Widening Our American Identity

Religious diversity is not a modern phenomenon in America; it is one of its oldest truths.

As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, I think about the ancestral stories my children will inherit about the country they belong to. The story of their great-great-great Jewish grandmother who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine; their great-grandfather from Ireland who entered America as a whiskey merchant; their refugee Palestinian family rendered stateless and homeless in 1948, followed by a grandfather who came to America as a college student; the story of their Indian grandparents who worked their way through the Middle East to finally settle in the suburbs of Chicago. Each of these stories is part of who they are.

Events like Sunday’s Rededicate 250 gathering are supposed to invite Americans to reflect on the stories we tell about ourselves and our nation. But you did not hear my story or my family’s story reflected in this commemoration.

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The organizers of Rededicate 250 said the quiet part out loud, clarifying their goal to elevate one religious narrative: America was founded as a Christian nation.

It’s a claim that may feel familiar or comforting to some, but it is historically inaccurate and civically harmful. It narrows the American story at precisely the moment we need it to widen. It excludes millions of our neighbors from the narrative of who “truly” belongs. And it obscures a deeper truth: Religious diversity is not a modern phenomenon in America; it is one of its oldest truths.

Long before the United States existed, this land was home to hundreds of Native nations, each with its own spiritual traditions, cosmologies, and practices. To speak of a “Christian founding” is to erase the profound religious diversity that existed here for millennia. Indigenous communities practiced forms of spirituality as complex and deeply rooted as any tradition that later arrived on these shores. Their presence is not a footnote to the American story. It is the foundation.

Historians estimate that as many as 30 percent of the Africans enslaved and brought to the shores of what became the United States were Muslim — men and women who prayed in Arabic, recited the Quran from memory, and carried with them centuries‑old intellectual and spiritual traditions. Their presence is a direct rebuke to the idea that America’s earliest religious landscape was exclusively Christian. These enslaved Muslims built, labored, resisted, and survived on this land long before the nation imagined itself as a beacon of religious freedom. Their stories — from Omar ibn Said writing Qur’anic verses in a North Carolina jail to countless unnamed Muslims whispering prayers on plantations — make that truth impossible to deny.

Even after European settlement, the idea of a religiously monolithic America collapses under scrutiny. By the mid‑1600s, New Amsterdam — later New York — was home to Huguenots, Mennonites, Quakers, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Jews, and others. A group of Jewish refugees arrived in the colony in 1654, more than a century before the Declaration of Independence. Their presence alone refutes the claim that America began as a Christian nation. Other colonies were similarly diverse: Maryland as a refuge for Catholics, Pennsylvania as a haven for Quakers and dissenters, Rhode Island explicitly committed to religious freedom. The colonial landscape was a patchwork of traditions, not a single religious identity.

The founders understood this diversity and built a constitutional framework to protect it. The First Amendment’s guarantees of free exercise and prohibition of religious establishment were revolutionary. It created a civic architecture that allowed people of all faiths and none to participate fully in public life. James Madison argued that religion is a matter of individual conscience, not government decree. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “wall of separation” that protects both faith and democracy. Benjamin Franklin opened his own wallet as seed money for any number of religious congregations in Philadelphia, supporting spaces where people of different traditions could gather, argue, preach, and belong.

These were not marginal ideas. They were foundational principles that shaped the nation’s identity. The founders did not create a Christian nation. They built a constitutional system broad enough for many traditions to flourish.

Today, the United States is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. According to the Pew Religious Landscape Study, 36 percent of Americans are non‑Christian, including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and the religiously unaffiliated. The religiously unaffiliated have grown from 21 percent in 2013 to 27 percent in 2023, according to PRRI. White Christians have declined from 57 percent of the population in 2006 to 41 percent in 2023. One in four Americans is a Christian of color, a reminder that even within Christianity, diversity is the norm.

The “Christian nation” narrative imagines a past that never existed and a future that would exclude millions of Americans. At Interfaith America, we see another story: a country where people of many traditions have always struggled and persisted to build something bigger than themselves. That diversity is a national asset, and the ability to build bridges across differences is a civic virtue. That America’s religious diversity is not a departure from our founding ideals. It is their fulfillment.

Our future depends on not shrinking, but expanding and strengthening, the table of American belonging.

Jenan Mohajir is vice president of external affairs at Interfaith America, a national nonprofit organization that equips leaders to navigate a pluralistic world.

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