The Treaty That Declared America Not a Christian Nation: Article 11 Revealed

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On June 7, 1797, the Senate of the United States took a vote.
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They were looking at a document signed by President John Adams.
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It was a peace treaty, a desperate attempt to stop American sailors from being
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enslaved in North Africa.
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But hidden inside the legalese of that treaty was a sentence that would become
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the single most controversial statement in the history of the founding era. It was Article 11.
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It read, quote, As the government of the United States of America is not,
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in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, There was no debate. There was no outrage.
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There were no protests in the streets of Philadelphia.
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The Senate ratified the treaty unanimously.
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It was signed by the President. It was printed in the newspapers.
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And for the first decade of our history, it was the supreme law of the land.
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Today, Christian nationalists try to bury this document. They call it a mistake. They call it a lie.
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They claimed the founders didn't mean it. But they did mean it.
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And to understand why, you have to look at the men who were rotting in chains
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while the Senate was taking that vote.
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Welcome to a special bonus episode of False Foundation. I'm Jim.
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We are here to dismantle the Christian nationalist myths of the American founding
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and look at the cold, hard mechanics of how our republic was built.
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No idols, no pedestals, just the facts. Let's move out.
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To understand why the United States officially declared itself secular in 1797,
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we have to go back 12 years, to the summer of 1785.
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In June of that year, Captain Isaac Stevens set sail from Boston Harbor.
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He was commanding the Maria, a small schooner designed for short coastal hops,
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not deepwater crossings.
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But her owner, William Foster, was desperate.
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The post-war economy was in ruins, and the only way to make money was to take risks.
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So he loaded the Maria with lumber, salted cod, and grain, and sent Stephen
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and his crew of six across the Atlantic to Spain.
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It was a gamble, and they lost.
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On July 25th, off the coast of Portugal, they spotted a ship flying the British flag.
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Stephens held his course, thinking he was safe. He wasn't.
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As the ship pulled alongside, the British colors dropped, and the flag of Algiers went up.
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The Maria was staring down the barrels of 14 cannons.
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Stephens didn't have a single gun. He surrendered immediately.
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The pirates boarded looking for one thing, a Mediterranean pass.
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This was a specific piece of scalloped parchment that proved a nation had paid its protection money.
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But America wasn't paying protection money anymore.
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We had declared independence, and in doing so, we had lost our insurance policy. The Maria had no pass.
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Under the hot summer sun, the Corsairs stripped Stevens and his crew of everything.
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Their cargo, their valuables, their clothes, even the buttons on their shirts.
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They arrived in Africa wearing only rags.
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Five days later, it happened again. This time, it wasn't a small coastal schooner.
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It was the Dauphin, a fully rigged ship out of Philadelphia owned by the Irwin Brothers.
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She was carrying tobacco, high-value cargo, and she was commanded by Richard O'Brien.
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O'Brien wasn't a merchant by trade, he was a fighter.
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During the Revolution, he had served as a lieutenant on a privateer brig called the Jefferson.
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He knew how to handle a ship in a fight, but when he was intercepted 150 miles
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west of Lisbon, experience didn't matter.
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He ran straight into the Algerian flagship, a heavy cruiser with 34 guns and a crew of hundreds.
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O'Brien tried to run, but in the light winds, the massive Algerian ship rode
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by hundreds of Christian slaves below deck ran him down.
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When the Corsairs boarded, they didn't just climb over the rail.
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The reports say they leapt onto the deck with daggers clamped in their teeth.
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They stripped O'Brien and his 15 men naked on their own deck.
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They tore through the lining of their coats looking for gold.
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And just like the crew of the Maria, they were hauled south.
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When they arrived in Algiers, the 21 Americans were paraded through the streets.
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The crowds jeered at them. They were inspected like livestock.
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The day of Algiers, the warlord of the city, picked the strongest men to work on his own ships.
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The rest were sent to the Bagneos. The Bagneos are the most crucial aspect of
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the Treaty of Tripoli. This is the Iran hostage crisis of the 18th century.
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These were state-run slave prisons. They were dark, damp, and swarming with vermin.
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The men were shackled in iron chains and marched out every morning to the rock quarries.
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Under the blistering North African sun, they hauled massive stones to repair
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the harbor walls, the very walls that protected the pirate fleet.
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Their diet was two small loaves of black bread a day. In 1787,
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the bubonic plague swept through the prison.
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Six of the Americans died in the filth. The survivors wrote letter after letter
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to Congress, to Jefferson, to anyone who would listen. They asked a simple question.
