And regardless of the BS spewed out the arses of the blackrobed jurists, the First Amendment applies ONLY to Congress wherein Congress cannot interfere in religion BUT religion is free to interfere/interact in government as much as it wants.

Every state was left alone to be involved in religion as the individual state constitution allows/ed.

There’s a nice 1200 page book written in 1864 that disproves all “the US is not a christian nation” bullshit. This book is available now as a reprint of the original. It also disproves this deist crap about the writers of the DoI, etc.

The Treaty of Tripoli was written in arabic and is meaningless relative to the state of religion in the US. It is quite possible that no one translated it before it was approved. Can NY1 prove otherwise? One document out of thousands does not make the case.

Tiochfaidh ar la!

See also:

Brooke Allen: “Our Godless Constitution”
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050221/allen

And the fear of state power is an excellent example: this is something experienced by Christians, but in a historical contingency, not simply read straight out of a list of fundamental or essential Christian ideas.

“This romanticized view of our founders being incredible rational superheros above the sway of 18th century christianity in all its forms is a bigger fairy tale than washington chopping down the cherry tree.”

Or Washington praying at Valley Forge.

But regardless, nonsense. No one said that they were above its sway. But to simply declare that they were simply applying the basic values and principles of orthodox Christianity to arrive at the underlying values and laws of the nation is equally absurd. It’s far more complicated than that, and for many of the founders, yes, political philosophy WAS far more important than quoting Bible verses. It’s not for nothing that Franklin got voted down when he suggested that the convention pray. It was because almost no one there cast their reasoning or decisions in a religious cloak.

Plus, modern Christians would find many of their diverse views heretical or absurd.

People can argue philosophy until they’re blue in the face but this is very basic sociology. The first amendment to our constitution is a direct result of christians taking it on the chin from the church of england. They only had one religious influence, christianity. These folks were not jews, hindus, buddhists, muslims, or any variety of native american polytheist voodo, at that stage in our devolopment we were very much a christian nation. Are we all forgetting these peoples grandparents and parents spent their youths burning witches? Yeah tarran, I’d call that pretty fundamentalist.

This romanticized view of our founders being incredible rational superheros above the sway of 18th century christianity in all its forms is a bigger fairy tale than washington chopping down the cherry tree. Lets all take a look at the laws these people passed in their home colonies and then argue whether their christian based religion played any part in the founding of this nation. Jesus people, sodomy is STILL illegal in some places.

In response to #42 dsmallwood,

The matter is fairly simple, looking at historical data, find one nation that prospered where the government controlled religion, or religion controlled the government. The very premise of the foundation of the country, of the church, and of the human condition in general (from a Christian perspective, but I think many can agree) is that men are inherently capable of evil and particularly corruption. This applies to leaders in the government, as well as in the church. This is why these two establishments are, insomuch as the systems themselves are concerned, necessary evils. The need of any structured system where flawed men lead flawed men is at best a necessary evil. I need government to ensure property rights, enforce laws, and maintain military, but they also steal, manipulate, lie, cheat, etc. Just as I rely on church to be a moral center and a place of intillectual and spiritual growth, they end up straying from both intellectual and spiritual highground and go astray from the quintessential foundation of the original precept. The point many would make at this point is that church and religion are not necessary at all, but the founding fathers disagreed.

“It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” – Patrick Henry 1765

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” – Thomas Jefferson 1781

“Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.” – George Washington

The founding fathers understood that a deep understanding of our inherent liberties and morals was made possible by an understanding of the basis for them: religion. I would submit that there is no solid foundation for freedom or morals, outside of religion. Christianity in particular, but even just religion in general. In court, you swear an oath of truth on the Bible, because it is the doctrine for the basis of the morals which are brought to question in that very court. Regardless of your religion, you can agree that just as the governments establish laws, a deity can establish freedoms and morals in the same manner, both acting as a higher power.

This is a fair point.

I’d say that the key issue is this: our nation was founded on principles that came from all sorts of Western canons and philosophies, and simply headlining them all as “Christian” simply because that was the dominant religion of the West is ridiculous: terribly shallow as intellectual history, sheer nonsense as political philosophy. Many of the Enlightenment ideas that shaped the founders’ views emerged as ideas that at the time stood in direct opposition to traditional religious ideas and understandings of the world. The fact that modern Christians have updated their understandings to better fit into the liberal enlightenment is evidence of influence going the other way, not that these basic values and ideas are inherently or distinctively Christian.

And the whole point of the constitution, the whole underlying philosophy behind having one at all, was that people could _reason out directly_, rather than appealing to any religious authority, a system of government that would best serve the interests of the people WITHOUT a supreme pontiff or divine king to oversee it all. None of this was premised on the idea that people must or could only be Christians. There’s a reason the Federalist papers are all pragmatic appeals to political and legal concepts, rather than endless citations of Bible verse. Bicameral legislatures are not endorsed in the Bible.

