This interview with John McCain has caused a minor furor on account of his claims that the “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation” and his saying that he would hesitate to vote for a Muslim candidate for president.

Now, assuming this accurately represents Sen. McCain’s views rather than being an attempt to shore up his flagging campaign with the conservative Christians who make up a significant chunk of the GOP base, it’s worth looking at this a little more closely.

One of the problems with the interminable debate about whether the U.S. is a “Christian nation” is that all parties seem to identify the founding of the nation with the writing and ratification of the Constitution. Perhaps only Americans with our fabled lack of a historical sense could actually believe that the nation sprang full-grown as it were from the heads of a few bright bulbs in the 18th century. But in the real world, it’s not quite so easy to pinpoint the “founding” of a nation.

This leads to pointless arguments over the religious devotion and orthodoxy (or lack thereof) of the Founders, as though determining this would somehow bind us to their particular views. It’s funny that this is the one area where liberals and leftists will slavishly defer to the views of the Founders who, in other contexts, are routinely described as elitist, racist, oligarchical, etc. (and not without justice!)

But the fact is that nations come into existence, not by writing up a Constitution, but through a gradual historical process. Would anyone presume to pinpoint the date that France or England was “founded”? The same applies, though perhaps in a more telescoped fashion, to the U.S. The nation came into being over a period of time, as the original colonies were gradually forged into a single nation (a process that arguably didn’t conclude until after the Civil War).

Looking at it this way, there’s at least one unambiguous sense in which we can speak of America as a “Christian nation”: the vast majority of the people who populated the nation were professing Christians. And I think we can make an even stronger claim, namely that the public life of the USA has been strongly informed by a Christian ethos, particularly infused with Puritan and revivalist overtones (for better or worse).

Now, McCain is surely wrong if when he says that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation he means that the Constitution is explicitly founded on Christian principles. It may be founded on principles that have their roots in Christianity, but nothing in it explicitly presupposes Christian (or even theistic) belief. And, obviously, the Constitution explicitly rules out the U.S. being a confessional state with an established church along the European model. (Though it’s worth noting that individual states had established churches well into the 19th century; the 1st Amendment wasn’t originally understood as ruling this out.)

Some people have criticized McCain for applying the verboten “religious test” to candidates for office in saying that he would be uncomfortable with a Muslim President. But the religious test clause has nothing to do with the actions of individual voters; it simply prevents anyone from being required to profess a particular religion as a condition for taking office. Voters are free to vote or not vote for any candidate for any reason whatsoever, as far as the Constitution is concerned. We may think that it’s wrong not to vote for someone on account of their religion (though I suspect most of us could come up with some religion that would disqualify a candidate in our eyes; I for one have a hard time imagining voting for a convinced Scientologist), but it’s not in any way Constitutionally forbidden.

So, as in so many other cases, the answer to a question like “Is the U.S. a Christian nation?” has a variety of answers, and requires drawing distinctions in order to discuss it with any clarity. I think the answer is “yes” if we mean Was the U.S. population historically composed of professing Christians? And it’s also yes if we ask whether the public ethos and language in which we argue about politics has been strongly shaped by Christianity. But if the question is whether the Constitution explicitly established a “Christian nation,” the answer is pretty clearly “no.”

At the end of the day, though, the question has to be: so what? If the U.S. is a nation historically shaped by Christian belief and whose institutions are rooted in principles that derive, at least in part, from Christianity, what follows for the practice of our common life now? That’s the question that appeals to the beliefs of the Founders simply can’t settle. At least some of them believed that religious devotion was necessary to sustain free institutions and republican government. Were they right? And does it require a homogeneity of religious belief or just a lowest common denominator civil religion? We can’t answer these questions by appealing to the 18th century. Arguing about whether the U.S. was established as a “Christian nation” in some sense is historically interesting, but largely politically irrelevant.

P.S. I thought it was funny that in the discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr McCain says that he suspects Niebuhr “would have” opposed the Vietnam war. Um, he did.

P.P.S. Fr. Chris has a post coming at this from a different angle; he also mentions how we could use some old-fashioned Niebuhrian skepticism and humility. Amen.