In the wake of the enacting of the United States Constitution and the swearing in of national hero Gen. George Washington as the nation’s first president, David Ramsay’s two-volume History of the American Revolution rolled off the printing presses in 1789. Considered by many as the first major historian of the American Revolution, Ramsay experienced the war as a field surgeon, from within a British prison and, following his release, as a member of the Continental Congress.
A historian, doctor and devout Christian, Ramsay had a warning for his fellow Americans: The young nation, he insisted, must refute “the dishonorable position, that religion cannot be supported but by compulsory establishments [state churches].”
Ramsay knew that although long dominant theocracy had been abandoned by the nation’s founders, and the Constitution mandated that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,” some Americans longed for a return to Christian governance.
Five years later on July 4, 1794, 18 years after the colonies’ Declaration of Independence, Ramsay delivered a public lecture subsequently published in the Philadelphia Gazette. Voicing words aspirationally reaching far beyond the racial and gender limits of freedom in his day, Ramsay observed that “religious freedom,” a “fundamental constitutional point” guaranteed by the 1791 First Amendment’s separation of church and state, “kindly invites the distressed from all quarters to repair hither.”
Americans’ secular federal government, grounded upon the “universal equality” of religious freedom, Ramsay enthused, “is the most effectual method of preserving peace among contending sects. It has also demonstrated that the church and the state are different societies, and can very well subsist without any alliance or dependence on each other.”
Some critics, including many Christian clergy and laity no longer favored by the state, nonetheless condemned their newly established nation as godless. Not so the Rev. Hezekiah Packard, a Congregationalist once enjoying the privileges of theocracy in his home state of Massachusetts. Whether Packard liked it or not, the United States was a secular nation. Christianity had to adapt. But how? Reaching back into his childhood, the minister found an answer: a catechism.
A means of rote indoctrination, Christian catechisms consisted of lists of questions and mandatory answers. Packard had been indoctrinated into theocracy in this manner. Now it was time to teach a new generation of Christians how to live within a secular government.
Packard’s A Catechism, published in 1796, was unlike any other. Divided into two parts, it first indoctrinated children and youth in proper religious beliefs. But breaking new ground, the catechism’s second section was titled “A Political Catechism, designed to lead Children into the Knowledge of Society, and to train them to the Duties of Citizens.”
Previously, in Massachusetts and other theocratic colonies, the state granted large leeway to the Establishment Church in the shaping of religious mandates, law codes, societal norms and citizen duties. In his political catechism, Packard instructed a new generation of orthodox believers in how to influence a clearly secular federal government into retaining the traditional cultural shaping influence of Christianity, minus a state church.
Packard’s task required walking a fine line. “Civil government is divine,” Packard decreed. God had created secular America, for “All power is of God.” Since God had created America, the nation’s civil laws, as long as they were not in violation of Christian doctrine, were “the laws of God” and thus required Christians’ dutiful obedience.
At the same time, Packard taught that public worship, “essential to the well being of the State,” was “the grand cement of society.” True justice could only be derived from “the love and fear of God.” Good political “policy” promoted “the honor of God and happiness of man.”
“Civil liberty cannot long be supported” if the preeminence of Christianity is not acknowledged by government,” Packard concluded. “Because, without religion there will be no virtue, and virtue is the basis of civil liberty.” Long ago “the ancient Jewish Theocracy” had embodied God’s hand in civil law, and theocracy “has been a mean in all Christian nations since.” Although America’s theocratic years were now in the past, the secular United States should yet honor Christianity’s cultural influence.
Others disagreed. God was not the architect of their nation’s secular, pluralistic democracy, a coalition of Christians previously dominant in theocratic colonies insisted. Christianity should rule. Repeatedly they petitioned Congress to officially recognize Christianity’s dominance by passing federal legislation establishing Sunday as a national, weekly holy day. Alas, their theocratic-leaning efforts failed in the face of widespread opposition from Christians committed to church-state separation, many having formerly been persecuted in tyrannical colonial Christian theocracies, including Packard’s Massachusetts.
Then something surprising happened: in states formerly theocratic, secularism and church-state separation became a godsend to cultural Christianity. One observer in the 1840s, writing of formerly theocratic Connecticut, observed that “not a single survivor [of church-state disestablishment] at this day, of all who once wrote against the separation of Church and State in Connecticut, has not long since seen that he was mistaken, and has not now found to be a blessing what he once regarded as a calamity.”
Church-state separation had, in fact, led to dramatic organic growth for Christianity. Other religions also advanced, albeit in the shade of cultural Christianity. Nostalgia for colonial-era Christian theocracy seemingly faded.
Nonetheless, in the early 20th century, white Christian theocratic longings experienced a national resurgence. Increasingly layering political discourse with triumphant Christian rhetoric, nationalistic “American exceptionalism” insisted that the United States stood apart from other nations as a righteous and heroic role model in an increasingly chaotic world.
Amid the global unrest, some authoritarian leaders in Europe tapped into their own continent’s history of church-state alliances. Stoking white Christian Nationalism, they sought to magnify their own political power. In the 1930s, one white Christian Nationalist leader of a European nation granted Roman Catholicism national privileges in the shaping of public religion, education, marriage practices and the law. His Christian Nationalist movement, he declared, “now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism.” Determined to eradicate by force “the whole complex system of democratic ideology,” he repudiated secular, pluralistic, majority-vote democracy, grounding his movement upon “the immutable, beneficial and fruitful inequality of mankind.”
Benito Mussolini’s words were self-descriptive of his tyrannical movement and ideology: fascism. In Mussolini’s fascist Christian Nationalist Italy of the 1930s, freedoms of speech, association, conscience and religion did not exist. Rather, the State, in alliance with the Church, tightly controlled what citizens could do and say — as had America’s colonial theocracies of long ago.
