“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
– The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
The United States is not now, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation. The founding fathers explicitly and clearly excluded any reference to “God” or “the Almighty” or any euphemism for a higher power in the Constitution. Not one time is the word “god” mentioned in our founding document. Not one time.
Americans have been debating where to draw the line between religion and government since the country’s founding. Though the United States wasn’t founded as a Christian nation, Christianity was always intertwined with America’s self-definition. Many people believe, without it, Americans no longer have a common culture upon which to fall back. Yet that philosophy can be alarmingly discriminatory and lead to violating others freedom and liberty.
We all are aware that Christianity is the most prevalent religion in the United States. However, deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA.
America’s anti-Semitism was practiced institutionally as well as socially for decades. The most persistent form of antisemitism has been a series of widely circulating stereotypes that construct Jews as socially, religiously, and economically unacceptable to American life. They were made to feel marginal and menacing. Additionally, Holocaust denial is prevalent among a minority of Americans. According to a 2020 survey of adult Millennials and Generation Z members (U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey) , 24% said the Holocaust might be a myth or had been exaggerated
With the great threat of “godless” Communism looming in the 1950s, the country’s fear of atheism also reached new heights. Virtual anti-communist consensus existed, and the commonly held American view of Communism included a lack of Christian faith. By the time the cultural climate allowed dissent on Soviet policy, atheism had established itself as the one touchstone of agreement to an otherwise divided nation.
In this democratic, protestant nation, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was seen as too authoritarian. There was always the question of Catholics ultimate loyalty – was it the nation or the Pope. The 1850s Know-Nothing Party even made anti-Catholicism one of its political planks. Later, in the 1920s there was a resurgence of the KKK in the North, as well as in the South. And, as late as 1960, Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy felt compelled to make a major speech declaring that his loyalty was to America, not the pope.
The Latter-day Saints saw tremendous opposition. The LDS were violently driven out of Ohio, Missouri, and finally Illinois. The worst violence occurred from 1833 to 1838 in Jackson County Missouri, where Mormons were dragged from their homes and beaten while their property was destroyed. Their leaders were jailed and tortured, while those left behind were beaten, raped, and eventually murdered. All because they believed differently. And as recently as the 2008 Republican primary campaign, Mormon candidate Mitt Romney felt compelled to address the suspicions still directed toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Most recently, Muslim communities in the U.S. have faced a disturbing wave of bigotry and outright hostility. From religiously motivated discrimination and attacks on existing and proposed Islamic centers to vicious rhetoric from presidential candidates, Muslims in America are being unfairly targeted simply for exercising their basic constitutional right to religious liberty.
The Views of the Founding Fathers
The phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers saw nothing wrong with having religion in American culture. However, the framers did not did not believe in a union between church and state.” Instead, the founders instead wanted to protect against government “control” of religion and that they did not object to symbols of faith being present in the public square.
Professor Michael McConnell, constitutional law scholar who served as Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals from 2002 to 2009 and who is Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, explains:
“This did not mean that the framers believed that the American people should be any less religious than they choose to be. It didn’t mean that the culture – that there was anything wrong with having religious elements in the culture. What it meant is that we would not have a system in which the government was able to tell us what to believe, was able to control churches, decide what their doctrines, decide who their personnel would be, and so forth.”
To seek the truth, let's examine the views of some of the most influential founders and allow them to address the issue in their own words.
George Washington
George Washington may have said it best: “Religious controversies are always more productive of acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.” To prevent such controversies, Washington ordered Continental Army commanders “to protect and support the free exercise … and undisturbed enjoyment of … religious matters."
Washington's experience leading the Continental Army and the fledgling nation helped shape his opinion that religious intolerance and bigotry led to dangerous divisions where unity was needed. And as President, he wrote carefully worded letters affirming the nation’s areligious status and its promise of religious freedom to leaders of twenty-two religious groups – and atheists.
While in Newport in 1790, President Washington was inspired to issue a major statement on religious freedom, making it clear that the new government of the United States intended to do things differently from other nations: Here, in the U.S., government-sanctioned religious bigotry would be a thing of the past. All faiths would be welcome in an atmosphere of mutual respect and peace. He promised a government where “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”
(Rob Boston. “A Message From George Washington: 230 Years Ago, America's First President Penned A Letter On Religious Freedom That Still Speaks To Us Today.” Church & State Magazine. July-August 2020.)
Like the founding documents, the collected letters, speeches, and papers of George Washington never invoked the name of Christ or Christianity and mentioned God only once, as he concluded his oath of office as first President of the United States and added, “So help me God.” Prior to that, he carefully omitted all references to God and Christ, appealing instead to “providence,” “destiny,” “heaven,” or “the author of our being” as sources of possible supernatural favor for himself and the nation.
