The majority of the founders also believed that religion was necessary for maintaining moral virtue and assumed that the nation would remain culturally Christian.

But people should be cautious about reading too much into the religious rhetoric during the founding period.

From where did the idea of America’s founding as a Christian nation arise? In a nutshell, it arose in the early 19th century as later generations of Americans sought to establish a national identity, one that distinguished and exemplified the founding by sanctifying the nation’s origins.

This is the origin of the “Christian nation” myth.

Demographically speaking, America certainly resembled a “nation of Christians” at the time of its founding and has ever since. But it’s a rather different proposition to claim that the founders established the new American government as a “Christian nation.” Clearly, they did not.

To be sure, the Declaration of Independence appealed to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” and asserted that all men had basic rights “endowed by their Creator.” But the Constitution – the document that actually enumerated and enshrined those rights – lacked even those vaguely drawn references to a deity.

The closest approximation came in its date, which was presented, in the standard style of the 18th century, “in the Year of our Lord.” (Even that lone mention was a late addition, as the draft voted on at the Constitutional Convention lacked any reference to the Lord.)

Meanwhile, in the text of the Constitution, religion was deliberately kept at arm’s length from the state. In radical departures from the era’s norms, there would be no religious tests for federal officeholders, no establishment of any national religion and no congressional interference with individual citizens’ free exercise of their own faith.

This was no accident. Despite their respect for religion and their belief in the divine origins of human rights, many of the Founding Fathers worried that religion would corrupt the state and, conversely, that the state would corrupt religion.

In his longest rumination on the topic in the Federalist Papers, for instance, James Madison challenged the idea that religion in politics would lead men to “cooperate for their common good” and asserted instead that it would make them “vex and oppress each other.”

Accordingly, Madison praised the new Constitution for keeping faith out of federal officeholding, which would welcome individuals “of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any particular profession of religious faith.”