America Was Never a “Christian Nation”: Islam, Slavery, and the Forgotten Truth of the American Founding

PART I

Founding Myth vs. Historical Reality

How the Story of a “Christian Nation” Was Manufactured - and Why It Refuses to Die

When Myths Become Political Weapons

Every nation tells stories about its birth. Some are honest. Most are convenient. A few are so carefully repeated that they harden into sacred truths, immune to evidence and resistant to doubt.

In the United States, one such story has grown louder in recent years: the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation - not merely influenced by Christianity, but ordained by it; not shaped by pluralism, but anchored in a single religious identity. This claim is no longer whispered on the fringes. It is declared confidently by senators, preachers, media figures, and political movements that frame dissent not as disagreement, but as betrayal.

Yet history, when examined without fear or nostalgia, tells a far more complex - and far more unsettling - story.

This essay begins where myths usually collapse: not in ideology, but in evidence. Not in sermons, but in documents. Not in modern culture wars, but in the intellectual and moral anxieties of the eighteenth century.

What follows is not an attack on Christianity. Nor is it an elevation of Islam, secularism, or any competing worldview. It is something far more dangerous to power than polemic: a historical reckoning.

Because when nations lie about their origins, they inevitably lie about their obligations.

The Seductive Simplicity of the “Christian Nation” Claim

The appeal of the “Christian nation” narrative lies in its emotional economy. It offers certainty in a time of confusion. It promises moral clarity in an era of pluralism. And most importantly, it transforms political power into divine inheritance.

If the nation is Christian by design, then political authority becomes theological stewardship. Laws become sacraments. Borders become holy. Dissent becomes heresy.

This is not accidental. It is strategic.

The claim rests on three assumptions:

1. That the Founding Fathers were devout, orthodox Christians.
2. That American law was derived primarily from Christian theology.
3. That religious homogeneity - not diversity - was the intended foundation of the republic.

Each assumption collapses under historical scrutiny.

The Founders Were Not What Modern Christian Nationalism Needs Them to Be

The Founding Fathers were many things: revolutionaries, slaveholders, philosophers, hypocrites, idealists, pragmatists. What they were not was a unified religious bloc.

Their spiritual landscape was fragmented, restless, and often openly skeptical.

Thomas Jefferson rejected the divinity of Jesus.
 James Madison feared religion fused with power more than he feared foreign invasion.
 John Adams viewed organized Christianity as historically corrupting.
 Benjamin Franklin believed in God but distrusted dogma.
 George Washington rarely referenced Christ and avoided sectarian language entirely.

This was not coincidence. It was intentional restraint.

The founders lived in the long shadow of Europe’s religious wars - centuries of bloodshed fueled by the certainty that God had chosen sides. They had watched churches crown kings, justify massacres, and sanctify tyranny. To them, the danger was not atheism. It was religious certainty wedded to state power.

That fear shaped the republic.

The Enlightenment, Not the Pulpit, Was the Foundational Classroom

The intellectual DNA of the United States was forged less in churches than in books banned by churches.

John Locke’s arguments for natural rights.
 Montesquieu’s separation of powers.
 Spinoza’s radical critique of religious authority.
 Voltaire’s relentless assault on clerical tyranny.

These were not Christian theologians. They were Enlightenment philosophers - many of whom were condemned, censored, or excommunicated by religious institutions.

The founders did not reject religion. They rejected religious domination.

The Declaration of Independence speaks of a “Creator,” not Christ.
 The Constitution mentions no God at all.
 The First Amendment explicitly prohibits religious establishment.

This was unprecedented. Not reform. Not moderation. Prohibition.

No European Christian nation had ever done this.

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an and the Anxiety of Pluralism

Few historical details unsettle Christian nationalist mythology more than Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an.

Jefferson did not own it as a novelty. He studied it as a legal and philosophical text while training as a lawyer. He approached Islam not as an enemy faith, but as a civilization with moral and juridical traditions worth understanding.

More unsettling still: Jefferson explicitly envisioned Muslims as future American citizens.

In debates surrounding religious liberty, Jefferson and Madison argued that protections must extend not only to Christians, but to “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.”

This was not symbolic tolerance. It was constitutional intention.

Religious freedom, to the founders, was meaningless if it applied only to the majority.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom - America’s True Baptism

If the United States has a sacred text, it is not the Bible. It is the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Authored by Jefferson in 1777 and championed by Madison, the statute declared:

• That no person should be compelled to support any religious worship.
• That civil rights are independent of religious belief.
• That religious opinion should never determine citizenship or political participation.

This was revolutionary.