A treaty negotiated with the Muslim Barbary States during Washington’s administration (1796) declared, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of the Mussulmen (Muslims])...”
(Christine Leigh Heyman. “The Separation of Church and State from the American Revolution to the Early Republic.” Department of History, University of Delaware ©National Humanities Center.)
Thomas Paine
Washington’s friend, Thomas Paine tried ending the controversy. “I do not believe in…any church,” he declared. In a call to arms against what he called church-state tyranny in early America, he insisted that “every national church or religion accuses the others of unbelief; for my own part, I disbelieve them all.” A fervent patron of Deism, Paine said, “Mingling religion with politics (should be) disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.”
Paine wrote …
“The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow.”
(Thomas Paine. Age of Reason, Part First, Section 1. 1794.)
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin
Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin agreed.
Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States, stated in his Jan. 1, 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
President Jefferson denied that Jesus was “a member of the Godhead.” This from Thomas Jefferson in an April 11, 1823, letter to John Adams:
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. … But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding ….”
Benjamin Franklin, a co-author of the Declaration of Independence with Jefferson, decried Christian church services for promoting church memberships instead of “trying to make us good citizens.”
An outspoken deist, Franklin criticized all religions for making “orthodoxy more regarded than virtue.” He insisted that man be judged “not for what we thought but what we did…that we did good to our fellow creatures.”
Benjamin Franklin (1817) in private correspondence is recorded as saying …
“When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
James Madison
Most of the rest of America’s Founding Fathers echoed Franklin’s beliefs. America’s fourth President, James Madison was raised an Anglican and was a cousin of Virginia’s Episcopal bishop. But he was a fierce proponent of church-state separation and fathered the Bill of Rights, whose opening words outlawed government “establishment of religion” and any prohibition of “the free exercise thereof.” Both Congress an all the states agreed.
“It was the universal opinion of the [18th] century,” Madison wrote in 1819, “that civil government could not stand without the prop of a religious establishment and that the Christian religion itself would perish if not supported by a legal provision for its clergy.” But as President, Madison found that, “the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of church from the state.”
In 1822, for example, Madison said this in a letter to Edward Livingston:
“And in a Government of opinion, like ours, the only effectual guard must be found in the soundness and stability of the general opinion on the subject. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
John Adams
Even the devout, church-going Congregationalist John Adams, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, inked his presidential signature on the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli affirming to Americans and the world that “the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” The 23 members present in the U.S. Senate (out of 32) ratified the document unanimously.
Ties To Religion
The sole grain of truth to claims of governmental ties to Christianity in early America lies in the different religions established in each of the independent British-North American provinces before the birth of the United States. Although individual states retained state-supported religions well into the 19th century (four did so until after the Civil War), the ratification of the Constitution created an absolutely secular nation.
Indeed, each of the nation’s three founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the United States Constitution—carefully avoided all mention of Christianity or Christ. Article VI of the Constitution states as dramatically as possible, that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” –hardly the hallmark of a “Christian” nation.
To reaffirm America’s not becoming a Christian nation, Congress and all the states added the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791, reiterating the nation’s areligious character by barring government establishment of any and all religion.
Only the Declaration of Independence even mentions God – n a single ambiguous reference in the opening paragraph to what Deists rather than practicing Christians called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”
(Harlow Giles Unger. “The U.S. a Christian Nation? Not According to the Founders!” The George Washington University's History News Network. September 08, 2019.)
(Jeff Schweitzer. “Founding Fathers: We Are Not a Christian Nation.” HuffPost. February 26, 2015.)
The founders intended a separation of church and state to ensure religious freedom.” “The early framers of the Constitution wrote it as a secular document not because they were hostile to religion – neutrality is not hostility – but because they did not want to imply that the new federal government would have any authority to meddle in religious matters. To the core of their values, they wanted the American people to make their own choices for the rest of time and be free to believe what they wish to believe.
Americans Still Support Separation
Separation of church and state is still widely supported in the U.S. A poll conducted for Americans United by Anzalone Liszt Grove Research found Americans recognize the importance of supporting the separation of church and state, and many of them want political candidates to back the principle. 60% of poll respondents said protecting the separation of religion and government is either one of the most important things to them personally or very important. Only 9 percent said it was not too important.
Furthermore, nearly half of likely voters in 2020 – 47 percent – say they would be more likely to support a candidate who announced support for church-state separation. Only 11 percent say backing separation would make them less likely to support a candidate.
Support for pro-separation candidates was shared in all parts of the country – even in the Bible Belt South. Looking at specific sub-groups, support for separation-friendly candidates was highest among men with college degrees and people who said they never attend religious services.
Another 2019 poll by Pew Research reported that more than six-in-ten Americans (63%) say churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics. An even higher share (76%) say these houses of worship should not endorse political candidates during elections, according to a 2019 survey.
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