Published Feb. 21, 2010 Was America founded as a Christian nation?<\/P> Like so many of our public debates, those who argue on opposite sides tend to speak past each other. In fact, both sides are correct as long as we add some clarifications.<\/P> Was America founded as a Christian nation? Answer: No. Was America founded as a nation of Christians? Answer: Yes.<\/P> When we speak of a \u0093Christian nation,\u0094 we are not asking if most \u0096 in fact nearly all \u0096 of the citizens and founders of the nation were Christians. Indeed they were.<\/P> We are asking if the framework of the nation was built on Christian principles. Did our founding documents \u0093establish\u0094 Christianity as a basis for government and for citizenship much in the same way that Israel is a Jewish republic or Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state?<\/P> The answer to this question is an unequivocal \u0093no.\u0094<\/P> Our nation did not emerge organically from a common faith or ethnicity, but rather from a set of documents \u0096 primarily the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation) our first constitution) and our current Constitution.<\/P> Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, believed in God, as did all the founding fathers, but Jefferson\u0092s faith can only loosely, if at all, be described as \u0093Christian.\u0094 He glorified the teachings of Jesus (which he compiled into the \u0093Jefferson Bible\u0094), but he did not consider Jesus to be the son of God nor did he accept miracles or anything else in the Bible that conflicted with his belief in a rational universe.<\/P> The Articles of Confederation acknowledged the \u0093Great Governor of the World,\u0094 but, leaving aside the proforma \u0093Year of our Lord\u0094 date stamp at the very end of the document, the U.S. Constitution makes no reference at all to religion, a God or a Creator, except in the First Amendment clause prohibiting Congress from making any law \u0093respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.\u0094<\/P> The religion that was thus encoded in the Constitution was not Christianity, but religious liberty. In fact, the founders established the first modern nation that did not rest upon God or religion as the basis of state authority.<\/P> The founders vested the authority of the state in the hands of the people, whose citizenship had nothing to do with their religious convictions. Their ideas about government came from John Locke, Scottish republican thinkers and classical political thought, not the Bible.<\/P> \u0093In God we Trust\u0094 did not become our \u0093national motto\u0094 until 1956, two years after \u0093Under God\u0094 was added to our Pledge of Allegiance.<\/P> Does this mean the founders were irreligious? Quite the opposite. They simply believed, as James Madison said, that \u0093Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.\u0094<\/P> And they weren\u0092t merely protecting the \u0093purity\u0094 of religion from the corruption of politics. In arguing against the establishment of religion in Virginia, Madison worried that \u0093an established clergy\u0094 would aid \u0093rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty.\u0094<\/P> If our founding documents do not support the notion of a \u0093Christian nation,\u0094 it also is not accurate to say that the founders were not deeply religious and mostly Christian. Sure, there were a handful of deists, including Benjamin Franklin.<\/P> But even Franklin sought to \u0093imitate Jesus and Socrates.\u0094 If not a Christian nation at its founding, the U.S. was, in other words, a nation of Christians whose founders \u0096 with the support of certain newer denominations such as the Baptists \u0096 wished to see the free exercise of religion flourish outside the boundaries of state support or control.<\/P> And flourish it did. With no particular denomination or doctrine given state privilege, the number of new denominations and congregations exploded in the early republic, leading Alexis de Toqueville to remark in the 1830s that, \u0093There is no country in the whole world in which Christian religion contains a greater influence over the souls of man than in America.\u0094<\/P> The same is true today if the U.S. is compared to other advanced industrial nations. Religion and spirituality of all kinds have prospered in America precisely because our founders did not write them into the social contract.<\/P> Could the founders have foreseen that their ideas about religious freedom would be extended to protect even non-Christian religions? Probably not. But neither would they have foreseen that the phrase \u0093all men are created equal\u0094 would be extended to include women, blacks and other nonwhite male property holders.<\/P> They lived in a different time, but their vision of religious freedom has been remarkably durable and incredibly effective in keeping our nation from devolving into the kind of sectarian conflict that we witness today in Iraq and other parts of the world.<\/P>
<\/SPAN>By Dave Arnold CBC Associate Professor, Tri-City Herald<\/P>