Indiana’s Lt. Gov. falsely claims every Founding Father would be labeled a "far-right Christian Nationalist"
Micah Beckwith’s Christian Nationalist fantasy relies on rewriting America’s secular origins
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Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, said in a recent video posted to his official YouTube channel that, by today’s standards, “every single one” of the Founding Fathers “would be labeled a far-right Christian Nationalist without a doubt.”
He said this after noting the most obvious examples of founders didn’t accept his version of Christianity at all.
Our next question comes from Abigail. Abigail writes, “Are you aware that multiple Founding Fathers were not Christian?”
I hear this argument a lot when we’re pushing back against Christian foundations of America. There were really only one Founding Father, if you want to actually get really specific, that wasn’t a Christian, and his name was Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine, even though he was an atheist, still recognized the virtue that Christianity provides for a good orderly society.
Benjamin Franklin oftentimes is referred to as not a Christian. Some say he was a Deist. Actually Benjamin Franklin wrote in his biography when he was in his early 20s that he wasn’t a Christian and he was a Deist. But then he quickly realized, even in his biography, he says this, he quickly realized how foolish of an idea that was and he turned from theism. By the end of his life Ben Franklin was very much a Christian.
George Whitfield, one of the founders of the first Great Awakening, the movement that was spurring across the the Colonial Era, influenced Ben Franklin greatly. And we see it at his life even in the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin gives a passionate speech about how we need God, the God of Heaven and Earth, the Judeo-Christian God to intervene, or else we will not get a Constitution. Ben Franklin was a solid believer by the end of his life.
Thomas Jefferson as well was a Christian. Now, he had some certainly some different theological beliefs, but he always pointed to the Christian virtue as well.
And so to say that our Founding Fathers were not Christians, there’s basically one! And even that one was very much aware that we needed Christian virtue and values in our society. So if you were to take the entirety of the Founding Fathers and even, you know, not even just the framers of the Constitution or those of the Declaration of Independence but just the entirety of the multiple hundred Founding Fathers that we label, you would see that every single one of them by today’s standards would be labeled a far-right Christian Nationalist without a doubt.
So our nation was absolutely rooted in Christian values by these men who laid down their life, their liberty, and their sacred honor for you and I.
It’s ironic to hear Beckwith celebrate those men when, if they were around today, he would immediately label them all as heretical woke leftists who deserve to be tried for treason.
Everything he just said is a lie, which he doesn’t care about, because he believes his faith gives him permission to spread misinformation in the name of Jesus.
This is, after all, the guy who said the LGBTQ movement is operating out of a “demonic playbook,” that the infamous three-fifths compromise was “a good thing,” that his own election was a choice between “godly boldness” and “the Jezebel spirit,” that people who advocate for church/state separation are “the LGBTQ community trying to support Hamas,” that he would only allow exceptions to his state’s anti-abortion laws in the case of child rape victims as long as the rapist was murdered, and that Zohran Mamdani was wrongly trying to “force his values onto New York” by daring to be Muslim in a country that Beckwith claims is founded on Christianity.
In any case, he’s wrong about a lot of things, and he’s wrong here, too. Part of that stems from the simple fact that, roughly 250 years ago, we didn’t have awareness of evolution, much less diversity of religious thought in the country. Customary references to God were nothing more than a default setting, while actual beliefs varied heavily between the sort of slaveowners who began the country.
There have been countless articles and books (affiliate link) that dismantle everything Beckwith is saying, so it’s useless to rehash everything here. Needless to say, the Founders didn’t accidentally forget to write God into the Constitution; they deliberately excluded God. It wasn’t an error that they pushed for no religious tests for public office; it was part of the design. We weren’t a Christian nation back then and any claims to that label make even less sense today.
The only way you could believe otherwise is because you inhale a steady diet of David Barton-esque bullshit rather than listening to anybody credible or doing any kind of cursory investigation on your own. Or perhaps you’re under the false impression that the slew of changes in the 1950s to our motto, our money, the Pledge of Allegiance, etc. weren’t just the actions of reactionary Christians of the time but an attempt to correct the record instead of an obvious ploy to rewrite history.
Beckwith isn’t some guy on the fringe either. Just last week, Indiana’s governor and attorney general filed a lawsuit hoping to install a Ten Commandments monument outside the Statehouse in an effort to symbolically force Christianity upon citizens.
That’s why what Beckwith is doing is so malicious. It’s not like he’s hashing out some disagreement among historians. He’s try to retrofit his beliefs onto well-documented history that he knows damn well doesn’t match up with what his religious tribe believes. Based on everything we know about the Founders, they would be appalled by the way Republicans are forcing their faith on others.
Beckwith just proves what I’ve been saying for a while now: When facts become inconvenient, Christian Nationalists like him will never revise their theology; they’ll just try to revise history. Beckwith’s narrative requires us to accept that the men who were meticulous to the point of obsession about wording somehow failed to notice they created a secular framework for the country.
That’s why people like him are so worried right now. They know their narrative is failing so they double down on it. And if that means changing the very foundation of our country to justify their propaganda, it’s not like it bothers them. The Founders rejected the very logic Beckwith is pushing for now, but he’s betting that enough people won’t remember or care.
(via Right Wing Watch)
The First Amendment belies his stance. Were the founders Christian Nationalists,the text would have read “these United States are a Christian nation and all other religions will be subordinate”. A far cry from the actual text. Should further note that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion “ is the FIRST line of the FIRST amendment.
“ Beckwith’s narrative requires us to accept that the men who were meticulous to the point of obsession about wording somehow failed to notice they created a secular framework for the country.”
I use this point a lot when I interact with CNs. Something like “Do you think the Founders didn’t mean what they wrote or didn’t write what they meant?”