George Hawley is one of the best students of contemporary political conservativism and the Alt-Right. His recent Law Liberty piece on American Christian nationalism does not disappoint. He and I are in full agreement that “the notion that the United States is on the precipice of a fundamentalist theocracy”—as so many critics of Christian nationalism assert—is, in his word, “risible.”

　　To be sure, there are racist nationalists in America, but as Hawley observes in his Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know, “Most prominent Alt-Right leaders are also non-Christians, and they are highly critical of Christianity, although there are Alt-Right Christians. However, unlike earlier white nationalists, the Alt-Right is mostly indifferent to religious questions.” Tobias Cremer persuasively argues that this is also the case with French and German religious nationalist leaders.

　　But I write not to praise Professor Hawley, but to take issue with a widely-used but inaccurate statistic that he included in his essay. Utilizing the usually reliable work of the sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, he references their calculation in The Churching of America: 1776–2005 that “[a]s of 1776,” perhaps as low as 17 percent of “Americans belonged to a church.” 

　　Hawley’s use of this figure is almost irrelevant for the purposes of his argument, and I agree with the connection he makes between religious liberty and religious vitality. But this figure is regularly used by those who would deny that Christianity was an important influence in America’s founding. For instance, Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore apparently rely on Finke and Stark’s work in their book The Godless Constitution when they claim that “Americans in the era of the Revolution were a distinctly unchurched people. The highest estimates from the late eighteenth century make only about 10–15 percent of the population church members.”(I write “apparently” because Kramnick and Moore don’t bother to cite their sources).

　　Similarly, Jon Butler, in an essay entitled “Why Revolutionary America Wasn’t a ‘Christian Nation,’” utilizes Finke and Stark’s figures to support his claim that “it is all but impossible to calculate church membership at more than 20% of colonial adults before the American revolution.”Geoffrey Stone, Steven Green, Alan Dershowitz, and many others have reiterated these figures, often simply ignoring studies that suggest the percentage of church adherents is far higher.

　　Finke and Stark were not the first academics to suggest that few Revolutionary-era Americans attended church. In 1935, the church historian William Warren Sweet published an article asserting that there were “more unchurched people in the American colonies, in proportion to the population, than were to be found anywhere else in the world.” Variations of this claim, often setting church adherent rates at 5-10 percent, were repeated by students of American history including Franklin Hamlin Littell, Sydney Ahlstrom, Richard Hofstadter, and Martin Marty over the next fifty years. They provided little to no evidence to support their claims.

　　In 1988, Finke and Stark published a widely cited article entitled “American Religion in 1776: A Statistical Portrait,” which argued that “only 10 to 12% of the population in 1776 was churched.” They claimed to use social science to arrive at their conclusions as opposed to historians whom they essentially accused of guessing. They arrived at this percentage by multiplying the 3,228 churches in America in 1776 by their estimate that each church had 75 members and dividing this figure by the nation’s white population (2,524,296). Their article focused on whether individuals formally joined a church, but by their 1992 book The Churching of America (and its 2005 second edition) they switched to “adherence rates,” which included individuals who regularly attended church but did not formally join. Shifting from membership to adherence rates enabled them to reach the 17 percent figure cited by Hawley.

　　In 2003, James Hutson, then Chief of the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, offered compelling criticisms of Finke and Stark’s analysis. He showed that they make numerous factual and historical errors. For instance, they misstate Yale President and early demographer Ezra Stiles’s estimate of the population of New England in 1760 and they ignore the best calculations of the American population in 1776—inflating the figure by 300,000.

　　More significantly, Finke and Stark drew from records of the fledgling Methodist and Baptist churches and from an 1826 Presbyterian figure to conclude that the average church in 1776 had only 75 members. But there are good reasons to believe that many older, more established churches had far larger congregations. For instance, Ezra Stiles calculated that New England’s Congregational churches averaged 160 families each. Given that the average family in the era contained six people, each church ministered to roughly 800 souls. Using a similar methodology, accurate population figures, and better membership numbers, Hutson calculates that 71 percent of Americans were “churched” in 1776. 