Jefferson considered this achievement - alongside the Declaration - worthy of inscription on his tombstone. Not his presidency. Not his power. His defense of religious freedom.

Christian nationalists rarely mention this.

The Capitol’s Silent Rebuttal

Walk through the U.S. Capitol and you will find an inconvenient truth carved into stone.

Among the lawgivers depicted in the chamber that honors the foundations of Western legal tradition is a Muslim jurist. His presence is not decorative. It is declarative.

It acknowledges that American law did not emerge from a single religious stream, but from a confluence of traditions: Roman law, English common law, Enlightenment philosophy, and yes - Islamic jurisprudence.

This inclusion was deliberate. It reflected an understanding that civilization is cumulative, not exclusive.

The myth of a purely Christian legal lineage cannot survive this reality.

Islam Was Not Foreign to Early America - It Was Enslaved Within It

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth for Christian nationalist narratives is this: Muslims were present at the founding of the United States - not as visitors, but as captives.

Historical research suggests that a significant portion of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims. They carried Qur’anic literacy, legal traditions, and spiritual discipline into a land that denied their humanity.

Some wrote in Arabic.
Some fasted.
Some prayed in secret.
Some taught their children fragments of faith under threat of punishment.

They were not peripheral to American history. They were foundational to its economy.

And they were systematically erased.

Slavery and the Selective Memory of Christian Morality

Christian nationalism often frames Christianity as the moral engine of abolition. This is only half true.

Yes, religious movements fueled abolitionist fervor. But churches also defended slavery with biblical arguments for centuries. Scripture was wielded both to liberate and to enslave.

The founders themselves were divided:

• Some denounced slavery as incompatible with liberty.
• Others rationalized it as economic necessity.
• Many owned human beings while preaching freedom.

This contradiction did not emerge from secularism. It emerged from selective theology.

The lesson is not that religion is evil. It is that religion, when fused with power, becomes malleable - and often cruel.

This contradiction did not emerge from secularism. It emerged from selective theology.

The lesson is not that religion is evil. It is that religion, when fused with power, becomes malleable - and often cruel.

Why the Founding Myth Matters Now

Historical myths are not academic errors. They are political tools.

If America was founded as a Christian nation:

• Religious minorities become guests, not stakeholders.
• Secular law becomes suspect.
• Pluralism becomes deviation.
• Power becomes moralized.

This is why the myth resurfaces during periods of demographic change, cultural anxiety, and declining institutional trust.

The past is being rewritten to control the future.

The Danger of Retrofitting Destiny

The founders did not imagine America as finished. They imagined it as fragile.

They designed a system meant to resist certainty - especially religious certainty.

Christian nationalism does the opposite. It retrofits divine destiny onto historical ambiguity. It replaces debate with revelation. It transforms compromise into sin.

This is not faith. It is idolatry of nation.

History as Resistance

To tell the truth about America’s founding is not to diminish it. It is to honor its most radical aspiration: that people of radically different beliefs could govern themselves without sanctifying power.

That aspiration is unfinished.
And fragile.
And worth defending.

Part II will continue this investigation by confronting what American mythology most aggressively suppresses: the role of Islam, slavery, and non-Christian legal traditions in shaping the nation’s moral and constitutional foundations - and why acknowledging them threatens modern political theology.

PART II

Islam, Slavery, Law, and the American Birth

The Presence America Forgot - and the Truth It Was Never Meant to Remember

The Silence That Built the Republic

Nations do not only forget by accident. They forget by design.

Some silences are louder than any proclamation. They are maintained not through censorship, but through repetition - by telling one story so often that all others disappear beneath it. In the American imagination, Islam is framed as foreign, recent, incompatible. Muslims are portrayed as newcomers to a civilizational house already built.

History says otherwise.

Islam was present at the creation of the United States - not as an invading force, not as an external influence, but as a silenced presence inside its earliest economic engine: slavery. The contradiction is devastating. A nation born proclaiming liberty was simultaneously sustained by millions whose freedom was stolen - and among them were Muslims whose faith, literacy, and law were systematically erased to preserve a simpler national myth.

To understand America’s origins honestly, one must descend into that erasure.

Islam Enters America in Chains

The dominant American narrative imagines the first Muslims arriving in the late twentieth century - immigrants, refugees, students, strangers. But Islam’s entry into America predates the Constitution by centuries.

Historians estimate that between 10% and 30% of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslim. These were not marginal figures. Many came from regions such as Senegambia, Futa Toro, Mali, and parts of West Africa where Islamic scholarship, jurisprudence, and literacy had existed for centuries.