None of this is to say that Christian ideas weren’t major cultural and intellectual players. They were. And many of the founders held the elitist view that while traditional Christianity was a mess of silly superstitions, that it served to keep their unschooled inferiors in line. But the point was that in many cases we’re talking more about flavor than substance. The “Judeo-Christian” values Blackwell cites are actually common to most societies, and while Christian cultural themes are important, a lot of them (like, for instance, the Protestant work ethic, or ideas of religious conscience) are specially contingent on 2000 years of history since Christ, influenced by countless other forces and ideas, rather than direct reads from the Gospels.

What was distinctive and unique about the US at the time, which everyone AT THE TIME seemed to understand perfectly well, was not how religious an enterprise the new government was, but how explicitly secular. Heck, the Blackwells of the day outright called the founders atheists (falsely, as it happened, as they were far more complex than that, and not a known atheist amongst them). For the founders, the point of that secularism was not that religion was bad, but that their efforts were about organizing political forces in the material world, not about deciding matters of religion. As they saw it, religion would (and did!) thrive best the more it was left up to individuals to choose and practice as they chose: in their theory of government, all state power is appropriated from the people. And the power to believe or not believe whatever one wants was not a power the government had any right or business to take unto itself.

That was awesome.

The Hitchens I hear constantly justifies the GWOT in terms of the secular West vs. retrograde, obscurantist Islam. Sorta like how the NYT’s Tom Friedman justifies the war on the grounds that, because ‘they’ (meaning Muslims) attacked the US on 9/11, it was important to attack a (random) Islamic country to attack to send the Muslims of the world the message “suck on this.”

I’d agree with Lloyd’s position on Hitchens and Iraq…frankly, it’s almost impossible for me to read anything from Hitchens regarding the GWOT mainly because most of what he writes isn’t predicated on an advocacy of national defense but on his blinding hatred of Islam (even when he goes with the national defense tack, it’s mainly operating from the position that warring with Islam is interchangeable with national defense…which he sells by using the most egregious examples of Islam he can find).

I’m an atheist myself, and I certainly have no love for religion, but there’s a big leap between wanting to be able to live a life free from religious intrusion, personally, and wanting the state to stamp it out because I want a world free of religion (as Hitchens does). So while I might agree with Hitchens on many of his religious views, his political solutions show him to be no true friend to libertarians who are atheist.

Fair enough and agreed on all points.

I disagree with Hitchens’ support for the war, but I think your characterization of his motive is both unfair and inaccurate.

Did the founders write the constitution as a shining beacon to their christian heritage? No, but no one can seriously argue that their very fundamentalist christian upbringings and beliefs didn’t influence every aspect up to and including the final product.

we’re being lectured on reality by someone who thinks the founders were exposed to Christian fundamentalism.

Dude, half of them were theists (didn’t believe in the trinity). Thomas Jefferson wrote a version of the New Testament that removed all references to Jesus supernatural properties. Christian Fundamentalism didn’t start to coalesce until about 80 years after the U.S. Independence.

Maybe you should actually read stuff the founders wrote instead of blindly accewpting whatever your pastor tells you as the gospel.

#36 | Big Chief | April 9th, 2009 at 11:44 pm

Mostly it was an asinine argument. The reason was the basic topic wasn’t even defined. What do they mean we’re a “Christian Nation”? I still don’t know after wasting 8+ minutes of my life watching that garbage.

Exactly right. This is an argument over semantics. Did the founders write the constitution as a shining beacon to their christian heritage? No, but no one can seriously argue that their very fundamentalist christian upbringings and beliefs didn’t influence every aspect up to and including the final product.
There was only one religious influence on those folks. In case some have forgotten, the only people involved who were not white or descendants of a christian theology were slaves.

The only people who don’t seem to understand this are rabid atheists, a constant embarrassment to non-religion hating atheists like myself, and rabid religious types who can embarrass someone else.

Reality — enjoy some today.

I think the main reason why the founding fathers did those things was to protect religion from government, much like they tried to put many things in the constitution to protect the people from government. After all, when a powerfull organization such as the government can control a religion they will inevitably use it for their own corrupt gain (just as some mega churches use their power in the wrong ways). So my take on it is this: the founding fathers thought that Christianity was the best way to live a life and make decisions, but they did not want the government (which they knew was bound to become corrupt) to enforce a corrupt state religion or to suppress the free practice of religion.

Cheer him on for making Blackwell look like a boob, but realize his radical atheism has cost lives.

For the record, I’m an atheist.

i would like a “Christian nation” proponent to address one question though:
how do you reconcile the fact that the founders were religious people with the fact that they went out of their way to ensure that gov’t would NOT be religious, and NOT interfere in religion?

i concede that the founders were largely christian. and i support you when you say, “yay, look what our alums have accomplished. christians are cool”. you are just citing facts. But it appears to me that a group motivated by their faith was extremely worried about the mixing of faith and govt.

I agree with Aresen’s comment 100%. And I think much of the activity that the Religious Right has taken to “Christianize” politics has mostly politicized the Church and done more to hurt the Church than it’s helped America.