Our Christian Nation and the Curious Incident of Article XI of

the Treaty with Tripoli

James Arnt Aune

Texas A&M University

Paper presented at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Public

Address Conference, September 26, 2008

One prominent argument by the religious right in American

politics since 1980 is the factual claim that the United States is a

"Christian nation." In the mid-1990's the Texas Republican Party

adopted as a central plank in its platform the following statement: "The

Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of America is a

Christian nation, and the public acknowledgement of God is undeniable

in our history. . . . Our Party pledges to exert its influence to restore the

original intent of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution

and dispel the myth of the separation of Church and State." (p. 8). The

primary architect of this resolution was David Barton, a math teacher

from Waco and a self-taught historian--author of widely selling books

and videos, including "Our Godly Constitution," which I can attest has

been seen by almost all of my evangelical students. Barton brags that

his most recent book, Original Intent, "has over 1300 footnotes!"
Barton has been praised by Republican leaders such as Sam

Brownback and Newt Gingrich, served as the main religious outreach

organizer for Bush-Cheney in Ohio in 2004, and has been listed by

Time magazine in 2005 as one of the top 25 influential evangelicals in

the U.S. The use of the term "evangelical" here is not quite accurate,

because Barton does not subscribe to the Arminian or Wesleyan notion

of making an individual decision for Jesus but is rather a hard-core

Calvinist with deep connections to the Christian Reconstructionist or

Theonomy movement, which seeks to restore its version of "Old

Testament Law" in the United States, including the execution of

homosexuals and adulterers, and which has been growing in intensity

and influence since 2000. George W. Bush even nominated a Christian

Theonomist lawyer from Dallas to the NLRB in 2001. Barton, about

whom no scholarly work has been written, has been the single most

influential peddler of the Christian Nation meme, despite his admission

in his most recent book that many of the Founders' quotations used in

his video were false. He appears to have shifted to the claim that since

the U.S. is based on majority rule, Christians should be allowed to

mandate school prayer, church-based welfare, and establish state

churches. Every time at TAMU that I have urged students to eliminate

the use of Christian prayers to begin each Student Senate meeting I

have been answered by talking points right out of Barton, especially

the argument about majority rule.

 The most peculiar, to me at least, rhetorical feature of the

current political culture of the United States is that liberals and

conservatives no longer live in the same world of facts, perhaps a

characteristic feature of argument during times of intense polarization.

This paper consists of a rhetorical criticism of a single sentence, Article

XI of the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli, one of several efforts by the United

States to deal with attacks on American shipping by the so-called

Barbary Pirates, including the Barbary War of 1801-1805, which gave

the phrase "to the shores of Tripoli" to the Marine Hymn. The "Barbary

Treaties" is the collective name given to a set of treaties signed from

1795 to 1836 between the U.S. and the Barbary States--the semi-

autonomous North African city-states of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli,

under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Article XI of the 1797 Treaty

reads as follows:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is

not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in

itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or

tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered

into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it

is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious

opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony

existing between the two countries.

 I proceed as follows: first, I will describe the context and

composition of the treaty, as well as its later uses in diplomacy and,

more recently, as part of the factual disputes over the notion that the

U.S. is a Christian Nation. I then speculate a bit about the ambiguous

constitutional legacy of the religion clauses and propose a brief theory

to account for the relationship between fact and ideology in public

argument.

First, the background. The United States consul-general to the

Barbary states of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis was Joel Barlow, author of

the once-popular epic poem, The Vision of Columbus, and part of a

group of young writers known as the "Hartford Wits." Commissioner

Plenipotentiary of the United States, David Humphreys, was given the

right to establish a treaty with Tripoli and assigned Joel Barlow and

Joseph Donaldson to broker it. It was Joel Barlow who certified the

signatures on the Arabic original and the English copy provided to him.

Although Barlow did not draft the treaty as it now stands, it was based

on an outline drafted by him during negotiations with both sides.

Later, Captain Richard O'Brien established the original transport of the

negotiated goods along with the Treaty, but it was the American Consul

James Leander Cathcart who delivered the final requirements of

payment for the treaty. The treaty was broken in 1801 by the Pasha of

Tripoli over President Thomas Jefferson's refusal to pay the Pasha's

demands for increased payments. The Treaty was renegotiated in 1805

after the First Barbary War.

The Treaty also had spent 7 months traveling from Tripoli to

Algiers to Portugal and, finally, to the United States, and had been

signed by officials at each stop along the way. Neither Congress nor

President Adams would have been able to cancel the terms of the

Treaty by the time they first saw it, and there is no record of discussion

or debate of the Treaty of Tripoli at the time that it was ratified.

However, there is a statement made by President Adams on the

document that reads:

Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United

States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty

do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept,

ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article

thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed,

and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I

have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby

enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military

within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants

thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every

clause and article thereof.

