Why I’m Inviting John Leland to Thanksgiving Debates About Christian America

Pass the big wheel of cheese, and defend the Baptist legacy of freedom of conscience.

As someone who studies religion and politics, I often find myself in “fun” conversations at the Thanksgiving table. As the turkey’s carved, the stuffing passed, and the pies put out to cool, my aunts or cousins or their plus ones will ask me to agree that America is in decline. It used to be, they will say, that this was a Christian nation, but now the government isn’t doing what it needs to do to defend our values.

As they nostalgically recall a golden age when America was a Christian nation, I am reminded of an eccentric Baptist minister with a 1,200-pound wheel of cheese who offered an alternative vision of confident religious conviction in the public square—confident enough that it didn’t need government support.

Maybe it’s not fair to call John Leland, a Revolutionary-era Baptist minister, eccentric. But he did once give President Thomas Jefferson a four-foot, four-and-a-half-inch wheel of cheese made from the milk of 900 cows. The author of the Declaration of Independence called it “an ebullition of the passion of republicanism.”

So, he was at least a little eccentric.

More important to me is that Leland spent his life articulating a vision of Christian confidence. He was a passionate advocate for religious freedom, arguing the truth needs no support from the government and doesn’t depend on social privilege.

Congregationalists and Anglicans at the time appealed to the state’s authority to uphold religious doctrine. They believed that an ordered society could not stand the jostle of diverse religious beliefs and that the truth needed protection from the government. Leland, along with other Baptists and evangelicals at the time, rejected this. He said only ...

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