The Myth of the Builders
We are not a White Christian Nation.
The myth says the country (USA) was built by chosen hands, guided by one faith and one destiny, but the record tells a different story; one written in competing creeds, stolen labor, and endless argument.
This is the story of how America built itself while pretending it was already whole.
I. The Story They Wrote
When someone says this country was built by white Christian people, what they really mean is that they built the story, not the nation.
It sounds noble, clean, and divinely ordained. A people chosen to bring order to wilderness, morality to chaos, civilization to a blank map. It makes for good mythology but bad history. The truth is older, bloodier, and far less flattering.
This country rose on land already mapped, named, and cultivated by hundreds of Indigenous nations. They were not discovered. They were dispossessed. Their cities were burned, their treaties broken, their children taken. Entire languages were erased to make room for a flag.
It was built on the backs of enslaved Africans whose stolen labor funded the wealth that made freedom possible for others. They built ports, roads, universities, and banks. They worked the fields that fed the republic while the law defined them as property.
It was built by Chinese and Irish workers who blasted tunnels and laid track through mountains. It was built by Mexicans and Filipinos who harvested the crops that fed the cities that never learned their names. By Jewish and Muslim immigrants who opened shops and built neighborhoods while being told they did not belong. By women who raised generations and kept homes while being denied a voice in the laws that ruled them.
If white Christians built anything, it was the system that decided who counted as human and who did not. They held the whip and wrote the rules. Ownership was mistaken for creation. Power was mistaken for virtue.
II. The Lie of Inheritance
The architecture of freedom was drafted by those locked out of it. Every expansion of rights, from abolition to suffrage, came from people who had to fight their way into the story. The republic did not grow because the powerful chose inclusion. It grew because the excluded refused to disappear.
The myth of ownership never died. It evolved. It learned to call itself patriotism.
After the wars were won and the factories built, the story of a nation carved by white Christian hands hardened into a moral property claim. If “we built it,” then “it belongs to us.” That logic still fuels border walls, culture wars, and the dream of divine entitlement.
The Civil Rights era cracked that illusion but never broke it. When the laws changed, the language did too. “Segregation forever” became “heritage, not hate.” “Manifest destiny” became “American exceptionalism.” The vocabulary of exclusion learned to smile for the camera.
Every generation redresses the same anxiety: the fear that equality means loss. When the myth of ownership is all you have been taught, sharing looks like theft. That is why every wave of inclusion is followed by a wave of panic. The Voting Rights Act brought the Southern Strategy. The Obama presidency birthed the Tea Party and Trump. Progress exposes the lie, and the lie retaliates.
Today’s white Christian nationalism is not new. It is the same inheritance fraud repackaged for the digital age. The claim that God signed the deed and history notarized it. It turns diversity into invasion, justice into persecution, and democracy into a threat to divine order.
“Real Americans.” “Christian nation.” “Replacement theory.” Different slogans, same sermon. The goal is always the same: to turn citizenship into lineage and law into scripture.
III. The Fractured Faith
Even that story of unity was false. There was never one Christianity building one nation.
The Puritans who crossed the Atlantic were not seeking freedom in general. They were fleeing the wrong kind of Christians. Massachusetts was founded by those who wanted to purify faith, not pluralize it. They exiled dissenters, hanged Quakers, and burned women in Salem.
Anglicans stayed loyal to the crown. Deists like Jefferson and Franklin cut miracles out of the Bible and replaced them with reason. Catholics were vilified as agents of Rome. Southern Baptists split from their northern kin over slavery. The Civil War was fought between two armies that prayed to the same God and claimed divine favor for opposite causes.
The myth of a single Christian nation only emerged when diversity became too visible to ignore. “One nation under God” was not written at the founding. It was added in 1954 during the Cold War, when “Christian” became shorthand for “anti-Communist.” It was never about faith. It was about allegiance.
What we call Christian America was never united by theology. It was united by hierarchy. The cross was the logo. The system was the product.
IV. The Argument That Built the Nation
And yet, the cracks have always shown. Every revival met rebellion. Every sermon was interrupted by someone shouting no. The strength of this country has never been in its piety but in its argument.
This nation was never God’s country. It was a country where gods were forced to share a roof.
The real builders were not the ones who claimed divine right or wrote themselves into the myth. They were the ones who looked at the contradiction and kept building anyway.
History does not need to flatter anyone. It only needs to be told honestly.
🔥FURO: Source Notes🔥
Indigenous displacement: Indian Removal Act (1830), Dawes Act (1887), over 90 million acres seized by the U.S. government.
Enslaved labor: By 1770, enslaved Africans made up nearly 20 percent of the colonial population, providing the economic base for early industrial and agricultural development.
Religious diversity: Puritan Massachusetts exiled dissenters in the 1630s and 40s. Catholics faced persecution until the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.
Denominational splits: Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845 to defend slavery. Methodists and Presbyterians also split regionally.
“Under God” in the Pledge: Added in 1954 during the Eisenhower administration as Cold War propaganda.
Christian nationalism: PRRI 2023 estimates nearly 30 percent of Americans support some degree of Christian nationalist ideology.