Those who argue that the United States is a Christian nation are hard-pressed to explain why our founders went out of their way to make sure that our founding document, the U.S. Constitution, lacks any mention whatsoever of God, church, the Bible, or Jesus. It is inconceivable that men who put so much time into crafting the Constitution would so explicitly and thoroughly steer clear of religious justifications for their beliefs in any way if they wanted to convey some particularly religious status to our nation.
Perhaps even more striking, if we go back a few years before the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence, there is even greater, and much less publicized proof, that not only did the Founders reject any notion of the United States as a Christian Nation, but they explicitly rejected any notion of today’s view of the Christian god.
Many Christians like to cite this sentence in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
These Christians run into serious difficulty trying to explain why the signers of the Declaration used the ambiguous word “Creator”, which is consistent with any deistic interpretation of the origins of life and is not exclusively Christian, but even more importantly, they never quote what comes in the very first paragraph even though the word “God” is used:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. (Highlighting mine.)
Not only did the authors put the “Laws of Nature” as a justification for independence before the word “God” they explicitly state that God is subservient to Nature! When I first read this I was astonished since this is so embarrassing to the proponents of the Christian Nation myth, and I was surprised that it hadn’t gotten more press.
I could spend pages more discussing the historic views of “Natural Law” philosophy that animated and motivated many of the Founding Fathers, and how the majority of them held deistic beliefs that were more consistent with modern forms of agnosticism than anything approaching the assertions made by many modern-day Christians. And of course, some religious people could throw back a few cherry-picked religious quotes from some of the Founding Fathers that point to a greater degree of religiosity than is found in our founding documents.
None of this is necessary.
In both the U.S. Constitution, and even more strongly in the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers explicitly rejected any notion that our nation is based on the tenets of Christianity and the Bible. I can only shudder at the theocracy we would live under if the Founders had given religious literalists any opening whatsoever.
Fortunately, they didn’t and for that I am ever grateful.
J.S.
P.S. Here’s a scathing critique of the Bush Administration by Pat Tilman’s brother, also in the military; it’s one of those pieces that apologists for Bush and company’s failures hate to see.
Jason Scorse