Official records show that after President John Adams sent the treaty to
the Senate for ratification in May 1797, the entire treaty was read

aloud on the Senate floor, and copies were printed for every Senator. A

committee considered the treaty and recommended ratification, 23 of

the 32 sitting Senators were present for the June 7 vote which

unanimously approved the ratification recommendation. The Senate's

ratification was only the third recorded unanimous vote of 339 taken.

The treaty was printed in the Philadelphia Gazette and two New York

papers, with no evidence of any public dissent--a remarkable

occurrence during the profoundly polarized late 1790's. The claim that

the U.S. was in no sense a Christian nation was uncontroversial in

1797. I proceed next to describe the later uses of the treaty in

diplomacy, the 1931 controversy over the Arabic text, and current

efforts by the Christian Right to explain Article XI away.

There have been some instances when Article XI of the treaty of

1796-97 helped diplomatic agents of the United States in their dealings

with their own or Moslem nations. Mordecai M. Noah (1785-1851), who

was special agent to Algiers (1813-15) and helped to secure the

release of American prisoners held by the pirates, carried a point in his

negotiations by pointing out that the United States government was

not Christian. Later, however, he was called home by President Monroe

because his Jewish religion was held to be an obstacle to the successful

outcome of his work. Noah pleaded that Article XI of the 1796-97 treaty

showed that Americans do not need to be Christians, but he was still

forced to return to the U.S.

A more important instance of the helpfulness of Article XI

involved Oscar S. Straus (1850-1926) who was U.S. Minister to Turkey

(1887-89 and 1898-1900) and Ambassador to Turkey (1909-10). In the

Spring of 1899, at the beginning of the war with Spain, it was

discovered that there were Moslems in the Philippines who might start

a Holy War against the United States. Mr. Straus gained an audience

with the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid, and requested him as Caliph of

the Moslem religion to act against this possibility. The Sultan sent a

message to the Sulu Moslems of the Philippines forbidding them to

fight the Americans as no interference with their religion would be

allowed under American rule. The move was successful, and President

McKinley sent a personal letter of thanks to Mr. Straus saying he had

saved at least 20,000 American troops in the field.

In 1931 Hunter Miller completed a commission by the United

States government to analyze United States's treaties and to explain

how they function and what they mean in terms of the United States's

legal position in relationship with the rest of the world. According to

Hunter Miller's notes, "the Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt

at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic" and "Article

11... does not exist at all."

After comparing the United States's version by Barlow with the Arabic
and even the Italian version, Miller continues by claiming,

The Arabic text which is between Articles 10 and 12 is in form a

letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant, from

the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli. How that script came to

be written and to be regarded, as in the Barlow translation, as

Article 11 of the treaty as there written, is a mystery and

seemingly must remain so. Nothing in the diplomatic

correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the

point.

From this, Miller concludes: "A further and perhaps equal mystery

is the fact that since 1797 the Barlow translation has been trustfully

and universally accepted as the just equivalent of the Arabic... yet

evidence of the erroneous character of the Barlow translation has been

in the archives of the Department of State since perhaps 1800 or

thereabouts." [The translation, made by a Dutch Orientalist, is

available here:

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/barbary/bar179

6e.htm]

David Barton has made much of Article XI in his various writings

on the religion clauses, probably because it is the best single refutation

we have of the Christian nation argument. The absence of the "not a

Christian nation" language in the Arabic treaty was viewed as a sign of

some chicanery by Barlow, who was already known as a religious

skeptic. For example, in the Vision of Columbus, later expanded into

the Columbiad, Barlow had depicted an allegorical vision of the Truth:

Beneath the footstool all destructive things,

The mask of priesthood and the mace of kings

Lie trampled in the dust; for here at last

Fraud, folly, error all their emblems cast

Each envoy here unloads his wearied hand

Of some old idol from his native land;

One flings a pagod on the mingled heap,

One lays a crescent, one a cross to sleep;

Swords, sceptres, mitres, crowns and globes and stars,

Codes of false fame and stimulants to wars

Sink in the settling mass; since guile began.

These are the agents of the woes of man.

A second argument concerns alleged lack of attention to the

"minutiae" of the Treaty by Adams and the Senate: "With no help

forthcoming from the international community -- who preferred to use

the pirates, even against America, as lackeys to destroy the small fry --

and with treaties taking such an extraordinary amount of time to

negotiate and agree to -- what would the American government be

expected to do? Even if anyone objected to Article 11, it would have

been foolish and counterproductive to send it back for re-negotiation.

We would suggest that matters were weighed in the balance, and that

it was considered more important to get the Treaty through than to

rework it." This argument is unpersuasive, given no evidence of

controversy over the wording; it would require belief in the

simultaneous inattention of both President Adams and the Senate.

