islam? You must either pick one, and answer all the ensuing hot questions, or you must obtain the meat drippings from each and work them down into your very own unique brand of a moral-system-reduction-sauce. And yet what moral system allows you to combine them in that way? Who died and left you the reduction sauce chef?”
In the arbitrary making of this kind of reduction sauce, what usually happens is that a series of secular bromides are picked out—the kind of moral imperatives you find on Starbucks cups, “dance like nobody’s watching,” that kind of thing—and all arranged into an arbitrary and capricious system of morality. You tie all these into a bromide bundle and suspend it from a cable that is attached to a metal plate up in the troposphere, laid flat against the noumenal realm, and fastened securely there with some Kantian lug nuts. You were hoping that it wouldn’t come down on our heads, but alas, it now has.
Conclusion
So we were in fact a Christian republic at the Founding. We are a backslidden Christian republic now.
Our modern secularists have told us that we could somehow dispense with our covenantal national obligations as a Christian people by the simple expedient of forgetting about them, or pretending that they never existed. Just hire yourself an accredited historian, credentialed by Golden Calf State U, and during his lectures nod at the appropriate times. Pretend to take notes.
But like it or not, we have been a Christian nation for most of our history, and covenantal forgetfulness is not an excuse that passes any kind of muster with God. Backsliding is no excuse, but is rather another sin to be confessed. Willful forgetfulness just makes everything worse.
There was a broad, deep, and unquestioned Christian consensus, one that existed from the landing of Columbus down into the twentieth century. It did not result in a formal church establishment at the federal level, but it didn’t have to. It was the kind of commitment that touched everything and got into everything. It was the kind of Christian consensus that Francis Schaeffer spent so much time calling us back to. And it is actually still functional and functioning in many parts of our country.
“You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Dt. 32:18, ESV).
