The Colonies Are Not the Founding

The colonies were settled between 1607 and 1732; the United States was founded between 1776 and 1789, about 167 years after Plymouth. Many colonies had official churches and punished dissenters. The founders gave the national government no established church, and the states that had one dismantled it by 1833.Last checked October 2026

Several of the claims this site examines depend on a single quiet move: treating the colonial period and the founding of the United States as if they were the same event. They weren’t. This page exists so the other pages can point here instead of re-explaining it each time.

Here is a sentence you have almost certainly heard, in a sermon or a social-media post or a Christian-school textbook:

“The Pilgrims came here for religious freedom. The colonies were founded on faith. America was Christian from the very beginning.”

Every part of that sentence contains something true. And assembled together, they produce something false. The trick isn’t in any single fact. It’s in the word “beginning,” and in the way three different centuries get folded into one.

So it’s worth slowing down and separating what actually happened, in order, because once the timeline is laid out plainly, a whole family of “Christian nation” claims loses its foundation.

Three Different Things, Roughly 150 Years Apart

When people say “the founding,” they usually mean one of three things without distinguishing between them.

The colonies (1607–1732). Jamestown was settled in 1607. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. The Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Georgia, the last of the thirteen, was chartered in 1732. These were English colonies, governed under English law, populated by people who were legally English subjects. Many of them were founded by intensely religious people for intensely religious reasons.

The Revolution (1775–1783). A century and a half after Plymouth, a different generation, the great-great-grandchildren of the colonists, fought a war to stop being English subjects.

The founding of the United States (1776–1789). The Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. The government it created beginning in 1789. This is when the United States, as a nation with a government, actually came into being.

The distance between the Pilgrims and the Constitution is about 167 years. That is a longer stretch of time than separates us today from the end of the Civil War. When someone points to the Puritans to explain what the founders intended, they are reaching across a gap as wide as the one between us and Abraham Lincoln, and treating everyone inside it as a single group with a single purpose.

They weren’t one group. And on the specific question of church and state, the people at the two ends of that gap wanted nearly opposite things.

What the Colonists Actually Wanted

The religious-freedom story flatters the colonists in a way the record doesn’t support. The Puritans did not come to build a place of religious liberty. They came to build a place where their religion governed. And they enforced it.

Massachusetts Bay was a religious state. It taxed residents to support the Congregational church. It made church membership a condition of political participation. And it dealt harshly with dissent: Roger Williams was ordered banished in 1635 (he fled in early 1636) for, among other things, arguing that the civil government had no business enforcing religious matters. Anne Hutchinson was banished after her 1637 trial and left the colony in 1638. Four Quakers, including Mary Dyer, were hanged on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661 for the crime of returning to a colony that had expelled them.

This is the part the story leaves out. The colonists who came “for religious freedom” generally meant freedom to practice their faith, in a society ordered around it, not freedom of religion as we now understand it. Those are not the same idea. One is a demand for a monopoly. The other is a guarantee against one.

The person who actually argued for something like modern religious freedom was Roger Williams. He did it as a devout Christian minister, on the grounds that state-enforced religion corrupts the church. He founded Rhode Island on that principle after Massachusetts threw him out. He is the hero of this story, and he spent it in exile from the “Christian” colony.

The Fact That Gets Turned Around

Here is where the colonial period gets used as evidence, and where the evidence, followed honestly, points the other way.

It’s often said that most of the original states had established, tax-supported churches. This is broadly true. (Scholars argue about the exact count; the common “nine of the thirteen” figure is disputed; but the general picture holds: established churches were widespread in the colonial and early-state period.) New England ran Congregational establishments. Several southern colonies were officially Anglican. Being taxed to support a church you might not attend was an ordinary feature of colonial life.

The “Christian nation” argument presents this as the smoking gun: see, America had official churches, establishment is our tradition.

But look at what the founders did with that inheritance. When they wrote the Constitution, they refused to give the new national government any established church at all. They went further and banned religious tests for federal office (Article VI) and barred Congress from establishing religion (the First Amendment). They took the establishment tradition they had grown up with and deliberately declined to build it into the nation.

And then the states themselves dismantled their establishments, one after another:

  • Virginia disestablished with Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted 1786.
  • South Carolina removed its establishment in a constitutional revision in 1790.
  • Connecticut ended its in 1818.
  • New Hampshire ended its establishment with the Toleration Act of 1819.
  • Massachusetts, the last holdout, cut the final ties between church and state in 1833.

That is the actual trajectory. Not a Christian founding that later generations betrayed, but a colonial establishment that the founding generation and its children deliberately took apart. The established churches are real. They are just evidence of the thing America moved away from, on purpose, as a matter of considered principle.

One More Piece: The Bill of Rights Only Bound Congress

There’s a technical point that often causes confusion, and it’s worth clearing up because it gets misused in both directions.

When Massachusetts still had an established church in 1820, that was not a violation of the First Amendment. The First Amendment, as originally understood, restrained only the federal government: “Congress shall make no law.” It did not apply to the states until the twentieth century, when the Supreme Court began applying the Bill of Rights to state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment.

So the existence of state establishments after 1789 doesn’t prove the founders wanted a Christian nation. It proves the opposite of what it’s used to prove: the founders built a federal government with no religion, and left the states to sort out their own arrangements, which the states then did, every one of them, in the direction of disestablishment.

Why This Page Exists

Once you hold the timeline firmly, a whole set of claims stops working:

  • “The Pilgrims founded America on religious freedom” fails twice: the Pilgrims didn’t found the United States, and they weren’t after religious freedom as we mean it.
  • “The colonies had established churches, so establishment is our tradition” fails because the founding tradition was disestablishment, and the states proved it by dismantling their own churches.
  • “America was Christian from the beginning” depends entirely on which beginning, and on quietly sliding from the colonial one to the national one as the argument requires.

None of this erases the genuine religiosity of colonial America. It was real, and it mattered, and this page isn’t an attempt to write it out of history. The point is narrower and more exact: the colonial period is not the founding, the two are separated by the better part of two centuries, and on the question of an official national religion, the founders looked hard at the colonial model and chose to leave it behind.

When a claim asks you to treat 1620 and 1787 as the same moment, that’s the moment to slow down. They aren’t, and the difference is the whole argument.

Related claims

Sources

  • Colonial founding dates: standard chronology; Jamestown 1607, Plymouth 1620, Massachusetts Bay 1630, Georgia charter 1732.
  • Massachusetts Bay as a religious state; banishments and executions: records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the banishments of Roger Williams (1635) and Anne Hutchinson (1637); the executions of Mary Dyer and other Quakers on Boston Common, 1659–1661.
  • State disestablishment dates: Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786); South Carolina (1790); Connecticut (1818); New Hampshire (1819, the Toleration Act; some references, including the First Amendment Encyclopedia, give 1817); Massachusetts (1833). See “Established Churches in Early America,” The First Amendment Encyclopedia (Middle Tennessee State University), and the Encyclopedia.com entry on Disestablishment.
  • On the disputed “nine of thirteen” establishment count: Mark David Hall’s discussion of the complications in dating and defining establishment, from his essay “Did America Have a Christian Founding?”
  • The Bill of Rights applying only to the federal government until incorporation: the doctrine of incorporation through the Fourteenth Amendment; the First Amendment’s establishment clause was applied to the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).