“A Christian government would simply uphold the Christian values we all share.”

VerdictMisleading

Christians do share core creeds and many moral commitments, and “Christian government” often means general principles rather than a state church. But every time American governments have tried to turn general Christianity into actual law (a church tax, a school Bible, a classroom poster), they have had to pick one tradition’s version, and the record shows that the first people to object were usually other Christians.Last checked October 2026

The claim usually comes with a reassurance attached. Nobody is talking about a state church or forcing anyone into a denomination. A Christian government would simply honor what nearly all Christians already believe: that God exists, that Jesus is Lord, that murder, theft and lying are wrong, that families matter. Those are shared values, the argument goes, and a nation that writes them into its public life is only being true to itself.

The best-developed version of this idea is careful about denominations. In Mere Christendom (Canon Press, 2023), the pastor and author Douglas Wilson describes “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgment of the Lordship of Jesus Christ,” anchored in “the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” an approach he says “avoids both hard sectarianism and easy latitudinarianism” (as quoted in Brad Green’s review, p. 69).

There is real substance here. Catholics, Orthodox Christians and most Protestants do affirm the ancient creeds, and they agree on much of the moral law. So the question is a fair one to put to the record: when American governments have tried to act on “the Christian values we all share,” what happened? Across three centuries, the answer is consistent.

The founders heard this exact argument

In 1784 and 1785, Virginia’s legislature considered “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion.” The bill named no denomination, not even the Anglican Church, Virginia’s old establishment. It was a general assessment: a tax to support Christian teaching broadly (Founders Online, editorial note and text).

That is, in effect, the claim on this page written as a bill. In the third paragraph of his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (ca. June 20, 1785), James Madison answered it:

“Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?” (Founders Online)

Madison wasn’t speculating. Eleven years earlier he had written to a friend that in the neighboring county “not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men” were “in close Goal for publishing their religious Sentiments which in the main are very orthodox” (Madison to William Bradford, January 24, 1774; spelling as in the original). The editors of his papers identify them as Baptist preachers, probably in Culpeper County.

Notice Madison’s words: very orthodox. By his account, these were Christians whose beliefs were mainstream. Sharing the core of the faith did not protect them from a colony with an official church. The assessment bill never passed; the editors of Madison’s papers say it was “allowed to die in the pigeonhole” in 1785 after a flood of opposing petitions (same editorial note). On January 16, 1786, the General Assembly adopted Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom instead (Encyclopedia Virginia). The fuller story of Virginia’s Baptists is on our page about Christians and separation.

Before the founding: Christians governing Christians

Colonial establishments were specific churches: Congregationalist in Massachusetts and Connecticut, Anglican in Virginia. Our page on why the colonies are not the founding covers this in detail; two examples will do here.

In October 1635, Massachusetts Bay charged Roger Williams, a Puritan minister, with “new and dangerous opinions against the authority of the magistrates” and ordered him to “depart out of this jurisdiction within six weeks.” According to the National Park Service, one of those opinions was that civil government had no jurisdiction over the “First Table,” the first four of the Ten Commandments, which he regarded as matters of conscience. (Not every tradition counts the “first four” the same way, as we’ll see.)

In 1660, Massachusetts hanged Mary Dyer on Boston Common. She was a Quaker who had been banished for her faith and kept returning (City of Boston archives). Connecticut’s Baptists and their appeal to Jefferson are covered on our separation of church and state page.

The Presbyterians rewrote their own confession

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the founding confession of Presbyterianism, gave the civil magistrate a duty to see “that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed” (chapter 23, section 3).

In 1788, when American Presbyterians organized as a national church, their synod rewrote that section. The American text, still used by several Presbyterian denominations, says magistrates “may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments” and that it is their duty “to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest” (Orthodox Presbyterian Church text).

Reformed scholars still debate how much changed. Kevin DeYoung, writing in Themelios in 2025, argues the two versions are mutually exclusive rather than differences of emphasis (Themelios 50.2). Others read more continuity. Either way, the American revisers put “without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians” into their confession on purpose.

Whose Bible? The school wars of the 1800s

The nineteenth century tested the shared-values idea in public schools, where daily Bible reading was common. The Bible in question was usually the King James Version.

Philadelphia, 1844

In 1842, Philadelphia’s Catholic bishop, Francis Patrick Kenrick, asked the city’s school board to let Catholic children read the Douay version, the Catholic English translation, and to excuse them from Protestant religious exercises. The board’s compromise excused them from the King James reading and allowed substitute Bibles only “without note or comment.” Because the Douay included explanatory notes, it was effectively barred (Villanova University Library exhibit).

Rumors spread that Catholics wanted the Bible thrown out of the schools. Kenrick denied it publicly: “Catholics have not asked that the Bible be excluded from public schools,” he said, only that their children have “the liberty of using the Catholic version” (as quoted in Christian History).

