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In 1867 America bought a land that had already been Christian for seventy years. The faith had come from monks instead of soldiers: St. Herman on Spruce Island, and St. Innocent teaching Aleuts to read in their own language. By the time of the sale, roughly 12,000 of Alaska’s Native people were Orthodox Christians. The treaty of sale promised that they would be protected in the “free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and religion.” Then the “Christian nation”, the Americans, arrived. Its soldiers looted Sitka, including St. Michael’s Orthodox Cathedral. Its Presbyterian missionary, Sheldon Jackson, called the Protestant mission boards together and divided Alaska among them, as though the baptized were heathens and the altars already standing there counted for nothing. Washington DC then made Jackson its General Agent for Education, and some mission schools received federal money under government contracts. In those schools children were punished for speaking their native languages. Orthodox boys could attend Saturday Vespers but were kept away from the Sunday Liturgy and most feasts. Natives were sometimes turned away from the Presbyterian hospital unless they converted. In 1897 the territory’s marshal and governor helped carry the coffin of a Tlingit woman who had wanted an Orthodox burial, so that she could be buried as a Presbyterian. Jackson was candid about the goal. When an Orthodox bishop appealed to the President, Jackson predicted that “twenty-five years hence will see the end of the Greek Church in Alaska.” So here is the question for anyone who says America was a Christian nation: what Christianity are we even talking about? Historic America was always suspicious of and hostile towards authentic Christianity. A nation that treats the Church of the Apostles, of Nicaea, and of the Fathers as a foreign superstition to be schooled out of children was not a Christian nation in any sense the early Church would recognize. It was Protestant and civil-religious, and “Christian” was simply the name it gave its own culture. The Tlingit saw this more clearly than the missionaries did. They turned to Orthodoxy in the 1880s as a way of holding onto their independence against Presbyterian pressure to become "Americans". They recognized that the Church which honored their dead, blessed their fishing boats, and prayed in their language believed in the Incarnation enough to let it take flesh among them. As we know today, Jackson's prophecy failed.