Because it is a well-known fact that the Constitution only mentions religion once, in Article 2’s prohibition of religious tests for elected office; and that the phrase “nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence was more likely a stand-in for the Founding Fathers’ rationalist sympathies, it has always been incumbent upon Christian nationalists who feel that the US was founded as a Christian nation and remains so, to come up with the receipts—to wrap the early history of the nation in a protective, anachronistic shield of Christian faith. One way the Trump administration has recently tried to do so is with its “America Prays” campaign, which called for “ceaseless prayer” throughout the 2026 semiquincentennial.
As part of that effort, they published a pamphlet called Prayers and Proclamations, highlighting nineteen historical moments of prayer by American leaders. The selection is wildly exclusionary—of the nineteen texts quoted, seventeen of them are by white Christian men; one is by a group of colonial Jews, and one by Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of these brief moments of public prayer are meant to demonstrate that the nation has always been unified in its notion of Christianity, and in the relationship between that Christianity and democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Take for instance, the entry on “The First Prayer in Congress, September 7, 1774.” According to the White House pamphlet, the Constitutional delegates,despite their “profound ideological and regional diversity,” immediately proposed that the session begin with prayer. They invited Rev. Jacob Duché, an Anglican clergyman from Christ Church in Philadelphia to do so. And “despite initial concerns over denominational divisions, the prayer service proved unexpectedly unifying.” Indeed the First Continental Congress soon “turned into a lengthy and solemn devotional session, reportedly attended with deep emotion by the delegates, including George Washington.”
Duché’s prayer was apparently extemporaneous, heartfelt, and unusually relevant as the colonies withstood British aggression:
“O Lord our Heavenly Father, high and mighty King of kings, and Lord of lords, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers on earth and reignest with power supreme and uncontrolled over all the Kingdoms, Empires and Governments; look down in mercy, we beseech Thee, on these our American States, who have fled to Thee from the rod of the oppressor and thrown themselves on Thy gracious protection…”
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In the White House telling, diversity of religious opinion is quickly overcome, by an Anglican minister no less, and all are enveloped in a unifying, devotional moment of prayer. This image of powerful men suddenly overcoming their differences and falling down in prayer is straight out of the right-wing Christian Nationalist organization The Fellowship’s contemporary playbook, the fantasy of a vaguely unifying idea of God who can supersede all human difference. As history here, it is at the very least anachronistic—an image more associated with the Christian revivalism that was pervasive among ordinary Americans in the post-Revolution “Second Great Awakening”—but was never predominant among the halls of Congressional power.
What is much more common in the historical record are stories of Anglican ministers causing political division when they attempted to pray for everyone. To be an Anglican clergyman was to represent the Church of England, which was a national church. The head of the Church of England was the King of England. That put Anglican clergy in a delicate position when it came to advocating for revolution and independence. The only solution turned out to be to view American religious diversity as a feature and not a bug, as contemporary Christian nationalists do.
For example, when the idea of daily prayer came up for New York’s Provincial Congress, a year after Duché’s comments for the Continental Congress, it was so controversial as to require setting up a separate subcommittee. New York was already then a formerly Dutch colony known for religious tolerance and full of Quakers, Shakes, Dutch Reformed, Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The committee carefully planned a rotating cast of clergy to represent some of these important religious groups. But they never got that far: because the clergyman chosen to deliver the very first daily prayer, on May 26, 1775, was an Anglican. Rev. Samuel Auchmuty caused a general public outcry when he insisted on praying, in the Provincial Congress, for the King.
New York was not an isolated case. The Southern colonies had been founded by Anglicans, and they still then predominated. But the expanding populations of Presbyterians and Baptists were unified in their resentment of state religion, as Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason discovered when he ventured out to the Carolina backwoods. He particularly hated the Presbyterians, “the most lowest vilest crew breathing; groups of Scots-Irish settlers who, according to the minister, thought that they had religion, but would regularly disrupt his services by “hallooing and whooping without Door like Indians.” The Baptists were equally troubling. They had “taken such deep Root there that it will require long Time and Pains to grub up their Layers.”
Indeed, suspicion of Anglican clergy had been a national preoccupation for decades by the time of the Continental Congress. In 1763, faced with the expansion in the colonies of Woodmason’s employer, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), the Church of England’s missionary outreach group, American religious leaders like Jonathan Mayhew wrote sharply against increasing the number of Anglican bishops, sparking a ten-year “pamphlet war” fought between English Loyalists, who favored a stronger Anglican hand, and the many Americans, north and south, who much preferred their own local religious establishments.
