Charlie Kirk's Christian America

New podcast segment debunks Kirk's viral video claiming America was founded as a Christian nation

In 2024, Charlie Kirk distributed a five-minute video defense of the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. It has been played at least 20 million times on various social media platforms and is full of faulty history. This podcast segment serves to correct the false claims and defend the proposition that America's founders crafted a secular government with provision for religious pluralism.

You can listen wherever you get podcasts and I urge you to distribute this widely. If you know someone who has seen the Kirk video, send this link to them.

Kirk and his fellow Christian nationalists use a variety of false stories to prop up a vision of a Christian American founding. They want to go back to that mythical time. In this segment, historians Aaron Cowan, Randall Balmer, and George Marsden, English professor Matthew Boedy, and co-host Michael Coulter join me to debunk Kirk's false claims and advocate for good history and religious pluralism.

Here is a challenge for Kirk. If he has evidence for his claims, he should post it on his website. Establish a page where he posts primary sources. I would love to see his sources for the claim that Congress printed the first English language Bible with public funds (there is no such evidence). How about producing all of the Constitutions with requirements that office holders profess faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Here is a website with many of those documents: The Avalon Project. Read the state Constitutions for yourself.

On common law, read Thomas Jefferson’s reasons for saying it predated the arrival of Christianity to England.

Read Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist ministers.

Read Donald Lutz’s article about the usage of the Bible during early America for yourself (you will need to establish a JSTOR account).

Read John Adams’ Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States

If you really feel ambitious, read the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention so you can find out for yourself how little the delegates discussed religion and/or the Bible. Read it daily, starting on May 25 and then daily until the delegates finished their work in September of 1787. It takes some time, but surely you can doom scroll less and read more about how the delegates actually thought about the Constitution while they were constructing it.

Oh, and here are some links about the Aitken Bible (here, here, and here)

If you have questions about anything in the podcast or feel I am off on any of the points, please contact me through email or the comments section.