These were not “primitive” societies, as colonial mythology insists. They were cultures with:

• Written legal traditions
• Schools and religious institutions
• Trade networks spanning continents
• Theological debates and jurisprudential schools

When these men and women were captured, sold, and transported across the Atlantic, they carried Islam not as an abstract belief - but as memory, discipline, and law.

And that terrified slaveholders.

Literacy as a Threat, Faith as Resistance

One of the most dangerous things an enslaved person could possess was literacy. And many Muslim Africans were literate - not in English, but in Arabic.

They wrote letters.
They copied Qur’anic verses.
They kept personal manuscripts.
They recorded their lives.

This literacy directly contradicted the racial mythology that justified slavery. The lie that Africans were intellectually inferior collapsed in the presence of Arabic writing, structured theology, and legal reasoning.

As a result, Muslim slaves were often:

• Separated from others
• Punished more harshly
• Forced into conversion rituals
• Prevented from congregational prayer
• Renamed to erase identity

Islam, for them, became a quiet form of resistance. Prayer became memory. Fasting became discipline. Writing became survival.

The Legal Erasure of Muslim Identity

Slavery was not just an economic system. It was a legal regime.

Colonial and early American law systematically stripped enslaved people of legal personhood. For Muslims, this had a specific consequence: Islamic law - fiqh - was rendered invisible.

This erasure mattered.

Islamic jurisprudence recognizes contracts, property rights, marriage laws, inheritance structures, and moral obligations. Enslaved Muslims came from societies where law restrained power. In America, law became an instrument of absolute domination.

The denial of Islamic legal identity was not incidental. It was necessary.

A Muslim who understands law is harder to dehumanize.
A Muslim who understands justice is harder to pacify.
A Muslim who understands God as sovereign is harder to enslave.

Thomas Jefferson and the Paradox of Law

Thomas Jefferson stands at the center of this contradiction.

He championed religious liberty.
He opposed clerical tyranny.
He studied Islamic law.
He owned enslaved Muslims.

This is not a moral accusation alone. It is a historical paradox.

Jefferson’s legal curiosity extended beyond Christianity because he understood something radical for his time: that law precedes theology, and that justice cannot belong to one faith. His engagement with Islam was intellectual, legal, comparative.

Yet Jefferson could not - or would not - extend that universalism to the enslaved people whose labor sustained his lifestyle.

This contradiction was not unique to Jefferson. It defined the republic.

America was founded on ideals it was structurally incapable of honoring.

Fatima, “Little Fatima,” and the Names History Tried to Erase

Among the enslaved individuals owned by George Washington were a woman named Fatima and her daughter, often referred to as “Little Fatima.”

Names matter.

They are not incidental labels. They are declarations of identity, lineage, faith. The presence of these names within the household of the first American president exposes a truth rarely acknowledged: Muslims lived at the heart of American power.

Fatima was not an abstraction. She was not a statistic. She was a Muslim woman whose faith survived long enough to be named - and then erased.

The silence around her is not accidental. It is symptomatic.

Islam in the Architecture of American Law

American law did not emerge from a vacuum. Nor did it emerge solely from Christian theology.

Legal historians have long acknowledged the influence of:

• Roman law
• English common law
• Enlightenment philosophy

Less acknowledged - but no less real - is the indirect influence of Islamic jurisprudence on Western legal thought, particularly through medieval Europe.

Concepts such as:

• Due process
• Evidentiary standards
• Contractual obligation
• Trust law

were transmitted through centuries of intellectual exchange, often via Islamic Spain, Sicily, and the Mediterranean world.

The inclusion of a Muslim jurist among the symbolic lawgivers in the U.S. Capitol is not an act of modern multiculturalism. It is an admission of intellectual inheritance.

Islamic law was not adopted wholesale - but it was respected.

This undermines the claim that American law is inherently Christian.

The Founders’ Fear of Religious Monopoly

The founders’ resistance to religious establishment was not theoretical. It was experiential.

They had seen:

• Churches dictate law
• Heresy punished by the state
• Minority faiths persecuted
• God weaponized by rulers

They understood that once the state declares a religious identity, dissent becomes treason.

This is why the First Amendment does not merely protect religion - it restrains it from power.

Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and unbelief were all meant to exist without state preference. That was the radical promise.

The presence of Muslims - enslaved, free, imagined future citizens - was part of the founders’ calculus.

Religious freedom was designed precisely because diversity was inevitable.

The Psychological Necessity of Forgetting Muslim Slaves

Why is this history absent from public consciousness?

Because remembering it destabilizes foundational myths.

If Muslims were present at the founding:

• Islam is not foreign
• Pluralism is not modern
• Diversity is not deviation
• Exclusion is betrayal

The erasure of Muslim slaves allowed America to imagine itself as culturally homogeneous, morally coherent, and divinely sanctioned.