Once the Revolution was over, people looked back on the “Bishop Controversy” as a precursor. In an 1818 letter to Hezekiah Niles, no less a personage than John Adams wrote firmly on the side of Mayhew, whose arguments seemed to him a “Model of Candour, Sagacity, Impartiality and close correct Reasoning.” And what was more, Adams remembered in 1818, the Bishop Controversy was but a sign of things to come:
“If any Gentleman Supposes this Controversy to be nothing to the present purpose, he is grossly mistaken. It Spread an Universal Alarm against the Authority of Parliament. It excited a general and just Apprehension that Bishops and Dioceses and Churches, and Priests and Tythes, were to be imposed upon Us by Parliament. It was known that neither King nor Ministry nor Archbishops could appoint Bishops in America without an Act of Parliament; and if Parliament could Tax Us they could establish the Church of England with all its Creeds, Articles, Tests, Ceremonies and Tythes, and prohibit all other Churches as Conventicles and Schism Shops.”
The White House also claims that this one prayer led by Duché was such a success that it led Congress to “institutionalize the practice” of daily prayer before each session, “going through today.” It is true that Congress did and does employ chaplains who lead prayer before each session. However, the line from the first prayer to today is hardly straight; rather it is missing pieces and is often contested. Take the example of President James Madison, the architect of the Bill of Rights and its First Amendment’s religious freedom clause, and himself a religious Anglican, who is nowhere mentioned in “Prayers and Proclamations.”
Even before the Bill of Rights was finalized, Madison was appointed to a committee to discuss the question of Congressional prayer, and he voted in favor of appointing chaplains. Later, as President, he more than once voted in favor of appropriations bills that paid these chaplains. Nonetheless the hiring and payment of chaplains for the Senate or the House, how many and how long they should serve, and what traditions they should represent, were subject of ongoing dispute and legislation.
Americans were worried about the implications of Congressional prayer—even religious Americans. In 1810 Madison received a pleading letter from an old ally, Reverend Jeremiah Moore, a Virginian Baptist preacher who had fought the British colonial establishment to be able to preach what he wanted to preach, where he wanted to preach it, and who had assisted Madison in advocating for religious freedom legislation in Virginia, but was nonetheless incensed about Congressional chaplains. Never mind that the chaplain at the time was a Baptist just like him. Moore’s objection was one of principle.
“The purity of his faith, practice, and moral rectitude, must be determined by God alone and all legislative interference must from hence, not only be an illegal usurpation, but finally corrupt the principles they profess to support and maintain. All and every attempt made by legislators to give sanction to creeds, and confessions of Faith, or in any otherwise govern and regulate modes of divine worship, provide for the maintainance of priests, preachers, or any other set of men under the name of teachers of religion, is an usurpation in its nature, and an assumption of power, that they neither hold in themselves, nor can their representatives delegate it to them—it is true, that this principle has been recognised in our constitution; but whether our legislators act in conformity thereto is yet to be ascertained…a combination of priests and legislators, when united, seldom fail to rob the people of all that is dear and valuable.”
This was hardly the last time Congressional chaplaincy was questioned. In the runup to the Civil War in the 1850s, chaplaincy, like every other political decision in the nation, became a proxy for the fight over the institution of slavery, so much so that throughout the entirety of the Thirty-fifth Congress, “neither the House nor the Senate had an institutional chaplain,” only a rotating selection of guest clergy.
Even the very person to offer the 1774 prayer, the Philadelphia Anglican Jacob Duché, would eventually come under suspicion along these lines. Duche was at first a vehement defender of independence—on July 4, 1776, he made a show of crossing out King George’s name from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, an illegal act, which won him official appointment as Congressional chaplain five days later. But a year later, Duché was detained by the British, and wrote a letter to George Washington asking him to stop fighting for American independence. John Adams bemoaned the chaplain’s treachery to his wife Abigail: “Mr. Duché I am sorry to inform you has turned out an Apostate and a Traytor.”A North Carolina delegate called Duché “the first of Villains.” Another called Duché’s letter to Washington a “[rascally] epistle from the Ir-Revd. Jacob Duché.” Duché was fired from his job as the first Congressional chaplain, and replaced with two clergymen—one Anglican and one Presbyterian.