A third argument, however, is more persuasive. "The government

is not the nation, and the government of the United States is not the

same as the state and local governments. In adopting the First

Amendment, the Founders clearly intended that there be no

established religion at the national level, but they left the states free to

have their own establishments. A primary reason for the adoption of

the First Amendment establishment clause was the different

establishments at the state level -- Congregationalists in New England,

Anglicans in the South, Baptists in Rhode Island, Catholics in Maryland,

Quakers in Pennsylvania, etc. If I had been a Senator at the time of the

ratification of the Treaty of Tripoli, I might have raised my eyebrows at

the wording of Article 11, but I probably wouldn't have considered the

statement categorically false."

This argument reflects, somewhat accurately, the deeply

confusing record of the early republic on the religion clauses of the

First Amendment. Closely related to an argument of fact is a rhetoric

of originalism or constitutional fundamentalism--the assumption that

the Framers were all of one mind, probably inspired by the Almighty,

and any effort to adapt the Constitution's 18th-century language to

current conditions, as the Common Law has always enabled judges to

do, is illegitimate. This ideological desire to fix constitutional meaning

is interestingly paralleled in the insistence by the Texas Republican

Party platform, like texts on economics by Christian Reconstructionists,

that the U.S. must return to the gold standard as the basis for its

currency. It is as if the end of the gold standard and its eventual

replacement by floating exchange rates thrust right-wing Christians

into a state of post-structuralist anxiety, with money, like words, only

possessing meaning by its difference from other forms of money. A

stable currency, a stable constitutional text, American history written

from a Christian point of view, fixed gender roles, and an infallibly clear

Bible present a unified response to the anxiety-inducing ambiguity of

modern liberalism.

Discussing the constitutional aspects of religion in the U.S. is a

profoundly complicated process. One reason is the language of the

Establishment Clause itself: "Congress shall make no law respecting

an establishment of religion." We know that James Madison

unsuccessfully tried to require the states to respect the fundamental

rights of freedom of speech, free exercise, and separation of church

and state. The problem was that many states still had established

churches at the time the Bill of Rights was framed. The "respecting an

establishment" language was ambiguous enough to satisfy Madison's

insistence against a nationally established church but also

Masschusetts Puritans, whose state establishment was not abolished

until 1833. This common language to accommodate opposite political

views is a textbook example of the problems with conservative

originalist constitutional arguments: whose original intent gets to

count? Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, insisted in his

concurrence in Zelman v. Harris in 2004 that states were free to

establish a church.

So we are left with a puzzle. If the rejection of "Christian nation"

language was a consensus position among elites and the populace in

1797, how and why did things change. A number of American

historians, including Charles Sellers' The Market Revolution, a history

of Jacksonian America, Jon Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith, and Paul E.

Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium, painstakingly demonstrate that

our modern evangelical America, which reached its apotheosis at

Saddleback Church for the first 2008 presidential debate, stems from

the revivals of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which in

turn were responses to profound economic anxiety and social strain

caused by the rise of a modern market economy. By 1850, pressure

was applied on the Post Office to eliminate Sunday mail delivery.

Petitioners from Ohio wrote that Sunday mail had a "direct tendency to

destroy that piety and morality so necessary to be cherished by a

Republican people." Concern over the lack of mention of God in the

Constitution led to the proposed revision of the Preamble by the

National Reform Association in 1863: "We, the people of the United

States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all

authority and power in civil government. The Lord Jesus Christ as the

Governor among the Nations, and His revealed will as of supreme

authority, in order to constitute a Christian government . . . do ordain

and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Although widely supported by Presbyterians, Methodists, and

Episcopalians, Jews, Unitarians, and Catholics were mobilized against

the Amendment, and both Congress and President Lincoln let it die a

quiet death. Nonetheless, God first appeared on our currency in 1863.

It remains to be seen how long the Christian Nation theme will

survive. Has the Christian Right peaked with the nomination of Sarah

Palin, or it about to go from strength to strength. Should we consider

adopting some version of French republicanism, known as laicisme, in

which religious symbols are rigorously banned from public life,

including the wearing of religious garb in public schools? We know that

religion has the power to motivate people to acts of inspiring

selflessness as well as murderous intolerance. Liberalism itself, in both

its market- and New Deal-based forms, notoriously has a motivational

deficit, which it tries to fix with patriotic and/or religious appeals. Is so-

called American exceptionalism inextricably connected to its public

displays of religiosity? There is still much more work to be done on

religion and the republic, including a better understanding of the

religious revivals of the nineteenth century, the oddly cyclical

prominence of Calvinism in politics, and comparative analysis of the

role of religion in other democratic systems. But the most immediate

task is simply to teach our students the accurate history of religion in

American politics. As Walter Benjamin wrote, "Not even the dead are

safe if they win."