Mark Thompson notes the following about debating whether the Founders intended the United States to be a “Christian Nation.”
The response to the “America is a Christian nation” meme is usually to argue that the Founders were deists, which results in an intractable debate about the Founders’ actual religion.
He follows this up with a link to this post, which argues that the Founding Fathers took pains to hide their religion, and that we shouldn’t bother to try.
I still think that this is the wrong way of looking at it. As I argued last December:
However, I would contend that an argument over what the Founders believed has little if anything to do with whether the government of the United States is based on religious principles. After all, I believe it was Jesus Christ himself who said: “You will know them by their fruits.” Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that all of the the Founding Fathers were pure Christians, that has very little bearing on whether the Constitution itself is based on Christian teachings. The only way to figure that out is to examine the Constitution itself and determine whether it adheres to Christian percepts.
And, as I argued last December, the Constitution is manifestly not Christian.
I do not believe that our ideas are inconsistent. My post is not about the nation or the government that the Founders created, but rather the Founders themselves, personally, as individual men.
Christian Nation advocates advance the claim that because the Founders were Christians, they intended for America to be a Christian nation. Your original point — even if they were all devout Christians, they nevertheless created a secular government — stands even if you concede my point, which is that we ought not to try to identify them as Christians or anything else.
I entirely agree with you that the USA IS not a Christian nation and the Constitution is not founded on Christian principles.
I think I was more arguing with Mark’s point than with yours on this one. I quite enjoyed your post, actually, which I think gets to the heart of how modern notions of piety are very different than those in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
This is why I usually try to avoid posts where I only write a sentence or two of my own. I wasn’t trying to make any point beyond TL’s - just to give it a little bit of an introduction. Since brevity is not my strengthy, it not surprisingly came out a bit vague.
Blech. What the $#@% does “strengthy” mean?