My commenter ytterby (a.k.a. 25% of my readership 😉 pointed out this excellent article which restates what I’ve been trying to tell the chattering churchy chowderheads for years. The United States is not a Christian Nation. It was not founded on Christian ideals.
The Nation | Article | Our Godless Constitution | Brooke AllenOne of [the Bush] Administration’s current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.
Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate…
And she goes on to quote many of our Founding Fathers’ opinions on the matter.
In the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, endorsed by Secretary of State Pickering and President John Adams, and passed by a unanimous vote of the Senate:
As the Government of the United States…is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…
Thomas Jefferson wrote of the Evangelical Fundamentalists of his time, warning about:
“…the impious presumption of legislators and rulers,” as Jefferson wrote, “civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.” [emphasis mine]
The columnist also points out that many of the Founders were Deists — specifically not Christian. Their beliefs were in harmony with the Enlightenment of the times and rejected the fundamentalist religious bent of the previous century (Salem witch trials, anyone?):
If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists–that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.
George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that “religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize.” He spoke of the “almost fifteen centuries” during which Christianity had been on trial: “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as “God” but with some nondenominational moniker like “Great Author” or “Almighty Being.” It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism. [my emphasis, again]
Thomas Paine, unrestrained by political concerns, was a bit more frank:
“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life…. I do not believe in the creed professed by … any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” … he railed against … the Old Testament, “a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.” The New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ’s divine genesis a “fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.” He held the idea of the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, “the wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it.”
…Like Paine, Jefferson felt that the miracles claimed by the New Testament put an intolerable strain on credulity. “The day will come,” he predicted (wrongly, so far), “when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
And of course, my favorite Founder, Benjamin Franklin, gives us words to think about in the Era of Bush:
“A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law”