In May 1844, nativist rallies in the Kensington district turned into gunfights. Over the following days, mobs gutted homes, a Catholic seminary and two Catholic churches: St. Michael’s in Kensington and St. Augustine’s in the city proper. In July, fighting around St. Philip de Neri church in Southwark left four militiamen and “probably a dozen rioters” dead (Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia). Nativism was a larger cause than the Bible alone. Still, the spark was a dispute between Christians over which translation of the same Scripture children would hear.

Cincinnati, 1869–1872

Cincinnati tried a different solution. On November 1, 1869, its Board of Education resolved that “religious instruction, and the reading of religious books, including the Holy Bible, are prohibited in the Common Schools of Cincinnati,” explaining that the aim was “to allow the children of the parents of all sects and opinions, in matters of faith and worship, to enjoy alike the benefit of the Common School fund” (The Bible in the Public Schools, Cincinnati, 1870).

A group of taxpayers sued. The city’s Superior Court blocked the resolution; Judge Alphonso Taft dissented, calling the Bible reading and hymns “Protestant worship” (Unitarian Universalist Dictionary of Biography). The Ohio Supreme Court reversed in Board of Education of Cincinnati v. Minor (1872), holding that the state constitution does not require religious instruction or Bible reading in public schools. Justice John Welch wrote: “True Christianity asks no aid from the sword of civil authority” (Supreme Court of Ohio).

Whose Ten Commandments? The same question in 2026

Louisiana’s 2024 law (Act 676) and Texas’s 2025 law (S.B. 10) require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in a specified text. Louisiana’s act states that its text “is identical to the text of the Ten Commandments monument” upheld in Van Orden v. Perry (2005) (Act 676). The Fifth Circuit found that S.B. 10 “adopts the same text of the Ten Commandments as in Van Orden” (Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD). That monument was presented by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in 1961. Arkansas’s 2025 law (Act 573, passed as S.B. 433) prescribes the same wording, line for line (engrossed bill text).

The Eagles genuinely tried to find common ground. Justice Breyer noted their “consultation with a committee composed of members of several faiths in order to find a nonsectarian text” (Van Orden v. Perry). It was a good-faith attempt at exactly what this page’s claim describes. It ran into the fact that the traditions divide the same verses differently.

Jewish tradition Catholic and Lutheran Reformed and Orthodox
First “I am God your Lord” No other gods No other gods
Graven images Within the second, with “no other gods” Part of the first Second commandment
Sabbath Fourth Third Fourth
Coveting One commandment (tenth) Two (ninth and tenth) One (tenth)

The Catholic Catechism itself explains the split (¶2066): its division, “established by St. Augustine,” is “also that of the Lutheran confessions,” while “the Greek Fathers worked out a slightly different division, which is found in the Orthodox Churches and Reformed communities” (Vatican). Table sources: the Catechism’s article titles; Luther’s Small Catechism; the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 49, 57, 79; and Aish, whose list “According to Judaism” begins “I am God your Lord.”

The required poster text is unnumbered. It gives “I AM the LORD thy God” its own line, keeps “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images” as a separate sentence, and splits coveting into two sentences, house first, as Luther’s catechism does. Read against the table, it draws on more than one tradition and matches none exactly.

The wording matters too. The poster says “Thou shalt not kill.” Justice Stevens, dissenting in Van Orden, noted that “in the Jewish version of the Sixth Commandment God commands: ‘You shall not murder,’” and called the difference “one example of a deep theological dispute.” On images he wrote that what “is the Second Commandment in the King James Bible translation” is “a portion of the First Commandment in the Catholic translation,” a distinction that “represents a critical divide between the Protestant and Catholic faiths” (Cornell LII, Stevens dissent, nn. 15–16). And “Remember the Sabbath day” means Saturday to Jews and to Seventh-day Adventists, who keep it “from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday” (Adventist.org). The Catholic Catechism teaches that for Christians, Sunday’s “ceremonial observance replaces that of the sabbath” (¶2175).

Religious families raised these points in court. In Louisiana, Joshua Herlands, a Jewish parent, said the displays “distort the Jewish significance of the Ten Commandments.” Rev. Jeff Sims, a Presbyterian (U.S.A.) minister and fellow plaintiff, objected to “favoring one version of the Ten Commandments” (ACLU, June 24, 2024). In Texas, plaintiffs argued that the text “conflicts with Jewish and Catholic articulations of the Decalogue.” The Fifth Circuit upheld S.B. 10 anyway, and on the theology it declined to choose: “These matters of theology and scriptural interpretation lie beyond our ken” (Nathan, above). We found no statement from a Catholic bishops’ conference opposing either law on these grounds.

The same en banc court had earlier dismissed the Louisiana challenge as premature, because Louisiana leaves the displays’ details to local officials (Nathan, above). As of October 13, 2026, petitions in both the Texas and Louisiana cases are pending at the U.S. Supreme Court, with responses due October 28 and October 19. In Arkansas, a federal judge permanently blocked Act 573 for six school districts in March 2026; the state’s appeal was argued before the Eighth Circuit in September (ACLU, March 16, 2026; Courthouse News, September 22, 2026).

Christian bodies officially disagree about church and state itself

Here is how several traditions describe the relationship in their own documents.