As if on cue, white tyrannical Christian Nationalist movements in Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany stirred similar authoritarian longings in the United States.
“Stop persecuting Christians” became a disingenuous mantra of America’s 1930s and 40s white Christian Nationalists. Demanding a “Christian America and a Christian Republic,” some called for a “holy war” against American democracy. “This nonsense about democracy and equality is through when I’m in power,” declared one Christian Nationalist leader. Another focused on raising “a Christian army … to beat the hell out of the [democratic] enemy.”
“It’s about time we Christians got up and fought for a Christian government,” one authoritarian declared. “We’re nationalists and we stand for a nationalist form of government. We are fascists, American fascists … out to help bring fascism to this country. Democracy is a tool used to do away with Christianity. The time is ripe for something entirely new — fascism! And it will come. It will march triumphant in America. Christian nationalism will march hand in hand with militant fascism everywhere to conquer the world.”
Soon, though, the United States’ entry into World War II against Europe’s white Christian authoritarianism subdued America’s own emerging white Christian tyranny. Embarrassed, Americans set about forgetting memories of the nation’s first incarnation of modern Christian Nationalism. Decades later, however, some observers began noting similarities between present-day white Christian Nationalism and fascism of old.
In 2007, Chris Hedges — a journalist and a Presbyterian minister — in his book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, presciently warned that white Christian Nationalists were again gravitating toward fascism and the destruction of democracy. Later, during the first Trump administration, Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, defined white Christian Nationalism as “a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is nationalism in the service of domination, with the goal of preserving, maintaining, or gaining a position at the top of a hierarchy of power and status.”
And that was before the January 6, 2021, white Christian Nationalist domestic terrorist insurrection that came perilously close to toppling America’s democracy and ushering in a tyrannical regime.
In our present perilous days, history remains instructive. Mussolini’s white Christian Nationalist quest to enshrine “the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind” failed due to his movement’s insistence — in the words of one historian of fascism — on the “complete state control of every phase of human activity.” A groundswell of resistance on the part of freedom-minded Italian citizens arose. From afar United States military forces came to join the war against Hitler and Mussolini’s tyranny. Following years of war and the loss of many lives, Americans celebrated victory in World War II, soon conveniently forgetting that many of their own had supported both tyrants.
Today, white American Christian Nationalists, echoing Mussolini, are implementing authoritarian state control over race, religion, mind, body, privacy, education, science and economy through the implementation of Project 2025 — a tyrannical manifesto that British economist Umair Haque calls “a blueprint for a totalitarian society.” (Mussolini, in fact, coined the term “totalitario” to describe fascism’s goal of subordinating individual freedoms to the state.)
Some two centuries after historian David Ramsay’s celebration of constitutional church-state separation, the Rev. Hezekiah Packard’s resignation to the reality of a secular America, most Christians’ opposition to re-theocratizing America, and, still later, former theocrats’ widespread realization that church-state separation was itself freedom, white Christian Nationalists have long abandoned the lived experiences and witness of their forebears. Without evidence denying America’s secular founding, their tyrannical movement manifests fascist tendencies in using the state to eradicate freedoms. Rather than celebrating America’s constitutional equal freedom of religion — and no religion — for all, many praise European white Christian Nationalist authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán.
Pretending they are persecuted, today’s white Christian Nationalists — in reality among the most privileged of Americans culturally — are wielding government power to openly and systematically discriminate against others. Most recently, through President Donald Trump’s misnamed Religious Liberty Commission, a Christian Nationalist White House, effectively envisioning a state church, is bent on ferreting out and eradicating so-called “anti-Christian bias.”
In reality, studies of “anti-Christian bias,” revealing the disingenuous use of the term, have concluded that such claims are rooted in white Americans’ fears of soon becoming a minority of the nation’s population. A 2024 study by sociologists Rosemary (Marah) Al-Kire, Clara L. Wilkins and Michael Pasek effectively anticipated the second Trump administration’s anti-freedom agenda driven by white Christian Nationalist fears. As stated in an April 18, 2025, Religion News Service article, their findings suggest “that expressing concern for anti-Christian bias can be interpreted as signaling allegiance to white people — without the social cost of being accused of racism. Instead, allegations of anti-Christian bias can be presented in a positive way as issues of ‘religious freedom,’ a core American value.”
Throughout American history, Christian theocrats have long falsely used the phrase “religious freedom” — meaning their religious freedom — to tread on and persecute others. Roger Williams, founder of America’s first Baptist church, was among the first in colonial America to experience the wickedness of state-enforced, tyrannical “religious freedom.”
Convicted in court of demanding equal religious freedom for all that could only be achieved through church-state separation, Williams was banished from the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. Thereafter establishing the Rhode Island colony upon the foundation of church-state separation and religious freedom for all equally, Williams, in his 1644 book The Bloody Tenet of Persecution, wrote that “enforced uniformity [of religion] (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.”
Prescient to Williams’ warnings of old, today’s politically empowered white Christian Nationalists are now engaged in a fascist-like eradication campaign against inclusive democracy and Christianity both. Erasing eyewitness accounts of their Christian forebears and disdainful of constitutional church-state separation and equal religious freedom for all, they place their faith in authoritarian lies. Producing legislation denying religious freedom to persons of color, women, LGTBT+ people, immigrants and people disadvantaged otherwise, they threaten any who resist.
Amid the growing tyranny, however, a renewed American freedom revolution is rising. Befitting the coming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, patriotic Americans of goodwill and informed by history are advancing the actual realization of the “universal equality” of religious freedom that Revolutionary War historian David Ramsay visualized so long ago.