Tending the Fire: a Declaration
This we declare
America is a Christian nation.
Not because the state confessed a creed, but because it inherited a Christian understanding of society: the state is limited, society comes first, and rights as well as dignity come from God rather than government.
This view rests on the Christian innovation that separates church and state. Where before the divine and earthly power were closely intertwined, Jesus’ words about rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, together with His insistence that His kingdom is not of this world, sever the two. The state is a limited servant of society; the church, in the broadest sense, is the heart of society and the guardian and teacher of morality. We are therefore first and foremost living parts of society, NOT of a ‘state’.
This inheritance is carried forward, from Flemish medieval cities, to Dutch citizens, to American colonists. In each case the people hold their rulers to account, and when those rulers forgo their own responsibility and break the social contract, the people depose them.
Absolute monarchy was not the fulfillment of the Christian medieval order, but its distortion and undoing. The Enlightenment did not cure that distortion, but rationalized and intensified it, under the idea that reason should govern the people. And who better to rule and govern than an enlightened person, advised by very smart experts?
The French Revolution then goes further, sweeping away the king (and the Church that supported the old view), while keeping the experts. The gap is filled by the state, which now claims rule over every aspect of life: not just politics, but also religion and how to live. The foundation of rights is no longer God, but man’s own reason: “We will tell you what is good for you!” Where freedoms were once inalienable, they are now granted, and revocable. Where people once held agency, they now hold permission and license.
Patrick Henry exclaims ‘Give me liberty or give me death’: the free man, willing to die for his convictions. The French revolutionaries yell “Liberty, equality, fraternity, OR DEATH!”: the state, willing to kill any who refuse its reasonable laws. This focus on forced compliance has haunted Western political thinking ever since.
Yet when Napoleon’s state seized hospitals, charities and schools, it had neither the money nor the calling to sustain them well.
Today, citizens are arrested for silent prayer in the wrong places, or prosecuted for making factually correct claims that somehow carry ‘criminal intent’ because they could ‘incite hatred’, of course ‘as defined by law’. The state that exclusively controls and administers marriage now also redefines it, at will.
In the United States, the old Christian understanding is still preserved: the limited state, under God, where rights are unalienable because granted by their Creator. But it is under continued assault, pressured to follow Europe into the revolutionary order, where not just kings but God is removed, and the state is all-encompassing.
The answer is not a new revolution, but the conscious reclaiming of the heritage left to us. Not a form of nationalism, but the understanding of life in society as a social contract, with religion guiding culture and morality, and the state limited in service of the whole.
That foundation can be stated in seven points:
1. Our culture is Christian, and that is the foundation on which the state is built.
2. Society comes first; the state is its servant, limited and answerable to it.
3. Rights, and our dignity, are given by God, not granted by the state, and so the state cannot revoke them or infringe on our dignity.
4. The spiritual lives in society, at its heart, and there it guides what is right.
5. Society is plural and interwoven, holding both the person and the whole, neither swallowing the other.
6. Freedom is ordered, exercised in society and carries its own responsibility; it is not license, and it is not the state’s to ration.
7. The foundation lives only so long as enough of us carry it knowingly. It is lost not when it is attacked, but when it is forgotten.
This inheritance does not ask Americans to confess any creed. It does not require any particular church or doctrine. It asks only that we recognize what we live inside, and carry it knowingly.
This, now, is what we declare: America is not Christian because the state commands belief, but because its founding was built on a Christian order of society, rights, freedom, responsibility, and limited government. Ours is a Christian nation not by confession but by structure. That ordered structure can still be carried. It can still be practiced. It can still be taught. It can still be restored. But only if Americans recognize what they have been given before they surrender it without knowing its name.
I am American by civil law and Christian in conscience. I can forget what I am and lose my part in the inheritance. So can a people. That is the choice before us now: rediscover the inheritance, or let it go.
Be ours to hold it high.
This article is part of The Inheritance Papers, a collection of articles exploring why the US was founded as a Christian nation, and what that looks like 250 years later. For the full historical argument, see the Pamphlet.
© Wim Vanraes, 2026.
All rights reserved.
This is very helpful. Thank you for tracing our roots and choices so clearly.
I dunno… there’s a lot of Roman and Greek gods on the ceiling in DC