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Where is our country? Captain O'Brien wrote, quote, We are a victim of the little
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feuds of the United States. End quote.
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He was right. They weren't rotting in prison because America didn't care.
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They were rotting there because America was broke, paralyzed,
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and completely unprepared for the world stage.
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We had no Navy to fight for them. We had no money to buy them back,
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and we had no treaty to protect them. The United States was learning a hard lesson.
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Independence is expensive. While Richard O'Brien was hauling rocks in the desert,
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the two most powerful minds in American history were sitting in a room in London,
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trying to figure out how to save him. It was 1786.
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Thomas Jefferson was the minister to France. John Adams was the minister to Britain.
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And they had a problem. They managed to arrange a meeting with the ambassador
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of Tripoli, a man named Sidi Haji Abdrahman.
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They wanted to ask him a simple question. Why?
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The United States had never attacked Tripoli. We had no quarrel with the Sultan.
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We weren't part of the European colonial empires. So why were they hijacking
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our ships and enslaving our people?
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The ambassador's answer was terrifyingly simple.
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He didn't talk about trade routes or territorial waters. He talked about theology.
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He told Jefferson and Adams that it was written in their Quran that all nations
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which had not acknowledged the prophet were sinners. And therefore,
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it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave them.
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This was a wake-up call. The founders realized that to the Barbary states,
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the United States wasn't a new special republic.
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We were just another flavor of the Christian infidel.
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We were being lumped in with the Spanish, the French, and the British,
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nations that had been fighting religious wars with Islam for a thousand years.
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So Adam and Jefferson had to make a choice. How do you deal with a holy war
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when you don't even have a navy? This started a debate that would paralyze the
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government for a decade.
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John Adams, ever the pragmatist, did the math. He looked at the cost of building
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a navy versus the cost of paying the bribe.
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He argued that we should just pay. He said, quote.
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To Adams, paying the tribute was just the cost of doing business in a bad neighborhood.
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Jefferson disagreed. He hated the idea of paying for peace.
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He famously said, quote, millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute, unquote.
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He wanted to build a navy. He wanted to organize a coalition of nations to blockade
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North Africa and burn the pirate fleets. It was a great debate.
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Realist versus idealist. The checkbook versus the frigate. But there was one small problem.
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We couldn't do either. We didn't have the money to pay the bribe.
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Congress was broke. And we didn't have the ships to fight the war. We had sold them all.
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So the United States did the only thing it could do.
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Nothing. For ten years, Congress debated. They formed committees. They wrote reports.
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And for 10 years, Richard O'Brien and his men watched their friends die of the plague in Algiers.
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It wasn't until 1794, when the pirates started hitting us in the Atlantic again,
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capturing 11 more ships and over 100 more sailors, that the government finally panicked enough to act.
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They decided to do both. They authorized the construction of six frigates,
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including the USS Constitution, to fight a future war.
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But they also authorized a massive loan to buy a peace treaty right now.
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And to get that peace, they needed a diplomat who could convince the Muslim
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warlords that America was different, that we weren't crusaders,
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that we weren't there to fight a holy war.
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They needed a man who could separate the cross from the flag. They sent Joel Barlow.
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Joel Barlow was an interesting choice for this mission. During the Revolutionary
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War, he had served as a chaplain in the Continental Army. He had preached the gospel to soldiers.
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But in the years since the war, Barlow had changed.
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He had spent time in Paris during the French Revolution. He became close friends
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with Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
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Barlow is not the only one whose convictions evolved during the Enlightenment.
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By 1795, Barlow wasn't looking to build a city on a hill. He was a rationalist.
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He believed that religious entanglements were a trap that dragged nations into unnecessary wars.
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And when he arrived in Algiers to negotiate the release of the hostages,
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he saw the cost of those wars firsthand.
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He saw Richard O'Brien and the survivors of the Dauphin gaunt, sick, and desperate.
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Barlow realized that to get these men out and to keep future American ships
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safe, he had to build a diplomatic firewall.
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He had to convince the Muslim authorities that the United States was a new kind of political animal.
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He negotiated the treaty through the day of Algiers, who was acting as the boss for Tripoli.
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And when Barlow sat down to draft the English text of the treaty,
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he didn't use the standard diplomatic boilerplate.
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He wrote Article 11. Let's look at the text again.
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Really look at it. Quote, As the government of the United States is not,
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in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, end quote.
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Notice the phrasing. He didn't just say the U.S. has no established church.