  • Southern Baptist Convention. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000, Article XVII: “Church and state should be separate.” It adds that “no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state more than others” (SBC).
  • Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis Humanae (December 7, 1965) declares that “the human person has a right to religious freedom.” It allows that a state may give “special civil recognition” to one religious community, provided “the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom” is “recognized and made effective in practice.” It also says it “leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion” (Vatican).
  • A Reformed case for Christian nationalism. Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press, 2022) is openly Presbyterian. According to a review by Jeff Straub of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, Wolfe calls infant baptism “most natural to Christian nationalism” and urges a return to “the old Protestant principles of our spiritual forefathers” (Straub review). Even a sacrament divides the would-be coalition.
  • Presbyterian Church in America. In June 2026, the PCA’s General Assembly released a partial report from its committee on Christian nationalism, which says “the church is not called to direct the affairs of the state, nor the state the affairs of the church.” A full report is due in 2027 (Christian Post, June 26, 2026).

We aren’t refereeing these positions. The point is simpler: the Christians who would have to agree on “the Christian values we all share” do not share an official view of what government should do with them.

Engaging the counterargument: “We mean general principles, not a church”

The strongest reply is Wilson’s: nobody wants Presbyterian or Catholic law, only a public acknowledgment of Christ on the basis of the Apostles’ Creed, plus moral laws nearly every Christian supports. Laws against murder and theft need no denomination.

That deserves a direct answer, and part of it should be conceded. Many laws that Christians support are laws non-Christians support too, and nothing in this record suggests a believer can’t bring faith-shaped convictions into politics.

But the historical record shows a pattern in the cases where government tried to act on general Christianity as Christianity:

  • Virginia’s 1784 bill was general. Madison’s objection was that the power to establish Christianity is the power to establish a sect.
  • Philadelphia’s “without note or comment” rule looked neutral. In practice, it excluded the Catholic Bible.
  • The Eagles’ monument text came from an interfaith committee. A Supreme Court justice still found that it takes sides, and Jewish and Christian parents still objected.

Each time, “general” had to become specific: a translation, a numbering, a day of rest, a mode of baptism. Each specific choice left some Christians outside it. Beyond deciding to honor God, a “Christian government” has to decide whose Bible goes on the desk, whose commandments go on the wall and whose Sabbath the law protects. Justice Welch’s 1872 answer was that “true Christianity asks no aid from the sword of civil authority.” Not every Christian agrees with him. That disagreement is the point.

The takeaway

Shared creeds are real. But a government can’t post a creed, fund a creed or teach a creed without choosing a text. American history, from Massachusetts in 1660 to Philadelphia in 1844 to classroom posters in 2026, shows that the Christians whose version wasn’t chosen are usually the first to notice. That is why many of the strongest defenders of keeping government out of religion have been devout Christians themselves.

Related claims

Sources

Primary – James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, ca. June 20, 1785. Founders Online – James Madison to William Bradford, January 24, 1774. Founders Online – Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. 23 (American text). OPC; Westminster Shorter Catechism. OPC – Cincinnati Board of Education resolutions, November 1, 1869, in The Bible in the Public Schools (Cincinnati, 1870). Internet Archive – Louisiana Act 676 (H.B. 71), 2024. Louisiana Legislature – Arkansas S.B. 433 (2025; Act 573), engrossed text. ACLU of Arkansas copy – Nathan v. Alamo Heights ISD (5th Cir. en banc, April 21, 2026). Justia – Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005). Justia; Stevens dissent. Cornell LII – U.S. Supreme Court dockets 26-257 and 25-1360 – Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶2066, ¶2175, Part Three, Section Two. Vatican – Dignitatis Humanae (1965). Vatican – Baptist Faith and Message 2000. SBC – Luther’s Small Catechism. Concordia Publishing House – ACLU press release, June 24, 2024 (plaintiff statements). ACLU – ACLU press release, March 16, 2026 (Arkansas ruling). ACLU

Secondary – Encyclopedia Virginia, “An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786).” Link – Courthouse News Service, Arkansas Eighth Circuit argument, September 22, 2026. Link – National Park Service, “Roger Williams: Rejecting the Middle Way.” NPS – City of Boston Archives, “Mary Dyer executed #onthisday in 1660.” Boston.gov – Villanova University Library, Chaos in the Streets: The Philadelphia Riots of 1844. Villanova – Zachary M. Schrag, “Nativist Riots of 1844,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Link – Ann T. Snyder, “The Bible Riots,” Christian History 100. Link – Supreme Court of Ohio, Justice John Welch biography. Link – Walter Herz, “Alphonso Taft,” Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography. Link – Kevin DeYoung, “Does the American Revision of the Westminster Confession Contradict the Original…?” Themelios 50.2 (2025). Link – Brad Green, review of Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom, Christ Over All (2023). Link – Jeff Straub, review of Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary (2025). Link – “PCA General Assembly votes against female deacons, advances report on Christian nationalism,” Christian Post, June 26, 2026. Link – Aish, “What Are the Ten Commandments?” Link; Adventist.org, “Sabbath.” Link

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