Remembering them forces a reckoning.

Slavery as America’s Original Cult

Slavery functioned as a cultic system.

It demanded:

• Absolute obedience
• Total identity erasure
• Moral inversion
• Justification through divine sanction
• Punishment of dissent

Religion was instrumentalized to maintain control. Christianity was selectively taught to slaves as a theology of submission. Islam was suppressed because it offered structure, dignity, and resistance.

This matters because it reveals a pattern that will reemerge in later American history: religion fused with power to demand obedience rather than justice.

Islam as a Mirror America Avoided

Islam posed an uncomfortable mirror to early America.

It exposed contradictions:

• A nation proclaiming liberty while practicing bondage
• A republic rejecting monarchy while tolerating absolute power
• A legal system claiming universality while denying personhood

To erase Islam was to avoid confronting these contradictions.

And so it was erased.

The Cost of Historical Amnesia

Historical amnesia is not neutral. It shapes policy, prejudice, and identity.

When Islam is portrayed as alien:

• Muslims become suspect citizens
• Religious freedom becomes conditional
• The Constitution becomes selectively interpreted
• History becomes propaganda

This is not accidental. It is functional.

The Unfinished Reckoning

America has never fully confronted the implications of its pluralistic origins.

It has oscillated between:

• Inclusion and exclusion
• Universalism and supremacy
• Law and myth

Islam’s suppressed presence reveals that pluralism was not a concession - it was foundational.

But foundations demand maintenance.

What It Means to Remember

To remember Islam’s role in America’s birth is not to rewrite history. It is to restore it.

It is to acknowledge that:

• Muslims were not outsiders
• Law was not sectarian
• Freedom was aspirational, not accomplished
• The republic was born incomplete

PART III

Modern Christian Nationalism & Political Weaponization

When Faith Becomes Power, and Power Demands Worship

The Return of the Sacred State

Every nation has a myth about itself. Some are benign. Others are lethal.

In the United States, the most dangerous myth to reemerge in the twenty-first century is the idea that the nation belongs - by divine right - to a single religion. Not as culture. Not as heritage. But as authority.

This is not merely a revival of personal faith in public life. It is something far more radical: Christian Nationalism - an ideology that fuses religious identity with state power, treats dissent as heresy, and frames political conflict as a cosmic war between the righteous and the damned.

It does not present itself as authoritarian. It presents itself as restoration.

And that is precisely why it is so effective.

What Christian Nationalism Is - and Is Not

Christian Nationalism is often misunderstood because it hides behind familiar language.

It is not:

• Christianity as personal belief
• Church attendance
• Moral conservatism
• Public expressions of faith

It is:

• The belief that the United States was founded for Christians
• That its laws should privilege Christian doctrine
• That political authority is divinely sanctioned
• That dissenters - religious or secular - are illegitimate participants in the nation

In this worldview, democracy is tolerated only as long as it produces the “correct” outcomes. Rights are conditional. Equality is negotiable. Pluralism is a threat.

Christian Nationalism is not about faith.
It is about ownership.

The Myth of a Christian Founding Reborn

The founders rejected religious establishment precisely because they feared it.

But Christian Nationalism rewrites that history. It selectively quotes. It mythologizes. It transforms complexity into certainty.

The United States becomes:

• A covenant nation
• A chosen people
• A moral empire

This myth performs a crucial function: it converts political disagreement into moral rebellion.

If the nation belongs to God, then opposition does not merely disagree - it defies divine order.

That logic has consequences.

From Belief to Mobilization

Christian Nationalism remained marginal for much of the twentieth century. It existed, but it did not dominate.

That changed as three forces converged:

1. Demographic anxiety
2. Cultural pluralism
3. Political polarization

As the country grew more diverse - religiously, racially, culturally - some communities experienced pluralism not as enrichment, but as loss.

Christian Nationalism offered comfort:

• You are not losing power; it is being stolen.
• You are not one voice among many; you are the rightful voice.
• You are not afraid; you are under attack.

Fear became identity.
Identity became politics.

The Language of Persecution

One of the most powerful tools of Christian Nationalism is the persecution narrative.

This narrative insists that Christians - particularly white Christians - are the most endangered group in America. Evidence is irrelevant. Power is reframed as vulnerability.

The loss of cultural dominance becomes “oppression.”
The removal of privilege becomes “persecution.”
Equality becomes “erasure.”

This inversion is not accidental. It mirrors the psychological logic of cult systems: the more power you hold, the more threatened you must feel to justify its retention.

Democracy as an Obstacle

Christian Nationalism is deeply uncomfortable with democracy.

