Concurrently cultural elites now are more hostile to public Christianity than ever before. But there never was truly a comprehensively Christian America in terms of ethics and law. Christians must not despair of today by falsely imagining a past golden age that never existed. Evil and good have always coexisted in our land and in every land. Christians today as always must contend against individual sin within themselves and against corporate sin within society. 

The deconstruction of marriage, gender and family, with growing threats to liberty of conscience, imperiling historic reverence for religious freedom, has left many traditionalists further lamenting the ostensible collapse of old Christian America. A new postmodern, secularist or pagan successor will be divorced from historic Christian and Jewish ethics, it is feared, leaving us a nation of radically autonomous individuals with no common ethos and an insatiable appetite for self-actualization, fueled by self-will.

But was America ever truly Christian ethically? It’s hard to describe it so up until 1865 when slavery was legally affirmed. The anecdote that particularly sticks in my mind was recalled by eventual Secretary of State William Seward, who before the Civil War travelled south with his wife. Outside Richmond they encountered enslaved children chained together, weeping on the road. The aggrieved Sewards turned around, unwilling to continue their southern tour. Slavery, profoundly unjust of itself, birthed and perpetuated countless other sins. Marriage was not legally recognized among slaves, leaving slave children without intact families. Slave women, and presumably some slave men, were sexually exploited by masters. Many offspring of illicit unions had fathers who would never acknowledge them. Abortion, in secret, likely was common, and perhaps also infanticide. The slavery culture also inhibited free speech and religious freedom. Dissenters were silenced, printing presses smashed, public mails seized, votes suppressed.

Slavery’s abolition in 1865 by the 13th Amendment was followed by a century of de facto and legally institutionalized racial segregation until the civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Blacks, even where in the majority, were often inhibited from voting and refused full citizenship rights. Whites who protested were themselves often threatened and silenced. Sometimes the truly defiant were beaten, chased from their homes, jailed or murdered. In fairness, it should be recalled that America practiced universal sins, had no monopoly on injustice, almost uniquely had the capacity for self-reform, and even at its worst was often preferable to nearly anywhere else. In the 1920s several hundred blacks were lynched in America. In Bolshevik Russia, several million were in those years starved and otherwise murdered. Some years ago, a Jewish rabbi, recalling his family’s escape from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, described finding a relative paradise in Birmingham, Alabama, of course a segregated city. America was always a refuge for many, even as it failed to safeguard many of its own people.

If America was ethically not Christian under legally enforced slavery or subsequent segregation, it arguably ceased to be so with the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling for unrestricted abortion rights, overthrowing laws in all 50 states, centuries of Common Law, and millennia of Jewish and Christian teaching. Roe v. Wade gave legal sanction to killing 50 million unborn, and subverted democracy with judicial royalism summoned by secular cultural elites.

So was America ethically Christian for a mere 8 years?! Was 1965-1973 the golden age of Christian America? Perhaps, although few likely recall it as such, and the 1962 Supreme Court ruling banning organized school prayer muddies the issue even further.

Strong majorities of Americans have always and still do profess Christianity. Rates of religious practice such as church attendance remain unchanged or are higher now than in earlier times. Concurrently cultural elites now are more hostile to public Christianity than ever before. But there never was truly a comprehensively Christian America in terms of ethics and law. Christians must not despair of today by falsely imagining a past golden age that never existed. Evil and good have always coexisted in our land and in every land. Christians today as always must contend against individual sin within themselves and against corporate sin within society. Our battles are rarely if ever unique to our own time, which if not reassuring, is at least edifying.

Mark Tooley is President of the Institute on Religion & Democracy. This article appeared on the IRD blog and is used with permission.