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He said the government is not founded on Christianity in any sense.
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That covers everything. It covers the laws. It covers the culture.
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It covers the intent. He continued, quote,
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As it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws,
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religion, or tranquility of the Muslim, that's Muslims,
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and as the said states never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohammedan nation,
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it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions
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shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. End quote.
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Barlow was drawing a hard line. He was saying.
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The treaty was signed in Tripoli in November of 1796.
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Barlow sent it to Philadelphia. And this is the part that matters most.
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When that document arrived in the Senate, it wasn't hidden in a drawer. It was read out loud.
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Copies were printed for the senators to review. If the United States was a Christian
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nation, if the founders believed that our liberty came from the cross,
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this was the moment to scream heresy. But nobody did.
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On June 7th, 1797, the Senate ratified it unanimously.
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President John Adams signed it three days later. The hostages came home.
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The Christian nation myth was dead on arrival.
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Now, if you bring this treaty up in a debate today, you aren't going to get
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a unanimous vote. You are going to get a fight.
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The Christian nationalists know about this treaty. They hate it.
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And they have developed two specific arguments to try and bury it.
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You need to be ready to dismantle them.
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Argument number one is political expediency.
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They will tell you. Jim, the founders, didn't mean it. They just wrote that
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to appease the Muslims. It was a live convenience to get the hostages out.
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Let's play that logic out. If the United States was truly founded as a Christian
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nation, dedicated to the glory of God, then denying that faith in a legal contract
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is an expediency. It's apostasy.
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Imagine if the apostle Peter signed a document saying, I am not in any sense
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a follower of Jesus, just to get a discount on shipping. We wouldn't call him
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a diplomat. We'd call him a traitor.
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Are the Christian nationalists really arguing that John Adams,
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a man they claim was a devout fundamentalist, was willing to sell out his savior for a trade deal?
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Furthermore, we have a control group. The British and French were signing treaties
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with Tripoli at the exact same time.
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They were Christian nations. Did they renounce their faith?
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No, the British treaties often started with, in the name of the most holy and undivided trinity.
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The British managed to get a deal without denying God. The Muslims didn't demand
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that we deny Christianity, we volunteered it.
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We put that language in there because Joel Barlow in the Senate believed it
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was the distinguishing feature of the American Republic.
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Argument number two is the translation trap. This is the one the,
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well, actually, crowd loves.
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They will tell you, actually, the Arabic version of the treaty didn't include Article 11.
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The translator changed it. And they're right.
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Barlow didn't speak Arabic. He relied on a court translator,
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a fixer working for the Day of Algiers.
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This fixer likely looked at Barlow's English draft, saw the not-a-Christian-nation
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part, and thought, I am not going to tell the Bashaw of Tripoli that these guys
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are proud atheists. He might get mad.
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Even then, Muslims considered Christians of the book.
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He understood that denouncing religion in general would probably make things
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worse for the Americans, something Barlow was not likely to understand.
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So the translator swapped it out.
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In the Arabic text, Article 11 is just a flowery letter of friendship.
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The apologist will look at you and say, See, the Muslims never agreed to it. The treaty is void.
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Do not fall for this. Because this discrepancy actually proves our point. Think about it.
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The Muslims didn't ask for that clause. The Muslims didn't even see that clause.
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The translator removed it.
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That means the idea that America was not in any sense Christian came entirely from us.
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It was Joel Barlow's idea. It was the American Senate's approved language.
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We weren't saying it to appease a foreign power, since the foreign power never
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even read it. We were saying it because we believed it was true.
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The fact that the translator hid it does not change the American intent.
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It clarifies it. When John Adams signed that parchment, he was reading the English text.
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When the Senate voted, they were voting on the English text.
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And for the first decade of our history, the official legal stance of the United
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States government was that Christianity had nothing to do with our foundation.
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And nobody, not the press, not the pulpit, not the people, had a problem with that.
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Think about the timeline. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.
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Five years later, the same generation wrote this treaty.
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Article 11 isn't a contradiction of the First Amendment. It is the clarification of it.
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When the founders told the world the United States had no religion,
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they weren't lying to a sultan. They were telling the truth about themselves.
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The Treaty of Tripoli is the receipt. And it is time we stopped letting people
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pretend it doesn't exist.
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This has been False Foundation. If you learned something, tell a friend. If you got mad, tell me.
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You can send your feedback, your arguments, or your own examples of historical
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stolen valor to Jim at falsefoundation.com.
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I read everything, even the hate mail.