Not because it rejects voting - but because it rejects uncertainty.

If God has chosen a nation, then outcomes are not negotiable. Elections are not expressions of popular will; they are tests of faith.

When democracy delivers unfavorable results, it is reinterpreted as:

• Fraud
• Corruption
• Spiritual warfare
• The work of enemies within

This logic does not merely undermine trust in institutions. It prepares followers to accept extraordinary measures in the name of salvation.

The Cultic Pattern Reappears

The psychological structure of Christian Nationalism closely mirrors the cult dynamics explored earlier.

Revisit the BITE model:

• Behavior control: regulating morality, sexuality, gender roles
• Information control: closed media ecosystems, distrust of independent journalism
• Thought control: binary moral language - good vs evil, saved vs damned
• Emotional control: fear, guilt, shame, apocalyptic urgency

This is not accidental.

Modern political cults do not require compounds or robes. They require narrative dominance.

Media Ecosystems as Sacred Texts

In Christian Nationalist spaces, media becomes scripture.

Certain outlets are treated as:

• Infallible
• Spiritually aligned
• Morally pure

Contradictory information is dismissed as deception. Journalism becomes heresy. Fact-checking becomes persecution.

This closed loop ensures ideological purity. It also creates radicalization without coercion.

Believers police themselves.

The Weaponization of Law

Once a movement claims divine authority, law becomes a weapon rather than a restraint.

Legal structures are repurposed to:

• Enforce morality
• Punish dissent
• Redefine citizenship
• Restrict religious freedom for others

Ironically, the First Amendment - designed to protect faith from state power - is reinterpreted as protection for religious power.

The state becomes a missionary.

Islam as the Necessary Enemy

Christian Nationalism requires an “other.”

Islam fits this role perfectly - not because of theology, but because of symbolism.

Islam represents:

• Religious pluralism
• A challenge to Christian exclusivity
• A reminder of America’s forgotten diversity
• A faith resistant to assimilation into Christian supremacy

This is why Islam is framed not merely as different, but as dangerous.

The irony is painful: Muslims were present at the founding, yet are portrayed as existential threats to the nation’s identity.

History is reversed to justify exclusion.

Jews, Zionism, and Selective Inclusion

Christian Nationalism’s relationship with Judaism is paradoxical.

Jews are embraced selectively - not as citizens with agency, but as theological instruments.

Support for Israel becomes unconditional not out of concern for Jewish well-being, but because of apocalyptic theology. Jews are cast into a prophetic script that ultimately does not include their survival.

This is not solidarity.
It is instrumentalization.

Judaism is tolerated only when it serves Christian eschatology.

The Moral Immunity of Divine Politics

Perhaps the most dangerous feature of Christian Nationalism is moral immunity.

When actions are framed as God’s will:

• Accountability disappears
• Harm is justified
• Cruelty becomes obedience
• Violence becomes righteousness

History is filled with movements that believed themselves divinely sanctioned. None ended peacefully.

Why This Is Not Christianity

It is crucial to say this plainly: Christian Nationalism is not Christianity.

It contradicts:

• The teachings of humility
• The ethic of compassion
• The rejection of worldly power
• The warning against idolatry

Christian Nationalism does not worship Christ.
It worships control.

Faith becomes a flag.
The cross becomes a weapon.
The gospel becomes a border.

The Cost to Christianity Itself

In merging with power, Christianity loses its soul.

It becomes:

• Defensive rather than transformative
• Coercive rather than persuasive
• Authoritarian rather than redemptive

The church becomes indistinguishable from the state.
And when the state fails - as all states do - the faith collapses with it.

This is not preservation.
It is self-destruction.

The Fragility of the Republic

The American republic was built on a fragile promise: that people of different beliefs could govern themselves without domination.

Christian Nationalism threatens that promise not by force alone, but by myth.

It tells a story that feels ancient, righteous, inevitable.

But it is none of those things.

It is modern.
It is constructed.
And it is dangerous.

The Choice Ahead

Every generation faces a test of its principles.

This generation’s test is whether it will:

• Defend pluralism as strength
• Protect faith from power
• Preserve democracy from certainty
• Remember history honestly

Or whether it will trade complexity for comfort, freedom for dominance, and law for myth.

What This Trilogy Reveals

Across three parts, a single truth emerges:

America was never meant to belong to one faith.
It was meant to belong to people - flawed, diverse, equal under the law.

Islam was present.
Pluralism was intentional.
Power was restrained.

Christian Nationalism is not a return.
It is a rupture.

And history has shown us - again and again - what happens when nations confuse God with authority, and belief with domination.

The question is no longer whether this ideology exists.

The question is whether it will be resisted.