Neil Gorsuch says the US wasn't founded to be about 'one religion'

Days after facing backlash for calling America a “creedal nation," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says the United States was "never supposed to be a nation that was about one race or one religion."

In an appearance on PBS’ “Firing Line With Margaret Hoover” that aired last week, Gorsuch discussed his new children’s book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence. Host Margaret Hoover noted that Gorsuch has said “there is no common religion or cultural heritage of Americans,” and that he has described the U.S. as “a creedal nation” because “we believe in the creed, we believe in those three founding ideals.”

Hoover was referring to freedom of religion, freedom of speech and equality under the law. She told Gorsuch that “that sentiment, particularly as expressed by you, has received some criticism from conservative circles and drawn backlash,” and asked him to respond to critics who insist “we absolutely had a common cultural heritage and religion.”

Gorsuch pointed to Charles Carroll, a Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and said many American colonies were founded on the principles of “religious pluralism” and “the opportunity to practice your own faith in your own way.”

“We were never supposed to be a nation that was about one race or one religion," Gorsuch said. "It was about those ideas.”

“Those things are perfect ideas that speak to every human heart and that unite us all,” he added.

When Hoover pressed him on whether there was “a revisionism” asserting that “we’ve always been a white Christian nation,” Gorsuch replied, “I just don’t see it that way.”

“America is available to each and every one of us and it’s up to each and every one of us to see that those ideas continue to flourish.”

When Hoover pushed him to “refute the idea that we came from the same heritage and the same religion,” Gorsuch said, “It’s demonstrably not true that we came from the same religion.”

“Think about the Amish who came here in the 1600s on a handful of rickety boats, a third of them dying along the way for their freedom,” he said. Gorsuch rejected the idea that “they weren’t part of the American experiment” and pointed to the Quakers as another influential religious group at the time of the founding.

“We have a First Amendment for crying out loud,” Gorsuch said, listing its principles as “no established religion,” “everybody has the freedom of religion,” “everybody has the freedom of speech” and “we are all equal under law.”

Gorsuch called those ideas “something all of us can unite behind,” recalling how “that’s what brought [Thomas] Jefferson and [John] Adams together again at the end of their life was recognizing that more unites us than divides us.”

He noted that while the second and third U.S. presidents agreed on the need to declare independence from Great Britain, “they bickered about everything thereafter” because they had “totally different visions for the way they wanted to take the country.”

Gorsuch said “they stopped speaking for something like 10 years,” but credited “their love for those three ideas” with eventually reuniting them. His comments on “Firing Line” came shortly after he faced backlash for similar remarks in an interview with National Review.

Speaking with National Review in May, Gorsuch said, “We’re a creedal nation. What unites us is not a religion, not a race.”

John-Daniel Davidson, senior editor of The Federalist, pushed back: “America is not a really great idea. It’s a people and a culture derived from England and Christian Europe. Anyone who wants to be an American must adopt that culture as their own. It’s not racist or xenophobic to say this, it’s simply the truth.”

Federalist CEO Sean Davis added: “If America were a creedal nation, then America would regularly be denaturalizing and deporting anyone who rejects the creed, either in word or in deed. But that never happens, so you know this is just empty rhetoric.”

At the start of the interview, Gorsuch said Christianity did play a role in the founding, listing what he called the three ideas at the heart of the Declaration of Independence: “That we’re all created equal, every one of us, and that each of us has rights given to us by God, not from government, and third, that we have the right and the power to rule ourselves.”