Definition
As used in historical legal texts, "Christian" carries two overlapping meanings:
1. (Substantive/religious) A person who accepts, professes, and endeavors to live by the doctrines of Jesus Christ as set forth in the New Testament. The term excludes, in historical legal usage, Mohammedans, Jews, pagans, and infidels — categories that were treated as legally distinct in certain common-law contexts, particularly with respect to oath-taking competency and witness credibility.
2. (Adjective/derivative) Pertaining to Christianity or to institutions and practices associated with it. Used in this sense to modify legal concepts that have ecclesiastical origins or connections. Two compounds appear with regularity in the legal literature: "court Christian" (an ecclesiastical court, as distinguished from a temporal court) and "Christian name" (the given name conferred at baptism, as distinguished from the surname or family name).
The term also carried a secondary, culturally descriptive meaning in older legal authorities: one born of Christian parents or in a Christian country who does not affirmatively profess another religion. This negative or default definition reflects historical common-law assumptions about religious identity as a baseline civic status rather than an active personal commitment.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A believer in Christianity; a person who seeks to live according to the principles and values taught by Jesus Christ; also used loosely to denote a European or person of Western cultural background regardless of active religious practice.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who believes or professes to believe in Jesus Christ and the truth as taught by him; one whose life is conformed to the doctrines of Christ; or, more loosely, one born in a Christian country or of Christian parents who has not become an adherent of an opposing system.
The legal usage tracks the common meaning closely but adds a dimension that common definitions do not: in historical law, religious identity carried procedural consequences. Whether a witness was "Christian" was not merely a biographical observation — it affected the form of oath administered and, under older common-law rules, could bear on a witness's competency to testify at all. The common definition describes belief; the legal definition, at its historical core, was also a threshold for civic and procedural participation.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Court Christian: An ecclesiastical court exercising jurisdiction under canon law, as distinct from temporal courts of the common law. The phrase appears in older English legal authorities discussing the boundary between secular and church jurisdiction.
Christian name: The given name — also called the "baptismal name" — as distinct from the surname. In legal instruments, wills, conveyances, and pleadings, the correct use of a Christian name versus a surname was a matter of technical precision with consequences for validity and identification. The term remains in use in legal drafting discussions even where its religious derivation is no longer operative.
Why It Matters in Research
This term presents a significant interpretive trap for researchers working in pre-twentieth-century Anglo-American legal materials. "Christian" in historical sources frequently functions as a legal status marker, not merely a religious descriptor. In cases touching on witness competency, oath administration, marriage law, or the enforceability of contracts and wills, whether a party or witness was identified as "Christian" could determine which procedural rules applied.
The secondary "default" definition — one born of Christian parents or in a Christian country who professes no other religion — reflects assumptions baked into common-law and colonial legal systems that researchers must read critically. Courts applying this definition were not always engaged in theological inquiry; they were often determining civic baseline status for procedural purposes.
The compound forms "court Christian" and "Christian name" are still encountered in historical documents and must be parsed correctly. "Court Christian" does not mean a court favorable to Christians; it means an ecclesiastical court — a jurisdictional category with its own rules, remedies, and appellate structure. Confusing these with common-law courts will produce systematic misreadings.
Researchers consulting cases or treatises from jurisdictions with established churches (England, some colonial American contexts) will find "Christian" doing heavier legal work than in post-disestablishment American materials. After the First Amendment's incorporation and the progressive removal of religious tests from American procedure, the term's legal force diminished sharply, though it persists in historical source reading and in the narrower context of "Christian name" in drafting and identification law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries converge on the core substantive definition — a person who believes or professes belief in the doctrines of Jesus Christ as taught in the New Testament — and all carry the derivative uses into their entries.
Bouvier's is the most explicit in treating "Christian" as a status with legal content, noting that the term does not include Mohammedans, Jews, pagans, or infidels, and citing New Hampshire authority for this distinction. Bouvier's also preserves the default or negative definition: one born of Christian parents or in a Christian country who has not adopted another religion. This dual approach — affirmative belief or cultural default — reflects the practical reality that courts were often not adjudicating sincere faith but rather assigning procedural categories.
Anderson's closely tracks Bouvier's language and cross-references "Christianity" as the system of doctrines and precepts at issue, suggesting these entries functioned as a connected cluster in legal reference use.
Both editions of Black's emphasize the adjective's "more remote" uses, flagging "court Christian" and "Christian name" as the legally operative compounds — a useful editorial signal that practitioners of their era needed to be reminded that these terms had shed most of their theological content in day-to-day legal work.
What historical dictionaries largely omit is any sustained discussion of the constitutional implications that would later develop under American First Amendment doctrine — understandably, given their period of composition. Researchers using these dictionaries as guides to historical meaning should not read modern Establishment Clause or Free Exercise analysis backward into them.
Jurisdictional Note
The legal significance of "Christian" as a status category was substantially greater in English common law and in colonial and early American jurisdictions with established or preferred churches than in modern American law. Many states had religious test provisions that used "Christian" as a qualifying term for office or witness competency; these were progressively repealed or invalidated over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Researchers should check the specific jurisdiction and period before treating any historical usage of the term as normatively operative in a modern context.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Ecclesiastical Courts; Oaths and Affirmations; Christian Name; Establishment of Religion.