　　Hutson’s conclusion fits well with figures derived by Patricia U. Bonomi and Peter R. Eisenstadt in an important 1982 William and Mary Quarterly article. Utilizing a definition of “churched” that includes “member, adherent, parishioner, and auditor,” these historians calculated that in late eighteenth-century America, “56 to 80 percent of the [white] population were churched, with the southern colonies occupying the lower end of the scale and the northern colonies the upper end.”

　　Unless one is ideologically committed to deemphasizing the influence of Christianity in the American founding, there is no good reason to assert that church adherence rates were 17 percent or lower in the era.

　　Remarkably, Finke and Stark did not even address Bonomi and Eisenstadt’s figures in their 1988 article even though it was published in one of the most prominent history journals six years before their study. They register their disagreement with it in a footnote in their 1992 book where, among other things, they challenged Bonomi and Eisenstadt’s estimate of congregation size based on their “informal tours of colonial churches [which] reveal them to be exceptionally small.” They don’t say how many churches they toured, but one suspects it was not a representative sample of the estimated 3,600 church buildings (v. the 3,228 congregations referenced by Finke and Stark) in late eighteenth-century America.

　　In a 2020 study, Lyman Stone offers a sweeping account of American religiosity from the early colonies to the present day and compares it to various European countries. His focus is not on the late eighteenth century, but he does engage the differences between Finke/Stark and Bonomi/Eisenstadt and offers criticisms of both before concluding that his approach yields “an estimate that is considerably nearer to Bonomi and Eisenstadt’s higher counts of pre-independence religiosity.”

　　Finke and Stark accused earlier historians of simply guessing at church membership rates, so it is perhaps only fair to quote one of the best students of American church history in his review of their 1992 book. According to George Marsden, with respect to church size in the founding era, Finke and Stark “take the lowest possible estimate [of church adherence rates] and then become dogmatic about it, even though it is based largely on guesswork.” This seems about right to me.Unless one is ideologically committed to deemphasizing the influence of Christianity in the American founding, there is no good reason to assert that church adherence rates were 17 percent or lower in the era.

　　Scholars and popular authors intent on showing that founding-era Americans were not religious don’t simply rely on church adherence rates, they sometimes also reference contemporary accounts to support their position. For instance, Jon Butler quotes the French visitor Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letter to an American Famer (1782), where he observed that in the United States “all sects are mixed” and that “religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other.” Complaints of this nature were common among visiting and recently immigrated European ministers, but rather than a lack of piety they may have indicated, as the Lutheran immigrant Henry Muhlenberg eventually concluded, the “European standards … do not always fit the complicated conditions in America.” In other words, these visitors interpreted the lack of religious establishments, commitment to specific denominations, and/or concern for the finer points of theology to reflect indifference rather than charity.

　　Relatedly, one must be careful not to read too much into laments by indisputably pious clergy about the troubles besetting Christianity in the era. For instance, Ezra Stiles wrote in his diary that only thirty of the eighty-five men receiving more than one hundred votes in Connecticut’s 1792 election were “religious characters.” Similarly, Charles Nisbet, the Presbyterian minister and president of Dickinson College, thought Christianity in Pennsylvania would be destroyed by the “equality and indifference of religious opinions that is established by our political constitutions.” Based on my extensive study of both states for my books on Connecticut’s Roger Sherman and Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, I can confidently say that reports of Christianity’s demise were greatly exaggerated by these men. More likely, it seems to me, Christians in these states did not believe, worship, and act exactly like Stiles and Nisbet thought they should. This hardly makes them “irreligious” or “unchurched.”

　　Estimating the percentage of Americans in the late eighteenth century who were “churched” is extremely difficult. But there is no excuse for scholars and popular writers to reiterate unsubstantiated estimates that grossly undercount the percentage of Americans who regularly went to church. There is every reason to believe that late eighteenth-century Americans were a churched people, and the percentage who attended evangelical churches would increase in the nineteenth century as a result of the Second Great Awakening.