America once jailed people for blasphemy. Why don't we know?

There's a battle raging for the soul of our nation. It's a fight over who we were and who we're allowed to say we were. Secularists insist America was founded by Enlightenment deists who never intended Christianity to shape our laws, and that anyone who argues otherwise is peddling “revisionist history.”

We're told the Founders built a “wall of separation” between Church and state. But that phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution, and legal scholars still call the Establishment Clause's original intent “the most contentious and misunderstood provision” in the document.

Even the progressive Political Research Associates has conceded the point indirectly. Quoting Brent Walker of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs: “Neither the words ‘church state separation’ nor ‘wall of separation’ appear in the Constitution ... it's a metaphor for the spirit of the First Amendment.” PRA then argues society needs to “craft a compelling and shared story” about religion's role in our history. It’s a remarkable admission that the dominant narrative is, in fact, a narrative, not a transcript.

That project has produced an all-out assault on Christian values, weaponizing the term “Christian nationalist” as a slur to silence anyone who points to the Christian foundations that undeniably shaped this country.

I got a stark reminder of just how undeniable it is recently, when Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler sparked a debate over blasphemy laws — first through a debate on Christian nationalism, then through a book project featuring five authors from different Christian traditions — that sent me down a rabbit hole of 19th-century court cases. His fellow Southern Baptist, Dr. Richard Land, pushed back in his column for The Christian Post, arguing there should be no religious test for office.

The dispute over how far a “Christian nation” framework should go is itself proof of how seriously these questions are still taken. Such a debate would be nonsensical if America's Christian roots were the fiction secularists claim.

I was stunned to learn America ever had blasphemy laws at all. Weren't we always supposed to have been “neutral toward religion”? The historical record says otherwise, and it's a time capsule of a country we're now told to pretend never existed.

‘Jesus Christ was a bastard’

In 1811, John Ruggles of New York was convicted of declaring, “Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother must be a whore.” He was sentenced to three months in prison and fined $500. Chief Justice James Kent, also a Columbia law professor, wrote the unanimous opinion: “The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice; and to scandalize the author of these doctrines is ... a gross violation of decency and good order.”

A decade later, at New York's 1821 Constitutional Convention, Kent defended his ruling and explained why blasphemy laws protected Christianity specifically, not other faiths: “We are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply ingrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those impostors.” The convention voted to affirm his reasoning.

Pennsylvania followed suit in 1824, when its Supreme Court upheld a blasphemy conviction against a man who called Scripture a “fable” full of “lies,” ruling that “Christianity, general Christianity, is, and always has been, a part of the common law of Pennsylvania.” Notably, that law wasn't struck down until 2010, nearly two centuries later.

In 1887, New Jersey resident Charles B. Reynolds, a former minister, was fined for distributing a pamphlet ridiculing God and the Bible. He hired Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, one of the era's most celebrated attorneys, who argued the state's blasphemy law was “an outdated remnant of an ignorant and intolerant past” that “enslaved the human mind.”

Ingersoll's closing statement stretched across two days, and he invoked the state constitution's own guarantee that “no law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.” The trial judge was unmoved, instructing the jury that the statute was “not obsolete” and that “the law ... is constitutional.” Jurors agreed, convicting Reynolds after just one hour of deliberation.

Perhaps most telling is that The New York Times complained afterward that Reynolds' $25 fine was too lenient, while praising New Jersey for going “on record against blasphemy” and arguing such literature should be “suppressed.”

The turning point

Blasphemy prosecutions continued state by state until 1952, when the U.S. Supreme Court's Burstyn v. Wilson ruling finally held that blasphemy is not a recognized exception to First Amendment protection. The case involved a film, “The Miracle,” banned by New York censors after Catholic backlash over its “sacrilegious” content.

The Court sided with the distributor, reversing decades of precedent and, within a decade, dismantling state and municipal film censorship boards nationwide. It also undercut the Hays Code, Hollywood's self-imposed “moral code” co-written by a Catholic priest in 1930, which had governed everything from on-screen violence to why Lucy and Ricky Ricardo slept in separate twin beds.

Two centuries of reversal

What followed Burstyn was a cascade of rulings that dismantled the legal architecture of Christian public life:

• Engel v. Vitale (1962) ended official school prayer.
• Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) struck down mandatory Bible reading in public schools.
• Miller v. California (1973) narrowed obscenity law.
• Roe v. Wade (1973) established a right to abortion, conflicting with the traditional Christian belief that life begins at conception (later overturned by Dobbs, 2022).
• Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) struck down Louisiana's Creationism Act, ensuring evolution is now taught in every public school.
• United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) dismantled the traditional, Judeo-Christian definition of marriage nationwide.

Even secular groups concede the starting point of this story. The nonprofit Freethinkers International admits: “Until the 1920s, public education in America was deeply intertwined with religion. Schools incorporated Bible readings, prayers, and teachings about the creation story without any significant opposition.”

Who's rewriting history?

To be clear, this isn't an argument for reviving blasphemy laws. It's an argument about evidence. These cases aren't ideological talking points; they're the actual legal record, and they tell an unambiguous story about how thoroughly Christianity once shaped American law, and how completely that has changed.

Merriam-Webster defines a revisionist as someone who breaks from an established historical account, “often by reinterpreting facts.” By that definition, it's worth asking who's actually doing the reinterpreting.

It took two centuries to transform a nation that once treated blasphemy against Jesus Christ as comparable to “wantonly going naked ... in the public streets” into the one we live in today. Given that record, I don't think it's conservatives who are guilty of revisionist history.