Tue, 09 Nov 2004

America Was Not Founded as a Christian Nation

Yesterday's post elicited a comment from my friend orangeguru, showing a very common misconception about the origins and history of the United States. He said:

In some way I see america coming back to it's roots. What we see is a form a christian fundamentalism and rule of the rural mind. The Reformation and Age of Enlightenment never happened in America, so religion and society never made the change in America as it did in Europe.

This is continually trumpeted by the Religious Right, and believed by many Left and Right, but a careful examination of the documents will show that America was never a Christian nation, and was founded, in fact, in the very heat of the Enlightenment as a reaction against Christianity.

To begin with, there's the First Amendment to the Consitution of the United States:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

Quite radical for it's time, as most European countries had (and still have) established churches: religions supported by tax monies. Thomas Jefferson, himself a Deist and the author of the Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom explained the context of the First Amendment in his Letter to the Danbury Baptists. It's pretty clear what he hand in mind.

Many of the Founding Fathers penned serious disputations with Christianity, most famously Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, but also Revolutionary War hero Col. Ethan Allen in Reason: The Only Oracle of Man. Jefferson himself rewrote the Bible in an attempt to extract the ethical teachings of Jesus from the religious mumbo jumbo.

Then there's the Treaty of Tripoli, authored by American diplomat Joel Barlow in 1796. It was read aloud in its entirety and unanimously approved by the Senate on June 7, 1797, and signed into law by President John Adams. Note Article 11:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

If that's not unequivocal I don't know what is! But wait, there's more: the original Pledge of Allegiance did not contain the words "under God" - those were added in 1954, the same year that the motto "In God We Trust" was officially added to US coinage. Curiously, the offical motto of the United States remains what it was in 1789: E Pluribus Unum - From Many, One. Here's an article from The Early America Review that's just chock full of goodies on our Founding Fathers and their religious views.

In short, it's a myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. It's been slowly perverted into one over the course of the last two centuries, with the change accelerating in the last forty years. But it's founding was clearly secular. Margaret Thatcher summed up America best when she said "European nations ... are a product of their history, while America is a product of philosophy."

We are, or rather, we were, the Enlightenment.

/Asatru | 0 writebacks | permanent link

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